Autumn, Ayurveda, Local Food / Sustainability, Nutrition + Health, Seasonal Eating, Winter

Creamy Rutabaga (Swede) Mash with Mushrooms, Sage + Hazelnuts

February 14, 2024by RebeccaLeave a Comment

For the past couple months, I’ve been cooking and taking a lot of inspiration from Gill Meller’s Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower cookbook. I say “cooking” but I rarely cook the recipes as written. Instead, I’ve learned my own energetics and the energetics of the season, and I adjust ingredients and amounts accordingly. Or the recipe technique doesn’t seem quite what I’m looking for and I adjust it somehow.

This is the type of cooking and eating that is the goal for all the individuals I work with in the nutrition clinic, but admittedly, it can take a long time to get there when one’s intuition is overwhelmed by inflammation, chronic pain, nutrition and food confusion, etc.

But back to the cookbook – Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower has been my favorite inspiration to cook from for the past few years. It’s hyper seasonal with produce common of the climate I live in, exceptionally British (meaning the seasonings and ingredients are very much of the region), and uses simple high quality ingredients in often novel and creative ways. The ingredient lists tend to be short and don’t require much beyond the produce and pantry staples at hand.

This creamy rutabaga mash with mushrooms is one such example of inspiration I took from Gill Meller last year. I first shared and published this recipe locally with a farming and food organization that I served on the board of for the last few years, the Willamette Farm & Food Coalition (WFFC).

Each year, WFFC publishes what is called the Locally Grown Guide, a printed and online directory of all the local food resources: farms, farm stands, CSA’s, grocery stores that stock local, and the like. This recipe first appeared in the 2023 edition of the Locally Grown Guide, but since we’re gearing up for a 2024 release (with new inspiration within the pages), I want to share the recipe here.

Plus this combo of creamy mashed rutabagas (also called Swede), mushrooms, sage and hazelnuts is incredibly tasty. It’s a true comfort dish using local–to Western Oregon as well as the UK–fall and winter ingredients. And it’s a good one for mid to late winter, when our ideas for novel and healthful (and seasonal) eating tend to wear out.

As you’ll see, this recipe is either a side-dish or a meatless “main component,” and it will need a protein on the side to balance out the meal. Even though many vegetarians tend to recommend mushrooms as an alternative to a protein source (and they do contain some protein), I don’t recommend just eating this on it’s own–most individuals will benefit from 20 to 35 grams of protein for main meals during the day–so pair it with a side of sauteed or baked tempeh, stewed and sage-ey garbanzos, or your choice of animal-based protein on the side. Another option is to pair it with a simple and delicious pot of lentils.

P.S. Lentils have been my often go-to the last few months. If you follow me on Instagram or read my newsletter, you’ll know why I’ve had them on repeat. :)

Creamy Rutabaga Mash with Mushrooms, Sage + Hazelnuts
inspired and adapted from Root Stem Leaf Flower by Gill Meller

Prep: 10-15 minutes | Cook: 40 minutes | Serves: 4

1 large ~ 1 ½ lb. (600 gr) rutabaga, peeled and chopped
1 Tbs. ghee or butter
8-12 fresh sage leaves
½ tsp. mineral salt, divided
⅛ tsp. ground black pepper
1 Tbs. olive oil or ghee
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 pound (450 gr) mushrooms, thickly sliced
A small handful of toasted hazelnuts, roughly chopped

Place the chopped rutabaga in a medium pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook for 25-35 minutes, until the pieces are completely soft when pierced.
Drain the rutabaga with a colander, then transfer to a food processor or a blender. Add the butter or ghee, ¼ tsp. salt, about four small sage leaves, and black pepper. Puree until smooth, adding a splash of water if it is too dry. Set aside and keep warm.
Mince the remaining sage leaves.
Then heat the remaining olive oil or ghee in a large saute pan and bring to medium-high heat. Add the sliced mushrooms. remaining ¼ tsp. salt, minced sage leaves, and garlic. Cook the mushrooms for about 6-8 minutes, until they are tender, dark, and the moisture has cooked off. Then stir in the chopped hazelnuts and give it all a good stir.
To serve, spoon the rutabaga puree onto plates and top with the mushroom and hazelnut mixture.

Notes:
– Rutabagas, which are also called swede in some countries, are truly underrated but you can swap them out for nearly any other root vegetable for a variation.
– Rutabaga belongs to the same family as broccoli and has compounds called glucosinolates, which can help with liver detoxification and can help
prevent conditions like heart disease and cancer. Hint: it looks like a large turnip but the interior flesh is more yellow.

