As you likely know, we try to grow and enjoy wholesome food at home, making us frugal foodies.

We raise and milk our own dairy goats.

We raise our own laying chickens for eggs.

We are getting a family Jersey cow this fall. We will have cow and goat milk next spring.

I blog about some of that craziness at my homesteading blog Humble Garden.

We source a lot of our red meat as pastured Beefalo meat from Wild Mountain Farm.

This year, in addition to our layer flock, we will be raising between 25 and 50 broiler chickens which we will butcher and freeze for the year!

The video below shows those (the little yellow ones) as well as some fancy chicks – ameraucana which lay blue eggs and purely ornamental chickens – white crested black polish – the ones that look like they have marshmallows stuck to their wee little heads.

Many people here in the US are getting into urban homesteading but run into roadblocks when they try to get some chickens.

I totally support you all and send you all my positive vibes as you fight to regain the right to raise chickens in your space.

I put together this recipe on a lark (a term you might use to describe most of my experimentation in the kitchen, light hearted with a chance of failure always but that being ok).

I call it Three Secrets Chicken because there are three ingredients in it that I think most people do not usually use with their chicken.

Those ingredients are:

• POM 100% Pomegranate juice
• homegrown kefir
• Maseca (Instant Corn Masa Mix)

Chicken can get to be such a drudge! With this recipe you get something new from a meat that might be boring to you. I do not like buying boneless and skinless chicken. The flavor is not in the meat (especially in the BigAg industrial chicken) but in the fat, bones, and skin. You can take the skin off after cooking if you have issues with it. Nibble the meat off the bone!

I think you will enjoy this recipe, do give it a try. If you do, let me know how it goes!

Three Secrets Chicken

Ingredients:

• 6 chicken thighs (bone in, skin on)
• 1 – 2 cups Maseca (Instant Corn Masa Mix)
• dried herb mix (up to you, I used a Montreal Steak Seasoning mix)
• pinch of salt, up to you
• 1-2 cups medium thick real Kefir
• 1 red bell pepper, sliced into strips
• 1/2 head of white cauliflower, cut into florets
• 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
• 8 ounces POM 100% Pomegranate juice
• olive oil, enough to oil baking pan

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 F.

Oil the baking pan, sprinkle with some of salt and the herb mix, layer in sliced onion, red bell peppers and cauliflower.

Mix herbs into maseca in a bowl for dredging.

Dry thighs off, dip in kefir, dredge in maseca, put into baking pan.

Sprinkle with a little extra herb mix.

Pour POM pomegranate juice over or between chicken thighs (juice, if poured on chicken will turn it dark while baking, which is great!).

Bake in 400 F oven until thermometer inserted into flesh (without touching the bone) reaches 170 F.

Remove and allow to cool enough to eat!

I served it to the family with rice. The veggies are also served on the side.

Everyone enjoyed the various flavors and the moistness of this chicken. The maseca gives the chicken a crispy exterior that is much more flavorful than wheat flour would. The POM pomegranate juice added a delicious dimension of delicious tanginess to the chicken and the vegetables. The kefir seemed to help add some of that tanginess and also keep the meat moist.

This post was entered into the “Grow Your Own” roundup, created by Andrea’s Recipes and hosted this month by House of Annie.

On a Nor’easter day like today, as I listen to the plow guy clear our driveway, I am rather fixated on warmth. It doesn’t help that our wood boiler has been slow to start this morning (making for cold water and no heat from the baseboards).

The boilermaster (namely the DH) is very distracted by a blown motherboard from a power outage last Friday, way too distracted to be attuned to the lack of heat coming from the boiler (I guess even the expensive backup batteries didn’t help, don’t ask me). All of which results in frozen toes and my cooking breakfast in a chilly kitchen while wearing a heavy jacket and scarf.

The advantage to this is that you do not need potholders, you just use your jacket sleeve.

This advantage is not making any friends in my book though.

Days like this (ok, all winter here), making a pot of warming soup is a coping mechanism, not a cute foodie affectation.

Today’s soup is one that I seem to make again and again, its that effective at countering the cold chillies. The base is butternut squash and chicken stock.

Its clearly NOT a raw food. (Administrative note, I am now going to post raw recipes and thoughts over at my new food blog Raw+Simple, its better to keep these things separate)

This soup is extra good because I am using really local food, namely, Dandy the really bad rooster (as seen below). He could NOT play nice in the chicken yard, being brutal to the girls and also to us if we strayed too close.

