Cucumber Namasu

Posted on | September 13, 2008 | No Comments

Invigorating Borscht

Posted on | September 13, 2008 | No Comments

This is a modified, sort of Asian-ish version of Borscht, which I created for a dietetics class. The purpose of this soup is to help remove liver qi stagnation.

• 5-6 medium/large beets
• 8 cups vegetable (or mushroom) stock
• 1.5 in. piece of ginger, chopped
• 1 tbsp dry dill
• 2 medium cloves garlic
• 1/4 tsp. black pepper
• 1/2 head cabbage, chopped
• 1/2 cup rice wine vinegar
• 1 cup coconut milk

1. In a stock pot, cook beets, stock, ginger, dill, garlic, pepper and cabbage until boiling.
2. Turn heat down and cook on medium for 1 - 2 hours.
3. Use a hand blender or food processor to puree the soup.
4. Add vinegar and coconut milk.
5. Add salt to taste.

Beets are considered to have a cooling thermal nature and a sweet flavor in Chinese medicine. They nourish the blood and cleanse the Liver in both Western and Chinese dietary philosophies. The coconut milk balances the beets with it’s warming nature but still continues to harmonize (especially the Earth center) with it’s sweet flavor. Both beets and coconut have a lubricating effect on the intestines and the coconut further detoxifies and is especially beneficial in parasitic cases. Fresh ginger is warm and has dispersing qualities because of it’s pungent flavor. It’s important to provide this dispersing function to balance the cooling nature of the beets because the Liver will fight if held down too much. The ginger offers it a release. The fresh ginger is also a Qi tonic and helps to circulate the blood, which is being tonified by the beets. The black pepper, garlic and dill serve similar functions in this recipe. The cabbage is neutral and sweet - still offering that harmonizing factor to the whole body, while promoting digestion and urination. The vinegar has a warming thermal nature but is also considered to be sour and bitter. These two flavors are necessary to balance this recipe. Vinegar, because of it’s sour flavor, will act directly on the Liver and will detoxify it (as anyone who prepares liver by soaking in lemon juice will know).

I usually prepare my borscht with bone broths, but if this recipe is being used to move qi stagnation, it is imperative that a vegetable broth be used to keep the energy light and moving.

Earthly Eggplant and Lamb

Posted on | September 12, 2008 | No Comments

This recipe requires a clay pot. I got mine at Ikea, but you will occasionally see them in thrift stores and there are many places online that sell them. The clay pot and it’s lid need to be soaked for 30 minutes prior to cooking. Don’t preheat the oven - clay pot cooking requires that the pot goes into a cold oven and heats up slowly. I love my clay pot and I have found that it cooks food to perfection, and the foods retain their moisture content because of the steaming that occurs. Cooking with clay is cooking with Earth, and this can be thought of as a way to balance that element in a meal that might otherwise seem devoid of that bland sweetness that can harmonize the whole body.

This meal is best prepared in the late Summer, or early/mid Fall in Portland. All of the ingredients here are available at local farms at that time. We procured the delicious lamb from our local farmers market too.

Earthly Eggplant and Lamb

• 3 small/medium eggplants
• 2 TBSP butter
• 2 bell peppers (diced)
• 1 pint cherry tomatoes (washed and halved)
• 3-5 cloves garlic (chopped)
• 1 lb lamb stew meat, cut into 1-inch chunks
• 1 TBSP fresh thyme
• 1.5 - 2 TBSP salt
• 1 tsp pepper

1. Heat butter in a large skillet on high.
2. Cut tops off eggplant and dice into 1-inch cubes.
3. Toss eggplant with 1 tablespoon of salt and add to skillet.
4. Sautee until browned (about 10 minutes).
5. Add peppers, tomatoes, garlic, stew meat, thyme, pepper and remaining salt to clay pot. Toss eggplant on top.
6. Put lid on pot and put into cold oven.
7. Turn heat up to 425 degrees and cook for 90 minutes.

Lamb is considered an hot food in Chinese medicine. It nourishes the Qi and Blood and dispels cold. It’s usually eaten for wintery-type conditions, like Kidney deficiency, impotence, coldness, etc… but is also used for blood loss after pregnancy and insufficient milk production.

This time of year tends to be very hot in Portland, with people suffering more from feeling too hot than the above mentioned symptoms. The use of eggplant in this dish provides a huge cooling energy to balance the lamb. In this way, the heat of the lamb is tempered. The cherry tomatoes in this dish also offer a cooling nature. They promote body fluids (which are in danger of being dried up during the Autumn). They will cool the blood (while the lamb strengthens it) and clear the heat so that it doesn’t build up in the body. The bell peppers are considered warming, sweet and slightly pungent. This offers another balance to the whole meal.

This dish is best given to women who have given birth during the Summer or Fall season, those suffering from impotence or infertility, people who are cold in the extremities even though it is hot outside, blood deficiency or anyone who is suffering from general bodily weakness. Women with low milk production will benefit from this entree.

The Millenium Cookbook: A Review

Posted on | September 9, 2008 | No Comments

The Millenium Cookbook by Eric Tucker and John Westerdahl is one of my favorite cookbooks, EVEN THOUGH it’s vegan. No offense meant by those huge capital letters, but good vegan cookbooks are hard to come by, and as will soon be evident, I am by no means into sporting a 100% vegan diet for this body - but if you are, more power to you, and it’s part of the reason I wanted to talk about this book.

I looked for weeks for a vegan cookbook for my family that did not rely completely on soy products. We are lovers of Sally Fallon here and we don’t eat unfermented soy - so we’re usually sticking to tamari and miso and the very occasional tofu (which is only partially fermented and most often comes with nasty preservatives). I also wanted something that was kind of fancy and fun and wasn’t all bulgur and boring blandness. This book really hits the spot. It’s got a couple of Seitan recipes in there, and there is certainly a small reliance on tofu…but relatively, it’s pretty damned great. Not to mention that they’ve got vegan breakfast/brunch recipes galore! Yippee!! Those are some of the hardest recipes to come by.

