Healthy Hot Cocoa

It's not that I don't have time to cook anymore, it's that I don't have time to both cook AND blog. But I have promised more than one person that I will try to post regularly.

I have also almost finished rereading Lierre Keith's The Myth of Vegetarianism, and after a holiday week full of sweet treats, I have again vowed to cut back on my and my family's sugar intake, including fruit. 

So here is the first recipe for the new year. It's easy, quick and it will be super-popular with the small set.

Hot cocoa!

...and not just any hot cocoa. With good chocolate, very gently heated so as not to ruin the vitamins and enzymes in the raw, whole milk or, better yet, raw cream. (Yum!) Raw, local honey is added after heating, again, to preserve its nutrients. Technically you can make it with raw cacao, although, to be honest I have often found that the raw stuff has a musty smell that seems like it would be problematic for me, personally, with my sensitivity to molds and yeasts.

Hot Cocoa

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2-3 tablespoons water (enough to make a paste)
1/4 teaspoon organic vanilla extract or 1/8-1/4 of a vanilla bean pod
1 cup raw whole milk or cream
Raw honey or stevia to taste

In a small saucepan on low heat, blend the cocoa, vanilla extract and water into a creamy paste. If you are using a vanilla bean, cut open and scrape the beans into the chocolate and water mixture.

Add a few tablespoons of milk to the paste and whisk well. When it's entirely blended, add the rest of the milk and heat only until it's just a little warmer than body temperature, so that it feels just barely warm on a finger. Turn off the burner and add honey to taste.

This is absolutely delicious with a few tablespoons of unsweetened whipped cream.

Variations:

Using unsweetened baking chocolate.. .melt 1-2 ounces gently with the vanilla, whisk in the milk bit by bit and heat to just over body temperature. (I haven't entirely perfected the concentration of chocolate here and tend to add too much, so let me know what you find.)

It can also be made with coconut milk, almond milk or any other non-dairy milk (although do yourself a favor and skip the soy). It can even be made with water for a more coffee-like experience, especially if you skip the sweetener. Just substitute one cup for one cup of milk.

A coordinated GAPS Vegetable Stew/Beef Simmer - the chatty version!

This post is for my mother, who likes my stews, but also because it seems like a nice time to get this up there to share. I keep hearing about folks on GAPS who flail around during the intro and the first few stages trying to figure out how to get things to taste good, how much fat or meat is right for them and what combinations of vegetables to use. Here's the way we do it, more or less. It's infinitely variable for each family's tastes and preferences.

So it's taken me about 2 years to get to the stage where I have come up with a clear method for a nice all -purpose supper that lasts for a few days. It's basically a development of the stew from the early phases of the GAPS Diet. I do use herbs. Our kid likes her eggs so much that I leave them out of the stews and serve them in the mornings for breakfast. So if you're in the early stages of the diet, this should be fine, depending on what your food sensitivities are.

At least for us, the key is saturated animal fat - ghee and drippings, mainly. We also use olive oil, but it's not as healing as the other two. We can't have lard, so generally it's tallow or schmaltz and the gelatinous leavings from whatever roast or simmer I've made. To our early 21st century eyes and palettes these recipes look frighteningly out of whack with the mainstream dietary advice you'll get from your doctor, but I've found that it is the perfect balance of fat to flavor for dealing with our allergies, migraines, general health and digestion, including sugar digestion. This is a meal after which our kid almost NEVER asks for dessert.

I try to coordinate the making of a soup and a roast so that I can use the fresh drippings in the soup. Occasionally my cooking will be out of sync and I'll store the stuff in a jar, then use it from there. It still tastes good. I've included a simple and thrifty ground beef simmer in this post. The reason I make the meat separate from the rest of the stew is that we opt for meatless meals after 3 or 5pm. This works well whether I'm working late and eating alone or on regular weeknights when Snackboy gets home from work at 7. We include the actual meat for lunch or breakfast, but leave it out for dinner. (Both the stew and the meat make nice additions for breakfast scrambles, too.)

