Time to Catch Up (a Bit)

I know I have been neglecting my blog lately. What can I say? I've been working on other projects and none of them are knitting (although I do have something in the works there). But I have not stopped reading and have found tons of things that I thought might be of interest here. Let me quickly post a few links this morning to try and clear the backlog.

In the Low-Carb world, there is a lot of talk about lipids right now. If you want a primer on fats and especially saturated fats, read this Mark's Daily Apple entry, The Definitive Guide to Saturated Fats.

Mark has also recently posted about red palm oil, which is the newest food in my larder. Mine comes West Africa made by Jungle Products. It has a strong taste which I love, especially on chicken and ground meats. but it has also given my calves' liver a wow flavor! Cleaning up can be tricky since it can stain anything made from plastic red, so I rinse out my pan immediately after cooking with hot water.

Other blogs that have recently devoted a lot of space to lipids include Stephan Guyenet's Whole Health Source, Chris Masterjohn's The Daily Lipid, and Peter at Hyperlipid (you can browse through his labels list for all kinds of interesting stuff).

Of course there's always the Drs. Eades. Try Mary Dan's mayonnaise recipe. It's great! I make mine with 3/4 cup of melted coconut oil and 1/4 cup of a light-tasting olive oil. And leave out the Splenda! Dr. Mike has found Twitter and keeps a running commentary there on whatever he has been reading and he is a voracious reader! Here is a recent post of his on lipids, Low Carbohydrate-diets increase LDL: debunking the myth.

It seems that if you are a low-carb eater, your HDL tends to go way up and your triglycerides also go way down. If that happens then the Friedewald Equation which they use to determine your LDL levels comes out too high. Yes that's right, most routine lab tests do not measure LDL directly, it is derived from the values for total cholesterol, HDL, and triglycerides divided by 5. The equation is:

LDL = Total Cholesterol - HDL - Triglycerides/5

So if your HDL goes up, which is supposed to be a good thing, your total cholesterol goes up (bad). Likewise, if your triglycerides go down (good), then when you divide that number by 5 which is constant in the equation, you get a smaller number. End result, the LDL goes way up (very bad) and it was never actually measured! Dr. Eades provides an equation that corrects for this error. He calls it the Iranian Equation and cautions that it only works for total cholesterol over 250 mg/dl. I'll give it here because it is buried in the comments of his post:

For readings in mg/dl (units used in the US) use this equation:

LDL = (total cholesterol/1.19 + triglycerides/1.9 – HDL/1.1) – 38

For readings in mmol/L (units used in Europe and the rest of the world)

LDL =(total cholesterol/1.19 + Triglycerides/0.81 – HDL/1.1) – 0.98

Of course, you can always ask to have your LDL measured directly, a more expensive test. What you really want to know is how much of your LDL is the small, hard, and more easily oxidized kind (bad) or the light, fluffy, and larger kind (good). One person made a very interesting comment to this blog posting which gives food for thought and that is that when your LDL gets really large, some of the smaller HDL gets counted as LDL. No sources are given, but it does point to the fact that measuring our cholesterol may not be as straightforward as we have been led to believe.

And then there is Dr. William Davis's blog, The Heart Scan Blog. When Dr. Davis wrote his book, Track Your Plaque, he was generally in the mainstream as far as saturated fat and diet goes; he considered a vegetarian diet to be very healthy for your heart. It was interesting to watch, through his blog postings, as he made a complete turnaround and now espouses low-carb eating including healthy saturated fats. He credits his reversal to Gary Taubes's book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. So here is a thoughtful doctor who is well-acquainted with the topic of heart disease, who deals with people with heart problems all the time, and who has recently learned to question the prevailing dogma.

His latest post is on Sun, Fish, and Seaweed, which I intended to be the topic of my next post.

Liver

After spending two weeks playing, practicing, rehearsing, and playing some more, I am finally able to sit down at the computer and write a post. I have done some knitting and I'll bring you up to date on that later. (I have some gorgeous yarn to show you.) I haven't written about my diet in a very long time, so I thought I'd start back with that topic. Dr. Eades has had several very good postings recently on his blog and I'd like to draw your attention to a couple of them. If you are new to my blog, I am a low-carber and have been for almost five years now.

