While Waiting for my Low Glycemic Evolution, by Saul

Low Gycemic Index, low glycemic foods; well, I have to admit that there is something to it in feeling better, but I’m still suspicious of what’s going on in our life styles if we have to even limit ourselves so much in categories of foods that by many standards we should be able to eat without impunity; wholesome, natural, organic, simple, easy to prepare. Why can’t we just eat low on the food chain and not overeat? Is there something physiologically inherent within our human bodies that impels us to eat more sweets, more carbohydrates when they are convenient? Is the tendency to lose control over our appetites so strongly built in to us that we are hopeless cases? Has our collective human talent for growing, preserving, packaging and distributing food outstripped our evolutionary physiological adaptation by so many tens of thousands of years that only super-human applications of will power can preserve for some of us a semblance of a healthy life style? Does my will power need a boost? If so, I’ll use the concept of low glycemic index in my stockpile of tools to survive to my fittest condition in 21^st Century America. Sign me up!

Happy Bean Day! and Some Pictures, by Mollie

Two years ago from tomorrow, black beans exploded from our pressure cooker acr
oss the entire kitchen. Thus, Bean Day was brought into being (pun intended). For a full account of the occurrence, see the new "Tasty Anecdotes" page.

Here are some pictures from November (low-glycemic load month) and December (Holiday foods month).

The ingredients for our vegan, oil-free Thanksgiving pumpkin pie all ready in the food processor. ---->

Stuffed pumpkins from a local farm.

Our well-balanced Thanksgiving plate. (Colorful, isn't it?)

Christmas breakfast! Fresh bananas, pineapple, and mango topped with mango cream (mango, agave nectar, and Greek yogurt), roasted coconut and cashews, and dried cranberries.

Hope everyone's having a yummy, healthy holiday break!

Eating tastier food with less sugar content

Recently my doctor told me to eat a low glycemic diet. I've tried to eat healthy food for years and it amazes me how much there is to continue to learn. I'm vegetarian - mostly vegan - and don't eat dairy or wheat. There are so many food philosophies - local food, raw food, organic food - and now I was supposed to also attend the the glycemic load in food. How much more can I limit my diet, I asked myself? I thought the glycemic thing was just too much. However, the interesting thing is that I feel better, I love what I eat, and I've lost about 10 lbs.! I really didn't realize that starchy foods like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and bananas have a high glycemic load so even if they are organic and good for you they can impact your blood sugar levels. Yummy low glycemic foods are: broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, salad greens, celery, cauliflower, green beans, mushrooms, spinach, peas, berries, peaches, apples, cherries, pears, kiwi, plums, mango, pineapple, pinto beans, lima beans, kidney beans, and almost all nuts except cashews which are fairly high. For the first couple of weeks I didn't eat any grains because they have a pretty high glycemic load, but now I eat millet, quinoa, rice and buckwheat fairly regularly. I cut way back on using honey in my tea and now drink mainly green tea with nothing else in it. I've gone from drinking coffee lattes every day, to drinking chai tea with lost of milk and sugar, to green tea with lots of honey, to plain green tea. As much as I love my coffee and chai, I feel so much better when I just drink the green tea. If I want to splurge once in awhile I'll make some chai or - rarely - some expresso, but I really love the green tea the most now! A great resource to find out the glycemic load of various foods is: nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables

Low Glycemic Thanksgiving and the Joy of Simplicity, by Mollie

Sounds impossible, doesn't it? With the plethora of high carbohydrate and fatty foods that constitute the classic Thanksgiving meal, it's hard to be low-glycemic. Well, we tried this year. We still had mashed potatoes, but we didn't cook them with any butter. Of course we had stuffing - that's always the best part - but we used millet bread and small amounts of oil. Instead of stuffing a turkey - which we never eat anyway because we're all vegetarians - we stuffed two small pumpkins. Pumpkin pie was, of course, a necessity, but we used a recipe we found a couple of years ago for vegan pumpkin pie, which uses a nutty crust. We used bananas in the pumpkin filling to decrease the fat content, and we had it with a small scoop of coconut ice cream instead of whipped cream.

That was probably the best pumpkin pie I've ever tasted.

As my mother remarked as we sat down for our meal (well, actually, as I took a picture of it before we sat down), it all looked just like a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving. We saw the original painting only a week later at the Dayton Art Institute, and she really was right.