The recipe also takes for granted that the day or so before you've made your week's worth of ghee (which for us is a full 2 cups!) and your week's worth of broth. I also have either storebought or home made sauerkraut ready. If we could we'd alternate with a good sour cream dollop instead, but that's not happening with us for a while. :)

By the way, the big news is that Little Moo has nearly made it to the end of her second food trial with her favorite treat, sheep's milk yogurt, with nary a spot on her, a sniffle or an "ahem." Good news! This is after I forgot her dose of enzymes before her breakfast this morning and suddenly remembered it mid-meal. So tomorrow, unbeknownst to her, she gets another two large teaspoons full. Joy will ensue. It's been over a year. Yay!

So here it is...I'm sure that you will come up with your own fun variations. Try different veggies - midwinter's a good time for hard greens and roots. Those can get interesting. We're just starting to see new spring veggies come in. Asparagus, peas and string beans are nice additions. Just remember that the softer the vegetable, the closer to the end you add it. If it's a very tender vegetable, you might want to do a quick or even flash steam and add it at the very end to the hot soup so as not to overcook it. The warmth of the broth will continue to steam it at a nicely low temperature so that the color, texture and flavor stay put.

Lastly, you'll notice that the stew only has 1/2 teaspoon of salt, even though it's a pretty big pot-full. The reasoning for this is that it's meant to be served with a ferment which adds tang or saltiness at the end.

Ground Beef Simmer & The Ultimate GAPS Vegetable Stew

Ingredients for simmer:

2 teaspoons ghee
1 medium (or so) onion, chopped
1 clove garlic
1/2 teaspoon unprocessed sea salt
1 lb organic, full-fat, pastured ground beef
1/4 cup broth (we use chicken or beef - I think it's tastier with the chicken, but it's whatever you'd like)
(optional) 1/2 cup or so well-cooked gizzards from the last long-simmered chicken soup, chopped
1 teaspoon lemon juice

Ingredients for soup:

3-4 tablespoons ghee
1 large onion or two small, sliced
1 clove garlic
1/2 teaspoon unprocessed sea salt
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1 small leaf of dried sage or a small pinch of the bottled stuff
drippings from the simmer
1 carrot
2 stalks celery
1/2 to 1 cup mushrooms
1/2 head of yellow cabbage
1 BIG bunch of hard winter greens or a blend of a few. (Kales, collards are both nice - chard is sweet and pretty, especially if you have a pinkophile like we do. Mustard and dandilion are kind of bitter, but can be offset with the high fat content or by blending a small amount with a bunch of something sweeter. We stay away from spinach for calcium absorption reasons, but this can also be a nice addition. Don't cook it as much as the harder greens.)
1/2 gallon (or so) broth
(optional) a softer spring vegetable: peas, chopped string beans or asparagus
sauerkraut or sour cream

Get out 2 pots. One should be like a large skillet our round-belly saucepan for the simmer. The other big enough for a soup - either Dutch oven or spaghetti-sized. (I recommend NOT using iron for the beef, the reason being that at the end you'll have to lift it and pour out the drippings. If you have wrists of steel, go for it. Consider it part of your weightlifting regimen. :) Iron makes tastier simmers, anyway.)

If your beef is frozen start defrosting it in a bowl of warm water.

Melt the ghee for each recipe in the corresponding pan at medium-low temperature. Chop or slice the onion for the stew. Chop the onion for the simmer. Put into the corresponding pot. Set your timer for 15 minutes, minimum, cover the pots and stir occasionally. The longer the simmer on the onion, the sweeter it gets and the less structured. If you like nice solid onions, continue the recipe at 15 minutes. Everyone else, turn the heat down a bit and keep simmering.

Okay, so you're waiting now. If you're like me, you stop for a bit to blog or procrastinate. So here we are.

I keep hearing that onion is good for both digestive and immune systems if simmered between 25 and 35 minutes in ghee. I also read a post on Dr. Mercola's page recently where, below all the usual hype he revealed that there had been some study somewhere that showed that onions eaten regularly help boost calcium absorption. (No word on how to cook them, or why onions do that, or if the onion eaters were also doing weight-bearing exercise, eating well otherwise, standing on their heads chanting a sea chanty etc...so take with a grain of salt! So to speak. Sorry for the pun.)

Back to the recipe.

