Recipes for Real Food

It's breast cancer awareness month, hence the new pink hair profile photo, and all the more reason to be cooking and baking real food. I'm still eating it exclusively and it has changed my life --no drug or chemo-induced menopausal side effects at all. Amazing.

After my last food post, my friend A sent me a link to Food Renegade, a blog about real food. Although informative, the absence of references bothers me to no end. I believe the author since I've read a lot on food myself lately, but as my friend put it, the over zealousness gets in the way of the seriousness. I also don't like that she doesn't tell me where to get this real food. Regardless, it's worth taking a look, so I'll put the link in the resources section on the right column.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been busy baking, even bread. If you're interested in making bread, don't buy a bread maker. It'll be more hassle to take it out and put it away than it is to make bread from scratch. Don't be scared off by the time it takes --that's just time the dough rises, while you live. Don't think you'll have to knead for hours either; who has time to knead? I found two no knead recipes. The only thing you have to remember is that it takes practice to get it right.

The first recipe is a no knead bread from Chuck Hugues, a Montreal chef on Food TV. It's easy and it doesn't hurt that Chuck is very nice to watch. I saw him make this bread on tv and you don't have to be careful about the details. I do let it rise for an hour or more though. It makes two loafs like this one.


The second is a recipe for a French boule. It only has 4 ingredients and is much easier to put together. The inconvenience is you have to let the dough rise for 12 to 24 hours, then another 2 hours after folding it a bit. I usually make the dough at the same time I'll want to bake it the next day and I don't wait the full two hours afterwards. I changed the shape of the last one:


I've also been baking all of C. de Lune's snacks. I use seasonal produce or what I've frozen this summer. I'm not very original in the kitchen and although I'm starting to bake well and make substitutions, I need recipes. Most of the time, I substitute half the flour with whole wheat flour, I add only half the sugar called for and I always use butter.

Blueberry muffins
I made these muffins in August, in the middle of blueberries season. They're quite healthy and the only thing I changed in the recipe was the amount of honey -- blueberries are so sweet and honey is expensive, so I used 1/4 cup. The yogurt makes them moist. C. de Lune didn't like the first batch because she doesn't like big chucks of cooked fruit, so I mushed the blueberries with the mortar and pestle until they looked like jam.

Peach muffins
I found this recipe on a blog when I was looking to make something with my fresh Ontario peaches. It's for a peach loaf, but muffins cook so much faster and C. de Lune prefers them. I made a few changes to this recipe since I felt I could make it healthier and still have popular muffins --which they were. I didn't add flaxseed meal, but I would next time.

Banana chocolate chip muffins and banana bread
This is a basic and simple banana bread recipe but I add lots of chocolate chips. I've made both a loaf and muffins with it and C. de Lune requested a make more last night.

Applesauce muffins
This recipe is pretty much the same as the banana one. I used applesauce I made from scratch because it's apple season, but that's not necessary.

Apple bread
Scroll down the page to find the recipe. The only change I made in this one is I reduced the sugar quantity.

Pear white chocolate cookies
In this case, used more butter instead of shortening and oats instead of granola. As usual I reduced the sugar quantity and substituted some flour. Next time though, I'll cook the oats a bit first since I think what I have is not quick rolled oats.

I'm very busy this week planning for C. de Lune's birthday and the holiday--that's my fault for giving birth on Thanksgiving day. Therefore, I'll stop there for now. More recipes soon.

References
Food Network Website
"Chucks Day Off No Knead Bread"
"French Food at Home Miracle Boule"
"Fresh with Anna Olsen, Anna's Blueberry Muffins"

A Life Less Sweet blog

Cat Can Cook blog

Salt and Chocolate blog

About.com
"White Chocolate Pear Cookies"

Food. Part 1

You'll see many posts about food on this blog since there's so much to learn, or more appropriately, unlearn. I always thought I ate well: choosing foods from all 4 food groups and varying produce, limiting red meats and junk food, looking out for sodium and fat levels, eating whole grains, drinking water, limiting alcohol and caffeine, and so on. D has been the chef in this house for the last 10 years and has fed us consciously well. I've always been interested in the chemistry of food (vitamins, minerals) and learning what we get out off it. That said, I never really looked at ingredients in store-bought products and never stopped myself from eating convenience foods as long as the salt and fat content was reasonable. There lies the mistake.

I was reading a book entitled Food Matters about the meat industry, and watching the 100 Mile Diet on FoodTV when a friend suggested I read In Defence of Food. This book is written by Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivor's Dilemma. The first sentence was one of the 3 factors that made me start a food revolution in my kitchen. It read "Eat food. Not to much. Mostly plants".