Over the week of November, my mother made a lot of REALLY YUMMY low glycemic dinners. I'll leave the details of those left to be discussed by the Cook herself, but let me just say that I was extremely impressed with the variance that a low glycemic diet presents. Like with a salad bar, there are so many different options for combination, every one of which tastes good alone also, that the possibilities are endless. And they are so SIMPLE. Low-glycemic meals don't require a long amount of frying or baking. Some people mistake the simplicity of a vegetarian or gluten-free diet for repetitiveness. But the truth is that vegetables are vegetables no matter what, and they are so many different kinds that will be good together in almost any combination, as long as they are combined with good seasonings. I was SO GLAD to have those wonderful, feel-good meals when I got home after a long day, and I can never thank my mother enough for cooking them, or for converting us to a largely low-glycemic diet.

Indian Food, by Saul

Indian Food … as an item to be capitalized! I used to think that Indian food was healthy, so when given the opportunity to eat it, I ate as much as I could. It tasted good. Then I felt sluggish, dumb, eventually … fat. Then, I looked around at people I knew from India. Most of them did not look healthy. Neither did I although in my case it was not at all due to all Indian Food. I also ate too much Health Food, like brown rice and black beans. I used to think that Health Food was healthy, so when given the opportunity to eat it, I ate as much as I could. Who knew that all those complex carbohydrates would turn into excess fat? I looked around at people I knew from the Health Food Nut community. Almost all of them had health problems. So, I cut back on numbers of calories consumed in one day, ate a lot of very low calorie, nutrient dense foods until I felt full and lost forty pounds.

Indian Food and Creativity, by Mollie

One of my favorite things about Indian food is how warm and comforting it is. I think it shows vegetable-doubters how good a vegetarian diet can taste. And the miraculous thing is that just a change of a few spices can completely alter a meal.

I experimented with a couple of recipes from our beloved cookbook, The Green Way to Healthy Living - chapattis (pictured to the right) and naan. I tried using some chickpea flour in the chapattis, which really just made them taste like they had parts of mashed up chickpeas. And the dough for the naan didn't even rise. But the amazing thing? Both tasted so good (especially the naan). The naan ended up like thick, spicy crackers almost - which, while not at all the intention, fit perfectly with the rest of our meal and was, undoubtedly, Indian.

The last experiment I did - which was actually in this last week of November - was to try a puffed rice snack mix sort of thing which I had found online. Here's warning to my future self: don't try unfamiliar recipes when you're home alone and don't want to commit to making them correctly. By the time my father walked in the house, he became subject to the aromatic spices that filled the air and joined me in his coughing fits. Hastily opened jars of random spices covered the counter, and in the pan on the stove sat something that looked like pieces of carrot and onion surrounded by a substance that appeared burnt but was not. Which, when it comes down to it, I suppose that's really what it was. But you know what? Later in the day, when the mixture had completely cooled down and the only hotness that remained was that of the spices, it tasted pretty good. Not even just okay, but actually quite good.

I think the main thing that I've discovered over the month of October is how wonderfully flexible Indian food is. And it's quick, too - we discovered several new dishes that are more exciting because of their Indian flavor and more easily made than others we may have fallen for in our late afternoon after school stupor. I think that Indian food provides a great amount of creativity that will always - even if it doesn't rise or makes you cough in the process - turn out warm and comforting in the end.

October was Indian Month

I love Indian food. I mean I LOVE Indian food. I love the way the flavors and spices explode in my mouth. It's a great diet for a vegetarian because the Indian people have found amazingly creative ways to use beans and legumes. Who woulda thought?

The challenge for our family food adventure was to cook Indian food that is healthy not just tasty. I love samosas and pakoras, but they are generally deep friend which is not gonna work for the Greenbergs. So...we had to look through our cookbooks to find recipes that are full of vegetables for a low glycemic diet, gluten free, and low fat. Lots to think about, but we came up with some GREAT food for the month. Food that still explodes with tasty flavor, but that makes you feel good after you eat it. Below are some of our best recipes. I use all organic ingredients when I can.

Channa (Chick Peas - aka Garbanzo Beans)

This is like a garbanzo bean soup and cooks up very quickly if you have all the ingredients and get accustomed to making it. I can whip it up in about 15 minutes these days, and I love it on a chilly day when we arrive home from our various adventures out in the world and are ready to gather for a nice dinner. I never measure when I make Indian food, so the amounts are not exact. If you try it just experiment with the flavors until you get something you like. Most westerners err on the light side when using the spices. More is better! (But go light on the turmeric.)

Ingredients:

3-4 cups cooked organic chick peas

1T olive oil (or less if you are trying to stay away from oil - sometimes I just use a teaspoon)

1 onion

1 large can diced organic tomatoes (I think they are about 24 oz. cans. We use Muir Glen.)

1-2 chopped fresh organic tomatoes

1 t ground coriander

1T ground cumin

1/2 t red chili powder

1/4 t tumeric

Saute the onion, then add the tomatoes - both canned and chopped. Add the spices and let simmer for a couple of minutes and then add the chickpeas. You can eat this right away if you are in a hurry or you can let it simmer for awhile to allow the flavors to blend together. Either way it tastes delicious. It's really good if you add chopped cilantro on top.

