Time to Water the Garden!

Sweeten It Up Without Sugar

It is possible to make and eat desserts and other sweet treats without using sugar.  When I say "sugar," I include honey, agave syrup, fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, maltose, dextrose, glucose . . . ALL the "ose's," molasses, brown sugar, raw sugar, turbinado sugar.  That's right! Even if you see them in your health food store, that does not mean they aren't sugar or at least they act like sugar in your body and wreak all kinds of havoc with your hormones, your blood sugar, your arteries, your digestion.


Some brands will do anything to make you think they are healthier for you including putting their product in a brown package or labeling it with an enticing buzz word.  Would you believe that when I went to my health food store today I saw a package of refined white sugar labeled "Vegan!"  Who do they think they're kidding?  Vegan is getting to be very popular, so why not say that sugar is "vegan."  It is true.  Sugar did come from a plant.  It was a plant a long, long time ago before it was mashed and stripped and chemically-treated and altered and granulated and bleached and who knows what else.


What you choose to use instead of sugar can be a difficult decision because it depends on how far you are willing to go to protect your health and how far you personally should go to improve any conditions you currently have that are sugar-related or sugar-aggravated.


My mantra is always the same:  pick the closest thing to whole food as possible.  I don't actually know of any sweetener that is a complete whole food.  All of them, even the best choices, are processed and refined to some degree.  Probably some of you might say 100% raw honey right out of the honeycomb is an unrefined, whole sweetener.  And I'd have to agree with you on that.  The problem I have with honey is that it still consists of glucose and fructose just like table sugar.  However it has some other benefits and because it is so very sweet, you can use a lot less of it than you would sugar.  So maybe it is a good gradient choice if your system can tolerate honey.


I prefer not to use honey and instead I use whole grain sweeteners that have been naturally fermented.  I use organic barley malt and I use organic brown rice syrup.  I use these because they are not simple sugars and therefore do not rapidly spike your blood sugar level but instead they burn more slowly.  A good analogy would be to think of building a fire.  If you built a fire and used newspaper as fuel, it would burn up in a flash and then be gone.  That is like eating sugar.  It is a fast and furious fuel at first and then it's gone, leaving the rest of your body in a state of chaos to keep up with the rapid change the sugar made.  If you build a fire with good, aged hard wood, you can keep that going for hours as it burns at a slow, steady rate providing light and heat.  That is like fueling your body with whole grains and whole grain sweeteners.  They are what is called, complex carbohydrates and do not produce the rocky ups and downs that sugar does.


Grains are naturally sweet.  Here's a test you can try:  Make yourself some brown rice and take a mouthful, chewing it and chewing it but don't swallow.  You will taste how your saliva breaks down the whole grain and produces a beautiful sweet taste.  (Okay, eventually you can swallow!)


Here are a few ways to use whole grain sweeteners in cooking:

FRUIT CRISP

This is made by putting barley malt into a heavy pan (cast iron works well) and heating it until it is bubbling like you would make a soft candy. By adding toasted oatmeal flakes and chopped nuts to it, and maybe a little whole wheat flour, you can get a nice mixture to put over sliced apples or other fruit. Bake it in a 350 degree oven for a few minutes and you've got yourself a nice apple crisp that won't ruin your health.

BROWN RICE CRISPIES

• 6 cups of brown rice crispy cereal (read the label and make sure there is no sugar or honey added)
• handful of raisins
• handful of peanuts
• 1/2 tsp of cinnamon
• 1/2 cup of brown rice syrup

Mix the brown rice crispy cereal, raisins, peanuts and cinnamon in a bowl.  Pour the brown rice syrup into a heavy saucepan or skillet and bring it to a boil.  Simmer until the rice syrup is very bubbly and thick.  Add the rice crispy cereal mix and quickly stir it all up so the cereal mixture is coated.  Press the mixture into a 9X9 pan that is lightly oiled.  Let it cool, cut it into squares and serve!


When I make an apple pie, I drizzle a bit of brown rice syrup over my cut apples to sweeten them before baking the pie.  I also use whole grain sweeteners for puddings, and to create a sweet and savory sauce for an entree.  


These are just some very simple, quick-to-make examples.  The possibilities are endless and the best way to learn how to do it is by getting yourself a couple of great cookbooks.  There are all kinds of fancy desserts without sugar.  Let me know which ones you like best!

Sugar: Poison in the Pantry

Anyone interested in improving their overall diet may sooner or later discover that they are consuming way too much sugar and try to "cut back."