Dandy and a couple of other past-prime broilers were dispatched last summer. We made a huge amount of stock from these chickens and then canned some of it along with the meat.

I have been going through this stock slowly this winter, savoring each quart. After this soup, I have one quart left! Its no easy thing for me to make this because I find it exhausting to kill and then butcher the chickens. If Dandy had been an agreeable animal, he would not be on my shelf.

A pissy testosterone attitude has it’s consequences.

I long ago ran out of homegrown butternut or any other sort of squash so these are storebought. I did use homegrown sage that I dried last fall.

Thermotherapeutic Creamy Butternut Squash Soup

Ingredients:

• 1 and 1/2 butternut squashes, peeled and cubed
• 2 T butter
• 2 T olive oil
• 1 small onion, diced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 4 peeled carrots, diced
• 1/4 C fresh fennel, sliced
• 3-4 sprigs dried sage
• 1 quart chicken stock (with some meat)
• 1/8 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 C heavy cream PER SERVING
• sea salt and crushed pepper, to taste

Directions:

Over medium heat in a large heavy pot, saute the onion in the butter and oil. Once the onion is sweated somewhat, add garlic and allow to cook a minute or two, without getting any color on the onion or garlic. Add crushed dried sage, nutmeg, carrots, cubed butternut squash, diced fennel, and then add enough warm water to cover all. Cover pot.

Simmer until vegetables are somewhat tender. Add the quart of chicken stock (but reserve the meat in the refrigerator until later) and either more stock if you have it or warm water to bring the soup up to an almost full pot. Allow to come to a simmer but do not boil, the stock just doesn’t need to be boiled anymore, its been through enough already, don’t you think?

Once the soup has simmered for a good 45 minutes, take an immersion blender to the soup and blend until most of the texture is gone, leaving a few good bits. Cut up the meat and add to the soup. Simmer until the meat is heated through. Add salt and crushed pepper to taste.

Ladle into bowls and add heavy cream right before serving.

Enjoy!

I hope that you stay warm and dry today and likely best to stay off the roads. Stay inside and make up a big pot of something warm and thermotherapeutic!

Further to my post the other day on High Throughput Food, one of our 13 hens has started laying. Its hard to tell by these pictures but it is what is called a pullet egg. Chickens are not called hens until they are a year old. Before then they are called pullets. Our girls are only about 22 weeks old (we think, was ages ago now). Often with pullets, you will get small eggs. Later, once the chickens are in full swing, their eggs often come out much larger.

My daughter Q is the chicken mistress and these chickens are her pets.

She and her little sister KD are seen in the photos above cracking the very first egg open. Q enjoyed it pan fried. It was eaten so fast (she liked it) that I didnt get a chance to shoot it.

There will be many many many more.

I know I have been reviewing up a storm lately. I do not get anything from the publisher besides the review copy which is the way it should be. I enjoy doing this because it can inspire one out of a cooking rut.

What time of year is the most likely for you to get cooking-rut-itis?

I find that right now is a likely time because there are no holiday themes and grilling is starting to wear a bit thin and even my garden seems a bit monochromatic with a vast number of cherry tomatoes and little else. This is also a tough time for me because my body can tell the waning of daylight and it feels like winter is looming quickly. Its not really, there is little about today that is winterlike. Its delightfully warm outside with brilliant sun but the trees are changing and the days are shorter. This just contributes to my rut-itis.

With new cookbooks to consider and try out, I have been able to step out of the rut a bit. You have seen me try the more exotic Indian foods in the “Modern Indian Cooking by Hari Nayak and Vikas Khanna” post and the “A Surfeit of Indian Food – spice it up baby” post.

I have also been testing a few recipes from a cookbook entitled “2500 Recipes: Everyday to Extraordinary” by Andrew Schloss and Ken Bookman.

2500 recipes sounds like a dangerous idea, one that could be overwhelming for the writers and the readers.

In reality, what they have done is write a very organized cookbook that gives you 50 recipes per food type that will expand your repertoire and help you cultivate flexibility.

They offer a varied array of 50 recipes for foods such as:

• Chicken (parsed out in recipes for Whole and parts)
• Leftovers
• Kid Foods
• Chili
• Pizza
• Fish
• Health Food
• Roasts
• Breakfast
• And on and on

This is a book about recipes and not food photography, you will find no photos here. What you do find is a varied and useful compendium of different options for base ingredients like chicken breasts and pork roasts and beef.

If you are like me and you do not go to the store with a recipe in hand or a list generated from recipes and you simply buy meats and veggies and starches that you will later juggle together into the week’s meals then you will love this cookbook.

