Warming red beet soup with horseradish

This soup looks so amazing, don´t you think?!? It also tastes amazing…so soothing, warming and energizing! Too bad pumpkin season is long over here, I miss the pumpkins dearly 😦

To make the soup, first sautee some sliced onion in a pot with a small amount of sesame oil and a pinch of salt. Add chopped up carrot, hokkaido pumpkin, parsley root, red beet and a small piece of apple – you have to play with the ratios and each time you will end up with a different soup depending on which vegetable you decide to emphasize! 😀 Sautee together for a while, add a bit more salt and cover with hot water so that all the veggies are submerged. At this point you can add bayleaf, allspice and whole cloves (adds great depth of flavour). Boil slowly with a lid on for 15-20 minutes until the vegetables become soft. Season with ume plum vinegar. Blend the soup in a blender or use an immersion blender (I think that´s the easier way to puree soups, because you don´t need to transfer it anywhere!).  Don´t forget to take out the spices before blending…After blending, let the soup simmer for a while longer and then turn off the flame and mix in some finely grated horseradish – the amount depends on how spicy you want your soup to be… You can still season the soup with some lemon juice and add a nice green garnish, such as chopped fresh parsley.

Sauteed kohlrabi and celery root with lemon

This is such a simple meal but still something you probably never thought of! I certainly didn´t and I was surprised how two vegetables can create such a satisfying dish.

First you have to grate your two vegetables: one medium celery root (grate fine) and one bigger kohlrabi (grate coarse). Pour a couple tablespoons of oil in a deeper pan or pot, place the celery root inside, turn on the flame and sautee the celery root until lightly browned and fragrant, adding a pinch of salt at the beginning. Add the grated kohlrabi and stir-fry until it is softened as well. At the end sprinkle with lemon juice to your liking – the lemon adds a great final touch so you don´t have to be afraid of it!

I had the veggies with some rice and dulse seaweed flakes sprinkled on top.

Poppy seed millet with sauteed brussel sprouts

Ever tried pairing poppy seeds and millet? Poppy seeds are a big thing in this country (we used to be pretty famous for their production), but they´re mostly used as a sugary filling in all kinds of baked goods or as a sprinkle on top of savoury buns and bread rolls. In Czech macro desserts they are often used paired with millet and stewed fruit or some other sweet stuff. This time I wanted to mix them with millet just to make a usual grain sidedish and I must say I like it even though it might need some getting used to! 😀 The poppy seeds do lend a very distinct flavour, which I happen to love..

I mixed millet and poppy seeds in a 1:1 ratio and just boiled them together in a pot of water with a pinch of salt (grain to water was 1:3), for about 20-30 minutes.

As a vegetable dish I first blanched brussel sprouts halves – very shortly, maybe 30 seconds, just until they got bright green. Then I transferred them onto a pan with heated oil and sauteed them, stirring often and with the addition of some black Indian vulcanic salt, until they got a bit of a golden surface. I seasoned them with freshly cracked black pepper. I also blanched a few large chunks of daikon, longer than the sprouts, to bring out the daikon´s sweetness. Delightful simple dish 🙂

Marinated dried tofu with vegetables

Dried tofu tastes so very different than fresh tofu. If you don´t add any seasonings, then it tastes and looks literall like a wet sponge,  even exactly the same texture as the sponge used for wiping blackboards 😀 On the other hand if you first fry it and then soak it in a yummy marinade…both the texture and most of all the flavour change and you will be surprised what a transformation that is!

In any case, first you have to soak the slices of dried tofu (they come in small blocks), a couple minutes will do. Then squeeze out the water, but not completely, they should be still quite moist, otherwise they soak up too much oil. Slice up the blocks into strips. Gently pan-fry them in oil of choice, until light golden. Then place in a bowl with a marinade and set aside for at least half an hour – I used water, tamari soy sauce and apple cider vinegar. You can play with the ratios…

When your tofu is almost ready to be taken out, sautee some sliced onion with a pinch of salt, adding carrot slices and broccoli florets/stems and cooking them until softened. Add the marinated tofu strips and heat through.

I served the dish with a rice/hato mugi mixture.

Susan´s snack bread

This simple recipe is taken from Susan Marque´s Clearing candida cookbook, which is a great macro cookbook useful in cases of candida overgrowth or in general any case of intestinal imbalance, immune deficiency, infection etc. Of course, it´s bread, so you don´t want to eat a ton of it to feed the bacteria too much, but there is no yeast, so in moderation it is fine. You can make it using any grain and flour combination as long as you stick to the ratios, I believe. Making bread by adding a substantial amount of cooked grain to the flour makes it all much easier on your digestion.

Here I used 2 cups of cooked buckwheat and 2 cups of a brown rice flour+ buckwheat flour mixture (about half and half of each). I added half a teaspoon of sea salt, 1/4 cup (60 ml) of olive oil and about a  1/4 cup (60 ml) of water. I mixed all thoroughly to create a not too sticky firm dough which you can form into a ball. Now you can roll out the dough on a tray. You can either make several small bread “cookies” or pizzas or you can make one large one like I did…I also sprinkled some caraway seeds on top for extra flavour. I imagine this dough would work great as a base for pizza, but here I just wanted to make a bread for snacks. I baked the bread on 200°C for about 25 minutes until the top was nicely golden brown. So quick!!

Vegetable stew with smoked tofu and sauerkraut

Here goes another “complete macro plate”! A very warming filling meal great for any cold day…

I first sauteed some sliced onion on oil with a pinch of salt and then added roughly chopped veggies – carrot, burdock root and green savoy cabbage, and sauteed them all for a while together, in a heavy cast iron pot. Then I added cubes of smoked tofu and a substantial amount of sauerkraut. I filled the pot with enough water to almost cover the vegetables, sprinkled some dried thyme and tamari soy sauce on top, put the heavy lid on and let the stew gently simmer for perhaps half an hour. Towards the end I heated oil in a pan and after it warmed up I stirred in a couple tablespoons of corn flour to create a base for a simple thickener for the stew. Once the flour starts turning golden and emitting a roasted smell, you can carefully pour in some water until you get a thick creamy sauce. Stir well to prevent lumps from forming while cooking the sauce  for a couple minutes. When the stew is ready, mix the sauce into the veggies and tofu and cook all together for another five minutes or so. Done!

I also had some steamed chinese cabbage to balance the heavy grounding energy of the stew, served with a sauce of white (shiro) miso, tahini and lemon (you could eat the sauce raw, or let it come to boil in a little pan, that way the miso will be easier on your digestion). There was also pressure cooked brown rice with roasted sesame seeds.

Marinated vegetable oven fries

Since I try to avoid potatoes for their weakening effect and alkaloid content, I like to make oven fries from all kinds of vegetables, of course, not all of them are suited for this purpose. What works great are pretty much any root vegetables, especially carrot and parsnip. Also sweet potatoes, naturally, because they resemble standard potatoes so much. Also pumpkin, because it´s so high in starch. That´s actually the main criteria: it has to be starchy! 😀

Here I cut up carrot, pumpkin and sweet potato into the shape of french fries and marinated them for a few hours in some oil with salt and ground cumin, lovely, trust me! 🙂 Then I baked them on a tray in the oven, using a parchment paper, and turning them every 10 or 15 minutes to bake evenly. About 180-200°C and 30-50 minutes should work – but every oven is different.

I had the fries with millet cooked together with some already cooked dried chestnuts (yeah, they really were somewhere there!) and gomasio.