One of the things I like about the Drs. Eades is that they are willing to change their views or update their recommendations as new research comes to light (if the research is good research). They use their blogs to comment on these new findings and sometimes the best stuff is in their comments to the comments from readers. They will have to do a revision of their books someday. They do have a new book in the works that was supposed to come out this January, but release has been delayed until the fall. The burning question that seems to be on everyone's mind is, what do you do if you try low-carb eating to lose weight and you reach a stall, a plateau, and just can't get things going again. Or you go off the diet, gain weight, and want to get back on the diet to lose that weight, but find that things are not so easy the second time around. Then there are those of us who have reached a certain age and find that the pounds just pile on despite all our best efforts.

Dr. Eades points out that one cause for the stall, the difficulties losing weight, and the middle-aged weight gain is a tired or stressed liver.

The liver is the primary organ involved in metabolism. In order to lose weight successfully, you need to have a liver that is running on all cylinders.

Dr. Eades gives several reasons why the liver may not be functioning up to par, including old age, but also including the fact that alcohol, medications, caffeine, and excess insulin in the blood caused by excess sugar in the diet (remember all carbs are sugar) need to be processed by the liver. It has been found that being overweight can cause the same liver dysfunction that drinking too much alcohol does.

People who consume too much alcohol over too long a time period develop first a fatty infiltration of their liver cells, then inflammation that progresses to fibrosis, then ultimately, if the drinking doesn’t stop, to cirrhosis and possibly even liver cancer. This same exact progression takes place in the livers of many people who are overweight and/or insulin resistant.

If you have too much insulin circulating in your blood because your liver can't process it all, you will have trouble losing weight.

Insulin stays in the circulation because it is put there by the pancreas and because it isn’t metabolized in the liver. A liver that isn’t functioning up to snuff won’t break down insulin as rapidly as it should. Consequently, higher levels of insulin mean more difficulty in losing weight. Plus, since the liver is the major organ involved in the entire metabolic process, it works a whole lot better to stabilize everything when it is unhindered by having to detoxify a lot of unnecessary stuff. Which is why you need to baby your liver when you restart your low-carb diet.

He recommends laying off the coffee (and I would include any drink with caffeine in it) and alcohol until you get your system going again.

Another great post was about eating low-carb in Mexico. It can be done. In fact, I think it can be done anywhere there is good food and attention is paid to the preparation of that food.

Speaking of liver, my sister and I were talking about how we both like to have liver now and then, but our families won't touch the stuff. We were wondering if it is because we were forced to eat it when we were young and now it feels like "comfort food" to us. I just had some calves' liver yesterday and I am so full of energy today. That happens every time I have liver. But my sister and I both agree that it has to be cooked right—very lightly. I like to sauté mine over a low heat in butter and coconut oil with just a little seasoning. It's really good that way. I accompanied last night's liver with some wonderful cream of celeriac soup. I can give you that recipe, because I made it up myself. A hand-held blender is a great tool to have, but if you don't have one, you can use a food processor. It's messier but does the job.

butter
coconut oil
1 celeriac, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks
3 stalks celery, chopped coarsely
1 carrot, chopped coarsely
2 small or 1 medium onion
1 1/2 cups water
1 can coconut milk
sea salt

Melt the butter and coconut oil in a soup pot. Add the celeriac, celery, carrot, and onions and "sweat" (put the lid on the pot) for about 15 minutes. Add 1 cup of water and bring to a boil. Simmer the vegetables for 20 minutes or so, until the celeriac is soft. Turn down the heat and add the coconut milk. Purée the soup with a hand-held blender right in the pot. Add the other 1/2 cup of water (or more) if the soup is too thick. Add some salt and bring back to a simmer.

I like to serve the soup with a drizzle of a good quality olive oil in the middle.

The entire pot of soup will contain about 28g of carbohydrates, but you will get about 3 or 4 servings out of it depending on the size of your celeriac and how thick you like the soup. Considering that one smallish boiled potato (2.5 inch diameter) will have 25g of carbs, this is a good deal. At only 7.3g per cup, celeriac is a good substitute for mashed potatoes.