GI Problems, Nutrition + Health, Seasonal Eating, Sports Nutrition

Gut Health 101: Adding More in the age of Cutting Out

September 29, 2023by RebeccaLeave a Comment

How to improve your gut health naturally and sustainably

woman feeling good, with balanced gut health, standing in kitchen

Hi there. Just a quick message today that’s been on my mind lately. As many of you know, within the nutrition clinic, I specialize in digestion and gut health. In reality, even though someone might show up with health goals that don’t seem to do with gut health, nearly everyone with a health condition or imbalance has a gut health imbalance.

That’s because, if your hormones or endocrine system are out of wack, there’s a gastrointestinal component that’s involved too.

Or if you can’t lose weight (or can’t gain weight), there’s usually a gut and inflammation component to that weight resistance.

Or if your issue is blood sugar dysregulation or some sort of cardiovascular health issue, the gut is involved, and at the microbial level, is often a big component of healing and returning to balance.

What about common health concerns in athletes?

What about common concerns in athletes, such as low iron or iron deficiency anemia, fatigue without an iron deficiency, or poor workout recovery? First, it’s often as likely that you have an issue absorbing iron as that you’re not eating or supplementing enough, particularly because as your iron needs goes up, the digestive system, when functioning well, will preferentially absorb more iron of every bit you consume. That is true for many other minerals too.

Inflammation – The Common Culprit

At the heart of nearly every physical ailment is inflammation. Inflammation can be systemic or localized to one body system or part, but it often begins in the gut.

Gut Healing – Adding More Types of Foods

Over the years, I’ve given out lots of simple to-dos that one can implement to help digestive healing or rebalancing health in general (check out my last post because it’s a really good one!).

Today, I’ll share something we don’t often hear enough about from Dr. Google or all those companies marketing their products or special diets. And to be fully honest, no single tactic you implement to heal the gut is going to solve the whole issue. This is why it’s a good idea to work with a functional nutritionist (CNS), because then you’ll get unique guidance based on your presentation of symptoms and health imbalance.

But for today, let’s just touch on the importance of eating diversely.

Many of my clients come to me eating extremely routine meals from day to day with little variation. That can be because they don’t feel well and don’t know what to eat. Or because they’ve gotten into a routine, or they feel overwhelmed when grocery shopping. Or they don’t meal plan or prep.

Rather than taking away more foods and restricting your diet more when you don’t feel well or don’t know what to do, when I’m in a clinic with an individual client, I’m often encouraging him or her to be adding more foods.

Yes, we will screen for reactivity to top foods of concern and then eliminate them when needed, for as long as needed (which doesn’t necessarily mean forever!) But beyond that, a big to-do for clients is to start adding more diversity. Instead of eating just one or two grains, like rice or wheat, I’ll have them start adding a whole host of the many other grains. Instead of eating the same small handful of vegetables from day to day, they’ll begin experimenting and adding in more colors, textures, and flavors of in-season vegetables. Instead of just eating the same almonds or pecans or cashews in their breakfast or snack, I’ll ask them to rotate every day or every time they shop.

Why is all this important?

A big component of both gut health and overall health is having high diversity in beneficial gut microbiome species (1,2). And you only get high diversity if you’re eating lots of different (mostly plant) foods. That’s because the food for the bacteria is what you are eating, and each species or strain will have a preferred food, meaning if you feed them what they eat, they’ll thrive, but if you don’t, their population will disappear.

Now, if you think about the “Standard American Diet,” individuals are often eating different foods like pizza, tacos, pasta, burgers, meat and potatoes…but they’re eating mostly ultra processed foods that are the same small rotation of foods at the ingredient level: corn, soy, wheat, sugar, beef, pork, chicken, cow’s dairy, a small handful of processed oils.

With a diet with minimal diversity, there’s not much to work with at the gut microbial level, particularly because the balance of microbes that’s going to help the gut thrive, are mostly species that feed on plants.

Eating the Rainbow

When working with clients, a tactic I often recommend is to eat the rainbow – shopping for and preparing foods that are in season, and different from week to week and season to season.

In the nutrition clinic, I work with clients in individual nutrition consultations, and as a Licensed Dietician / Nutritionist (LDN/LD) and Board-Certified Nutrition Specialist (CNS), use medical nutrition therapy, integrative health measures, and a root cause approach to heal imbalanced health conditions.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can improve your symptoms of imbalance, I’d love to speak with you in a quick phone consultation!

References:
1. Gomaa E. Z. (2020). Human gut microbiota/microbiome in health and diseases: a review. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, 113(12), 2019–2040. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-020-01474-7 2. Hills, R. D., Jr, Pontefract, B. A., Mishcon, H. R., Black, C. A., Sutton, S. C., & Theberge, C. R. (2019). Gut Microbiome: Profound Implications for Diet and Disease. Nutrients, 11(7), 1613. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11071613

Ayurveda, GI Problems, Herbal Medicine, Nutrition + Health, Seasonal Eating, Spring, Summertime

Observing the 20 Energies and How To Really Start Intuitive Eating

May 30, 2023September 28, 2023by Rebecca4 Comments

Every day in May is precious.

