vegetables – Page 14 – GUTSy Performance Nutrition

Smoky Pear Tea Cakes

November 21, 2015November 21, 2015by Rebecca4 Comments

As it turns out, I am a giant nerd. I’ll gladly take an evening in with a good book just about any day. I take books to all family gatherings and long road trips. I have no problem sitting in a room full of people, disengaged from the small talk, reading. Like a true nerd, I love libraries and bookstores, and of course, good old-fashioned books.

Nerdism started early but back when I learned to read, I was a slow learner and had to go to Mrs. Ashcraft’s for special reading class. After Mrs. Ashcraft worked her magic, I was reading giant chapter books far beyond my grade level in a matter of weeks. To this day, reading is among my favorite pastimes. I still have little girl Jane Austen fantasies about long afternoons in the parlor with all my best gal pals reading and eating tea cakes. The one time this came even close to happening was last year in Victoria with William. We stayed at a B&B with a serious library, complete with fireplace, cozy chairs, a pot of English tea, and a good book. Those quiet mornings in the library were magical.

Back in reality, I’m often asked if I like to read. Though I’m open about my interest in books, I often share only the lighter things I’m reading when people ask–and it is a rare day when I snag more than 10 minutes or so at a time with a book. Since The Recipe Redux theme for this month is quick bread and I can think of no better time to enjoy a slice or two than on a slow weekend with tea and reading materials, I’m sharing all the good books I particularly enjoyed in the past year. If you are in need of a new one to read or cook from, or need gifting ideas for the holidays, read on. Or skip to making these smoky pear tea cakes and enjoy a slice over something from your own selection.

Non-Fiction

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, Terry Tempest Williams

This is the book I’ll gift to my former English-major friends. It is a memoir on Williams’ experience with her mother’s death and the resulting discovery of finding her voice. Of all the books in this list, it is the most beautiful and capturing to read.

Me and My Mate Jeffrey, Niall Breslin

Written by former professional rugby player and singer, Niall tells of his struggle with extreme anxiety disorder, how he kept the panic attacks and chronic insomnia a secret for 15 years, how it led him to give up on several careers, and ultimately to become a spokesperson leading the way for the discussion of mental health to be less stigmatized in our society. I can identify with much of Breslin’s mental struggles (though not how they present themselves) and his finding of endurance athletics and mindfulness to manage them. I can’t wait to see what happens when we as a society let go of the shame surrounding this topic and address it as we do other areas of health. I highly recommend this book to just about everyone.

The Five Elements of Self-Healing: Using Chinese Medicine for Maximum Immunity, Wellness, and Health, Jason Elias

I picked this one up at the library randomly and I’m glad I did. This book focuses heavily on addressing health from the standpoint of whichever Chinese Medicine element an individual identifies with most strongly. It also gives tools to balance oneself and delves deep into many common illnesses, starting with the most exterior (cold and flu) and moving to the most interior (diabetes and cancer). I’m super fascinated with Traditional Chinese Medicine and this was an easy to understand book that I will refer to again.

Between Heaven and Earth, Harriet Beinfield and The Web That Has No Weaver, Ted Kaptchuk

Both Between Heaven and Earth and The Web That Has No Weaver are great introductory texts that explain Traditional Chinese Medicine and bridge the gap between eastern and western medicine. I really enjoyed Between Heaven and Earth and am still making my way through The Web, but am adding it to the list anyway because I often find myself taking copious notes from it. I would definitely consider purchasing either of them to use as a reference when life gets chaotic.

Eating on the Wild Side, Jo Robinson

The premise of Eating on the Wild Side is that our modern foods have lost the rich nutrient content of their wild ancestors–and few of us are going to go gather wild herbs to eat every day to make up the difference. Instead, Robinson provides an exceptional resource on the most nutritious varieties of common fruits and vegetables, including how best to store and prepare them to ensure as many nutrients as possible actually arrive to our bodies. I took this book to work and made a handout for parents in our programs. My co-worker, who teachs a preschool parent-child health and nutrition class, says this is the number one handout that parents ask for and repeatedly refer to.