Once you've safely turned down your onion simmers, crush your garlic into each pot, then add the salt. Add the herbs and any previously stored drippings to the soup pot. Keep both on the lowest temperature. No worries about overcooking - there's no rush. Just keep it low. Turn it off and keep covered if you're concerned about burning. Let it steep. 

If you have time, pots and space, bring your quart of broth to a boil, then turn it down to simmer. I often don't have any of those three things so I add it cold, but I don't think that's necessarily the best way to do it. 

Get out a big bowl, fill it with filtered water and a teaspoon of vinegar or 2 teaspoons sea salt and prepare your greens. Different greens need different prep - kale gets the ribs stripped clean away, mustard gets some of the ribs stripped. Dandelion ribs are fine. So are chard. Go for it. Have fun. Put them to soak in the bowl. The salt or vinegar will encourage any freeloaders to jump ship. Set aside ribs for another broth at another time if you wish.

Chop the harder veggies first. I like carrots either in small dices or half-rounds, roots like turnip or rutabaga in dices, and celery in slices but there are no rules. Keep the pieces to a small bite size and try to make them more or less the same size with the harder vegetables smaller or added earlier. One exception to this rule is mushrooms. I like to add them early, sliced or coarsely chopped, since they are twice as amazing when they've absorbed the herb-scented ghee before the broth.

So you should be nearly done chopping, slicing and dicing by now. Your timer may have gone off, or you may be like me right now and have let the onion mixtures steep for a while in the ghee. Get the temperature of the skillet or round belly pot up a bit, then add the beef. Chop it up with a fork for a bit, then add the lemon juice - it breaks down the fat in the meat so that it starts to break up a bit. Add the chopped gizzards if you are using them. Then add the broth and blend well. Cover and simmer on low, stirring occasionally until done - about 10 minutes. Be careful once you add the meat not to overcook. Even the fattiest pastured meats cook much quicker and drier than the feedlot stuff. If you got good, clean, grass-fed meat it should be fine with a bit of pink. If you don't have that option, cook it until the pink is gone. Turn it off and set aside.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch...

Bring the heat back to a cooking temperature on your stew pot. Heft up that pot of meat and pour the drippings into the onion/garlic/herb mixture. Add the mushrooms. Stir well and allow them to absorb the niceness in the pot. Yum. Then add the hard veggies - carrots, roots, cabbage. Follow with celery, zucchini, string beans and other medium-hard vegetables. Stir and coat. Put the top back on. Chop the well-washed greens to a nice bite-size and add them on top of the rest of the mixture. They should just about fill the Dutch oven. It will look like they're taking over. Don't worry. They shrink. Stir to coat and put the top back on for about 5 minutes or until the greens look a bit wilty. (At this point either add your soft vegetables or put them on to steam.) Add the broth. Bring to a boil. Turn down to simmer. Simmer well for about 15-25 minutes depending on how long you've simmered previously. Take your steamed soft veggies - asparagus, peas, pea greens, etc - and add before serving.

A nice way to re-make the stew in its meaty hearty version is to take a dollop of the meat and a nice portion of the stew in a third pot (this is assuming that it's the next day or the day after and you're pulling out a nice instantaneous lunch that you can get from fridge to table in - get this - FIVE MINUTES, yes indeedy,) and heat them up together so that they blend nicely. If you do eat starches you can pour the mixture over rice, but if you're a hard-core GAPS follower, eat it as is topped with sauerkraut or sour cream.

Enjoy. I'm going to go chop vegetables now. :)

The best gluten-free bake-book...

If I haven't said it before, it's Babycakes by Erin McKenna.
One of my two complaints, though, is that it's all too sweet and uses too much sugar. They're not bad on the fat, and they do use coconut oil, but do not specify that in order to bake at 350 and higher the coconut oil has to be REFINED, not virgin.

I think it's the vegan thing. People who don't get enough good, whole animal fat and proteins in their diets crave sweets and starches. There's also this tendency that we all have to jump onto a simple bit of information and lose all sense of context. What Michael Pollan calls "nutritionism." There's a lack of information about smoke points and detailed information about what makes food good and good for a person - people just glom onto a factoid, and discard the system that surrounds it: "blueberries have antioxidents," "spinach is super-good for you and has lots of b vitamins," and "agave is less glycemic than sugar" or "coconut oil will do everything including help you lose weight, help your immunity and organize your closets." If coconut oil is damaged in too high of a heat, (or if your spinach is unaccompanied by a good fat,) it's not doing anything good for anyone!

