Start of “school”

So tonight I finally start my macrobiotic studies, woohoo!! I start with a weekend workshop called The Way to Health, Vitality and Strength, which is held, of course, at the Kushi Institute here in Amsterdam. Very curious! I wonder about my teachers and “classmates”. About the food (we start with dinner tonight). The lectures, workshops, and the morning do-in exercises. There will be both a lot of theory and a lot of practical cooking to get all under our skin. Tomorrow and Sunday I have to be at the institute in the morning already at 7:30 to start my hour-long exercise! Next week on Thursday I have a 4-day cooking class. And then the following week Saturday I start my two-week intense study programme, followed after a couple of days by another two-week intense study programme 😀 Ok, ok, I´ll stop here, it´s getting complicated. Anyway, I will have a looot of school (no free weekends, and often studying from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.). So not much time to blog – I will have to catch up later! Wish me good luck, and hopefully after I´m fully back there will be a lot of recipes, and a lot more theory!

Don´t burn your gomasio!

A couple of days ago I attempted to make my very first homemade gomasio, I was preparing myself for that for a long time!! I already purchased my Japan-made suribashi (ceramic mortar with fine thin lines/ridges in the bottom and sides) and surikogi (wooden pestle), both in the toko in Chinatown 😀 It seemed easy, all the recipes for gomasio are pretty much the same, differing mostly in used seeds (you can use basically any seed, but sesame is most popular).

So first you prepare a pan (stainless steel or cast iron; teflon coatings are not used in macrobiotics…unless you want some carcinogens in your food…) and dry-roast one teaspoon of high-quality sea salt for a few minutes, until it gets less bright white and starts smelling like ammoniac. You then grind the roasted salt in your suribashi with your surikogi (really, you need these tools for making gomasio, at least I think so). The salt grains should be crushed into very fine powder. So far so good. Then comes the next step – roasting sesame. You dry-roast 16-18 (differs per recipe) teasoons of sesame on your pan, that takes again few minutes. BUT be very careful to stir your sesame non-stop AND roast on a very low flame. Otherwise you will end up like me with dark brown, burnt smelling and tasting sesame (and gomasio…) 😦 Once your sesame seeds start to pop up, emit a strong sesame oil odor and change their color into a darker hue, they are ready to be transferred to the suribashi, where your salt is waiting. Crush together with the salt for a couple of minutes until 75% of the sesame seeds (god knows how you can tell – just estimate) are cracked open. It should smell reeeally nice – unless your sesame is burnt…The sesame seeds have to get thoroughly mixed with the crushed salt. And that´s it, voila. Your gomasio is ready to be stored in an air-proof container (preferrably glass jar) and used within two weeks (always make a fresh batch after about two weeks, otherwise it goes rancid). Next time I will watch my sesame with a hawk´s eye!!

26.9.

So I needed to prepare my tempeh in a quick, tasty way…here goes: fry a few slices of fresh tempeh in oil, adding a bit of tamari towards the end (tempeh in itself has a too mild and not that great flavour). Meanwhile cook corn on the cob in water, so that it is submerged. Ten to fifteen minutes will do. When your tempeh is crispy, place the pieces on one nori sheet (nori is the seaweed used as a sushi wrapper). Use the rest of the oil/tamari from the pan to lightly fry a few slices of daikon and leek. The tempeh looks nice on the dark green nori background 😀 And you can even wrap the tempeh (alone or with the veggies) in the nori and eat it rolled up. Whatever you like 😀

Quick hokkaido pumpkin dessert

I looooove hokkaido pumpkin – mostly cooked in a main dish, using salt and spices. But this time I made it into a dessert, which is not hard, because the pumpkin is very starchy and sweet in itself. To make it just a little bit sweeter, I added a handful of raisins while cooking the pumpkin in a few cm of water. Be smarter than me and add a few grains of sea salt too, it will bring out the sweetness 😀 When the pumpkin is soft enough that it´s easily mashed by a fork, it´s ready! Serve with a teaspoon of almond butter.

24.9.

Here is another Very Easy Recipe for a quick macrobiotic plate – cooked amaranth (this time I cooked 1 part of amaranth to 3 parts of water and it ended up much better than just 2 parts of water!), steamed carrots and onions (steamed onions become really really sweet, my favourite veggie to steam!), a spoonful of sauerkraut (I got one with juniper in it, be sure to get organic sauerkraut which has nothing but cabbage and salt in it, or some herbs, but no sweetener or vinegar!) and green fava beans from the can.

23.9.

I love the “macrobiotic plate” with islands of different types of food. It is a bit like creating a symphony 😀 Some time ago I finally got my order of 5 kg (!!) of teff in the mail, so I cooked it for dinner. Teff is a super-nutritious grain from Ethiopia, actually the smallest grain in the world. It reminds polenta a bit when cooked. It has a very fine delicate texture and I really like the taste and aroma…and it´s done in 15-20 minutes! Together with the teff I steamed broccoli and daikon (steaming is a hit in our household lately) and served them with a quick sauce made by diluting rice brown miso with some warm water. I also did a stir-fry in a wok – leek, green beans, carrot, chinese cabbage and celery stalk, with added sesame seeds and a dash of tamari and water. Simple yet satisfying dinner 🙂

Creamy cauliflower-parsnip soup

I like soups that are creamy thanks to blending them in a blender 🙂 well, this is one of them. I cooked

2 small onions

1 medium cauliflower

1 medium parsnip

salt

in a pot with water just to cover them, cook until soft and transfer to blender. Blend until it becomes a smooth milk coloured puree. You might need to add some water later to thin the soup. Return to the pot. Add a few teaspoons of white miso (“shiro miso”) to taste and let simmer in the pot a bit. Garnish with sprinkles of dulse seaweed or anything else you like!