Lentil Underground, Liz Carlisle

This book is about a group of renegade farmers in Montana who eschewed the norms and started an organic lentil and bean farming revolution in an area that was typically conventional dryland wheat. I was able to listen to Liz Carlisle in person, as she and the farmer, David Oien, presented at my university a few months ago. The number one thing that stood out to me from this story was the sheer amount of work–double decade long lifework–that comes with eschewing the norm and following your dream. If you are at all interested in the food movement and sustainable farming systems, this is definitely one worth reading.

Running With Joy, Ryan Hall

I own this book and refer to it often for spiritual guidance. Essentially, it is Ryan Hall’s daily training journal as he prepared for the 2010 Boston Marathon. For me, it reads as a runner’s daily devotional. It’s a good one for gaining perspective on finding joy both in running and in life.

Fiction

Skippy Dies, Paul Murray

When it comes to fiction, I often look to the award winners and the books that are short-listed. This one is a weighty novel (600+ pages) about a boy at a Catholic boarding school. The title gives away what happens and Skippy dies right away within the first chapter. This is a captivating journey into the world of teenagers, drawing the reader into their often nonsensical thinking patterns and how the opposite sex can become an all-consuming obsession. Rife with humor, drama, backstabbing, teenage confusion, mental health problems, and of course death, this book reminded me of both what it was like to be a teenager, and how the teens I work with often view the world from a very different lens than my own. And finally–this book is exceptionally well written. Murray has a special kind of voice as only the most gifted writers do.

The Master, Colm Tóibín

Tóibín is an exceptionally talented writer and this novel is about the famous novelist, Henry James. I loved the imagery that took me into James’ life, and Tóibín was able to make the seemingly drab doings of a writer come alive. I also learned an amazing tactic both to navigate uncomfortable social settings and to view life as a writer does. If you haven’t read this or any of Tóibín’s other novels, I highly recommend him. His books are gold.

Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine

One of my favorite pre-teen stories, I reread this one recently (again) and as always, loved it just as much as my 11-year-old self. This fun and easy remake of the Cinderella Story is actually a good one and is FAR better than the horrible movie that was made out of it.

Cookbooks

Green Kitchen Travels, David Frenkiel

Written by Swedish and Danish couple David and Luise of the lovely blog, Green Kitchen Stories, this is the cookbook that most aligns with my style of cooking. Sometimes simple and easy, sometimes off-the-wall combinations of textures, ingredients and flavors, and often vividly colored. I have been cooking through this all year long. I like it even better than their first cookbook and refer to it often for both inspiration and to make recipes as-written. A word about their diet: David is vegetarian, Luise is health-minded. Together, they share recipes that are always both but can contain dairy, eggs, and gluten, but often do not. I find it super easy to sub these ingredients and have loved nearly every recipe I’ve tried.

Ard Bia Cookbook, Aoibheann MacNamara

This book, titled after its namesake restaurant, is lovely to simply leave on the coffee table because it is so beautifully put together. Whenever I read it, I want to cozy up in a lovely restaurant near the ocean on a dreary day and drink tea and watch the other customers leaf through newspapers and chat about scholarly things. The pantry section is my favorite part and leaves me super happy that a restaurant cookbook provides more than just recipes for meals. There are exotic seed and spice mixtures, infused oils and vinegars, chutneys, and the like.

The Sprouted Kitchen Bowl + Spoon, Sara Forte

I love just about every one of Sara’s bowl recipes, and I’ve tried TONS of them. There is no way I could choose a favorite, but the lentil-stuffed poblano chilies over a butternut mash which I had recently was particularly good. Sara cooks with a vegetable-heavy hand and when she includes cheese, it is often as topping and is never missed by us.

Whole Grain Mornings, Megan Gordon

This is a lovely brunch book that I’ve checked out from my local library for several months (more than once). I love the sheer variety of breakfasty options all arranged by season, and the fact that 90% of the recipes can instead be eaten either as dessert or dinner. If for no other reason, Megan’s recipes for granola are the BEST, which should hardly be surprising as she founded a granola business.

