Ideally you don’t cook sprouts. The point of them as that contain living enzymes and vitamins which are reduced upon cooking. But I’d mixed quinoa which sprouts almost as soon as it gets wet in a sprout bag with neutered barley, and not wanting to eat raw unsprouted barley cooked the whole lot in this mornings porridge. The texture was magnificent. The barley (soaked for several days first) was chewy with a plump grape mouth feel, whilst the quinoa with their 5ml long tadpole tails maintained their mild crunch even after a 7 minute simmer. Next time I would add these sprouts raw. A date and half a banana cooked, coconut milk, coconut-syrup, and the other half banana added fresh all helped to create a thai-desert tasting vegan breakfast porridge with a comfortable blend of creamy chewiness.
The Soul of Porridge
I feel like such a predator harvesting the leaves off the lettuces you planted for me , says my sister Susan who only last week became a vegetarian. All food has an energetic resonance according to my friend Wendy who has recently trained as a raw food chef in California. Carrots have been proven to communicate with each other across a field, she told me and the energy surrounding their cultivation carries through to whoever consumes them. Jain’s – the vegetarian wanderers of India who use a peacock feather to sweep insects away from the impending doom of their footseps would not eat a carrot; they do not eat vegetables in which the plant needs to be killed for their sustenance , according to William Dalrymple in his interview with Jain Monk Prasanamati Mataji in the book Nine Lives.
Life is Life eating life; says Jospeh Campbell – and many rituals have grown up around hunters( and gatherers) being forced to accept this fact everytime they kill a plant or animal. Explorer Sir George Grey’s describes in his 1830 journal (recorded in Songlines by Bruce Chatwin) the dance of an Aborigine hunting a kangaroo:
“his graceful movements, cautious advance, the air of quietude and repose which pervade his frame when his prey his alarmed, all involuntarily call forth your imagination and compel you to murmur to yourself, ‘How beautiful! How very beautiful!'”
Wwoofing on an organic farm in Chiba japan, by instruction, my friend Yoko and I would cut back the leaves of the weeds growing up around the heritage rice, careful not to disrupt the integrity of the soil crust with all its life forms, apologizing for the cut then thanking the weeds for providing green mulch to warm and shelter the emerging seedlings.
Awareness, consciousness, love and kindness arise from our relationships with food.
Today I am soaking oat groats hoping to sprout my own porridge on my Hong Kong balcony which I will respect in the spirit of the Jain ( whisking ants clear with my peacock feather), fertilize with the love of a Japanese organic farmer, and harvest with the poise, grace and beauty of Sir George Grey’s Aborigine – saying a prayer of gratitude as I eat the porridge.
Porridge cake and Kind Food concepts
I am back in Hong Kong contemplating my new kindness diet – vegan where possible, vegetarian as a fall back, with allowances in remote area to eat wild and free meat,from animals that have had free ranging or cared for lives, been killed with respect- and only really because in some places you may need to eat whatever you are given in order to be kind to your own health or out of respect to the offerings of your host.
My primary motivation is to support my sister for whom this is important on an animal welfare level. My nephew has also become vegetarian, his motivations spiritual – moving beyond the painful paradox of one minute disneyfying animals and then the next minute eating them. I am inspired by his ability to zoom in on this unconciousness raising aspect of our society. My meat substitute is now self righteousness; being able to scream “meat is murder” is intoxifying!
A third motivation is health. The China Study which I have just read, basically puts it that the more vegetables you eat – the better health you will have.
In the three days that i have now been a vegetarian, I have honed in that you need to eat far more food, far more regularly -no problem there.
Variety and having food at hand is important; fruit, nuts , and vegetables washed and scattered about in bowls around the house, pulses soaking, vege snack delights like dolmades and samosas prepared and ready to be eaten – food accessible in all stages of preparation, dips, pickles, chutneys, ground nuts, seeds – then this diet becomes a lot of fun, with lots of exploration and discoveries.
And porridge of course plays its part. Soak the cereal the night before (as a vegetarian there should always be some lentil, whole grain or bean, or nut soaking to remove any antinutreints in their protective coatings in a pot in your kitchen). Porridge keeps cold 9 days according to the Peas porridge ryhme and was traditonally left to solididy in wooden draws by Scottish hearths, sliced into oat cakes to be snacked on during the day. Adapt this concept as vegan apple and oatmeal cake or or with chocolate, orange zest, cinnamon – any number of things. Let your left over porridge be your inspiration as it was for this blogger!