You can be dogmatic and follow these recipes, exploring until you find some new family favorites. You could also use them as springboards to create your own variations, something that I do often because I do not have a perfect ingredient match.

My copy is now rather smudged as it has been working in the kitchen, a messy place. I see using it a whole lot more. I also see this as an excellent book for the “new” cook who is looking for a generalist cookbook. I intend on using it for some of our culinary homeschool projects with my almost 11 year old daughter.

Stir-Fried Caramel Chicken (on page 164, print the PDF)

Ingredients:

• 1 lb (500 g) boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
• 1 tbsp (15 mL) cornstarch
• 3 tbsp (45 mL) vegetable oil
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 1 carrot, julienned
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1⁄4 C (50 mL) granulated sugar
• 3 tbsp (45 mL) cider vinegar
• 1 tsp (5 mL) Worcestershire sauce

Directions:

Dredge chicken in cornstarch.
In a wok, heat oil over medium-high heat until smoking.
Stir-fry chicken until browned on all sides and no longer pink inside; remove to a plate.
Add onion and carrot to the wok and stir-fry for 1 minute.
Add garlic and stir-fry for 1 minute.
Add sugar, vinegar and Worcestershire sauce; stir-fry until sugar begins to color, about 1 minute.
Return chicken to the wok and stir to coat with sauce.
Serves 4.

When I prepared this recipe I only had leg quarters on hand so I cut off the meat (took a LONG time, yikes!) and used that instead of breasts. Using breast meat (or those tenders) would make this recipe really zippy. I also added only 1/2 the amount of sugar because I was timid about the sweet aspect. I used baby carrots from our garden.

Our tasting found this recipe VERY flavorful and a wonderful change from the usual around here. Frying the chicken in cornstarch made a fantastic coating once the pieces were stir-fried in the sauce. The sweet garlicky Worcestershire sauce coated the chicken pieces, carrots, and onions to give a delicious savory-sweet flavor.

The family LOVED this and there would have been no leftovers to shoot if I didn’t threaten bodily dismemberment for eating the small portion I set aside to shoot the next day.

After this success, I put this cookbook to a more rigorous test, something I like to call “The Joy Test”. If I am cooking something that I need to find information on technique or variation, I usually open my Joy of Cooking. It almost never fails to have something for me. I did the same with this cookbook over several days.

We had Southern fried chicken from the recipe on page 292 and simply adored it. There was no chance to shoot any of that as there were no leftovers, period (was too dark to shoot fresh from the pan).

I would definitely recommend this book to newer cooks and those of us who have done most of Joy and want further ideas without having to resort to 10 different cookbooks.

If you do give it a try, let me know what you think!

Book Details:

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: Robert Rose (September 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0778801624
• Order from US Amazon $16.47
• Order from UK Amazon £11.11

Other Books of Interest:

• Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition – 2006

Related Posts:

• Modern Indian Cooking by Hari Nayak and Vikas Khanna
• A Surfeit of Indian Food – spice it up baby

Technorati Tags: publisher, cooking, holiday, theme, garden, monochromatic, tomato, brilliant, cookbook, Indian, food, Modern Indian Cooking by Hari Nayak and Vikas Khanna, A Surfeit of Indian Food – spice it up baby, recipe, cook, 2500 Recipes: Everyday to Extraordinary, Andrew Schloss, Ken Bookman, 2500 recipes, writer, reader, organized, repertoire, cultivate, flexibility, food photography, family, culinary, homeschool, Stir-Fried Caramel Chicken, Worcestershire sauce, Joy of Cooking, Southern fried chicken, Robert Rose

I have been slow in posting this last week for a variety of reasons, most of them creative!

I will be posting on some new recipes I have tried from a couple of new cookbooks, ones I made up myself, and also about this fantastic tour I took of several Vermont farms on an absolutely beautiful day.

Today, as I write those posts, I will share photos of our new chicklings (as our kids call them). As you may or may not know, you can order day old chicks to arrive by regular mail.

We have been building a chicken house for them.

With a nice clear roof.

See more details in the post “Avian Abode” over at our Humble Garden blog.

The types I ordered were:

• White Silkie Bantams – these are important in traditional chinese medicine (they are the black meat chickens), thought I might give them a try, eggs and meat
• Production Reds – lots of eggs, heavy breed
• Black Minorcas – interesting looking, eggs
• Buff Orphingtons – hearty large breed
• Mystery chicks – hatchery’s choice!

That last mystery set should be interesting, one little guy (seems like a guy, hope they are all girls tho) is all spotty and pretty fiesty!