Our other fantastic allergy-free bake-book, which is also vegan, is the same way with the over-sugaring, but better with the nutrition information, although they've bought into the mainstream myth that low-fat is good. I always cut out at least 1/4 cup of whatever sweetener is used and occasionally remove all the sweetener and replace it with applesauce or raisins or whatever.

Okay - here it is...

I apologize - the recipe isn't exact. I forgot to take notes while I made it, but the proportions are actually pretty clear and precision is not entirely necessary. The raisins are the sweetener, so start small and add to make it sweet enough. I found that little was necessary because the carrots were quite sweet as was the banana.

The best thing about this one is that it's a vegetable that masquerades as a dessert, and there's enough nut in it to make it an acceptable lunch for us if Little Moo has an adequately protein-laden breakfast, which she does these days. (Recently she's partial to hamburgers in the morning made into a burger and veg sandwich slathered with mustard or kraut. I kid you not. Then lunch is smaller and dinner is very light - not a bad way to live, actually.)

Carrot Nut Banana Pie

5 or 6 large fresh carrots

about 1/4 cup freshly roasted nuts (I used pecans and walnuts, but any kind would be tasty)

1 can coconut milk

about 1/4 cup shredded coconut meat

1 ripe banana

a few tablespoons full of raisins

about 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

3 tablespoons Bernard Jensen gelatin

boiling water

Peel and shred the carrots. Steam them until soft.

In blender put the raisins, banana, nuts, coconut, carrots, cinnamon, coconut milk. Blend well. Dissolve the gelatin in boiling water. Pour this mixture into the blender and mix well. Pour it into a pie pan, cover with a layer of waxed paper and then a sheet of foil. Chill overnight.

Next one: a savory quiche that is non-dairy and has no flour or eggs! We'll see how it turns out. It's baking now...

GF/DF/EF Stuffing

For Christmas Eve we visited friends for dinner. This is usually a major production for me since I often have to cart over an entire cooked meal for us whenever we go out. A number of our friends are excellent cooks and foodies, but terribly attached to certain types of dishes and traditions in a fairly rigid way. I've never quite understood that. Food for me, even before my allergies were discovered, was a bit of an adventure. I often ate the same things, but that was simply because I didn't have time to learn any other way, or when I was a vegetarian, because I thought I was supposed to. I usually preferred something new and exciting, preferably something that was something entirely new and not a "substitute" food.

Anyway, I've never gotten into the "traditional" stuff that goes with celebratory meals (read: super-sweet candied sweet potatoes with stuffing and a big, often overcooked tryptophan-laden bird with sticky, glutenous gravy - no fermented foods and nothing to relieve the heaviness but a bit of raw green salad with bottled dressing,) although I understand that for many folks it is important.

Our hosts decided to go with the old standbys, but bless her heart - she used ghee in the sweet potatoes so that Little Moo could eat them. She made the turkey herself and it was delicious. I think she gave up entirely on making a stuffing that her husband might like and went and found some at Whole Foods, then I suggested that perhaps I could take all of Little Moo's leftover rice bread-ends and make a stuffing for her and anyone else who wanted it. It was a huge winner. Little Moo had two big helpings, and it went great with an amazingly flavored turkey. Here's the recipe, based on the basic Joy of Cooking for a stuffing made separately from a roast:

Rice Bread Stuffing

4 cups lightly toasted or otherwise hard rice bread, cut into small pieces

about 1/4 lb giblets, cooked overnight in chicken soup

1 onion

1 cup chopped mushrooms

1/4 cup chopped celery

1/4 cup chopped parsley

1/4 cup rendered duck fat

1 cup chicken broth

additional fat for top - can be ghee if tolerated

Finely chop separately: giblets, onion, celery, parsley and mushrooms.

Saute onion for 2o minutes or so in duck fat. This is a good time to chop everything else to make the time go by. Add giblets first, then everything else to the pan and saute another 10 minutes or so.