Where I live, the months of February through April are often the most challenging – January and the post-holiday, beginning of year hope always seem to fly by, but it’s in February, and March, and April that every day can feel like a grind.

It’s not the sunshine that May can bring that necessarily turns it all around for me. I do love the sun and warmer days, but I also enjoy the rain.

It’s the flowers and the fully leafed out trees that late winter and early spring lacks. The sheer density of foliage that has returned by early May.

A heavy blanket or extra padding of plant life that soothes my nervous system as I go out into the world, making everything hard, more bearable, and everything mundane or merely good, elevated.

The twenty Gunas valued in Ayurvedic medicine.

One thing that is inevitably helpful from day to day, whether it’s in those more difficult late winter and early spring months, in May, or in the heat of peak summer, is tuning into and adjusting my food and lifestyle choices based on the energies around and inside me. What I’m referring to are the 20 Gunas in Ayurvedic wisdom. These are a set of 10 pairs of opposing qualities or energies that describe the different attributes inherent in all substances.

For instance, a rock is hard. Feathers are soft.
A rainy day is wet. A clear, sunny day in August in Oregon is dry.
Fresh ginger is heating. Coconut milk and coconut water are cooling.

What is so powerful about observing these qualities in your body and everyday life, and then using them to make subtle food and lifestyle adjustments, is that it’s a way to bring balance to your body, mind and health.

This daily adjusting is especially helpful as a preventative measure, but should also be used when there is clear illness or disease. Our body’s prefer to operate at homeostasis. Even with everything we do in our everyday that knocks the body out of homeostasis, its object is always to return to ‘baseline’ as quickly as possible. When there are too many blocks in its ability to do so, that’s when illness and disease, abnormal lab values, pain and aches, and injuries occur.

The 20 Qualities are:
Heavy | Light
Cold | Hot
Soft | Hard
Oily | Dry
Smooth | Rough
Dense or Solid | Liquid
Slow or Dull | Sharp
Stable | Unstable or Mobile
Cloudy, Sticky or Slimy | Clear
Gross or Big | Subtle or Small

Observing and using the 20 qualities or gunas is a way to help the body system return to homeostasis. How you do that is for every quality that is out of balance, utilize the opposite quality instead.

For instance, if I am currently experiencing hot, itchy skin rashes or acne, I know that adding more heating substances, foods, and heating spices will further increase the heat condition. Reducing the amount of spices in food, the type of foods that are hot in nature, and increasing cooling foods will help to clear the heat. Adding cooling, bitter vegetables like broccoli and asparagus and more cooling spices and herbs like fennel, coriander, mint and cilantro, instead of eating a dish with garlic, onions, ginger, mustard seeds, and chili peppers will slowly (or sometimes quickly) assist in coming back to equilibrium.

Or say I have a tendency towards being constipated and gassy, and I eat lots of dry, airy foods. Snacking on popcorn, granola, chips, crackers, yeasted bread, and raw, crunchy salads, which I eat while on the go, or eat while talking. All are dry and/or contain a lot of air.
A way towards balance is to increase the moisture — both through adding liquid into the foods consumed, and cooking foods until they’re soft, and by adding liquid fats and oils instead of dry, crunchy roasted nuts or seeds, etc.

A Daily Check-In

One way to begin to use this method is by doing a short daily check-in. Take a few minutes near the beginning of each day to journal or jot down the answers to these questions:

– What is Present today?
– And What is Needed?

Getting more granular, it can sometimes be helpful to do a quick scan or review of different body systems, the mind and emotions, and the weather to help. Is something feeling dry? Hot? Slimy and mucousy? Slow and sluggish? Adjust your food and lifestyle choices with the opposite qualities, and see where it begins to bring more balance.

As we weave into the summer months in the northern hemisphere, it’s often that the qualities on display in the environment become hotter, dryer (or more humid, depending on where you live), and this can be mirrored in the body more rapidly, especially when we likewise choose heating and drying foods. Here’s a recipe for summer that can give you a good example of how to balance the heat and dryness with cooling spices, coconut and gently cooked, more liquid-containing meals.

Observing what’s occurring internally and externally and adjusting to quickly reach equilibrium is the very definition of true intuitive eating. It’s tuning into what the body needs rather than what the mind craves.

If you’d like to know more, there is a free download in more detail to use this idea in the Resources section. I also work with clients in individual nutrition consultations, and as a Licensed Dietician / Nutritionist (LDN /LD) and Certified Nutrition Specialist (CNS), use medical nutrition therapy, integrative health measures, and a root cause approach to heal imbalanced health conditions.