Let your imagination soar, your eating become kind, your doubts become certainty, and your porridge become cake.
Oatey compotey dressed with watermelon, mint, and chia
Crazy combo this one, particularly the watermelon, but the house here in French’s Forest is overflowing with fruit that needs to be used up and porridge is a great vehicle for moving on bananas whose skin is beginning to blacken, mushing in plums who are tender to touch. Likewise the watermelon. the times that I have put a cut watermelon in the fridge only to pull it out weeks later as a slimey goo would be every time, prior to today whereby with new vegetarian zeal I transformed the fruit into juice, added the new gelatinizing wonder food “chia” and sprigs of mint from the garden and daringly dressed the oaty- compote. I know , I know… It is plain weird. Watermelon and carbs just don’t seem compatible. Watermelon doesn’t follow many foods very well as it wants to ferment if it gets stuck behind heavier foods in your stomach. But this vegan friendly dish somehow works and is reminiscent of a rhubarb compote.
A green tea chaser magnifies the antioxidant value of watermelon terrifically according to one of my favourite websites the worlds healthiest foods helping to prevent many different cancers and macro-ocular degeneration amongst other things. Go watermelon Go ( the U.S watermelon promotion board only has a budget of 1.something miliion dollars annually as opposed to the Dairy Industry’s which spends 165 million dollars on stemming the growing opposition to milk !
The Chia seeds, a new ancient food provide the calcium, omegas. vits and mins, and a lovely tadpole egg gelatinous chew. They may get a post of their own , but in the meantime , check out chia at herbs are special
Kindness Porridge
The China Study, a book which compares the American diet to the Chinese diet, basically concludes that heart disease, auto immune diseases and cancers are intrinsically linked to meat and dairy consumption and vegetable-underconsumption. Estrogen overload from excessive meat, dairy (and non-fermented soy) appear be skyrocketing breast cancers, depression and a bunch of other epidemiologically linked up diseases. If you are a meat or dairy user, do so safely. Tell a friend what you are doing. Make sure your dealer is treating their product kindly – feeding the cows grass and letting the chickens frollick in the meadows – and not cutting the meats with extra hormones or feeding them anti-nutrient soy, high fructose corn syrups, and other poisons.
If you are an addict (I am with ice cream, and even eat the antifreeze-cut varieties when I am desperate) reduce in other ways! Is this alarmist. Probably yes for some people. For others not. Michael Pollan who wrote the Omnivores Dilemna says that human populations will eventually adapt to anything (and probably the Swiss mountaineers have for milk, the mongols plainsmen have for meat). This means you are at greater risk from things your own cultural group has had little exposure to. Eat things that your own cultural group has evolved with for thousands of years. I am Sweedish/ Irish by descent so may be well adapted to soda bread, roll mops, cloudberry cordials, potatoes, Irish whiskey, pots of tea – but coming back to the China Study, Western diseases look to be linked either to too many animals products in western diets and / or not enough vegetables – particularly leafy fibrous ones. The smartest people in nutrition are also saying that whole foods are delivering nutrition in a way we dont even comprehend so are far better for you than supplements. So this mornings porridge is a meat and dairy free number, sweetened with black strap mollases which I think is the wholest version of canesugar – the bit with ALL the vitamins and minerals that is usually rejected after the sucrose has been extracted for refining – and made with oats which have long sustained both Irish and Swede.
Go forth and be nourished by the knowledge of kindness to your body, kindness to the plantet, and most importantly of all (though given the least attention in nutrition books) kindness to animals in whatever you eat
Recipe:
Oats
Black strap Mollases
Steed or fresh fruit ( nectarines for me here in Oz on the tail end of summer)
Nutrition Nazism and pig appreciation
I feel like I have stepped straight out of the dreamtime into the I.T age, said Susan as I googled a plant identification of some wild purslane I had scrumped from the sand dunes behind Curl Curl lagoon and which I was preparing to serve to her as the crunchy cucucumber subsitute in a raita topping for a pumpkin, backyard harvested dandelion leaves, red onion onion and free range ham porridge style lunch. She picked out the chunks of ham eagerly, puckkering her lips distatefully at the red onions whose anti inflamtory quercertins I was loving, but whose earthy overtones shouted hospital food, and memories of illness after a tropical ulcer inducing bang on the leg in Africa, 15 years ago.