Pour the bread pieces/crumbs into a 9x12" pan. Pour the sauteed mixture over it. Salt and pepper to taste. Mix well. Add more fat if necessary and the cup of broth and mix it in. Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees F for about 20 minutes. Remove foil. If the bread was cut into pieces, you might want to stir and mash it up a bit more if you like a finer grain stuffing. Dot the top with more fat and brown for up to 10 minutes.

What I discovered: when in doubt, add more fat and more broth. :)

My people liked it so much that they had it for Christmas Day breakfast!

Mango Chutney

After months and months of lactofermented veggies (for me it's been a few years, actually) it was time for something different. I tried a mango version of the Nourishing Traditions Papaya Chutney. It's delicious. I left off the rapadura and it's STILL amazing.

Basically, get a small onion, bunches of mint and cilantro, respectively, 3 big mangoes, a red pepper, and mix them up in a bowl. Cube the fruit, julienne the pepper, and chop the leaves of the herbs coarsely. Chop the onion, too.

In a separate bowl, mix together a few ts salt, 1/4 c whey, 1/2 c lime juice and 1/2 c water.

Put the fruit mixture into a quart mason jar, punch it down with something like a meat hammer or a ladle. Add the liquid, adding enough water to fill to 1" above the fruit. If anything floats to the top, try to push it down.

Seal it up and keep it in a warm place for 2 days, then refrigerate.

The trick here is that almost anything blended with whey and left to ferment tastes great. So, for a small jar of mustard, relish or whatever gets a few tablespoons and a quart gets 1/4 cup.

Slow Food Nation 08

We finally made it today, on the last day, in the last hour. We couldn't really afford the entrance fee for the events, so we were glad to just stroll around the stalls and see the lovely garden that was right in the middle of Civic Center. I was excited to see Organic Pastures with their raw dairy and their evangelizing of real milk. We bought 2 tubs of lovely butter. One to use and one to freeze. Each tub was only $5! It's about twice that at Rainbow and they're always out of it by the time we get there. I figured that it would actually be worth while to drive all the way to Fresno to stock up on the stuff a few times a year instead of going to Rainbow, even with the phone book coupons. 

In the middle of the square, beside the garden, was a small bandstand with all kinds of music going on. There was great produce from all over California. We stopped at the Pt. Reyes Bookstore stand to check out the books that were, in the last half-hour, on sale for 30% off. I bought "Full Moon Feast" by Jessica Prentiss. I read her first essay while Rain slept this afternoon. She wrote about her young-adulthood in which she partook of what Pollan calls our "national eating disorder," that is, being faced with excess, but little real food, and finding herself obsessed, yet incapable of eating well. 

That made me think. The oddity of starvation when food is so plentiful, yet so awful, makes horrible sense in a way. I grew up eating what my mother grew in her garden, along with traditional foods like chicken bone broth, homemade sourdoughs and meats from the supermarket cooked simply. Some time in the late 70s or early 80s, the foods in the market changed. Corn and soy were hidden in prepared foods. Corn syrups took the place of sugar. Weirdnesses like Nutrasweet joined saccarin on the shelves. The meat industry became more and more deregulated, resulting in an unsafe meat supply, full of hormones and antibiotics. Our eating lives became the equivalent of being alone in a crowd. People were surrounded by huge excesses of food, but it was junk, stripped of nutrients and filled with additives. It became more common to see fat, yet malnourished poor people, while toned, slim physiques became the mark of the wealthy. The overweight and the thin were all starving, because despite the huge amounts of food, with the illusion of choice (it was all wheat, soy and corn additives, citric acid, corn syrup, vegetables and fruits were tasteless and filled with pesticides, corn-fed meats with little nutrient value and too much fat, etc), but actually none. If you were sensitive to corn, soy, wheat, gluten, dairy, casein, citrus or any of the other big 8, you were up a creek. 

