Movin' On

I have a new website. It's pretty and it does a better job of explaining my work than my old website. I'm also happy with it because it has a blog page incorporated into it.

So....I'm not going to post here anymore. I hope to eventually move the recipes there as well.

I hope you'll check it out at www.madlyhealthy.com and keep visiting to see what's new.

As always, thanks for reading and your interest in my work. I hope that with the new format, I'll be inspired to blog and post recipes more often.

Namaste.

Hummus

Continuing in my lazy blogger mode, below is a post from a different blog I wrote a couple of years ago. Therefore, the prices shown are old and certainly less than they would be today. I believe you'd save even more money making your own hummus today.

I bought prepared hummus for years but never really liked it.  It was one of those foods that seemed fake to me and although there are plenty of prepared foods I ate, I always questioned how fresh they were, how nutritious, and although it's difficult to avoid, I try my best to limit the amount of plastics I buy or use or eat food from.

Turns out (and I know because I timed it), that it takes a mere five minutes to make your own hummus, less than ten minutes (nine to be exact) to make it and wash all the prep dishes. I estimate it cost less than $1.50 to make two cups worth using canned beans. Our local market sells a large container (but I forgot to see just how large, I'm guessing a cup) for $3.68, so for ten minutes of work, I save $2.18 and have fresh hummus, made to my own specifications.  When I soak and cook the beans myself, there's a bigger monetary savings, and a bigger environmental saving - one less metal can produced, one less metal can in the recycling pool.

Traditionalists stuff hummus into pita pockets, but I love it on a dense whole wheat bread, with slices of tomato, red onion, and lettuce or sprouts.  For a long time I gave it to my son Harry for lunch plain on bread as he was the kind of vegetarian that liked to avoid vegetables (so perhaps he was more of a carbosugovore as he tried to subsist on carbohydrates and simple sugars).

The Recipe (I didn't forget about it, I was just musing)

15 oz. can garbanzo beans (drained and rinsed)

3 T tahini

1/3 cup water

2 T lemon juice

1 T cumin

1 clove garlic

ground pepper (I did 20 turns on my pepper mill)

Place all ingredients in a blender.  Blend.  Use a spoon to scrape the sides and blend again. Stop when the hummus is as smooth as you like it. 

For the creative: try different spices - cilantro is great, you can't go wrong with parsley, or another clove of garlic for those who aren't speaking to coworkers right after lunch.  You may be able to trick your family's carbosugovore by sneaking in some grated carrots, celery, or bell pepper - these would also add a nice crunch.  Speaking of crunch, if you use a food processor instead of a blender, you'll get a crunchier hummus - use the blender if you like your hummus to have the store-bought consistency. 

Clean Food

Yesterday's post convinced me that pointing you toward resources I use and like is the way to go. Rather than typing out my own recipes, I'll give you links to find others' recipes (or whatever). It's faster and more fun for me (since these days I'm not interested in sitting here at the computer) and if you read my cranky post from January, I'm not that into recipes myself - I find it difficult to translate how I cook (a "measha" of this, a pile of that) into a recipe someone else can follow.

However, I also find it difficult to find cookbooks or websites that have truly healthy (and delicious recipes). Terry Walters books are different - the books the recipes use healthy ingredients, the ones I've tried taste good and as an added bonus, the books are beautiful. 

Walter's first book Clean Food was my inspiration for studying at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Walters is a graduate and when Barnes and Nobles highlighted her book and mentioned the school, I remembered being interested in it years before. I realized then that the timing was right for me to return to school and I enrolled a few weeks later.

This being 2011, of course Walters has a website where you can find some recipes.  Her books are Clean Food and Clean Start. 

If you check them out, please let me know what you think of them!

Vegan Recipes....Yum! (Really)

Eesh. It's been too long. And, since I'm too busy and unmotivated to write but still have info. and ideas I want to pass along, here's a new format that I'm going to work on: I'm just gonna pass on good stuff.

Inspired by one of my new Yoga buddies from the Yoga Teacher Training course I'm enrolled in, here's a link to a wonderful website chock full of vegan recipes: The Post Punk Kitchen. The Post Punk Kitchen was created, long ago in cyber-space time (2003) by Isa Chandra Moskowitz as a fun vegan cooking show. Back then Moskowitz was helped by friend Terry Hope Romero and they went on to host this website and write a number of truly excellent vegan cookbooks together.

I love the site and their cookbooks because
1. the recipes are uninformly excellent.
2. the recipes are easy.
3. the books are beautiful and are witty and fun reads - fun to read even when the last thing you want to do is find a recipe to cook.

I'm not vegan - my vegan experiment lasted a month but I treasure this website and the books by Moskowitz and Romero that grace my bookshelf: Veganomicon and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. One of these days I'll surely order who Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World if only for the title and cupcake porn.