Indian Pancakes

I think the Indian people have an actual name for these, but we just call then Indian pancakes and we love them!! Again, my measurements are very sketchy, so just experiment.

1 cup Bob's Red Mill Fava Bean/Garbanzo flour

1/2 cup water (keep adding water until the batter is about the consistency of regular pancakes)

1 T cumin

1 t coriander

1/2 t turmeric

dash of chili powder - add more if you like things spicy

1 t salt (add salt to your own taste preference - I tend to use more)

1 organic onion finely chopped

2-3 cups raw whole organaic spinach leaves

olive oil

optional: finely chopped organic carrots, potatoes or other vegetables you like

Stir the flour, water and spices together creating a batter like regular pancake batter. Then add the onion and spinach and stir it together. The batter should lightly coat the spinach so you can add more spinach if you want to. It's amazing how it sticks together when you fry it, so there shouldn't be a whole lot of batter. Lightly coat a frying pan with olive oil and use 1/8 cup or so of the batter for each pancake - this will probably make about 7-8ish pancakes. Cook like you do regular pancakes and prepare your taste buds to be utterly astonished!

We made another recipe which I'll try to get on another post - or maybe Magnificent Mango will get around to that.

Signing off for October,

Radiant Raspberry

aka Dione

Sadly Skipped September

Who knows what we were thinking when we assigned September - the first full month of school and seriously cold weather - to be raw food month. You just don't want frozen raw cheesecake or a salad when it's forty degrees outside and you've had to go through the entire day at school without warm food. (Actually I take that back - frozen raw cheesecake is just too good to not want.) And you also don't have time to make raw stuff when you don't get home until 6:45 every night starving and still with a ton of homework. That's just the way of things....

So, unfortunately - tragically - we've had to skip September as a raw food month. We still made a lot of really good food - Radical Raspberry made dinner almost every night for a very grateful Magnificent Mango, both of whom did a very good job at packing healthy lunches for themselves everyday. And we finally have the best-est ever apples from Peifer (an orchard on the edge of Yellow Springs)! Other things we ate: a good number of creative and soothing soups, most of which used the many green tomatoes from our garden, beans (of course), rice pasta and homemade pesto with garden basil (Raspberry picked a whole basket of it to save it from the frost), and some really pretty striped squash. Mango also made some (vegan) chocolate chip cookies for play rehearsal (since it was the director's birthday) with less sugar and replacing half of the butter with banana; those were a big hit.

In short, we're always on a family food adventure, even if we don't follow the schedule. But October is Indian Food Month, which sounds much more appealing in this cold weather than raw food! So let's spice it up!

Notes:

Despite the fact that Stunning Sauerkraut posted his blog post significantly late, no punishments were administered due to the fact that Mango was being lenient since it was the first month (a word which she wrote on the kitchen calendar board because she kept wanting to tell him she was being lenient when she reminded him to write it, but couldn't remember the word); and also because Mango sort of neglected to actually write a punishment for late blog posts.

Package foods go away

Packaged Foods Go Away

Nuts have shells. Corn has husks. Grapes have skins (and so do we humans). Oh, potatoes have skins that we peel. Watermelons have rinds …which we compost, throw away, grind up in the garbage disposer or pickle and eat. Milk, in its natural form does not have a package, so we package it in order to reap its benefits. Honey comes in a comb or a hive or a cute plastic honey bear. Hershey Bars, which are representaive of a food group called chocolate come in aluminum and colorized pigmented, chemically treated paper wrappings. Um! Now, we’re getting somewhere . Can we eat, pickle, compost, burn what Hershey Bars are wrapped in? How about pickled Hershey Bar wrapper paper? What about potato chips, Oreos, Moosetracks ice-cream, natural frozen orange juice from 3,000 miles away, Nutri-bars, protein powder and McDonald’s wrappings and packages and holders? We throw them away. Where is “away”?

by Saul

Non-packaged Food and the Hunter-Gatherers, by Mollie

We concluded our first month of the Family Food Adventure with a meal of locally grown green beans and sweet potatoes cooked with garbanzo beans yesterday afternoon. Looking out onto our lush front garden, we talked about the things we'd each discovered over this past month of trying not to eat/purchase packaged and processed food.