It’s a nice as far as vegetables go , but flexitarian your arm and reach back into the fridge and pass me that chunk of free range ham please, she said. I need a piece of just bread and meat to feel like I have had a meal .
But one more chunk of ham and we are back to being rigid meatarians I said, dismayed that all my chopping and simmering of vegetables had been in vain. I was determined to impose my newly aquired knowledge from “The China Study” – that meat and dairy lurk corrolatively behind modern western dieases ( heart attacks, cancers, depression, man-boobs) – and Micael Pollan’s whole foods manifesto ” In Defence of food” that tempers a mostly leafy vege diet with what he calls a flexitarian approach, meaning a little bit of pastured or wild harvested meat to flavour the vegetables is equally OK.
“Give me time to go through the franger stage please , said Susan ( a contraction of free ranger). This is the first ham I have had since Christmas, and now you suddenly want to take it out from under my nose. I thought I was being really good only eating animals that have had a decent life, and now suddenly its red onions, and you stirring weeds from the garden like the witches in Macbeth ( wild foods according to pollan are particular potent in antioxidants , vitamins, minerals etc).
The moment was tense.
You impose this food guilt which I live with, and then jet out of here to Hong Kong for a dim sum feast, slabs of cha xiu roast pork whole lemon chickens.
I realised this was true , as we both began chewing on the gluten free bread I’d baked with large chunks of free range offcut ham ( a bargain $18 doillars a kilo in the DJ’s as opposed to the $70 a kilo slices).
I backed down , and Susan forgave me my nutrition nazism.
Lunch was a lesson. As The China study also explains, not even the heart foundation dares to really tell people how to eat because it will turn people right off. Its too immediately confrontaional , and sends people into immediate comfort food therapy. And the guilt distracted us from really enjoying the ham for which instead we could have been more present and more grateful.
Recipe
pumpkin chopped small and simmered in in minimal water.
red onions and garlic left for ten minutes then added to simmer
soaked and chopped dandelion leaves, tomato, and free range ham chunks also
simmered
cook to desired porridge- soupiness
Top with crumbled white cheese ( feta , bulgarin white sheep cheese)
and a dollop of blanced purslane mainated in yoghurt ( both processes draw of oxalic acid)
Serve with bread and a bowl of extra ham giving thanks and loving apprecaition to the pigs- a loving attitude probably being more effective on our health than all the omega threes and antioxidennt in the purslane , beta carotenes in the pumpkin, and liver cleansing elemnts in the dandelions.
Sydney: a porridgeless summer.
A years love affair with exotic porridges from Hong Kong to Japan, Tibet, Thailand and Bali, ended as I I jetted into Sydney last Decemeber for summer. Cautious not to bring any food or biological matter through customs, I also deposited into the food waste bins my lust for oats, congee , and tsampa, bubur and all the other varities of porridges that fed my cells, anti-inflamed my blood, and warmed or cooled my soul ( and body chemistry) throughout the year.
Why?
Is it imprinted on us that at home we eat foods that we ate when we were young. Summer fruits, peaches, plums and nectarines for sure.
But there are also new old fashioned foods reclaiming their space in the sun at open air markets and pushing porridge off my breakfast menu for the sheer sake of so many new and wonderful breakfasts needing my support. There are A2 Jersey cow yoghurts, olive and rosemary sourdoughs, sour cherry and amaranth buns, anchovie stuffed olives, biodynamically grown tomoatoes, macadamia nut spreads, raw dark chocolate , coconut and agave spreads, free range eggs for omlettes and scrumped herbs . Porridge has simply been bumped out of the way by lovingly grown organic and natural foods that are abundant and nicely priced if you shop at the weekend farmers markets (rather than the gourmet providores)which sprouted up like pine mushrooms in the old railway tunnels under Sydney (another wonderful breakfast base avaialble at these markets).