EVERYTHING in this book is wonderful. ALMOST EVERYTHING in this book is guaranteed to please your meat-loving midwestern relatives. I know because I’ve tried it. One point of caution though: This book is based on the recipes of a 5-star vegan restaurant in San Francisco. Nothing is simple. The filo crescents have not one, but two sauces included in their recipe. My advice is pick what you want and leave the rest, otherwise you’ll be slaving over the stove all day as my husband first did when he started using this book. Make the filo crescents, but use the leftover sauce in your fridge. And make sure you’ve got a lot of miso on hand, cause that’s the one thing the authors of this book love!

Tomato Sauce

Posted on | September 3, 2008 | No Comments

This recipe is for a very basic tomato sauce. The wine and garlic offer a warming component to the cooling nature of the tomato.

• 3 Tablespoons olive oil
• 2 small/medium onions, sliced
• 3-5 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1/3 cup wine
• 7-10 medium to large tomatoes, cut into large pieces
• 1 bunch basil, chopped
• 1 Tablespoon finely ground sea salt

1. Heat a sauce pot to medium-high heat.
2. Add olive oil and after a couple of seconds, add onions.
3. Let onions start to brown slightly and then add garlic.
4. Cook for about 5 minutes and add wine. Let simmer for another 5 minutes.
5. Add tomatoes and basil and turn heat to medium-low.
6. Cover and let simmer for about 2 hours.
7. Let cool and then use a hand blender to puree the sauce.
8. Add the salt.

This is enough tomato sauce to freeze 1-2 large yogurt containers full. We get a lot of tomatoes and fresh basil from our CSA at this time of year, and this tomato sauce is one way that we can use them up!

Olive Oil Mayonnaise

Posted on | September 2, 2008 | No Comments

Adapted from a recipe by Marnel Groebner

• 1 egg, room temperature
• 1/2 tsp dry mustard
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp rice wine vinegar
• 1 1/4 C olive oil

This is the easiest mayonnaise recipe ever. It requires a hand blender with the flat attachement that looks like this:

My ma uses a mix of canola and olive oils in hers. I prefer to use 100% olive oil in mine. Olive oil has a high percentage of oleic acid (~75%). I prefer not to use canola oil in cooking at all. Canola is developed from rape seed and contains a fatty acid called erucic acid which was seen to cause myocardial lesions in rats.

If the taste of 100% olive oil is too strong, Sally Fallon has suggested using 1/2 expeller pressed sunflower oil. Sunflower oil has a composition that is similar to olive oil (in terms of it’s oleic acid content), but you must remember that sunflower oil has a high percentage of omega 6 oils - unlike the more balanced olive oil.

I also like this recipe because it encorporates the egg white and does not require finding a solution for it!

1. Crack the room temperature egg into a liter sized mason jar.
2. Add the rest of the ingredients.
3. Put the hand blender into the mixture and turn on, lifting up and down for about 20 seconds until the mixture thickens.

Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

Coconut and Honey Frosting

Posted on | August 31, 2008 | Comments Off

Adapted from Elana’s Coconut Cream Frosting

The ingredients in this frosting aren’t quite as horrendous on the body as the typical buttercream frosting.

• 1 cup coconut milk
• 1 cup honey
• 5 teaspoons arrowroot powder
• 1 tablespoon water
• 3/4 cup coconut oil
• 1/2 cup butter

1. In a medium saucepan, heat the coconut milk and honey.
2. In a cup, combine the arrowroot powder and water and stir until fully dissolved.
3. Pour the arrowroot mixture into the saucepan (with coconut milk and honey).
4. Mix the contents well (a hand blender works nicely, but a wooden spoon will do) and then bring to a boil. As soon as boiling, remove from heat.
5. Blend the coconut oil and butter into the mixture.
6. Put the pot into the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes and the frosting will start to turn white and get hard.
7. Remove from the freezer and put the frosting into a food processor*. Blend on high and after a few minutes the frosting will emulsify and magically thicken and look like buttercream frosting. Scrape into a bowl. (If you have a small food processor, you may have to do 1/2 the batch at a time.)

*If you don’t have a food processor, you can use a hand mixer, but the frosting will not be as creamy and is much harder to put through a pastry bag.

If you store this frosting in the refrigerator, you should reprocess before frosting. This frosting is excellent. I prefer it with the honey, but if the flavor of honey isn’t something you like, the original recipe uses agave nectar and there is no noticeable taste from that. I have taken frosted cupcakes to the park on an 85 degree day, and the frosting only held up for about 2 hours. It’s preferable to serve this as an indoor frosting, but in reasonable temperatures it will work well outside. If frosting the cake and then refrigerating, make sure to pull the dessert out of the refrigerator at least an hour ahead of time as this frosting can get very hard from the oil and butter.

As far as Chinese medicine goes, honey is considered thermally neutral and obviously possesses a sweet flavor. It has an upbearing direction and supplements the middle burner while it lubricates the digestive system and the lung. You’d want to avoid honey in cases of dampness and phlegm, stagnation in the lower burner and diarrhea. Butter is an anti-inflammatory and in Chinese medicine is considered to have a warm thermal nature with a sweet flavor and be upbearing. It also moistens and supplements the Qi, Yin and Blood. It’s useful in cases of Qi vacuity but should be avoided with Blood Heat disorders in people suffering from dampness and phlegm.

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I'm a Chinese medicine student who uses this blog as a place to store my thoughts and occasionally rant and rave about things I trip over in life.

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