Pears and Pomegranates

I love this time of year for many reasons, of course, but one of the reasons is all the surprises I receive in the mail or by other delivery services. Yesterday, I was totally surprised by two packages. The first was a gift from my bank, one of the new institutions I have opened accounts with recently. I thought the days of giving out toasters with every new account were over, especially in this economy, so I was very pleasantly surprised to receive a box of Harry & David's famous Royal Riviera Pears courtesy of Farmers and Merchants Bank plus a gift card towards a future purchase.

Now pears are not a low-carb fruit. Each one of these beauties delivers 31g of carbs, so when you are trying to keep your daily total between 30 and 60g, just one pear will do it for you. So last night I treated myself to half a pear, and an under ripe one at that (apples and pears are lower in carbs when green or under ripe). Just by chance I had purchased some delicious raw milk Pt. Reyes blue cheese and a bottle of pomegranate wine earlier in the day. I had the makings of a fantastic dessert.

Pomegranates and especially wine made from pomegranates have been found to be very high in anti-oxidants, containing three times more than the same amount of red wine or green tea. I had purchased The Republic of Tea's Pomegranate Green Tea earlier this year when it was available. Apparently, it is a seasonal thing. But my favorite way to consume pomegranates is to buy the fresh fruit and dig out the arils myself. It is a tedious job and the red juice splatters everywhere, but the arils don't keep very long out of the fruit. My son told me that there used to be a pomegranate bush on his way to school and that he and his friends would pick the fruit and eat it like an apple while they walked. I asked didn't the juice go everywhere and turn their hands red? He said yes, but they didn't care.

The wine came from Armenia and it turned out to be a good dessert wine. It was very reminiscent of blackberries and cherries although not very sweet. It is 20% alcohol, and 10 to 15 fruit are needed to make a gallon of wine. Something different.

The other surprise was a package from my cousin who shares my genealogy passion. She inherited boxes of stuff from our great aunt who also was very interested in our family history. Until now my cousin has not had time to go through the boxes, but a recent move has forced her to take a peek. What she sent me was a photograph of my father taken at the time of his high school graduation. My father died ten years ago and I had never seen this photo before. Now I can clearly see the resemblance between my father and my younger brother and my son. They all even sport the same hairstyle! It brought tears to my eyes and warmth to my heart. What a treasure!

Count Carbs Not Calories

Tuesday is Farmers' Market day for me and is the highlight of my week. I go early so that if I have a Music Teachers' Association meeting or something that day, I can get my shopping done and still make the meeting at 10:00. I know I am very fortunate not only to have such a large Farmers' Market nearby, one of the best in L.A., but also for the fact that I live in California where buying local means getting some of the best produce in the country all year round.

The photo above shows some of last week's cache. I like to try new things like the Armenian cucumbers and the greens next to them. (Don't ask me what kind they are, I don't know. But they were delicious sautéed with butter and elephant garlic.) The yellow balls are cucumbers, too, lemon cucumbers. They have a slightly different taste, but the difference is very subtle. A whole basket of these cucumbers cost $1.50. The orange cauliflower I have had before and use it in the summertime to make a raw cauliflower cold soup like the one shown on the left made from a head of purple cauliflower. (That's pine nuts and purple basil on top drizzled with extra virgin olive oil.) The carrots are actually red and the whole bunch, plus a few more not in the photo, also cost $1.50. The pile of greens in the back is arugula which cost $1.00. The watermelon cost $3.00. On the lower right are some currants and black mission figs, my one splurge for the week. I paid $4.00 for the pint.

All of the fruit and vegetables in the photo are low-carb choices except for the carrots and figs, but the carrots aren't too bad and even the figs aren't too bad if you only eat one or two. Unfortunately, the fruits most people think of when they agree that they should eat more fruits and vegetables are apples, oranges, pears, and bananas. These are high-carb fruits and should only be eaten sparingly, if you really want to cut down your carbs. A little book that can be very useful for helping you to count your carbs is The Protein Power LifePlan Gram Counter by the Drs. Eades. I keep mine handy in the kitchen at all times.