You are right if you eat a great deal of sugar and come to the conclusion that you shouldn't.  My first introduction to the problem with refined sugar was back in the '70's when I picked up a paperback book called Sugar Blues by William Dufty.  Dufty writes about what eating refined sugar can do to a body and what he did to stop eating it.  In the book, published in 1975, Dufty writes about how he met and married famous actress, Gloria Swanson, and how she taught him about diet and nutrition and helped him get completely off refined sugar.  He describes dramatic improvements in his health by doing so.  This is still one of the best, most straight-forward and informative books about sugar that I know of.


Dufty discusses sugar in terms of being an addictive drug responsible for many devastating diseases throughout history.  He attacks the sugar industry in his book and point out that American food manufacturers have kept Americans hooked on sugar, particularly by hiding sugar in its many forms in virtually every food product found on the shelves of the supermarket.  Of course the sugar industry didn't like this book and attacked Dufty for writing it.  But today all you have to do is google about refined sugar and you will find a multitude of authors and experts echoing exactly what Dufty had to say about sugar including his claim that too much sugar can cause depression and mental illness.


No matter whether you want to go in the direction of vegetarianism, vegan, macrobiotic, standard American some-of-everything, or the extreme opposite direction--the Paleo  Diet, which is heavy in animal protein--getting sugar out of your diet will take you a very long way in the right direction toward better health.


Why?  


The reasons to stop eating refined sugar are enormous in number but here are the main ones:


1.  Sugar depletes the body of vital nutrients including minerals and B vitamins. That means when we eat sugar we are not only eating something that is itself nutritionally empty, the sugar is taking some of the nutrients we did manage to consume and destroying them too.  This leads to all kinds of imbalances that can affect virtually every system in your body especially your digestion and your hormones.


2.  Sugar (and it's cousin white flour) heavily contribute to what is known as Candida, a condition in which the body has an overwhelming growth of a particularly damaging strain of yeast.  The yeast lives in the intestines and attach themselves to the intestinal walls sometimes even breaking through the wall and creating what is commonly called leaky gut syndrome.  There is much to know about Candida yeast infections and how easily they come about and you should also know that Candida can be difficult to get rid of and the treatments for it are themselves damaging.  But what I want you to know here is that every living thing on earth needs some kind of food and Candida yeast's menu of choice is sugar and white flour!  I recently read that 60-70% of Americans have Candida yeast infections.


3.  Because sugar consumption affects so many bodily systems and functions, it heavily contributes to all manner of diseases and disorders:  diabetes, indigestion, gas, high blood pressure, arthritis and other inflammatory conditions, heart disease, cavities, depression and mental illness, nutritional deficiency and weight gain, PMS, and the list goes on and on . . . 


4.  Eating sugar is addictive and is a poison in the simplest sense of the word.  If you eat a little, you become more active (as in hyped-up, on overdrive, buzzing).  If you eat a lot, you slow down (this is the typical drowsy, can't keep your eyes open stupor you may have experienced after a big sugar binge.)  And, like all other poisons, if you eat way too much you will become ill or die (see points 1 through 3).


What to do?


First, you need to educate yourself on what is and isn't sugar.  The quick study is to start reading labels in the store and asking questions in the restaurant:  "Does this have sugar?"  Realize that sugar includes maple syrup, molasses, brown sugar, "natural" sugar, organic sugar, raw sugar, and all those chemical-sounding ingredients that end in "-ose."  And don't be fooled by the packaging.  Just because the paper is brown instead of white does not somehow make the sugar better for you.  But  there is much more to know than that and it is worth investing some time to become knowledgeable.


Second, find out what else acts just like sugar in your body.  This is where we get into the subject of refined white flour, alcohol and things that literally convert to sugar when you eat them.


Third--and this is the good news--learn what you can or should eat and drink that will help you overcome your cravings for sugar, help you regain nutritional balance and vitality and help you recover from the damage that sugar may have caused you.  For this I recommend you find a program that works for you and commit to following it.  You may have to look around and try different things.  The bottom line is that you make your decision to stop eating sugar.  Learning what to do instead will only be workable if you have made that strong decision first. (And that advice comes from personal experience.)


Check back with me here for some help.  This is the first in a series about sugar and I will be writing in much more detail about what I know that is useful!

Summer Salad Recipe: Pressed Salad

With summer just around the corner, I like to share one of my favorite summer salad recipes, "Pressed Salad."  Before you start associating your ironing board with curly leaf lettuce, let me explain!

This is a cooking tool called a "salad press" or "pickle press."  You can find them online or in a local Asian, Korean or Japanese market.  A pressed salad is not cooked at all, yet it is not just like a raw salad because it has been processed by pressing it in some sea salt for a period of time.  This is actually a pickling method, only it is done for a very short time to make an ever-so-lightly pickled or pressed dish.