Garlic mussels with veggies and quinoa pilaf

So yesterday I chose to boost my B12 resources again and went to the vishandel (fish and seafood shop) to get a few mussels. They sell them already cooked, ready to use. I fried some garlic with leek, green beans and cauliflower on a bit of rice bran oil (one of my favourite oils) and added the mussels to warm them up and roast them a bit. As a sidedish I had leftover quinoa pilaf made of these ingredients cooked together for about 20 minutes in 1 big pot:

1 cup of quinoa

2 cups of water

salt

sliced leek

grated carrot

sliced curly cabbage

chopped up green beans

Usually I don´t mix the grain with the veggies in one pot to cook, but it actually is a good idea!

Fake tomato sauce with pasta! :-)

I reeeeally like tomato sauce, Italian style, on my pasta. Well, since tomatoes are nightshades, and thus far on the yin scale, they are rarely used in macrobiotic cooking. So I reached for a recipe into my favourite recipe book by Susan Marque (I believe you can still buy them, paperback or download, from Susan´s website!). The only thing I didn´t have (and still don´t have, damn it!) is thyme. Otherwise I used:

7 large carrots (yep, that´s a lot, this recipe is for about 3-4 portions of sauce for people who like a lot of sauce…)

1 small beet peeled

2 onions

4 cloves or garlic

1 celery stalk

1 bay leaf

about 2 cups water

oregano

basil

thyme

1/4 cup parsley (I had just dried one)

olive oil

salt

I chopped up the carrots, beet, celery and one of the onions into big chunks and cooked them with 2 cups of water, salt and the bay leaf for about 20 minutes until all got soft. Then transferred to a blender and pureed until smooth. Meanwhile I sauteed diced onion, diced garlic and all the spices on some olive oil. Then  I poured the blended vegetables into the pan with the onion, garlic and spices. The sauce has a beautiful red-purplish colour which really in a way resembles tomato sauce! But don´t be fooled, the texture is different and this sauce is much sweeter because of the carrots and beets. I also really liked the sauce mixed in quinoa the other day!

B12 and me – the vegetarian nightmare

So I recently found out (according to many resources) that I really, really need to get my regular doses of vitamin B12. Some time ago I decided to follow this macrobiotic route, but at the same time I didn´t want to give up being a vegetarian. That combination actually meant that I decided to become (after a couple of years of thinking about veganism) a full-time vegan (as we know, in macrobiotics, eggs and dairy products are not commonly used). I was already eating maybe 90% vegan for several months (if not years) by the time I discovered that B12 deficiency can be very dangerous and even life-threatening. Irreversible neural damage, risk of stroke and other heart diseases, fatigue, memory loss, anemia, depression, aching limbs…all those are just a few symptoms. I never realized it could be so fatal. I also lived under the impression that you can get your B12 from fermented foods (as some older macrobiotic literature suggests) and later I learnt that seaweed was thought to be a source of the vitamin. There were many theories about how you can get your B12 without any animal product use. Anyhow, that is (as far as we know) not true, and these plant foods offer only what is called a B12 analogue, something merely similar to the actual vitamin.

Since that moment of truth my head started spinning with a lot of inner dilemmas – should I take only B12 supplements and in that way stay 100% vegan (and most of all, vegetarian) which on the other hand is not really a macrobiotic approach (in macrobiotics the use of synthetic supplements is generally discouraged as you should be able to get all your nutrients from your diet), or should I start using dairy products/eggs (which are pretty low in B12, not at all macrobiotic and making me feel unwell, but they are at least vegetarian) OR should I just start eating some meat (I never thought that would cross my mind after 7 years of vegetarianism, but here it is…btw, in macrobiotics the meat consumed on a regular basis is basically only fish and seafood). In my current (and long-term) state of mind there is no way I would eat mammals, animals close to humans on the evolutionary scale, but there is also no need for that – fish and seafood have the highest amounts of vitamin B12.

Well, well, this storm is STILL spinning in my mind. My conclusion for now is: using high-quality (and actually vegan) B12 supplements (2000 mcg a day for two weeks, later 2000 mcg once a week) to get my levels back to normal (without supplements getting the levels back would take very long and would require large amounts of animal protein :-p), and gradually relying on B12 obtained through a macrobiotic diet of occasional fish and seafood consumption, using supplements when I can´t find a good quality source of these foods/when I feel I need to eat less yang food etc. It´s not ideal and my vegetarian heart is still not happy, but on the other hand, if my body needs something (and trust me, I searched for a lot of information on this topic), I need to give it that something. While fish and seafood are meat (to me, anyway), they are still the furthest from mammals I can possibly go. Especially seafood is really primitive organisms which I have less trouble eating.

So far I experimented with: canned dolphin-safe tuna (my first bite of meat after 7 years, that was really surreal and unpleasant), fried mussels from the local fish stand (really tasty actually), sushi rolls with raw salmon and crabsticks (surprisingly, the salmon was flavourless, and the surimi crabsticks – that just brought up childhood memories :-D) AND – believe it or not – Hollandse nieuwe, which is a typical Dutch meal, raw pickled herring! That, okay, was a bit to challenge myself and see if I like this Dutch “delicacy” or not…answer is…nope. Very very strong fishy smell (which I dislike in general) and slimy structure 😦 But – I ate it. As you can see in the picture, I ate the herring with steamed curly cabbage and daikon (to balance the acid-forming yang fish). Interesting experiment, but I think I will stick to mussels (or clams – that is my other plan still), maybe some other seafood, and a rare fish every now and then…