whole-grain – Page 6 – GUTSy Performance Nutrition

early autumn collard wraps with beet hummus, orange quinoa salad + apple slices

October 1, 2016by Rebecca3 Comments

I cooked my first winter squash this week, a delicata from the garden. I added it into the lovely split pea, rhubarb and apple soup from Vegetarian Everyday/Green Kitchen Stories. I sipped a rendition of Izy’s autumn-spiced coffee, planted purple sprouting broccoli for a late winter/early spring harvest, and kicked the heat on to a measly 62 degrees in the house. It ran almost all day while I wore my down vest and a blanket and powered through week four of term three–grad school life; the workload is intense; it calls for blankets and my first coffee in well over a year–and yet I love it. I’ve scheduled myself to take one-two days off from the material right now and I still wake up on those mornings ready to dive back in.

It’s safe to say summer is well on its way out. Ever the seasonal sleeper, I’m waking much later in the mornings. And catching up on processing my recent transition out of school garden education. I also began writing in more detail about my experience with running, eating disorder recovery, faith, and mental health in general–topics that might be a little too intense here. If you first came to this blog for those posts, feel free to read more on my new blog. Otherwise, below are a sampling of the many short and longer reading I’ve enjoyed these past months, a couple podcast episodes I feel are worth sharing, and a few seasonal meals we’ve been enjoying.

Reading
How to Build an Empire
The Salkantay Trek to Machu Piccho: perspective + privilege

David has been cooking with and sharing/photodocumenting the stories of Syrian refugees in Turkey this last week. It is a beautiful experience, important to share, and I think relates a lot to the point made by Ashlae, above.

Why I haven’t weighed myself in 2 1/2 years
The Starvation Study that Changed the World, I’m still reflecting on these last two but they are both well worth reading in terms of body image, eating, and/or weight struggles.

Longer Reading
Food and Healing by Annemarie Colbin. I just finished. I loved it.

Listening to
Up Your Game
How to Cultivate Non-Judgment
Andrew Wheating on Strengthening Your Winning Muscle (I’ve listened to this on repeat for weeks!)

Seasonal Eating–Basically, I only want to eat Moroccan or Middle Eastern flavors and/or eggplants so we’ve been enjoying these:
Moroccan Eggplant Mini-Galettes with Chickpeas + Harissa
Moroccan Tagine with Sweet Potatoes + Beets
Roasted Vegetable Pizza
Eggplant & Olive Caponata
We also enjoyed the Eggplant Meatballs from Love & Lemon’s new cookbook at a friend’s last weekend. They were delicious.
And I’m eating all the pears from my favorite pear farmer and these Chai-Spiced Pear Oats, daily.

early autumn collard wraps with beet hummus, orange quinoa salad + apples, makes 4
Every once in a while I get a craving for collard wraps, always with beets and a grain salad of sorts and perhaps some fruit. Wrapped up tight, they make for a delicious and nourishing lunch. This version is inspired by a recipe in Vegetarian Everyday with my own beet hummus (still delicious and addicting), thinly sliced crunchy apples, and locally grown chickpeas.

1-2 batches Beet Hummus
1 cup quinoa
1 tsp. fennel seeds
zest and juice of 1/2 an orange
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup toasted, chopped walnuts
2-3 spring onions or baby leeks, thinly sliced
2-4 Tbs. minced parsley
sea salt, to taste
2 cups cooked chickpeas
8 large collard green leaves
3-4 small apples, thinly sliced

To make the quinoa salad, bring 2 cups water and quinoa to a boil in a small pot. Add the fennel seeds, turn down to a simmer, cover and cook for 15-20 minutes. Set aside to cool.
Add orange juice and zest, raisins, walnuts, leeks or spring onions, parsley and salt to the quinoa.
To assemble the wraps, trim the base of the stem off the collard leaves and take a serrated knife and thinly shave down the remaining stem, getting it to the same thickness as the rest of the leaf. Then soften the leaves by either drenching in warm water briefly or heating in the microwave for a few seconds.
For each wrap, arrange two collard leaves head to foot, overlapping them halfway. Spread a generous amount of beet hummus, then quinoa salad, garbanzos, and finally a few apple slices in the center. Fold over each end, tuck one side under, and roll tightly like a burrito. If it’s in danger of coming apart, use a few toothpicks to hold it together, and slice in half.
Continue as above to create the remaining three wraps. There should be apple slices leftover which are great eaten on the side.

