Carrot Slaw for Breakfast? A Year of Dietary Fluctuations and How Light Can One Go?

The rapid turnover from Christmas/Solstice to New Year always catches me by surprise, especially living in such a 'far back' timezone. Some places, it's already New Year's Eve!

I don't set great store by New Year's, because I have always believed that any moment can be a beginning. I remember as a kid saying incredulously "but every minute, a new year starts." Perhaps it was easier for me to recognize this, with Jewish New Year--and school year, for that matter--both falling in September, and then everyone's birthday is their own new year's beginning.

All that said, it's a useful time to take stock and reflect, to align with the collective energy, to join the chorus. I'll be back tomorrow with some more general reflections about the year as a whole, but today, perhaps prompted by a bizarre comment I left on Gena's blog, saying that I was going to have carrot 'slaw for breakfast the next day, I'll start with that oddity, and go back over a year of odd breakfasts. I really like to have the same thing for breakfast every day, mostly for convenience, but over the course of the year, that "same thing" has shifted often. It may be that I'd be better off varying my breakfasts throughout a given week: it seems I'm prone to feeling nauseous after breakfast, and something can work for a while and then suddenly "not work."

I did, in fact, have carrot 'slaw for breakfast the morning after that comment. It may not be surprising, given my obsession with carrots, that I thought of them when feeling out of sorts with my regular breakfast and generally a little under the weather.

Carrot Breakfast 'Slaw for 1

1 large grated carrot

1 tablespoon melted coconut butter

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

squeeze of lemon juice

Mix all these together and let sit overnight.

Top with a teaspoon of ground flax meal, a teaspoon of lecithin, and a tablespoon or two of goji berries and raisins. Can also add some spirulina for protein.

I also had a kiwi and half an orange to round this breakfast out. It may not sound like a lot, but it sure was delicious.

In the early part of the year, I was having a smoothie with a bazillion different superfoods and vegetables and no fruit or sugar.

Then, that stopped working, or I stopped being willing to have it "not work," and I was eating leftover salads and carrots for breakfast. For a while, I was eating only yams, carrots, nettles and some coconut kefir, so the first three of those were my breakfasts.

Then, I went back to all-fruit, and a big hunk of watermelon...

...or other fruit medley was my breakfast.

Then, I got back into smoothies, but felt like I didn't have time to make them at breakfast, and needed something quicker. Sometimes, I had berries, fruit and coconut kefir with spirulina.

Then, for months, my breakfast was quinoa/amaranth/millet very-watery-porridge with berries, banana, turmeric and occasionally flax meal and protein powder.

At some point in there, I stopped eating bananas again because they're not digesting well for me. And for some of that time, I substituted adzuki beans for the millet and quinoa.

Lately, my breakfast has been chia pudding made from one tablespoon of chia seeds soaked overnight in water or herbal tea, sometimes adding some thawed acai juice, with some protein powder, lecithin and tocotrienols added in the morning and some fruit on the side.
It's amazing to me how filling that breakfast is for so few calories! You'd also think (I also thought) that with so few calories, there'd be no way I'd get nauseous.
Wrong! Just the past couple weeks, after a month or so of chia pudding for breakfast every morning, I've been nauseous until lunchtime after eating it.

Hence the carrot 'slaw, and very occasionally, if something like this is marked down at the store...

 ...I'll have it for breakfast with a little flax meal and lecithin, and a few berries.

Maybe I'll go back to chia pudding tomorrow, or perhaps I'll just have to have carrot 'slaw again!

It seems like I've come in a full circle from minimal sugar and low calories but lots of 'superfood' type stuff, through just fruit with no protein at all, through starchy porridge, porridge with added protein powder, and back to minimal sugar and low calories with 'superfood'-type stuff, albeit in a simpler version. Perhaps it's natural to go more fruity in the summer, even up here. But if anything, I'm eating a higher percentage of raw foods now than I was in the summer, when I was eating quite a bit of cooked starch.

My inner minimalist is definitely in the ascendant right now, both for frugality and for the simple, academic interest of seeing how little food I actually "need." That's an area in which I can claim to some expertise, actually, and in the new year I'm going to start sharing some tips for "going lightly." When I have time, I'll write a whole book about it!

Would you be interested in a book on "going lightly," or are you more interested in the "rev your metabolism and eat all you want" approach (which I don't have the expertise to offer!)?