I realized something when I started to buy and prepare real foods. Food is expensive. It's also rare to find. There are places in the country where it's impossible to get produce without pesticides or that can be guaranteed not to have been watered with raw sewage or chemical runoff. Most of the country drinks pasturized and homogenized milks and eats meats that some from the centralized slaughterhouse system. In fact, it's nearly impossible for independent ranches like Marin Sun Farms to slaughter their own animals thanks to the regulatory system that is weighted towards big business. A woman I saw at the market today told me that in the centralized slaughterhouses, the ranches are told that there may not be a guarantee that the meat they will receive will be the cows that went in. That means a lot if those cows were raised as carefully as they are at MSF. Although raw milk has made it back to our markets legally, it's always under threat from big dairy. It's rarely seen at any market and often has to be purchased through a cow-share.

Real food is scarce. It is unbelievably expensive. If we choose to only eat real food, we eat sparsely by necessity. The famine, is, in many ways, real. 

Okay. Now I have to reserve Michael Pollan's new book at the library. :)

Thoughts around a chicken dinner

As I sit before the remains of my plate, I watch my 2-year-old run around the living room with her daddy, pulling out pans and spoons and bowls, mixing and "cooking." She announces to my husband that "it's hot! I have to be careful!" He asks what she's cooking and she says loudly "PANcakes!" She uses a lot of exclamation points these days for everything, but especially the "food" that she makes in her "kitchen." Her "kitchen" exists on the bottom shelf of everything within reach in the dining room where she stores her implements....a tiny steel pot with a handle, a potholder, several small plates, wooden and plastic, spoons, and other bits and pieces. She's now proudly feeding her baby doll pancakes.

My plate is still colorful. It's my idea of the perfect dinner, more than half-eaten. I bought a small organic chicken from our local market at 6001 California St., locally raised and slaughtered in Petaluma. There was a nice head of kale and brown rice from Other Avenues Co-op in the Outer Sunset and homemade sauerkraut that is a shocking shade of pink against the greens. The kale was stewed with chicken drippings and a bit of beef tallow. The chicken was cooked very simply, roasted at a fairly low temperature with a bit of olive oil on top. When it was newly on the plate there was a lovely heap of brightly colored kale and kraut with the soft beige chicken and rice on either side. I know that the Weston A. Price people would be all over me for the fairly low fat content of this meal. We don't do laundry on washboards anymore, nor do we work in the fields from dawn to dusk or need the huge calorie load. I love the idea of eating fat well, but there's nothing wrong with a nicely distributed plate, either. 

I enjoy using everything and get several long-term recipes going at once. While I cooked the chicken, I soaked a beef bone, then put it in a crock pot with rice, a bit of  tapioca starch, a few pounds of stew beef and the broth from cooking the kale. The back of the chicken will be turned into broth in a day or so, then after that, broth-cooked rice. If I could get my hands on some decent giblets (or any giblets, actually) I could add that to the broth, too. The leftover kale will be added to the stew, possibly with leftover bits of chicken. There's a crock that's been on the butcher block since Thursday that has about three or four days left on its fermentation that contains a nice batch of tiny cucumbers in brine. 

I also enjoy sitting at the table with my husband and daughter while we all eat. My daughter asks for "a big one," an assisted forkful of a bit of everything on her plate (except for greens). My husband goes back for seconds. My child can't get enough of sauerkraut and anything salty or spicy. She started eating those foods by the time she was 11 months old. She's only now starting to be interested at all in sweet things.

All this was made in a kitchen about 8 feet square with an electric oven that barely works and burners that all sit at creative angles. (Just imagine making eggs in an iron skillet at a 20 degree angle...yep. Welcome to my life.) Our refrigerator and freezer doors seem to have no seal and are closed with duct tape. But I manage quite well. In fact, fermentation is a no-brainer in a kitchen like ours. I make coconut milk kefir in a jar that lives in our dining room hutch for 24 hours. Sauerkraut and other salt-brine pickles stay in one large crock and one small, accompanied by a small army of glass canning jars. All of them are either on top of the fridge from where my husband sweetly moves them to the butcher block table for midway checks, or on the butcher block table where I do most of the kitchen work. 

I should sign off for now to get out the coconut milk custard and fruit that's waiting for everyone in the fridge.

I wish you all a tasty, slow and savory dinner. (We went to the final day of the Slow Food festival here in San Francisco today...more on that later if I have time.)