Speaking of the good doctors, in the latest post by Dr. Michael Eades on his Protein Power blog, he uses the strongest language yet regarding the value of keeping your blood sugar in control to prevent not only diabetes but cardiovascular diseases as well. I strongly advise all my readers (all 20 of you) to check out this post including the excellent comments below it. If you need to lose weight, if Type II diabetes is a problem, if you have a family history of heart disease, or if you just want to be the healthiest you that you can be, READ this post and the related articles. Read the Eades's books. Eat low-carb, high-fat meals and forget about cholesterol.

The Slow Life

Grace and I have been having a discussion of sorts about the slow life, something we all wish we had, something many of us strive for, but something few of us attain. The slow life includes slow food, that's where you buy ingredients and make your own meals instead of buying prepared foods and especially fast foods. It includes slow clothing, where you make your own clothes instead of buying ready-made clothing that is often produced in sweat shops around the world. I suggested that we add slow music to the list. That's where you spend hours and days and weeks, months, and years of your life learning to play a musical instrument so that you can make your own music for entertainment. Here are some of my attempts to slow things down for myself.

The low-carb diet that I adhere to is definitely slow food I have to admit. It really helps to stay with the diet if you can do your own cooking. Last week I made a Pot-au-feu that took a whole afternoon to make but was out-of-this-world delicious. It could have taken longer, but I adapted the recipe to my needs which meant leaving out some of the ingredients. I just finished the last of the broth last night; I didn't want to waste one drop! The recipe came from a very slow-food cookbook, Lulu's Provençal Table by Richard Olney. The Lulu of the title is Lucie Tempier Peyraud, the wife of a French vintner, Lucian Peyraud and co-owner of Domaine Tempier, a vineyard and dwelling "nestled in the hillsides outside the neighboring fishing ports of Bandol and Sanary, some ten miles from Toulon and thirty miles from Marseilles."

A Pot-au-feu is basically a stew and includes several different kinds of meats. I made mine with some of my grass-fed beef and marrow bones that I bought last year when my daughter and I purchased a split side of beef from a California rancher. I love the instructions in the recipe that call for "freshly dug carrots." Apparently, Lulu can tell the difference. I did the best I could with carrots freshly bought from the Farmer's Market. Of course I added no potatoes and used no bread on which to spread the marrow. I love to eat marrow with a small spoon right out of the bone. The secret ingredient in the broth is a tangy white wine not red.

Knitting is definitely slow clothing especially, when it takes a whole year to produce a sweater! I have finished the back of Anya, but will have to put it aside for awhile as I will be travelling the next month and as I said in my earlier post on Anya, it is not a take-along project. So I have started something new which is definitely a take-along project, the Helon Dress from Rowan's newest magazine, No. 43 for Spring/Summer. This is an entirely crocheted dress, something I haven't done much of in years.

Crocheting makes me think of my mother who was so fond of it. She was constantly making something for someone right up until the day she died. In fact, she left a tablecloth unfinished for we don't know who. The mystery was never solved, so my sister finished the work and kept it. She says it helped her work through her grief. Interestingly, my sister is left-handed, my mother was not. Since the tablecloth was a work in the round, my sister had to reverse the direction and go the other way. She says she can knit both ways but never learned to crochet with her right hand.

I haven't really gotten off topic with all of this, it just made me think of when my mother, my sister, and I used to make all of our own clothing whether sewed, knitted or crocheted. Both my sister and I have pretty much stopped doing that. We don't have the time, or at least we don't think we have the time. My knitting is a hobby not a necessity. And sadly neither of us has taught our daughters the techniques so the skills will not be passed on.

Lastly, there's slow music. I get plenty of that. Grace, whose interests vary far and wide, came up with a link to a NY Times article on the subject. I have printed this piece out to give to all my adult students. It's never too late to learn to play an instrument and enjoy the benefits of slow music!

Wheat-free, Low Carb Thanksgiving

Many people, when they hear that I am eating low-carb and wheat free, have commented, "That's awfully restrictive, isn't it?" Of course, I don't see it that way mostly because I feel so good on this diet. I see it as an opportunity to be creative and try new things. One such challenge is the traditional Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner. There's no problem with the turkey. I can eat as much of that as I want. But for years I made my mother's recipe for a bread stuffing that was the highlight of the meal, but now I have to avoid wheat. And then there are mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry sauce, cranberry bread, butternut squash, and of course pumpkin or pecan pie, all of which are very high in carbs. What to do?