What good book are you reading? I always need more inspiration.

Smoky Pear Tea Cakes

We are enjoying Thanksgiving in eastern Oregon this year with my family. I can’t wait for a long weekend of cozy reading, hugging babies and toddlers, and catching up with the folks and relatives. Plus, I have a whole freezer of not quite good enough versions of this cake to hand over to my sugar-loving, thinks-he’s-sweets-deprived father, who will gobble it all up in no time. The trick with this cake is to find some good quality Lipsang Souchong tea which has a smoky flavor due to the leaves being dried over a fire. The pairing of the smoky tea and soft, ripe pears is subtle but prominent, especially when slightly warm. The smoke and sweet combo captures this time in the season perfectly.

1 cup + ~2 Tbs. boiling water

4 tsp. Lipsang Souchong tea leaves

2 Tbs. ground flax seed

6 Tbs. hot water

3/4 cup oat bran, certified gluten-free

1 1/2 cups gluten-free flour mix or flour of choice

3/4 tsp. baking soda

2 tsp. baking powder

3/4 tsp. salt

1 1/2 cups cored and shredded soft pears (~ 2 medium)

1/2 cup honey

1/3 cup canola oil

1 Tbs. pure vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Oil and flour four mini-loaf pans or one 9×5-inch loaf pan.
Bring about 1 1/2 cups water to a boil. Pour slightly more than 1 cup of it over the tea leaves and allow them to steep for a while.
In a small dish, whisk together the remaining 6 Tbs. hot water and ground flax seeds. Set aside to form a thick slurry.
In a large bowl, combine the oat bran, flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix well and set aside.
Grate the pears using the large holes of a box grater. Don’t include the core and seeds.
Strain the tea and pour 1 cup of it into a liquid measuring cup. Add the honey, oil, vanilla, pears, and flax mixture. Mix it all together thoroughly.
Pour the liquids into the dry mixture and stir the batter until just combined.
Fill the loaf pans equally and bake until a toothpick comes out clean, about 35-40 minutes for mini loaves or 50-60 minutes for a large loaf.

Autumn, Journal, Summertime

Pomegranate + Hazelnut Moroccan Grain Salad

October 30, 2015October 31, 2015by Rebecca5 Comments

There was once a man who had a fig tree growing in his vineyard. He went looking for figs on it but found none. So he said to his gardener, ‘Look for three years I have been coming here looking for figs on this fig tree, and I haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it go on using up the soil? But the gardener answered, ‘Leave it alone, sir, just one more year. I will dig around it and put in some fertilizer. Then if the tree bears figs next year, so much the better; if not, then you can have it cut down.’

– Luke 13:6-9

I have a plain black journal which I cart around for all things spiritual. It is a book riddled with inspirational sayings from homilies, scripture, from the girls in my prayer group, and messages I hear from prayer. I doubt the journal could be useful to anyone aside from me as it’s got thought-segments scattered randomly and the same phrases scribbled repeatedly throughout. Months ago, Father Ignacio stated, God is not like Amazon Prime. We have to wait, in one of his homilies. It is a phrase which has taken up considerable real estate these past few weeks.

As is usual when I need to work on something, signs appear from all sorts of corners with the same message. For the last couple weeks, I have had several reminders on perspective, of thinking about whose lens I am looking through, of being able to see my life as Jesus sees it, through His vision, and of rewriting the story I tell myself. Consistently at church, I hear the message to ask God the way and He will use you. I have been increasingly frustrated as I’ve been asking for guidance for months and (telling myself) I hear nothing. I sat for an hour this week and had an internal fight with God. Why are you not speaking to me?, I silently yelled. What do you want me to do? And then the quietest, softest answer: Have patience. Trust in me. My immediate reaction was to act as if I hadn’t heard anything. Instead, I responded, but WHAT do you want me to DO!? Trusting and being patient sounds a lot like sitting around doing nothing when all I want is for my fig tree to be bearing figs.