Is there any breakfast I haven't tried and should try?

Latest Culinary Experiment--Don't Try This at Home (Yet)! Confession

Since I've been experimenting with "Ela-friendly gluten free baking" (i.e. gluten free and vegan baked goodies without "junk" like omega 6 oils or refined sugar or flour), I've been thinking about whole grains and the whole question of flour. About how nice it is to be able to grind my own quinoa flour, etc, in the dry grinder of the Vitamix, to use it fresh. 

But also about "batters" and "doughs." They always feature both dry and wet ingredients, right? So if I took whole grains to begin with, and blended them with wet ingredients, I could make a batter direct from the whole grain without having to go through flour, right?

Right? I'm sure there are some baking mavens who would throw up their hands at the textural mayhem I'm getting ready to commit. But how different is it really? One less step to avoid, where oxidation and damage can occur to the grains. 

The other thing: if I soaked and sprouted grains, then blended them to a batter, I could make a raw bread from it in the dehydrator, right? 

I've actually been thinking about this for quite a long time. And there is a website, here, with various recipes and techniques for making batters with whole grains and a blender. I've made a cornbread in the style of that site quite a few times that was gluten free but not vegan, and I didn't even need the Vitamix--the little immersion blender could do it fine. I've never tasted that cornbread, but everyone I've made it for has loved it.

So, I decided it was time to experiment making some raw bars involving sprouted amaranth, my obsession carrots, raisins and applesauce. I also included a quarter cup of flax seeds and a couple tablespoons each of coconut oil and coconut sugar.

I greased these baking pans before pouring in the batter and putting in the dehydrator, but evidently not well enough.

Oh dear, what a mess!

I really should have lined the trays, or made a batter thick enough simply to spread on teflex sheets on the trays.

So, if you're hearing "not a success," you're hearing right!

They're not a total disaster, but they're really not very good, even aside from the "glued to the pan" issue. I think I used too much applesauce and not enough sweetener. There's something really "off" tasting about the applesauce in there too, to the point that I wonder whether the wet batter went a little awry in dehydrator. (I did follow the protocol of having it on a higher temp for the first hour.)

Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens rather often when I'm trying a new experiment for "me food." I think about it a lot ahead of time, but then I dive in to actually do the experiment when I'm in a rush and a time-crunch, and use ingredients that I think need to be used up (like the applesauce), and drastically lower the amount of sweetener and fat from anything reasonable.

I confess that I don't value myself enough to take the time to enjoy the experiment and make something really good, if it's really something "just for me." But this is ultimately for you guys also, so please watch this space: when I get back from my trip, I'll tweak this and make it into something good.

This is a time of year when you can't be running late, and just run out, jump in the car and drive away. There's ice to scrape off the windshield and even then, sometimes you drive off and can't see a thing through the windshield while the car warms up. And while you can't see so well, there's ice all over the dirt road. It's horribly dangerous just to drive off.

I intend that the practice of needing to leave in good time for any outing, allowing time for the vehicle to warm up, be a model for me with other activities too, that I allow a break, a transition, between one activity and the next rather than charging headlong through the exhausting and overloaded day.

Do you have good ways to avoid the "headlong" syndrome?

"Food as Pleasure" Challenge #1--"A" is for "Amaranth"

Often, I take on a new challenge or institute a new practice, only to have life circumstances move in ways that make follow-through complicated at best. Maybe I'm not alone in this?! This time, however, I knew from the get-go that when I set that 'food as pleasure' recipe-following challenge, I would be on the road within a few short days, heading off on my big adventure, my MFA residency, almost two weeks of everything 'writing and literature,' probably just the bare minimum of food-prepping, and otherwise just making the food thing work as seamlessly and graciously as possible. And so, on the eve of my departure, I have the first recipes (yes, I did make two) to tell you about.

First off, not a recipe but a wonderful fruit salad that is also a celebration of my renewed embracing of all macronutrients.

That is a bowl of blueberries, half a mango, thawed cherries and grapes, two chopped dates, spirulina and coconut kefir! It's like what you might make a smoothie from, but it's a very different experience from drinking a smoothie, let me tell you. A bouquet of varying textures and flavors: the intense almond note of the dense cherries, the juicy smack of the blueberries, the occasional sticky sweetness of the dates--and when you stir it all together, the spirulina and kefir just melt into the mix. So, I was pleased with that, and you'd enjoy it too (although replicating it just that way to eat while driving up to Anchorage might have been less smart--should have gone with the good ol' smoothie)!