Last year and again this year I will make a wild rice/brown rice stuffing with mushrooms and almonds that I got from the Internet and which is very good. As long as I use the same seasonings as my mother did, it tastes very similar to hers. Mashed cauliflower or celeriac can substitute for the mashed potatoes. After all, the potatoes are only a vehicle for the gravy. It's the gravy that matters, right? And said gravy will be thickened with corn starch. I will make my own low-carb cranberry sauce from the Eades's The Low-Carb Comfort Food Cookbook. And instead of cranberry bread, I have adapted a recipe from an old cookbook I bought on Nantucket many years ago called, From the Galleys of Nantucket. (I have the 1983 version.) The recipe is called Apple Pudding and here is my adaptation:

1/2 cup honey
3 tablespoons corn flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup tart apples, diced
1 cup chopped fresh cranberries
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon butter

Mix apples, cranberries, and pecans. Spread out in a greased pie dish. In a separate bowl mix honey and egg, add corn flour, baking powder, vanilla, and salt. Pour over the fruit and bake for 30 minutes at 375 degrees.

One year I forgot the vanilla and so sprinkled the top with cinnamon and ground nutmeg before baking. It was fantastic! Now I do both. This satisfies me as a dessert so much that I don't miss the pie. But as it stands, this recipe is wheat-free but not low-carb. So I am planning to eliminate the honey and use stevia powder instead. I just have to find some substitute for the liquid that the honey would provide. Or maybe I will just dilute the honey. This will be an experiment.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Three Summer Soups

Summer is here! Although it hasn't gotten very hot in LA yet, my thoughts have turned to light summer meals that don't require a lot of cooking. Here are three of my favorite cold summer soups.

The first two are adapted from the book, Raw, by Charlie Trotter and Roxanne Klein. This is a beautiful cookbook (?). Cookbook isn't the right word because none of the recipes inside involve cooking. Everything is raw as the title indicates, although they do make good use of a dehydrator. Their definition of raw is food that has not been heated to higher than 118 degrees F. The idea is not to kill all of the beneficial enzymes which help you to digest the food and which also act as catalysts for the metabolic reactions that take place in the body. I am not a total advocate of eating everything raw, but I do find that for me raw fish and raw salads, etc. are very easy on the digestion. When I had to cook the life out of everything my husband ate, the meals sat very heavy on the stomach.

The soup pictured above is a creamy cauliflower soup made with raw cauliflower. It's very simple and easy to make if you have a good blender. It's basically chopped cauliflower, water, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and salt. I made mine with a special Vinaigre de Banyuls, a sweet vinegar, imported from France. If you want to make this soup, use a good quality vinegar. It makes a huge difference in the flavor. Just throw everything in the blender and voila! You can top it with all kinds of things. I love a drizzle of olive oil on my soups and also used frizzled leeks (recipe from Vegetable Heaven by Mollie Katzen) for this one. Cauliflower comes in various colors, too. This week I had orange soup and I can't wait to try purple. The taste is the same, just the color is different. Someone suggested that broccoli might be used in the same recipe, but although I haven't tried it, I think the broccoli would not be as creamy.

The second soup is simplicity itself, just cucumber, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt thrown into a blender. I use either English cucumbers or Japanese cucumbers and I peel them partly in zebra stripes. Cucumbers are highly recommended for their potassium content by the author of Fiber Menace, Konstantin Monastyrsky. He makes a cucumber juice drink which is very similar to this soup and has some every day. He says that it is potassium and not the proverbial 8 glasses of water per day that keep constipation away. Good elimination notwithstanding, this is a very elegant soup and I would eat it anyway. Here it is paired with rolled slices of roast beef from the deli and topped with raw milk goat cheese for a perfect lunch with no cooking involved.

The third soup does invlove some cooking and is higher in carbs. I had all these beets collecting in my vegetable bin because I would eat the tops and store away the bulbs. What to do with them? Soup! This one was adapted from the recipe for chilled beet soup in The Book of Yogurt by Sonia Uvezian. I bought this book back when I was making my own yogurt (which I have started doing again, by the way). Instead of yogurt, I used coconut milk. I should have written the recipe down because I made quite a few changes from the original. For example, no potatoes and no broth. I steamed the beets and peeled them, sautéed some onions in coconut oil, added the beets, lemon juice, a little chopped cucumber, coconut milk, and enough water to make it the consistency I wanted. I used my hand-held blender and turned it into a pink creamy delight right in the pot. Then, of course, it had to be chilled. The beets became even more frothy after being chilled so the soup was very thick.