Autumn, Summertime

Blackberry Crumble

September 22, 2016by RebeccaLeave a Comment

If there is one thing I love to learn about others, it is their preferences for and memories involving food. I’ve shared much of my history with food and cooking in this space already but this month, The Recipe Redux asked us to stir up some of our earliest culinary recollections.

Instead of rehashing how it all began, I’m reposting a very slightly edited version of what I wrote then with a little note about this month’s recipe at the end.

“Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you.”

– Letters to a Young Poet, Rainier Maria Rilke

The truth is, the beginning is blurry. When I squint back into the depths of my childhood, my thoughts were not long off of food. I would take cookbooks to bed at night, scrunching my eyes into the flashlight-shadows, long after my sister had demanded I put our shared, bunk-bedded room into darkness. Looking back at the shy, quiet, anxious little person that I was then, I recall only that I felt most at home in the kitchen. I still do.

It began then, I think, with playdough. My mom mixed up homemade playdough. I remember seeing the recipe on a worn index card in her gray metal recipe box, a box that to this day holds her most cherished recipes. There were two recipes in that box that were beyond intriguing to my child-mind: elephant ears and playdough. The first was something that I had never considered could be made outside of a hot, steamy, trailer-kitchen at the county fair. The second was the only non-food recipe that I’ve ever known my mom to have on hand. I must have asked her, and she mixed up a batch for us. I don’t remember much after beyond the whirl of the mixer blades, and the fact that my mom brought me into the kitchen, handed me the measuring cups, and taught me fractions.

From that moment when I learned to turn on the mixer, to scoop flour into the measuring cups, to follow recipe instructions, up to now, nearly 20 years later, I’ve been most at home in any place surrounded by food. It fascinates me in its cultural symbolism, use as a socio-economic tool and weapon, as a medicine to heal, as a draw to family gatherings and entire holiday celebrations, and most importantly, in its most simple form as basic sustenance for the hunger in all of us.

In those simple childhood days, those most-remembered foods symbolize the dearly loved and oft-hated. My favorites from that gray box included our neighbor’s recipe for honey-cinnamon swirl rolls, my mom’s homemade bread, and leftover-oatmeal cookies with just the right amount of spice. There was my favorite breakfast, dad’s “stinkbug porridge”, which was a simple concoction of raisins and brown sugar. And then the fresh milk from our cow, Betsy, with flakes of cream floating amongst my morning cheerios. I had to plug my nose to get the milk down after staying an extra hour at the table gathering the resolve to drink it. Now looking back, I realize what a precious experience to have been raised in a place where our milk came right from the cow.

In this new season and new beginning of sorts, I am reminded of how I am drawn to food as a means of communication and connection. I am reminded of the beginning, how I learned in the kitchen with my mom and the whirl of the blender blades that are still in her cupboard today. I am reminded that food is special, and that when I go into myself, as Rilke suggests, the only answer I come back with is, yes, I must create.

Though I no longer enjoy thick slices of my mom’s bread, or partake in flecks of cream floating in cow’s milk, I hold in my heart and in my cooking a focus on good, simple, nourishing food, in whatever way it can be most enjoyed. I am looking forward to this season to come, and the creations it will bring.

Now tell me, what is one of your first memories in the kitchen?

Blackberry Crumble, serves 4-6
As I indicated above, I began creating with baked goods, and having grown up in an area rich with agriculture and with grandparents that often brought fruit from their own or nearby orchards, baking frequently involved fruit. Crumbles or crisps were an often chosen and easily made dessert that were devoured in a matter of spoonfuls. This one involves blackberries because today happens to be a special someone’s birthday and William requests blackberry desserts annually (or one of its many cousins in the form of boysen or marionberries). Hence, a late September blackberry recipe makes its way into this space nearly every year.

For this recipe, there are a couple options in the way of sweetening and using the oil. For the berries, opt for one tablespoon honey if you’re working on limiting sugar consumption, or don’t tend to eat much sugar, like me. If on the other hand, you do eat sugary sweets regularly, like William, opt for two tablespoons honey and you’ll likely be a little more satisfied. Likewise, we tend to find coconut oil a bit too overpowering in crumbles and pies (even refined coconut oil), and prefer a more neutral flavored oil like canola instead so the blackberry flavor can shine through. I know some particularly like the coconut flavor, so if that’s more your speed, opt for coconut oil instead.