The French’s Forest Organic Market ( my local) on a Sunday morning is one of my favourite Sydney experieneces: Fresh Jersey A2 protein milk from “over the Moon”, fishoil friendly dandelion teas from starflower, salt-bush free-ranged lamb sausages from Drovers Choice, Cherries, blueberries, peaches, bags of ancient grain sprouts micro-greens, and even lettuce leaves for the worms, to mention a few.
But the summer stone fruits are now dwindling as the crisp autumn air ushers in apples, and pears. Yesterday found myself drawn to the “Honest to Goodness – Real Food That Loves You Back” stall and purchased their Organic 4 Grain Goodness blend of oat, spelt, quinoa and Barley, with thoughts of a warming scottish porridge for breakfast. And when the porridge pot comes out in Sydney, I know that a cold wind is just around the corner creating a front that will push summer high into the sky and accross Indian Ocean lifting me with it across the water back to Hong Kong and other exotic porridge lands.
December 22nd
Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.”Gwyneth Paltrow
Experimental Porridge – Toasted
For the sake of experimentation this mornings oats were toasted in a saucepan over a hot flame filling the kicthen with a warm nutty smell.
Water added, I sat by the stove stirring whilst reading about survivalism – a term I came across whilst googling thermos cooking, following my discovery of this novel way to prepare porridge literally on the run (see previous post).
Milk cooled the oats, salt flavour enhanced them. No sweeteners this morning as I am chasing the flavour of toast. It is there, subtle, but the major difference seems to be the texture which is an oatsy version of al dente.
Aida and the Wind Atop a Dragon, Basho and Thermos Porridge, Beneath a Bamboo Bough.
Thermos porridge was a success!
Cooking time – the time it takes to flip the button on the kettle, make tea, and empty some oats into bag.
Meal Location: Bamboo thicket below the Dragons Back, Sheko Country Park, hong Kong.
Accessories: One banana, “On Love and barley – Haiku of Basho,” translated by Lucien Stryk a small runners size book of poems), and a bumbag to carry it all in.
I would like to say that I employed a slow cooking approach that lasted the length of a subway ride from Tin Hau Station to Shau Kei Wan and minibus to Shek-O Country Park ( all up about 40 minutes), but it wouldn’t be true. The dry oats were in a brown paper bag in my shorts-pockets, under a pair of light waterproof running trousers, for I wanted to run , then drink tea first before I began to brew porridge. The first cup i took at vertabrae T5 along the Dragon’ back in a misty rain carried on a blasting southerly from across the South China.
Alone on this ridge top , wind stunted vegetation leading steeply down to water on both sides, blue dawn mountains behind my back, I leapt boulders to the trails end shouting Matsuo Aida’s zen koan -When it’s rainy, I am in the rain. When it’s windy I am in the wind, to nobody but the sky and an eagle flying above who might have felt the same way.
This is a wonderful koan when its not too windy and not too rainy, whence-forth I am sprinting down goat tracks seeking shelter, which in this case I found in a bamboo thicket along with a new Zen Master to replace Aida.
I poured another tea from the thermos, then added the oats from my pocket into the half emptied thermos giving them and myself a good Ratu Bagus shake around, leaving them then to sit and porridgefy a moment whilst I read a poem from Basho whose haiku I had brought along for the bus ride.
“Learn about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk” he instructed his disciples.
To write good Haiku I had to become the bamboo stalk, let the bamboo’s poetry speak through me explained Basho’s transalator Lucien Stryk.
As thermos porridge brewed, I visualized myself as one more stalk of bamboo in this sheltering grove, the wind playing with the tips of my leaves, rustling me in the wind against all my brother and sister stalks, all of us danceing free up high in our branches, more gently down low, our roots solid in the earth below.
And then the porridge undergoing a similar experience began speaking its haiku through me:
Married with tea
This thermos so hot. Shaking.
Ah. Freedom,
Light at the end of the tunnel
bamboo, -sky , – cup . Oh no.
Mouth, gullet. intestine.
Yum, coffee,
Ooh. a banana.
freak..lemon water,
euw. last nights dinner
Oh shit.
Basho eventually became a recluse, I read.
I left the bamboo and caught the number 9 bus to Sheko, then the 720 express to Wanchai, thinking that i must google thermos cooking when I get back to my computer.
Porridge 