Technorati Tags: cookbook, Vermont, farm, chick, chicken house, egg, meat, heavy breed

I just wanted to share a few shots that I took the last couple of days at the Dole & Bailey North East Family Farms roadshow up in Quechee, Vermont. These will be the first of a larger project that documents, in my own certain way, “family” portraits of farmers (or producers), chefs, and animals.

The chicken seen here was fantastically patient with all of us and was handled with the greatest of respect. His general demeanor of dignity really set the tone for that.

The slide show may grow in size over the span of today and the future as I add more to that flickr set.

Let me know what you think!

I would like to introduce you to a product made by the Tiger Tiger company that I found at my big box grocery store here in Massachusetts (USA) that has wowed me to such a degree that I am actually writing about it here. If you are a regular reader, you would know that I don’t usually do this sort of thing.

I have used several of their Indian Sauces:

• Kashmiri Mild Korma Sauce
• Peshwari Murgh Tikka Masala
• A creamy butter sauce I can not find listed on their site

Tiger Tiger makes much more than these three sauces. They make Thai, Japanese, and Chinese sauces.

Their product range is wide, including:

• gluten-free noodles and nutty snacks
• many more coconut, wasabi, rice snacks
• cooking sauces
• salad dressings
• asian dipping dressings and sauces
• marinades
• soups
• various noodles and rices
• Indian and Thai spices and pastes
• all sorts of chutneys
• preserved exotic fruits and vegetables
• coconut products
• gift baskets (which they oddly call hampers)

One thing I know about Indian food is that the sauces, which can make or break a recipe, are long labors of love. I do not keep the whole Indian spice arsenal on hand at home so I never cook Indian recipes.

These Tiger Tiger Indian sauces taste so fantastic and are so useful to make just about any protein seem like a meal from the finest of restaurants.

If I had known that their product photography was so fantastically woeful, I would have shot the jar before I used it. For the purposes of immediacy, I have put one of their photos of the Kashmiri Mild Korma sauce here.

I am not at all certain what they are thinking using photos like this on the web. You can see from the packaging that they have done a professional job of branding and packaging but it is not well conveyed on their site.

What matters to me is the taste but its hard to blog such substandard hazy fuzzy photos!

The other night, I pulled out the Kashmiri Mild Korma sauce and, while crossing my fingers, poured it over some browned ground turkey. I usually never buy ground poultry but the price was right.

The korma sauce transformed the vague ground turkey into a resplendent delightful sauce that I poured over some authentic basmati rice.

For the basmati rice, I bought a tiny package of real basmati rice from Tilda.

Visit the Tilda site for sure. Their site is the diametric opposite of the Tiger Tiger site. Its beautiful, functional, evocative.

Try this link within the Tilda site for some Indian Recipes.

The directions were completely different than regular rice – boil one cup of rice in 6 cups of water for 8-10 minutes and then RINSE with boiling water.

Wild huh?

I let go of my “ingrained” Colombian rice-training and followed the directions to yield knock-out basmati rice.

I apologize for not having photos of any of this but it was night and we ate it so fast, there was no chance to shoot.

Bottom Line:

If you can find the Tiger Tiger products, buy some and try it.

I can see using this with anything from ground beef, pork, poultry, and small pieces of such meats, to tofu.

I am going to get another jar (or 10!) and use it on some cod and also some shrimp.

I just can’t wait!

Let me know if you try it too!

Where to buy online:

• Tiger Tiger

Technorati Tags: Massachusetts, Kashmiri, Korma, Peshwari, Murgh Tikka Masala, butter, Indian, spice, India, Tiger Tiger, Indian, sauce, resplendent, authentic, basmati, rice, Tilda

(Bhutanese red rice onigiri with tofu and split pea puree, recipe towards the end of this post)

Today’s post is going to have multiple personalities. I am going to cover three main topics:

• Low Glycemic Cooking and why I care
• A recipe for the Bhutanese red rice onigiri you see above
• A how-to on making onigiri with my new gadget – an onigiri form

Low Glycemic cooking and why I care

As a general rule, I respect everyone’s right to their own eating styles. I care that people eat the way they need to and I am no one to nit-pick others for that. My story that follows is like many of you. I can not say I have any answers and I am not an expert. I am sharing this story so that you can understand how I got into my current predicament – I am pre-diabetic, according to my doctor.