Local Harvest

Here is my stash for the week from the farm stand. Everything you see was picked the morning that I bought it. It's all so fresh and smells wonderful! All of the zucchini came in a basket for only $1.25. They sell oversized, misshapen, or slightly damaged veggies in these baskets for $1 or $1.25. As far as I'm concerned, the freshness matters more than the looks, but you have to get there early to get these specials. They get snapped up quickly. The two large zucchini's have already gone into a creamy soup using coconut milk and two of those gorgeous carrots.

Those luscious strawberries are the cheap ones! Three baskets for $7. They have really brightened my breakfast meal for the past few days. If you store them in Tupperware with a dry paper towel, they will last a week even though they were picked fully ripe. The farm stand people expect you to eat them the day you buy them, and I do stuff my face with a few before I put the rest in the fridge. In fact everything lasts longer if you buy it the day it is picked. I have also found that freshness matters more than variety. I can eat a salad every day for lunch and not get tired of it as long as the ingredients are fresh. When faced with the usual salad you get in most restaurants with wilted or brown lettuce and veggies that look like they have seen better days, my appetite turns off. I think it must be part of our basic instincts to seek out fresh food to eat.

Community Supported Agriculture or CSA is a movement to support local farmers and share in their harvest which started in Japan, spread through Europe, and then came to the US. But it has not come to my corner of Southern California yet, although I hear there is something in the works. Anyway, to find if there is a CSA farm near you, go to this USDA website which has several links to other sites that have directories of CSA farms anywhere in the US.

My daughter sent me this link to certified farmer's markets in the Los Angeles area. We do have several of those to choose from. Local Harvest, whose site I linked you to for CSA farms will also link you to farmer's markets in your area.

And last but not least, you can find farms that sell grass-fed beef and other pastured animal products at EatWild.com. I just received a shipment of beef from a farm in California yesterday. The New York steak I had for dinner last night was delicious.

Meals in Minutes

My sister called me the other night when I was in the middle of making my dinner. I thought she might like to see how it turned out. It was delicious, Sis!

Those are duck legs covered with sweet Vidalia onions and a watercress garnish. The flan was made with lovely small zucchini from the farm stand and raw sheep's milk cheese and fresh eggs. The salad consists of Belgian endive and a tangelo with flaxseed oil dressing. The recipe can be found in the Turkey and Duck issue of Time/Life's Great Meals in Minutes. (You can get it now for $0.01!)

This series came out in the 80s and was a mainstay of my cooking repertoire for a long time. The recipes are all for four people and everything is made from scratch including chopping your own fresh herbs. Naturally, this takes time and we used to joke that yeah, it's meals in minutes, but they don't tell you how many! The meals are designed by a variety of chefs and are very creative. I plan to pass this set of cookbooks on to my daughter someday. By the way, this meal really was a meal-in-minutes. It took only 60 and that included chatting with my sister on the phone while I cooked.

The whole meal was inspired by two things: the duck was on sale, and I just finished reading Nina Planck's book, Real Food. Planck espouses my own philosophy of diet and nutrition which I stated earlier, and that is, just eat whole foods and don't worry too much about counting things like calories, carbs, etc. Planck has read all the books that I have read and then some and has taken the time to delve deeper into the research and has come up with an excellent synthesis of a very complex subject. She will tell you what both sides of a controversy say (for example, whether or not to eat grains or dairy) and then tell you what she does, leaving you to decide for yourself what you want to do, but with a strong hint that she leans a certain way! She writes about food in such an appealing manner that I just wanted to run out and buy some new ingredients and try a new recipe.

If you want to know what to eat in this bewildering world of conflicting advice, and you want to read only one book, I recommend this one.

Rejoice!

The farm stand is open! There shall be strawberries for breakfast again! There's no doubt that produce that has just been picked tastes best—even the beets.