To press salad, you can choose things like lettuce, cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, radishes or anything that can be cut very small or that is "press-able."  Chunks of cauliflower or broccoli, for instance, are not very press-able.  I like to use three to five ingredients for a pressed salad.

Here's a simple pressed salad using cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, red onion and parsley.

1. Cut the cabbage into thin bite-size strips.  Cut the carrots into thin matchsticks.  Cut the cucumbers in half.  Remove the seeds with a spoon if you wish. I don't remove seeds because I like my foods to be "whole."  I also don't peel my cucumbers because I buy organic and use the skins of my veggies.  Cut the half-cucumbers into slices.  Cut the red onion into thin slices.  Cut the parsley into small pieces.

2.  Put all the cut veggies into the salad press.  Add sea salt and start mixing the salad around with a utensil, chopsticks or--I just use my hands.  You will add enough sea salt to make the veggies start sweating or glistening.  The salt is pulling some of the water out of the vegetables.  Don't worry, you'll rinse the excess salt out later.

3.  Tighten the press down so the veggies are snug and the pressure of the press is helping to get the water out.  If you don't have a salad press, just use a flat plate and a weight such as a heavy jar or a brick or rock.  They will do the same thing.

4.  The time you will press the veggies will depend on what veggies you use.  If you press a lettuce salad, it will only take 20-30 minutes and lettuce needs very little salt to "process" in the press.  With cabbage it will take longer--an hour or more.  You can decide how "pressed" you want your salad to be by how you like the taste and texture.  The thinner you cut your veggies, the less time they will take to press.

5.  When the salad is done pressing, you will see excess water in the press and you should drain that off.  Then rinse the salad itself in cool water and gently squeeze out the excess water by hand before serving.  You can serve the pressed salad with a dressing or not.  I usually don't feel it needs one.

Organic Gardening - Grow It, Pick It, Eat It

What better way would there be to get fresh, succulent organic vegetables than growing them yourself in your own garden?  Picture it:  you go out to your garden and there are your favorite vegetables at the peak of perfection and ready to be picked.  They have the best flavor, the most beautiful color and man, oh, man are they alive!

Just looking at these beauties sparks your desire and creativity for cooking today’s food, all the while knowing that you have the most nutritious, freshest and highest quality food at your fingertips.

Organic gardening is certainly a different way of growing things because, as you know, you aren’t going to use chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.  All the better for the environment, the soil, and the health of you and your loved ones.  But more than that, organic gardening includes restoring your soil so it is healthy and full of minerals, knowing which insects you want and which ones you don’t (and how to get rid of the “don’ts”) and how to recycle organic materials for making compost.  For that you might want to look for a good Organic Gardening book such as this e-book I found called Organic Gardening Magic by Laura Fox.

Organic gardening is a lot of fun and it’s a great way to get outdoors and be more physically active now that spring is here and summer is around the corner.  I once had an organic garden in which I dug up most of my back yard to build.  I made a double-dug garden in a spiral shape which gave me lots and lots of space to plant a very wide variety of vegetables and the spiral made a convenient walkway for us to get around to every plant and care for it.

We had tons of food and our grocery bills were way down during those years.  Organic gardening is definitely a money saving venture.  I also learned a lot about how things grow and why I should love ladybugs even more than I already did.  I had, for instance, huge brussel sprout plants.  I didn’t even like brussel sprouts until I grew them organically.  Mine tasted better than any I had ever been served anywhere.  No kidding.

Simple Brussel Sprouts Saute

I would just pick them fresh, wash them and trim the stem end if necessary.  (By the way, it often wasn’t necessary because when you bring in something fresh from your garden, it hasn’t had time to dry out or get tough.)  Slice the brussel sprouts in half lengthwise and if they are a little large, slice the stem end vertically just about a quarter of an inch in so it will cook in about the same time as the rest of the sprout.  Heat up a heavy pan with some olive oil and throw in the brussel sprouts.  Saute them with some sea salt and pepper if you wish and really, any other herb or seasoning you think will be good.  I like to add in some crushed garlic because that’s my favorite.  When the brussel sprouts are tender but no mushy, they are done.  Serve them like they are or garnish them with something toasted such as toasted light or black sesame seeds.  Mmmmm!

Unfortunately I do not still have that big spiral-shaped garden.  But that’s okay if you are like me and don’t even have a back yard!  Organic gardening can be done in containers, in a community garden that promotes organic growing practices or, according to Laura Fox in Organic Gardening Magic, you can grow indoors too!