Like most of the over-developed world, I have had to diet from an early age. Even though I swam 4 miles a day for two different swim teams, I still had to watch what I ate. When I decided that the swimming was more than I could bear anymore I decided to quit at the end of freshman year (4:30 am every day for the State National team and after school every day for the high school team, I never stopped smelling of chlorine and my hair was blond at it’s tips – I have blue black hair mind you).

Then, the weight FLEW on my body. At the tender age of 16 I was on Nutri/System. I lost 50 lbs and was down to 117 lbs (was 5’5″, have shrunk since then). I was sort of happy but my body wasn’t. When I went back to school that fall, I went back to regular food and the weight came back. Over the many years since, I have done Nutri/System many times, Weight Watchers many times, all the while, killing my metabolism. The only times when I maintained a loss after these diets was when I was working out excessively, running 3 miles a day and barely eating. In more recent times, I have tried the Atkins diet (I saw my grandma try it back in the early 80s with some success) and it worked but it was unsustainable. After a while, you can honestly get sick and tired of butter, bacon, steak, eggs, essentially any high protein food. The worst thing about the low carb high protein diet is the imbalance in something about one’s hydration (must be the ketosis) such that when one goes off of this diet, the weight (both water and fat) comes back quickly and with a depressing vengeance.

This has always seemed unfair to me because my dad and my little sister literally eat what ever they wish (or wished, my dad has passed away) and never get or got fat. So within my own family, there is the object lesson that if one’s body is genetically predisposed to accumulate fat, IT WILL.

In recent times, I have had to make peace with my body and not let the fat twist my entire self-worth. That is a very hard process and I would not say I had complete success. Doing this food blog and also, especially, doing the food photography has helped me in ways that may not be intuitive. When I do food photography (and the cooking for it), I am not eating the food and I am not craving it. (I have never been obsessive about eating food nor binged on it so I do not have that dynamic) When I am cooking, styling, and shooting, I appreciate the food as an art form, as shapes, composition, as artistic statement, as cultural statement, as a sharing of my identity or my process of discovery. Same thing with the writing. I can not help writing about food the way I do because my curiosity leads me to ask questions and learn, just for the sake of learning. This is a bit of overflow from the fact that we homeschool and life is about learning.

(Insulin hexamer: Wikipedia source – public domain)

All of this is fine and dandy but my doctor recently witnessed one of my hypoglycemic episodes (have had them all my life, thin or fat), tested my blood sugar which was fine, and so he sent out blood tests for something called the HbA1c test (hemoglobin A1c test or hemoglobin glycosylation – an assay that determines the amount of sugars that have been stuck on the hemoglobin molecules.. this is indicative of the levels of sugar in one’s blood over a few months). The following is a down to earth description of this assay.

“Sugar in the bloodstream can become attached to the hemoglobin (the part of the cell that carries oxygen) in red blood cells. This process is called glycosylation (pronounced gli-kos-a-lay’-shen). Once the sugar is attached, it stays there for the life of the red blood cell, which is about 120 days. The higher the level of blood sugar, the more sugar attaches to red blood cells. The hemoglobin A1c test measures the amount of sugar sticking to the hemoglobin in the red blood cells. Results are given in percentages.” Diabetes Tool Box

For those of you who are more scientifically oriented, try this abstract:

“Glucose reacts nonenzymatically with the NH2-terminal amino acid of the beta chain of human hemoglobin by way of a ketoamine linkage, resulting in the formation of hemoglobin AIc. Other minor components appear to be adducts of glucose 6-phosphate and fructose 1,6-diphosphate. These hemoglobin s are formed slowly and continuously throughout the 120-day life-span of the red cell. There is a two- to threefold increase in hemoglobin AIc in the red cells of patients with diabetes mellitus. By providing an integrated measurement of blood glucose, hemoglobin AIc is useful in assessing the degree of diabetic control. Furthermore, this hemoglobin is a useful model of nonenzymatic glycosylation of other proteins that may be involved in the long-term complications of the disease.” The glycosylation of hemoglobin: relevance to diabetes mellitus. HF Bunn, KH Gabbay, and PM Gallop. Science 1978: 200(4337):21 – 27.

Mine came back 6.2, which seems to indicate pre-diabetes and a cause of concern for my doc. I can tell you that I have figured I was pre-diabetic for a long time but every time I asked for tests, they came back negative (they never gave me the glycosylation test before). My doc has told me that I have three months to control the blood sugars and if I do not, I will have to go on meds. I have a natural dislike for meds so it was not good news!

