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!!

Parsnip french fries and buckwheat with cabbage

Missing potato french fries? Well, just make them from parsnip as I did, you´ll be surprised how similar the taste and texture are 🙂 I deep-fried mine until crispy and then gently sprinkled them with sea salt (something I don´t normally do, salt is better absorbed in the body when cooked into meals).

I had the fries with buckwheat which I cooked with some tamari soy sauce and oregano, for about 15 minutes in a double amount of water, under a lid and on a low flame. About five minutes before the end of the cooking time, I placed some cut up curly cabbage leaves on top of the grain so it can steam through.

I also had some raw green daikon to better digest the fried food.

Fragrant buckwheat with celery root “bacon” and sauerkraut

Yes, again my favourite combo of buckwheat and sauerkraut! 😀

This time the buckwheat is a teensy bit more fancy – I cooked it with allspice (one or two pieces will do) and a bayleaf, which I removed afterwards, you really don´t want to bite into those!

I sauteed a minced onion on some oil with a pinch of salt, added shredded white cabbage and water to cover maybe about half of the cabbage and then I simmered it under a lid until the cabbage got soft. I seasoned it with caraway seeds, marjoram and black pepper. Towards the end I mixed in also some ready-made sauerkraut and simmered together a bit longer.

I mixed the grain with the vegetable and topped them with mock bacon made from celery root – super easy to make! Just make tiny cubes of the celery root, place them into a fair amount of cold oil with a pinch of salt, turn the flame on and sautee while stirring often until the cubes become golden and look a little like bacon bits 😀

Quick buckwheat and sauerkraut pie

No, this is not really a pie, because there is no real dough made out of flour. Nevertheless, the dish is baked in a casserole and can be cut up into squares, so why not imagine you´re making a fancy “savoury pie”? 😉 Sometimes it´s  important how we present our food and also how we think of it ourselves.

This recipe is again from my favourite cookbook by Czech macro author, Dagmar Lužná.

All you need to do to make this lightning-fast “pie” is to bring two parts of water to boil, adding a pinch of salt, and then to add one part of cracked buckwheat. I make my own by grinding buckwheat groats very coarsely on my hand mill, but at least here the cracked buckwheat (“lámanka”) is sold in health food shops. Once the buckwheat is mixed with water, turn the flame off and let it soak up all the liquid, which should take five to ten minutes. Meanwhile sautee one large coarsely chopped onion in a pan with about 5 tablespoons of sesame oil, until the onion turns golden. Add 150 g of sauerkraut, cover with a lid and let simmer for 15 minutes, you might need to add some water as well. Stir the cooked sauerkraut into the buckwheat, season with salt and caraway seeds, and transfer to a greased casserole dish. Smooth out the surface with your hand and bake for about 10 minutes in a pre-heated oven, until golden. When done, cut up into squares and serve for example with fresh parsley leaves and small cubes of smoked tofu roasted on a dry pan.

Soba noodles with curried pumpkin sauce and tempeh crumble

Aaaaah, my favourite soba noodles! I have them so seldom, because they are so expensive! 😀 While I believe that nothing compares to authentic Japanese soba ( buckwheat and wheat or pure 100% buckwheat noodles), here in the Czech Republic I choose to substitute them with the cheaper local buckwheat pasta. I´m actually happy we have such a great buckwheat-product brand, not every country is so lucky! But here I used my long-saved stack of real soba, bought during our stay in Slovenia..

I made a sauce of long cooked cubed hokkaido pumpkin and onions – nearly cover the cubes with water and boil on low flame until soft. I seasoned the sauce with black Indian vulcanic salt and a generous amount of curry powder. I blended the sauce in a blender for a perfectly creamy texture.

On a pan I sauteed on oil a bunch of green beans, cut into tiny pieces, along with crumbled up tempeh and a splash of shoyu soy sauce.

Layer the bean/tempeh mixture and the pumpkin curry sauce over the noodles 🙂

Buckwheat with sauteed onion, roots and smoked tofu

Another one of those quick dishes when you come tired home from work and need something pronto!

I cooked buckwheat in 1:2 grain to water ratio, first bringing the water to boil with a pinch of salt, then tipping in the buckwheat. It cooks only about 15 minutes. Meanwhile I fried fine slices of onion together with tiny cubes of parsley root, celery root and smoked tofu on oil, untill all became crispy and golden. I topped the grain with the mixture and served the meal with blanched savoy cabbage.  The fried root veggies and the smoky tofu particularly give a sensation of bacon 😀

 

 

Okara shiitake stir-fry with buckwheat

Okara is one of those macro ingredients that most “normal” people have no clue about, and actually many macro people don´t use okara either…It´s a by-product of tofu production and it´s the cooked soybean pulp that gets strained before you put nigari into soy milk to turn it into a firm chunk of tofu. It´s quite neutral on its own so it can be used in many versatile ways, both sweet and savoury. So far I only tried the savoury applications, such as in this little recipe…

Sautee some onion with a pinch of salt on olive oil until translucent, then add two sliced (dried and well soaked) shiitake mushrooms, a bit of water, cover pan with a lid and let steam for a couple of minutes. Then add thinly sliced half or quarter moons of zucchini and cook some more. Be sure the mushrooms and zucchini both get soft. Add half to one cup of fresh okara (it is sold refrigerated) and again cook under the lid, stirring at times. Season with more salt or ume plum vinegar which gives a nice little sour kick. Serve the dish with buckwheat with mixed in fresh minced parsley. The parsley is totally optional but balances well the strong contracting heavy energy of the buckwheat.