I then came home and complained to William about the experience, of asking for guidance daily and hearing nothing, of being frustrated because He refuses to speak to me. William’s response was, perhaps you’re not looking at the situation the right way. Perhaps when you think nothing is happening, it is because His answer is not what YOU THINK it should be.

I can be incredibly stubborn. I ask for guidance but I only want to hear an affirmation that what I want is what I should want–is what I should be working on and is going to happen according to my schedule. I want clear, easily discernable boxes to check in a linear pattern marking the way forward. I want to know the daily labor will produce the desired results. I find it extremely difficult to entertain the possibility that He is answering and doing something in my life when it doesn’t look exactly like what I expect it to.

I look to my journal. His message to trust and have patience is written clearly, week after week, right next to the reminders about Amazon Prime. When I turn the pages back and see the same words time and again, I realize He’s been there responding all along. It is time to stop being frustrated and trust. It is time to rewrite the story I tell myself. I need to stop looking at my life as an unbearing fig tree. I need to spend less mental energy tearing it down and more of it in adding fertilizer.

God is not like Amazon Prime. We have to wait.

Moroccan Grain Salad with Pomegranates + Hazelnuts, adapted from Green Kitchen Travels

I pulled the last two eggplants from their stems the other morning. It was a beautiful morning to be in the sunshine, to pull the last of the season’s purple jewels from their life cord, to traipse around in my mud boots after months of heat and dry ground. It poured rain the day before and since and the ground has been soft. Most of the summer vegetables are finally done. This salad is a snapshot of the present season, a mix of old and new. Combined with those last two eggplants, roasted sweet onions and handfuls of parsley and mint, there are this season’s hazelnuts and the seeds of a pomegranate tossed in. I made this salad for the first time over the Labor Day holiday for our family reunion. That first version was slightly different with a couple zucchini sliced into rounds and roasted. It was a big hit and I promised to share the recipe. Now that summer is well and truly over, I’ve thought about how to carry this salad’s flavors into the autumn and holiday season as it would do nicely as a side during a celebration meal. I’m picking up a load of winter squash this weekend and I imagine some roasted delicata or kabocha squash would make for an even tastier mixture paired with the cinnamon-infused grains, herbs, pomegranates and hazelnuts.

1 large or 2 medium eggplants

1 medium onion

2 Tbs. olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

1 garlic clove, crushed

salt

1 cup equal parts quinoa and millet (or all of either one)

2 cups water

3/4 tsp. cinnamon

juice of 1/2 a lemon

a handful of mint leaves

a handful of parsley

1/4 cup raisins

1 pomegranate, deseeded

1/2 cup toasted and coursely chopped hazelnuts

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Chop the eggplants and onion into small pieces. Place them on a large baking pan and drizzle with a small dose of oil. Sprinkle with salt and roast in the oven until soft and slightly burned around the edges, about 15 minutes. Remove the vegetables from the oven and place in a large serving bowl. Add the olive oil and garlic and set aside.
Meanwhile, cook the quinoa and millet. Place the grains in a small saucepan and add the measured water, cinnamon, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat immediately, and cover. Cook for 15-20 minutes until the water is absorbed.
To assemble the salad, place the cooked grains in the bowl with the roasted vegetables. Add the lemon juice, herbs, raisins, pomegranate seeds, and chopped hazelnuts. Give everything a good stir to evenly mix. Serve at room temperature or warm slightly.

Autumn, Summertime

resourceful hands, all-the-greens interchangeable pesto

September 21, 2015May 29, 2017by Rebecca9 Comments

I vividly remember mornings at my grandparents in the north, my dad’s parents, who we visited less regularly growing up. Specifically, I remember mashed-potato cakes in the morning for breakfast, their perfect fluffy rounds composed of leftover mash from the night before. There was something special about the resourcefulness of meals at my grandparents–how my dad and grandpa had trout on summer mornings, freshly caught in a pre-breakfast fishing trip to the creek, how the milk and eggs came from their cow and chickens, and how my grandma’s large garden to the back of the house sustained them long past their garden season.