4 cups fresh or frozen blackberries
1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
2 tsp. fresh lemon juice
1-2 Tbs. honey (see notes)

Crumble Topping:
2 cups rolled oats, gluten-free if necessary
6 Tbs. sorghum flour
1/4 cup canola oil or melted coconut oil (see notes)
1/4 cup honey
1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
pinch of sea salt

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Place the berries in a baking dish and toss with vanilla, lemon juice and honey.
Prepare the crumble in a separate bowl. Start by mixing oats, sorghum flour, salt and vanilla.
Then add the canola or melted coconut oil and honey. Use a spoon or your hands to mix until combined. With your fingers, crumble the filling evenly over the berries.
Bake in the oven for 35-40 minutes until the fruit juices are bubbling around the edges and the topping is golden brown.

Autumn, Running, Summertime

Moroccan Tagine with Sweet Potatoes + Beets, food for runners (or this runner)

September 1, 2016by RebeccaLeave a Comment

There is nothing like a few days spent living with others to put into perspective how truly personal is our choice in food. While I will happily eat roasted broccoli or leftover kale salad for 9am snack (and frequently do), even the idea of kale salad at a seemingly more appropriate time of day might leave others running for the door.

This point is driven home in my frequent conversations about food with others. My work at the university has often left me chatting about the differences between foods here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world–how everything is just sooo sweet–and how diets inherently change even without the individual really attempting to when taking up residence here.

In sharing this recipe, I’ll make a point in saying first that I question the title and definitely the authenticity as I’ve never been to Morocco and have only eaten at one semi-Moroccan restaurant. And yet I love the flavors of “Moroccan” foods, particularly the tagines with sweet, savory, and spicy notes. So I’ll take liberty and call this my own version of a Moroccan tagine.

Second, I can see some camps loving this and others, again, running for the door because whoa, there are tooo many vegetables and don’t get me started on Rebecca’s fondness for spices.

But basically I call this the type of food that I like to eat to fuel my running life. Or more adequately, it is the food I tend to crave before a big run or race. So when William and others were packing sandwiches for our relay race a few weeks back, I found myself making and then eating Moroccan sweet potato + beet tagine with quinoa to fuel my runs and turning to it again a few more times throughout the ensuing weeks.

It is also a recipe I know I will adapt and make further into the fall season and the months (and miles) to come.

Moroccan Sweet Potato + Beet Tagine, serves 6-8
Inspired by Vegetarian Everyday

Though I tend to use a heavy hand with the harissa, I haven’t yet purchased or made one that has been nearly as spicy as the kind I’ve had in a restaurant–and its flavor tends to get muted by all the sweet notes of the apricots and currants. Use more or less, or even leave out, as you see fit.

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 inches fresh raw ginger, finely grated
1 1/2 tablespoons cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin
sea salt, to taste
2 tablespoons harissa
4-5 large tomatoes, diced
zest and juice of one lemon
3-4 beets, sliced into 2 inch pieces
1 medium eggplant, sliced into large pieces
1 medium zucchini, sliced into 2-inch pieces
2 medium sweet potatoes, sliced into 2-inch pieces
10 dried apricots, each sliced into about six pieces
2 cups cooked garbanzo beans
1/4 cup currants
thinly sliced fresh mint, to serve
cooked millet, quinoa, brown rice or other, to serve

Directions:

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan and sauté the onion for a few minutes until it becomes soft and translucent. Add the garlic and ginger and the spices and allow to cook for about 30 seconds more.
Stir in the harissa, diced tomatoes, lemon zest and juice. Bring the sauce to a boil and then lower the heat to simmer.
Add the beets, eggplant, zucchini, sweet potatoes, and apricots. Stir well so everything is nice and mixed, then cover and simmer for about an hour. Keep it covered as much as possible, but stir a couple times throughout the hour.
Once the vegetables are tender all the way through, add in the cooked beans and currants, cook for about 5 minutes more to heat through, and then season with additional salt and pepper, if needed.
Serve over cooked millet or other grain with a garnish of sliced mint on top.