The second factor was finding out about soy. Studies conflict about the role of soy in hormonal receptive cancers and estrogen dominant conditions. Some say it contributes, some say it reduces. The issue is between fermented and unfermented soy, basically real soy versus processed. In North American, we eat soy mostly in processed form. It's by-products are found in most baked goods--soybean oil, soy lecithin, etc, and are xenoestrogen. That's also why Asian women don't get breast cancer more than we do --they eat real, fermented soy which is a good form of phytoestrogen, and helps balance hormones. It's all very convoluted.

The third factor was finding out what's in cheap mayonnaise and sour cream. I went to the grocery store one day this summer to get both. I was curious about the ingredient so I picked up the cheap store brand sour cream (price has always been my selection factor) and read. The first ingredient was soybean oil... in sour cream. I was shocked. Isn't sour cream, cream that's sour? Shouldn't it be cream or milk and bacterial culture? I searched and found some that were just that, so I was right. Then I checked the mayonnaise: same cheap store brand, same soybean oil. Mayonnaise should be oil, eggs and seasoning. Nothing else.

These experiences were very upsetting, but they got me thinking. What's good for us is only getting more complicated: low fat, low sodium, margarine/butter, Omega 3, fibre and flax, red food, green food, blue food, health check this and blue menu that. But really, if you think about it, there are only two types of foods on the planet. Not healthy food and junk food as I used to think. Besides, that division is subject to interpretation and debate. No, it's even simpler than that:

Real food and fake food.

Think about it for a moment: Does an apple need a label that tells us it's healthy? Of course not, we all know it is. So why do already-made goods have one? It seems the more they try to convince us the food in question is good for us, the faker it is. One of the most obvious examples of fake food is Cool Whip and the less obvious is non fat, sweetener added yogurt. Yogurt is supposed to contain live bacterial culture and fat by definition. In North American, we pasteurize all dairy products, and fruit juice for that matter, to kill any potentially harmful bacteria. It's the fear of food poisoning liability kicking in. But since we've realized probiotics are essential to good gut health, we've seen more expensive yogurt with "good" bacteria appear on the shelves. You could say that's how they control the bacteria we injest. But the odds of getting sick from yogurt and cheese is minimal compared to the benefits. That said, yogurt is healthy regardless and I still eat it --just the real, sugar added, fatty kind. My favourite is Liberté balkan, made in Québec. All this is why I choose butter over margarine and sugar over artificial sweeteners. Speaking of which, did you know that when heated, aspartame turns into formaldehyde? And sorbitol is a laxative, by the way.

Why do products have a million ingredients in them now? They can't all be preservatives. Do I need guar gum in my salad dressing? Do you know what goes into real salad dressing? A fat (oil), an acid (lemon, vinegar or wine) and a flavour (seasoning, garlic, raspberries). It definitely comes in handy to know what foods are supposed to be made of. Have you looked at the ingredients in store bought bread, our western diet staple? Too much of nothing if you ask me. Bread can be made with 4 ingredients: flour, yeast, salt and water. That's what I make* it with and it looks like this. I'm so proud.



Last night I had a craving for potato chips, so D whipped some up in 15 minutes with potatoes, oil, salt and a frying pan.



The point is, this is back to basics at it's best. Just like with plastic, why fix what's not broken? Making your own baked goods like muffins, loafs and cookies takes little time and effort, and you have the added bonus of choosing what goes in it. It also feels very rewarding to say the least. So far this school year, I've baked* for C. de Lune's lunches, all from fresh and mostly local produce:

Blueberry muffins;
Peach muffins;
Banana chocolate chip muffins and banana bread;
Applesauce muffins and apple loaf;
Gingerbread;
Oatmeal white chocolate cookies and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies;
Carrots cookies.

*Recipes in future posts.

I freeze them until I pack them in her lunch. By the time she's ready to eats them, their thawed. You can also make your own tomato sauce, mayo, applesauce...the possibilities are endless.

The other advantage of eating real food is the reduction in options to choose from. Believe me, when you can't pop open a bag of cookies, you tend to go for the apple. I've been eating real foods exclusively for a month now and I've seen my chemo-induced-temporary-menopause symptoms practically disappeared. I've also been regular (I've had a problematic relationship with my gut all my life) and I feel like I'm doing something to prevent cancer from hitting me and my loved ones again.

If you're wondering how to recognize real food, here are a few hints:
If it's sold as convenient, it's fake;
If it's sold in the perimeter of the grocery store, it's real --there are exceptions of course;
If we had it 100 years ago, it's real;
If you can find it in the wild or in the garden, it's real;
If it only has more or less 5 ingredients, it's real.

There is so much more to be said about food, so keep checking. Recipes will be posted next time.

Sources
Bittman. Mark. Food Matters. A Guide to Conscious Eating. NY, Simon and Shuster, 2009.

Pollan. Michael. In Defence of Food. An Eater's Manifesto. NY, Penguin Books, 2008.

Sexy Hormones. F & W Ltd, Markham, 2007.