I hated beets when I was a kid growing up. We had government hot lunches at school every day, which when I look back on it now were much more healthy than the pizza and tacos that are being served in the school cafeterias today. A frequent Thursday meal included beets—not sweet little baby beets, but the strong-flavored, full-sized, humongous mature beets. They got cold on my plate because I would eat everything else first which made them even less appealing when the nuns would force me to get them down. I swore that when I grew up I would never eat another beet as long as I lived.

When I saw beets on sale at the farm stand a few years ago I had to admit that they did look appealing, large leafy greens with red veins and stems and a burgundy red bulb at the end. To encourage buyers to take the greens as well as the bulb (most people ask them to cut the greens off), the proprietors of the farm stand posted this message on their chalk board, "Beet Greens, Very Tasty, Very Nutritious." I decided to give them a try, and the rest, as they say is history.

The greens look as though they might be tough, but when steamed or stir-fried, they become soft and tender similar to cooked spinach. The red stems are edible, too. You can cut them into inch-long pieces and stir-fry them also with a little onion, then throw the greens on top and cover the pan to steam everything together. When I buy the beets, I cut the bulbs off, leaving about an inch of stem and bag the bulbs and greens separately. The greens should be eaten right away, but the bulbs will last longer like any root vegetable.

I like to cook the bulbs by steaming them. Just wash them well and cut the root end off but leave the stems and steam them whole. Do not peel them. This will minimize the amount of red juice that will bleed out of them. You can do this if you have bought small ones, otherwise, cut them in half for quicker cooking. After they are steamed and tender when pierced with a knife (about 20 minutes for small ones, longer for larger ones), rinse them under cold water while you rub the skin off. It should slip off easily and the beet will stay hot inside. Then slice them and add a little butter and tarragon. Yummy!

This morning's LA Times has a front page article about Wolfgang Puck's plan to join the fight against animal cruelty, specifically farm animals (hooray!). In Puck's words, "Healthier animals taste better." And that is true. Grass-fed beef tastes much better than grain-fed, and organic, free-range chicken comes close to tasting like the chicken I remember from my childhood, although it is not there yet. (I wonder what will happen to the human race when there are no longer any people alive who remember what good food tastes like.)

Last summer I treated my brother and sister-in-law to a meal at Puck's flagship restaurant, Spago in Beverly Hills. On the menu was this "Beet Cake" appetizer. I realized that I have come a long way from that kid who refused to eat her beets when I found myself ordering this tasty treat!

Nut Muffins

I have given this recipe to many people, but this is the latest version of it. It was adapted from the muffin recipe in Elaine Gottschall's book, Breaking the Vicious Cycle. This book and the diet that Mrs. Gottschall created was the starting point for my search for better health through diet. I do not follow the diet exactly any more, but it is still highly recommended for people with bowel disorders.

Ingredients:
2 ½ cups ground nuts (I use almond meal)
¼ cup melted butter, or ¼ cup homemade yogurt, or small amount of fruit juice, or pure apple butter (add last and adjust amount depending on the consistency of the batter. I use 1/8 cup butter and 1/8 cup coconut oil. Melt the butter first then add the coconut oil.)
½ cup honey (more or less as desired--I tend to use less and add water if more liquid is needed)
½ t baking soda ( have found a baking soda without aluminum in it--Bob's Red Mill)
1/8 t salt (I leave this out most of the time)
3 eggs (if eggs must be avoided, use puréed fruit to hold ingredients together)

Additions:
½ chopped apple
1/3 cup raisins
½ cup blueberries, raspberries, or cranberries
walnut halves

Melt butter and add coconut oil. Place dry ingredients (nut meal, baking soda, salt) in one bowl and mix thoroughly. Place eggs in separate bowl and whisk in the honey. Add egg mixture to nut mixture and stir. At this point you can add chopped fruit, etc. and then add the butter/oil mixture. Stir. The batter will be rather more liquid than a normal muffin batter.

Spoon batter into muffin cups and place a walnut half on top of each muffin. Let them sit while you pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Makes 12 muffins.

You can use almond meal or any nut meal to create breads, etc., and to use as breading, but this is the only baked goodie that I still eat since I stopped eating grains. As in the case of sugar, I feel that if you are going to stop eating cakes and stuff like that, then just stop and don't waste a lot of time looking for substitutes. You get over your cravings for them much easier that way.