In those days, we ate fairly similarly at home. But I had more respect for the ingredients that went into meals at my grandparents–even when I still hated the milk, refused to go near the trout, and was just as picky an eater there as at home.

Though I may not have wanted to partake in some of the foods that made up my grandparents’ lifestyle, in that pre-teen phase of wonderment, I loved sitting in the corner chair at the tiny table tucked into the kitchen, watching my grandma turn random assortments into a meal, listening to my grandpa spin yarns about his neighbors, his fingers cozied around his coffee cup, my dad nodding along.

In those early years before computers or smartphones or big screens to numb the mind and overwhelm the senses, I learned the art of quiet observation in small corners of rooms with the adults. In those rooms, where there is nary a sibling or cousin or similarly-aged friend in my memory, I watched, listened, and learned. I have always been fascinated by hands and it is the hands that I vividly remember, making it all happen. Hands flipping the potato cakes in the frying pan, the grease popping and squeaking. The hands swirling and lifting the coffee cup and setting it down again. The hands bringing in the basket of just-gathered eggs. The hands that helped mine push the creaky old elevator button leading to the farmhouse basement for another jar of jam. In observing those wiser hands throughout those early years, I like to think I learned to appreciate resourcefulness, of using what was had, and turning near-waste into something worth having.

I am not so naïve as to think the resourceful way of life practiced by my grandparents and parents then was born out of an extreme desire for some romantic farmy lifestyle. It was a way of life because it was what they knew, it was what they had, and it was how they (and we) survived economically.

William and I mutually agreed to forego gifting each other at many holidays over these past few years and we had to gently explain to friends and relatives why we were not willing to purchase certain items that might have seemed basic. But we didn’t scrap on our willingness to really pay the people who engage in the hardest of hand work to feed us. I am more willing to spend on food than these people I learned from, but I still hold tightly to their lessons on resourcefulness. I choose more expensive produce without complaint–but I damn well better try to use the whole vegetable. I like to think this comes as a result of all those quiet, watchful learnings growing up until it has become simply what I do–and every item we throw away goes somewhere.

When faced with carrot tops, radish or turnip greens, and other random herbs, I’ve spent the last few years finding ways to make them useful. My mom and grandma have chickens to eat their vegetable scraps. I have an ancient–but still working–food processor.

And that is how freezer-containers full of eclectic pesto combinations happened.

All-the-Greens Interchangeable Pesto, adapted from Gena Hamshaw

The Recipe Redux theme this month is freezer meals. Whenever I have more greens or herbs than I know what to do with, I turn them into pesto and toss the container in the freezer. This recipe is one of my favorites because it is so versatile and I can make it using whatever I have. It also makes for a simple and quick meal. Our standard busy day go-to is spaghetti with pesto, but I’ve swirled it into grain bowls, spooned it atop toasts and pizza crusts, and even thinned it out to make a quick and tasty dressing for green salad. Try a few different combinations. Use up those herbs and greens.

2 cups tightly packed greens (radish/kale/parsley/cilantro/basil/mint/turnip/etc.)
1/2 cup nuts or seeds, toasted
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 cup water
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast (large flake) or 2 tsp. powder
ground black pepper, smoked paprika, or red pepper flakes, to taste

Place the greens, nuts or seeds, and garlic in a food processor. Pulse to combine until the mixture becomes a rough paste.
Turn the motor on and drizzle in the olive oil and water. Add the salt, lemon juice, and nutritional yeast, and pulse a few more times to combine.
Add the optional spices to give it a different flavor spin.

My favorite combinations thus far:

Carrot Tops, Sunflower Seeds + Smoked Paprika
Basil + Pumpkin Seeds
Radish Greens + Almonds
Mint, Cashews + Green Chile
Cilantro + Radish or Turnip Greens, Pumpkin Seeds, Cumin, Coriander, Red Pepper Flakes + Lime