29.10.

 

On 29th October my boyfriend arrived from his vacation, so I wanted to surprise him with a bit of a more fancy meal. He loves miso soup, so I had to make that one – this time with fresh daikon, plenty of onion slices and with mugwort mochi (I think I mentioned already that mochi is a Japanese product made by pounding sweet brown rice into a firm sticky block, this one was flavoured with a herb called mugwort, it´s a dark green mochi!!).

The main course was pressure cooked brown rice with buckwheat (about 3:1 ratio), tempura of sweet potato and carrot slices (see previous post for the simplified recipe), sauteed cabbage, leek and fennel (without oil, just using a splash of mirin towards the end), a pressed salad from pointed cabbage

-thinly slice cabbage and place in a deep bowl, sprinkle about half a teaspoon of salt for two big handfuls of cabbage (it´s a bit hard to tell the exact amount of salt you need, but don´t use too little, you need the salt to start the fermentation), massage in for a minute or two using your hands, put a small plate on your salad in a way that it sits directly on the salad and put something heavy on the plate (you can of course use a salad press if you have one…I don´t). Let sit for at least half an hour, but preferrably for a couple of hours. The salad will release some water and it will be slightly fermented, just to break down the tough and hard to digest cellular structure, plus it gives the salad a pleasant fresh taste. You can rinse the cabbage in case you find it too salty.

and a kinpira…

-cut an equal amount of carrot and burdock root (can be found in some health shops, but it´s quite rare, you can also find them in nature) into quite thin matchsticks, quickly sautée on a high flame using a tiny bit of water, add sesame seeds if you like, put a lid on, change to very low flame, and slowly cook for 20-25 minutes. Be sure your kinpira doesn´t burn, but don´t lift the lid too often…at the end season with tamari.

For dessert I made a white rice pudding – I cooked a cup of white organic dessert rice (a sticky short-grained rice) with 4 cups of fruit juice (I used water mixed with fruit concentrate, in Holland called “diksap”), add chopped up dried fruit (I used a handful of organic dried apricots) and perhaps a squeeze of lemon (if you want to, you can also add lemon or orange peel, and vanilla essence or powder…). Bring to boil and cook under a lid for half an hour. Turn off heat and let sit for a few more minutes and better even longer so that the water soaks in a bit more. You can mix in a spoon or two of almond butter – I didn´t have any so I just sprinkled some roasted almond flour on top of my servings. If needed, add a natural sweetener, like maple syrup, or rice malt. Next time I have to be more careful with the liquid (I used too much) and maybe I will try and make this dessert in a pressure cooker for a more dense texture.

 

My typical breakfast

Since starting my MB studies, I transformed my breakfast meal from a sweet porridge with a looot of nuts and seeds (I used to sweeten it with stevia or raisins or rice malt, and always used rice milk as well…) to a much healthier savoury version.

I always start my day with miso soup – honestly this has been the best step for me as of lately!! Such a great food to get you started. I make it less salty in the morning (just using half a teaspoon of miso per bowl). I try to use some form of daikon to induce discharge (either dried daikon or fresh, as in today´s soup), I always add wakame as is traditional in miso soups (I add a poststamp of it just a minute before turning the soup on low to simmer, that´s when you add the diluted miso). I often add carrot or onion, but not today – instead I finely chopped some ginger to give me extra warmth on this cold day. I add a garnish of chopped leek greens, or spring onion (as you can see in the pic).

Then I make a savoury porridge from leftover grain (today it was leftover quinoa/buckwheat mix), sprinkled with roasted seeds, with some pickle (sauerkraut and pickled gherkin are nice in the morning, they give extra live enzymes). Plus today I added a spoon of the arame dish from yesterday.

I don´t even miss my sweet breakfasts!!

10.10.

Yesterday I was cooking a whole lot – I gotta practice now that I´m doing the macro school!!

For lunch I had cooked sweet millet (more sticky and creamy than regular millet), with steamed veggies (red cabbage, onion, daikon, carrot, cauliflower, rapini/mizuna), and dry-roasted tempeh with sauce made of tamari, mirin (sweet rice wine) and lemon juice (add after the tempeh is roasted and let evaporate). I burnt my tempeh a little bit, so no picture! 😀

For my dinner I cooked a mix of buckwheat and quinoa (which is truly awesome, the light texture of the quinoa makes the heavy hearty buckwheat less heavy and hearty :-D). I also cooked adzuki beans with kombu (helps soften the beans) and some time before the end added a few chunks of hokkaido pumpkin, mmmmmmm…..

I also had a sidedish of arame (which I presoaked for a bit and used the soaking water) cooked with sliced onion, roasted sesame seeds and corn kernels, and seasoned with tamari. I cooked it long enough to make the water soak in or evaporate. Arame is my favourite seaweed, with a very gentle pleasant taste – good for seaweed beginners!