A great source of nuts and the almond meal that I use (which can be an expensive item if you don't shop around) is Hadley Fruit Orchards in Cabazon, CA. That's just before you get to Palm Springs.

Oops, I almost forgot. If you use Bob's Red Mill Baking Soda, you need to add something acidic to get the baking soda to react and cause the batter to rise, so I add one tablespoon of cider vinegar when I add the butter/oil mixture at the end. Organic, raw, unfiltered cider vinegar, of course.

Soup, Beautiful Soup

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

No doubt about it, this is soup and stew weather here in sunny Southern California. I have a pot of my famous turkey stock simmering on the stove right now. I will turn it into soup later on today. Meanwhile, it fills the house with warmth and a wonderful aroma that makes all my students feel hungry when they come for their lessons. Nothing gives me the gratifying feeling that I am taking good care of myself better than homemade soup.

Recently I have made several soups and stews that fit perfectly into my diet regimen which on its simplest terms means no grains, no dairy except for butter, and no potatoes. There's a whole lot more to it than that, but it will take me months to get into all the details. For now, here are some recipes to whet your appetite and show you how it's done. (Grace warned you that I would do this.)

Last week I made an oxtail stew that was just yummie! (It's actually steer these days.) The recipe was adapted from the Williams Sonoma cookbook, Soup and Stew. The changes I made were minor but make a big difference to me. One was no flour. The soup comes out thick enough without it. No anchovy paste. An expensive item which adds a lot of salt. And the pièce de résistance, organic, sugar-free pancetta instead of the bacon. That's another expensive item, but you only need two slices and the flavor is out of this world. The white wine adds richness to the sauce which tastes even better the second time around. Also, I don't bother to pit and chop the olives. I just throw a few in at the end. If I can get my teeth to work their way around the bones in the oxtails, then I can certainly do the same with the olive pits and it saves a lot of time.

Bones--that's what these two broths have in common--long simmering of bones in water or other liquid. I'm sure that the first thing man did after he invented fire was to find some kind of container to hold water and throw in some bones. That was how he got his minerals, especially calcium. A little bit of wine or vinegar in the broth is what draws these minerals out of the bone, cartilage, marrow, and vegetables, and the broth makes them easy for our bodies to assimilate. The gelatin in meat broths also help to sooth digestive disorders. My turkey stock is very rich in gelatin because I add three or four chicken feet to the stock pot. (I know that if you are not a farmer, that probably sounds gross, but you don't look at them, you just throw them in, and they get taken out before the actual soup is made.)

I start with some turkey parts--wings and drumsticks and the chicken feet. If these have been frozen, I don't even bother to defrost them first. I put them in a baking dish and bake them for a half an hour at 400 degrees. Then into the stock pot they go along with 4 quarts of water (or enough water to cover them); 1/2 cup of vinegar (I use raw apple cider vinegar); and 3 celery stalks, an onion, and 2 carrots chopped; and lastly, a teaspoon of crushed dried green peppercorns. Then you let things sit partially covered for one hour to "rest." Turn on the heat and when it starts to simmer, reduce the heat to keep the stock at a simmer. Do not boil. Then you can go sit and knit and leave it for 2 to 24 hours. I started mine yesterday afternoon, put it in the fridge overnight, and reheated it this morning. The longer it simmers, the richer the stock.

After the stock is done to your liking, remove the turkey and chicken parts and strain the stock. I cut the meat off the bones, an easy job because by now it is falling off, and add it back to the strained stock. Then comes the fun part. You can add whatever vegetables and spices you like: fresh carrots, celery, parsnips, zucchini squash, tomatoes, whatever you have on hand--just no pasta and no potatoes. I'm on the fence as far as beans and peas go. Some of my experts say no legumes, and others don't care. This may sound like a lot of work, but if you have made a big enough pot, it will last for several meals and there might even be some left over to freeze for those times when you feel like you are coming down with something.

This recipe was taken from Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon's book, Eat Fat, Lose Fat. Dr. Enig is the lady I trust on the subject of fats in our diet and I will have more to say about her later. You can read her books or view her ideas on the web pages of the Weston Price Foundation.

Bon appétit!