I know that diabetes is absolutely nothing to mess around with and I want to reverse this pre-diabetic thing with whole foods and moderate exercise. Let me tell you though, when you start looking at what is recommended for the diabetic diet you find one commonality: there is NO consensus. I also found that diet recommendations for diabetes and pre-diabetes seems to be a dumping ground for ALL of the vague advice, all that stuff you have heard over the years and found didn’t work for you. Things like: Eat food X because so and so study says to! Yikes. Things like: eat only low fat foods, eat only fish, eat TONS of omega-3s, eat no fish, eat no carbs, eat only a few carbs, eat .. yadda yadda yadda.

Excuse me, but I am getting flash backs and they are not fun ones. I despair at the mediocrity and vagueness of the diet recommendations one finds for this condition. Its all a recipe for unsustainablity. Food is inherently associated with the desire to become satiated, even if it is through food porn.

If my life is on the line, I want something more than the flavor-of-the day diet recommendations.

I want some metrics.

This is where the low glycemic cooking comes in. I am going to explain this quickly because I have already yammered on WAY too long.

(Glucose: Wikipedia source – public domain)

The word “glycemic” in “glycemic index” comes from the word glucose, which you may know is sugar. A glycemic index is a measure of sugar. In this case, its the measure of sugars released into the bloodstream after the ingestion of a certain food. To determine a glycemic index, they have people drink a solution of 50 gm of glucose in water and then, after a certain period of time, they pull blood and test the sugar content of the blood. They set this value to an arbitrary 100. It is the index against which other foods are compared. To determine the GI of a food, like white bread, they gather a group of test subjects (people) who eat a slice of bread and then get the blood tested. They average the results (each person has their own unique food processing profile but we tend to have similar ones, within some sort of predictable range of variability) and then set the GI for white bread according to the results (its 70 for white bread produced in the US). They have tested 500 foods so far (its very expensive), tho you may come across foods in the store that claims to have a GI, it is likely not tested in humans but calculated predicated on the types of ingredients it has. Thats the rub, foods may be predicted to have a certain GI but the body may do something completely different with it.

Case in point would be white rice, sticky jasmine especially, which has a GI higher than glucose. This is because this rice is almost pure starch and starch, when it hits our bodies, is almost instantly broken down and dumped into our blood as sugars (there are enzymes in your saliva, namely amyloses, which start the process the moment you put the rice in your mouth). The sugars in the glucose solution are somewhat slower to pass into the bloodstream.

When you eat something with a high GI, like that rice in sushi or similar starchy foods, almost the entirety of that mass of starch goes into your blood like a race car, as a bolus in medical speak. You might as well inject several milliliters of sugar straight into your veins. Why is this a problem? Your body as not evolved to handle huge boluses of sugar. It “scrambles” to pull the sugar out (insulin is the messenger to the cells to let the sugar inside) because high sugar in the blood is “toxic” to the vessel walls, causing damage over time. When this happens and the body has put out insulin enough to deal with this sugar overload, it overshoots and then blood sugars drop. Low blood sugar is bad news too because the one organ in your body that is a sugar-freak is your brain. Low blood sugar equals stress to the brain and even coma and death.

The key to a healthy body and a healthy life lies in one huge word – BALANCE.

Eating high GI foods pushes your system out of balance. Over time, with a diet consistent in sugar boluses, your insulin response becomes impaired and you develop pre-diabetes and then diabetes and then your systems begin to fail.

I am going to begin to integrate low GI cooking into my family’s diet. We all need to lose weight too so the diet will also tend towards less fat but I do not want to be a fat nazi. I also do not want to be the food nazi either. I want the family to enjoy the food while also, hopefully, appreciate trying new foods and in the end, lose some weight.

If you are interested in doing this there are several things to do: learn about GI, learn about the GI rankings of your favorite foods, access your diet, find a way to do some exercise every day (walking lowers your blood sugar, another tool in your management of sugar-rich living).

Learning:

I went to Amazon and got these two books below, there are MANY others. You will have to decide whats right for you. In the future, I am going to try to give lists of relevant blogs, for your educational pleasure.

• The New Glucose Revolution: The Authoritative Guide to the Glycemic Index – the Dietary Solution for Lifelong Health (Glucose Revolution) $10.68 and £7.76 UK
• The Everything Glycemic Index Cookbook: 300 Appetizing Recipes to Keep Your Weight Down And Your Energy Up! (Everything: Cooking) $9.42 and £6.94 UK

There is A LOT more to learn, especially about glycemic loads and how protein rich foods have high GIs. Read and read some more.

GI ranking:

The authors of the GI book above also have a fantastic website that will help you understand GI but also to find your favorite foods (if tested) in their GI database.