Should you include animal products in your diet, I still highly recommend this website and these books.

Another Study on Autism

Am I missing something? 

Maybe. 

Today, a syndicated article from USA Today is making the rounds. It reports on a study that seems to indicate that having babies closely together raises the risk of autism. It also reports on a few other risk factors: prematurity, being born to older parents, and congenital rubella syndrome.

I wish I could find something other than mainstream news to understand this better. The article quotes Thomas Insel, director of the NIH as saying that autism rates now are 10 times higher than they were a couple of decades ago. It is believed that only 25% of that increase is due to changes in the ways that diagnosis is made. That leaves me wondering how this huge increase can be accounted for by having babies closely together and older parents having babies, two situations which were certainly common in pre-contraception days. As for congenital rubella syndrome, it seems that this, too, would have been at least as common, if not more so, decades ago before there were innoculations against German Measles.

So, what do I think? I think that perhaps it's true that the risk factors studied might indeed play a role in a child developing autism, but I more strongly believe that there's got to be more to this story as these risk factors do nothing to explain the rising rates of autism. 

Reporting on and reading reports of scientific studies is a tricky business because it's easy to take such reports at face value and difficult to know when they're truly adding to our knowledge base.

Why I Don't Like Recipes

I loved my grandmother's cooking. One day, when I was 20 or so, I asked Grandma to share some of her recipes with me. "Recipe, what's a recipe?" could have been her response. She had no recipes. She just knew how to cook.


Grandma invited me to spend the afternoon so she could show me how to make some of her signature dishes. It was one of the most frustrating afternoons of my life.


I stood by Grandma's side as she made chicken soup, noodles (from scratch...no dried noodles for Grandma - rather eggs, flour, water), twice baked stuffed potatoes.


We ran into trouble almost as soon as we started. I was already a collector of recipes by then and that's what I'd come to gather in the course of the day. But, Grandma just cooked. As she grabbed ingredients and threw them together. I tried to slow her down enough to get measurements. 


"How much flour, Grandma?" I'd ask. 
"A measha" she'd reply.
"What's a measha?" I'd ask.
She shook her fist at me, repeating, "A measha."


I still have the sketchy notes I took that day. I left her apartment feeling unsure I'd ever be able to recreate her meals.


Back home, my mother asked how the day went. "Terribly," I said. "I didn't learn how to cook anything. She doesn't measure," I whined. "And, what's a measha?" I asked, shaking my fist at my mother, convinced she'd have no idea what it was either. 


My mother laughed. She knew. A "measha" was the amount you could hold in your hand. That explained the shaken fist - Grandma was showing me how much it was - she was, indeed, teaching me how much of everything went into her dishes, but since I was looking for standard measurements, I didn't get it.


All these years later, I cook like Grandma. I rarely measure, I throw things together.  Which is one reason I'm not always happy to share recipes: to do so means I have to slow down, find measuring cups and spoons and stop myself from just cooking to figure out what I'm doing so another person can recreate it.


One reason I don't like recipes is that they make cooking seem like more of a big deal than it is. (Foodies please don't read further - if you really love cooking that exactly, that's great, but that level of attention to detail stops most of us from cooking, or from cooking regularly.) Most recipes do quite nicely with a little more or a little less of this or that.


Which brings me to the next problem with recipes: we all like something different. For example, my husband loves highly spiced food, I like to taste the flavors of the foods themselves and so prefer little seasoning.  Recipes reflect the palate of the writer so if you use them, remember to change them to suit your taste preferences.


My biggest problem with recipes though is that the more we rely on recipes, the less sense of food and food combining we naturally develop. Once you know food and know your own tastes, cooking becomes easy and then it can become a joy. Which then leads it to be something we're more likely to do which is one of my major points about food - it is meant to nourish us and the most nourishing food is food that's made at home (and enjoyed and appreciated). We've lost that ability we used to have: to easily prepare meals that are nutritious and enjoyable.


So, my advice is to take any recipe's directions suggestions. Use recipes to try new dishes or to start out if you're just learning to cook. But, also give yourself permission to cook without recipes and to make some mistakes - you may dump a meal or two in the garbage but you'll learn a lot - you'll focus more on the flavors and textures you enjoy and you'll learn to cook naturally. Finally, when you stop using recipes, cooking becomes a creative activity, one that's bound to bring you satisfaction.

Lastly, I've been cooking radicchio lately. A little olive oil, a little water, five minutes or so in a pan until it wilts. It's delicious combined with baby bok choy. After cooking, some sesame oil and coconut aminos (or tamari sauce) sprinkled on top is nice. 

(I apologize if I sound like the food police or cook book grump. That wasn't my intention but I couldn't find a jolly-er way to get this out.)