As for the recipes I chose to feature for purposely delicious food, a little voice in my head had been nagging me for weeks that I should try amaranth. I've never had it before, and I haven't really explored the world of the 'pseudograins' (quinoa, millet, amaranth) yet. I'd been impressed by its nutrient profile and since I love the greens, I was curious to try the seeds.

I googled around to find a recipe to try it in, and was immediately drawn to this 'Amaranth Polenta with Wild Mushrooms' recipe: I'd been having a hankering to make a mushroom risotto-type dish for ages too, so this fit both the amaranth and the 'mushroom risotto' hankerings!

For the challenge, I wasn't supposed to 'healthify' the recipe, and in this case it was pretty easy for me not to: it's a simple and healthy recipe as it stands. My one exception to the 'no healthifying' rule is that I'm allowed to substitute coconut oil for other cooking oils if high heat is going to be involved. So, the recipe calls for butter or olive oil, and I used a bit of coconut oil instead.

Garnished with fresh thyme...They recommended serving it with 'wild game,' so I fixed up something of that ilk, together with freshly harvested chard (steamed with lemon) and lettuces (in a salad), and freshly baked bread--and it was quite a spread!

We had one friend over for dinner, and then another one unexpectedly stopped in, and everyone enjoyed all of it. I knew that Phil would like the amaranth, because it still has a crunch even in a porridgy-textured context like polenta. Here's the funny thing: both Phil and our friend who was there from the start commented that the texture and appearance of the amaranth reminded them of fish roe at Japanese restaurants (although it tasted completely different). And then, when the unexpected guest started eating it a little later, he said, "What's this? Fish eggs?"

But I wasn't done! That same website linked a recipe for gluten free Amaranth-Ginger Muffins--a blend of gluten free flours including amaranth, with crystallized ginger pieces and nuts scattered through them. I decided I should make those too. Now, this was a gluten free recipe, but it called for eggs and milk. I used ener-g egg replacer and almond milk instead, but this was veganizing, not 'healthifying!' In other words, I used real sugar, not stevia and xylitol, and although I did use coconut oil instead of the recommended canola (not on your life!), I didn't reduce the quantity. (Actually, with the quantity recommended, there's only a quarter-tablespoon of oil per muffin anyway, less than a teaspoon...) I _did_ leave out the nuts, but not for 'healthifying' reasons: simply because I don't like nuts in baked goods. Oh, and I used arrowroot instead of potato starch because I didn't have the latter.

Crystallized ginger is definitely one of those things that I _would_ normally leave out: honestly, though, I was fully intending to include it. I chopped it all up hours ahead of time. But I was multitasking, and only remembered that I'd forgotten to add it when the muffins were almost done. Since I'd decided not to make the sugar crumb topping (just didn't think it was necessary--you can call me on it if you think that's 'healthifying' :) ), I added the crystallized ginger pieces as a belated topping a few minutes before they were done.

I'd been quite nervous about how these would be received, being as they were gluten free and vegan and all. But they were delicious on all palates! Phil ate three of them right away, and one of our guests also went for seconds. Very moist but almost a 'stretchy' texture, from the combination of xanthan gum and egg replacer: I imagine that the texture would have been more like classic gingerbread had I used real eggs.

Since I made the amaranth flour by grinding whole amaranth in the Vitamix, there were a few whole grains still in there--you can see them in the picture above (maybe I need to grind for longer next time). These little seeds popped like fig seeds as we chewed--I'm glad that people were put in mind of figs and not fish roe in this context!

Oh, and I liked them too. I love gingery, spicy stuff. I didn't adore them but it definitely felt like a treat.

So. I'm flying south to Tacoma tomorrow. For the next two weeks I don't know what my schedule will be vis-a-vis blog-writing and reading but I'd love to stay checked in as and when I can. 

Sending love to everyone and hoping that if it's raining as hard where you are as it has been here in AK, your garden is growing beautifully as a result--and otherwise, that you're enjoying sunshine and summer with no breath of fall!

Have you tried amaranth? Liked it?