• The Glycemic Index

Diet tracking:

If you are so inclined, you can track your food intake and calorie expenditure over time at various websites. The only one I have experience with is Fit Day.

• Fit Day

I wish you all the luck if you too are having to deal with this. Its a process, it can be depressing, it can be overwhelming but it can not be ignored.

Recipe: Bhutanese red rice onigiri with tofu and split pea puree

In our family, we eat potatoes (high GI) only rarely. We tend to eat rice as our starch. The problem with that is that white rice (sticky is my all time favorite) is very bad when it comes to GI. To keep rice in our diet, an easy peasy starch, I am going to introduce rices that are lower GI. This would include brown rice, red rice, and wild rice. It also means introducing rice-like alternatives like pearl barley and bulgar wheat.

(The Rice Plant: Wikipedia source – public domain)

The GI rankings for several types of rices (and alternatives) are:

• Jasmine rice, made in rice cooker 109
• White rice, boiled 45
• Brown rice, steamed 50
• Red rice 59
• Wild rice 54
• Pearl barley, boiled 35
• Bulgar wheat 47

I picked up some Bhutanese red rice (produced by Lotus Foods) recently and wanted to test it in a recipe where I would have normally used sticky jasmine rice.

Bhutanese red rice is:

“An ancient colored-bran short-grain rice grown 8,000 feet in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. Irrigated with 1,000 year old glacier water rich in trace minerals, this exotic rice has a nutty/earthy flavor, soft texture and beautiful red russet color.” SOURCE

Lotus Foods has lots of very interesting wholesome products as well.

Visit the Lotus Foods site for more information.

I decided to make onigiri, a Japanese food that is essentially a ball of rice with one’s favorite bits added to it. Often, it is wrapped with nori but I didn’t have any on hand so I used, as a substitute, the Vietnamese rice paper used to make spring rolls (spring roll wrappers).

I also served tofu (essentially zero GI) and a split pea puree (25 GI) to increase the green and protein.

Ingredients:

• 1 C Lotus Foods Bhutanese red rice
• 3 C cold water
• sea salt, pinch
• 1 spring roll wrapper
• basil leaf, sliced into ribbons
• black and white sesame seeds
• Roasted chicken slices, about an ounce
• extra firm tofu, cubed
• olive oil to saute
• minced ginger
• minced garlic
• sea salt, pinch
• 1 C green split peas
• 4 C cold chicken stock
• sea salt, pinch

Directions:

In a heavy stock pot put 1 C red rice and 3 C cold water, bring to a boil. Cover rice and put on low for about 1 hour. This will cook it longer than the package directions so that the grains pop a bit and the rice is easier to form later. When done, uncover, fluff, and allow to cool.

At the same time, put 1 C dried split peas in 4 C cold chicken stock, bring to a boil, and then simmer on low (loose cover) for about an hour. You may need to remove some of the liquid toward the end to make the puree your desired thickness. Keep warm but covered.

Once rice is cooked, spoon some into an onigiri form, leaving some room for the chicken slices in the middle. I have some pictures of the onigiri form below.

This type comes in two halves and this one makes two onigiri at the same time.

The top is pushed down over the rice, compressing it into the cake like shape desired.

The bottom half of this form has some little openings that you can use to push the onigiri out.

Using this mold transforms onigiri construction into a dream. To see how you make onigiri by hand visit this site – How to make onigiri.

Because I did not have the nori to wrap the onigiri, I improvised and added a strip of hydrated spring roll wrapper around it. This isn’t necessary but I wanted to approximate it. I trapped some basil leaf ribbons and black sesame seeds between the wrapper strips and the rice.

Wrap your tofu block in some paper towels and press with something heavy to remove some of the water it comes packed in. Cube the tofu and cook as you like. The way I like is with some oil (sesame or olive oil or both), some garlic, ginger, and some onions. I saute to get some tan color and then add some soy sauce. I simmer the tofu a bit longer and then serve warm.

Serve as desired and enjoy!