Having just completed my first full week back to school, I'm still recuperating from the constant rush that fills my days. First there's the insistent ear-beating from my alarm clock (those familiar with the iPhone's "piano riff" know what I'm talking about when I say there's a reason I chose that for my alarm clock - it's not the kind of thing you can stand to listen to more than three times). Skipping to about forty minutes later, it's time to decide what to have for breakfast - and this certainly isn't the time to concoct a masterpiece, so I usually end up settling for some fruit or half a cup of protein powder (packaged!). After the first five periods of the day, along comes lunch, gulping down bites of home and usually the night before in a frenzy. A pretty much daily topic on the car ride home is what we'll fix for dinner, and my homework isn't really done for that night until I've packed my lunch for the next day.

Now let's think: what if I ate cereal with milk for breakfast? That requires about thirty seconds of preparation. If I bought lunch at school, the only time dilemma I'm facing is waiting in line; the same goes for packing microwave meals or a myriad of packaged snacks. And if we got dinner at a fast-food place on the way home, the minutes planning and preparing dinner would be freed. The point is: what we're going to eat governs our lives. This past week, my mother met with a colleague over dinner. The first stop my friends and I made when we went to look for Homecoming dresses the other day was to get food, and then we worried about whether we could go into a clothing store with our shakes.

In World Civilizations class, we've been talking about hunter-gatherers and the Agricultural Revolution. And here's the most fascinating thing: agriculture actually changed the structure of society. Hunter-gatherer communities were egalitarian (one of those new words we find ourselves unanimously shouting out at least once per class), partly because women and men held equal positions in society. Women were the primary gatherers, and most of the people's food came from gathering, while men were the hunters. The San culture, which still lives near the Kalahari Desert, actually had a tradition called "insulting the meat," where they said negative comments about a hunter's kill so that he wouldn't become too proud of himself. Everyone had the same skills; there were no specializations. But when agriculture came along, some were more successful because of luck or skills. People developed specializations. Chiefdoms grew from this, eventually leading to the idea that some are higher than others due to birth, which is now a common idea. So agriculture - which, back then, would be like the equivalent of packaged food - forever changed the structure of human societies.

Here's something to mull over: hunter-gatherers only had a seventeen hour workweek. Now, in a time when almost everything we eat has been touched by many hands before us and is covered up by a package, we have less time to focus on eating because we're so busy. So many people don't focus on it; and I see why, because when you're making your own meals from scratch, you have to be constantly planning what your next meal will be. And even though we had to take more time with our food, I'm glad we did, because it forces you to spend time together and to appreciate that which fuels you to keep going and do other things in life.

There are many choices I made over the past month because I was avoiding packaged food: I drank a different kind of tea, I reminded my dad that, even though the rice cakes at Kroger were on sale, we shouldn't buy them because they were packaged, I didn't chew gum or have any of the candy I bought in China...and despite how trivial these things seem, they did play a part in changing my day.

Un-Packaged Food by Dione

We spent the month of August trying to eat food that does not come in packages, and it was an interesting experiment. The point of this, for me, was twofold: 1/ not wasting plastic wrapping unnecessarily - it bothers me to think about all the plastic we put into the environment and I wonder where it all goes, and 2/ eating food that comes more directly from its original source.

August was a good month for this kind of experiment because the organic farm that we have a share in gave us big boxes of locally grown food, AND our garden was also producing a lot of food. So, we had a lot of un-packaged food at our fingertips: fresh zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, corn, peppers, eggplant, chard, raspberries, and Amish grown peaches from a local orchard. We had so much it was difficult to eat it all, but we had so many choices when we set about preparing our meals.

One of the challenges for me was not reaching for packaged food in the grocery store that I'm accustomed to buying out of habit. For example, we make a lot of soup and it's easy to use the No-Chicken Broth from the store instead of making our own broth - which is actually also SO easy to make. Another time I had the good intention of making a raw cheesecake with cashews, but I grabbed a bag of cashews instead of thinking to buy them in bulk. Once Mollie reminded me, it was just as easy to buy the bulk cashews and save some plastic. Mollie had to remind me a number of times that something was packaged and I had to think of another alternative to my deeply ingrained habit. It's amazing how often I think of food in a package instead of thinking of the food itself as it comes from the earth.

One thing I'm puzzled about recently is why some people have resistance to working with their hands in the earth to plant and grow food. It seems to be perceived as menial labor or as work done by peasants or low wage earning farmers. We are very disconnected in our society from the source of our food, to the point that we have no idea what the food originally looks like. We expect it to be shiny and clean like it looks in the grocery store. It's like, in our consciousness, we actually think that food comes from the grocery store!! I think that growing food is very honorable, that it is truthful work that one can learn many spiritual lessons from, and that it has integrity. I like the feeling of planting a small seed and getting a plethora of vegetables from that one seed. I like having the connection to all the teeming life there is in a spot of earth - insects, plants, birds, butterflies, squirrels, mushrooms and fungi - it's wonderful. I feel really alive when I am working in the garden and lately I feel as though I have not really lived during the day unless I have done some work there.