Products of Interest:

• Lotus Foods Bhutanese red rice
• Spring roll wrappers (rice paper)- 12 oz

Books of Interest:

• The New Glucose Revolution: The Authoritative Guide to the Glycemic Index – the Dietary Solution for Lifelong Health (Glucose Revolution) $10.68 and £7.76 UK
• The Everything Glycemic Index Cookbook: 300 Appetizing Recipes to Keep Your Weight Down And Your Energy Up! (Everything: Cooking) $9.42 and £6.94 UK

Sites of Interest:

• The Glycemic Index
• eGullet discussion on onigiri
• How to guestimate the GI of whole grains
• Onigiri Wiki entry
• Hand-forming onigiri

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(Source: Hoffman Media, click image to go to magazine order page)

I watch only a few shows on the Food Network, two of those being Alton Brown‘s “Good Eats” and Paula Deen‘s “Home Cooking“. I do not watch the “Paula’s Party” show though, something about that show makes me feel uneasy. I am positively inclined toward Ms. Deen but am not what you would call a fan. I am only a fan of the Japanese Iron Chef, other than that, I watch without much fan-like adoration.

I am also not the sort to buy cooking magazines because I am not in the habit of buying in the “women’s magazine” genre. When I was a kid, I did have a subscription to Bon Appetit (I know, wierd, I was an odd one to say the least) but not to any of the pop culture teen mags. Thus, I am not jaded by other “women’s” genre food magazines. I get Food & Wine and Saveur but I did not compare them to this magazine, different concept.

When I opened this magazine, I wasnt really paying attention to the fact that it was a special edition. I was astounded that a food magazine would have zero interstitial ads. The only ads you will find are on the back and front cover. What you get instead is bombarded by page after page of simply delicious recipes, appetizing and dynamic food photography, and a huge dose of Paula’s personality.

This issue boasts 85 recipes, 20 complete menus (and they ARE, I got full just reading them, honest) and photographic suggestions of inviting table settings and decorations. In the back, you can find all sorts of high quality kitchenalia and dining room related objects carefully chosen from artists in Savanna and other people and places relevant to Paula’s universe.

Each of the seven recipe chapters starts with a nifty little box outlining the menu and then provides recipes. With no ads, they really pack quite a few recipes in on each page.

• Wake Up Sunshine – Ham and Cheese Quiche with Potato Crust
• Lunch Bunch – Molto Muffeletta (Paula’s vegetarian version of the resplendent New Orleans sandwich, too much bread and too little Italian cold cuts in my mind)
• Special Suppers – None of the protein dishes attracted me but the Lime Blueberry Tiramasu calls my name like a siren.
• Dinner from the Grill – Bourbon Beef Tenderloin with Sweet Bourbon Sauce and Sweet Potato Cheesecake with Streusel Topping (Pinch me, I think this sounds fantastic! When my grill thaws out, I will be trying this for certain)
• Casual Evenings – New York Strip Steaks with Terragon Melting sauce, Herbed Monkey Bread and pornographic Easy Chocolate-Cherry Cake
• Game Time Tonight – Mini Bratwurst Sandwiches (cute things. Little = eat more!) and Queen of Hearts Brownies (dainty decadence)
• After Dinner Delights – Hot Carmel Apple Cider

In the last chapter, “Quick and Classy Tabletops“, the table setups are so colorful and very textural.

All that said, I do not see how these could be considered quick! The time I would have to spend in Pier One just buying all the stuff would be hours. Note – I will use any excuse to spend hours there, my toddler cries when she sees the Pier One sign though.

The tabletops are classy, certainly, but super complex. I think I would need a Masters in Design to accomplish this on my own. I am sure there are many readers here who have the desire and talent to do this (it is just beautiful) but I dont see my doing it any time soon. Its likely that one of my kids would either pull the tablecloth off with little flair or light a bonfire with candles and fancy linens.

I have only three beefs with this magazine:

1. I gained 3 pounds just reading the thing
2. I honestly felt lonely after putting it down because Paula looks like she has SO MUCH FUN
3. Paula’s photos can be a bit disconcerting at times because some of the shots make her look like she has a 1000 yard stare and her blue eyes are a bit too retouched to look natural. Note to Paula’s photographer, keep her giggling, catch her happy smiles and forget the Hello Kitty vapid look, it is a disservice to Miss Paula.

I can not recommend this Special Collector’s Issue ENOUGH.

If you see it on the news stand, grab it.

It will be out until May and sells for

• $7.99 US
• $8.99 CAN

Technorati Tags: Hoffman Media, Food Network, Alton Brown, Paula Deen, Home Cooking, Paula’s Party, Iron Chef, cooking magazine, genre, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Saveur, magazine, special edition, recipe, appetizing, food photography, menu, Savanna, chapter, Quiche, Muffeletta, Lime, Blueberry, Tiramasu, Tenderloin, Bourbon, Cheesecake, Streusel, Strip Steak, Chocolate, Cherry, Cake, Bratwurst, Sandwiche, Brownie, Carmel, Tabletops, Pier One