On Life As A Picky Foodie

He hadn’t been gone more than an hour when the ideas started coming to me.  Maybe I would make a wild rice salad, or a green smoothie with rocket and the leftover frozen cherries.  When I’m sad, I make food.

Some people eat when they’re emotional, others burrow away like squirrels in the winter.  I cook.  That’s not to say that I don’t indulge ias well, but mostly, it’s about the act of creation.

From the moment he left, I started planning what I was going to be baking.  The baby looked up at me and smiled as if she knew what was coming.  Soon enough, she was secured in her little seat on the counter sucking on an Italian blood orange as I whipped up blood orange ice cream.  I had to use up the rest of the coconut milk, after all.  The idea that I was making something that would keep until his return pleased me.  We could celebrate with a couple of scoops, a little cup each to toast being back together. 

The ice cream cups are grey, with a brown stripe running around the top.  Beautiful Danish design.  Everything in this house that has any kind of aesthetic comes from my grandmother.  I love watching her inspect my belongings when she comes to visit.  She smiles in recognition of the things she has given me over the years, the cutlery, the tablecloths, the mugs that we use for ice cream or chocolate pudding. 

He texted me from the airport: it all seems so unreal. 

It does.  The baby said goodbye to him like she does every morning, unaware that this time it would be for much longer.  There is no way to explain it to her yet.  And in this feeling of dislocated reality, I got down to cooking. 

I found myself wanting to make his favourite things.

After the ice cream was in the freezer, cookies seemed like the easiest thing: quick and simple, before the baby lost her patience. 

Ba, she said happily holding the blender plunger in one hand and her snack in the other, ba mba, mbaba. 

Yes, I replied, cookies.  Sweetness combined with a little rosemary, to suit my bittersweet mood. 

Bababababa Nanamba.

Glad we agree, I said, giving her a kiss that she didn’t really want.  The orange was way more interesting at that moment.  Thankfully.

Here we go! his text read, I’m switching off now.  Will let you know when I arrive.

I put the cookies in the oven.   The baby was now wanting a change of scene.  Last night, when I told her we were going “au bain,” she looked me in the eye and said, “au bain.”

Au bain? I asked her now.

Mbadum badum.

My sentiments exactly. 

Rosemary Almond Cookies 
(makes about 28 small cookies)

Preheat the oven to 204 Centigrade (400 Fahrenheit)
-  Grind 1 cup almonds  and 1 cup hazelnuts
(the end result should be 1 cup of each)
-  Mix in:
2 t vanilla powder
¼ t salt
¼ c melted coconut oil
¼ c coconut nectar*
1 (organic, free-range) egg**
pinch rosemary

Mix all the dry ingredients together, then add everything but the egg.  Taste the batter to make sure it’s not too sweet, not to savoury.  Only then should the egg be added to minimize the risk of food poisoning.

Using an ice cream scoop, form little balls on a Silpat sheet or non-stick tray.  Use a fork to carefully flatten into cookies.

Bake for 9 minutes.  After removing from the oven, place on a rack and allow to cool fully.    

*  If there is no coconut nectar available in your area, you can substitute with 1/2c date syrup (no sugar added) and 1 T honey.
**  if you don't eat eggs, mix 1T ground flax seeds with 1T water.  Allow to sit and turn into a gel and use this mixture instead.  However, it's important to wait until it has gelled.  

P.S.  To turn them into slightly savoury chocolate chip cookies, simply add a chopped up tablet of 100% unsweetened chocolate 

One question many people ask me is about disasters in the kitchen.  Have I had any?  What were they?  Truth be told, I don’t often remember as that’s not what I tend to dwell on.  However, one meal – if you can call it that -- does stick in my mind and since January is Detox month, I thought I’d come clean and write about it.

I’ve noticed that when it comes to eating healthy food, people really want to be wooed.  If I said I was deep frying my kitchen sink, expectations would probably not be as high, but being known as a “healthy” person, means dinner guests expect to be impressed.

It’s as if healthy automatically means sawdust in most people’s minds.  And if you’re not planning on serving steamed sawdust, then you’d better come up with something spectacular.  Personally, I find that quite strange, but whatever…

On the other side of that is the person doing the cooking – me in this case. I don’t really fret over it anymore: like with most things, the more experience I have with cooking, the easier it feels.  However, it wasn’t always thus.

A few years back, my grandmother came to visit.  I was just beginning my Picky Foodie journey and wasn’t as comfortable in the kitchen as I am now.  My beloved grandmother was let’s say a tad sceptical about this whole “healthy” business.  I, however, was determined to change her mind – almost defensively so. 

All had gone relatively well until then, mostly because I had eased her into my cooking and supplemented liberally with bread, butter, cheese and brownies from The Kitchen Table, a favourite café up the road where everything is made from scratch using fresh and high quality ingredients.  My grandmother had politely declined most of my homemade offerings, or, at the most, tasted a bit or two, and nodded politely. 

I remained nevertheless determined to seduce her palate.  The plan was to make a broccoli soup.  It was going to be vegan and cold though not quite raw as I was planning to steam the broccoli.  Don’t ask me why, I thought it was a good idea to make something I had never made before – it was a recipe I was going to tackle for the first time!

You see, I wanted to woo my grandmother not only with the amazing flavours, but also with my incredible talent in the kitchen. 

Yeah, that didn’t exactly go as planned. 

I made two fatal mistakes:

The first was thinking a vegetable is a vegetable is a vegetable.  Once upon a time in an era when my cooking had consisted of heaping steaming food out of takeaway packages, my friend H had shared a foolproof recipe for vegan cauliflower soup.  No, not broccoli, cauliflower…  That day, I thought, how different can they really be?   

My second mistake was a little subtler.  My friend’s recipe called for a ton of soy milk.  Having recently been diagnosed with a thyroid problem, that wasn’t going to work for me.  Luckily, I had also become more interested in the raw food movement.  No problem in that case: I figured I’d simply use cashews instead of soy milk.  Cashews are used extensively in raw food.  They are used to make cheeses, blended and strained as mylk, and thrown in virtually everything as thickeners.  Cashews are like a magic raw ingredient (though hard-core raw foodists don’t often eat as much fat as that, in addition to the fact that many packaged cashews are heated above what is acceptable… but bla la bla -- I digress) and I thought they would be a perfect replacement for the soya milk.  Wrong Again!

The result was knobbly, lumpy, tasteless and FUGLY.  Fugly, fugly, fugly.  Green polka dot fugly.  My grandmother took one bite and shyly and politely asked may I have another piece of bread please?

Here’s the kicker, though.  My goal was to wow my guests – and one in particular – but I didn’t actually taste what I was going to be serving them beforehand.  Now maybe if I had made the recipe, oh I don’t know, a hundred times already, I might have gotten away with it.  But this was my first shot.  And man did it bomb. 

Luckily, my grandmother has never refused to try anything I have made.  She has an itty bitty bite of everything.  Since the broccoli soup disaster, she has gone on to pronounce my cooking Interesting and even asks for seconds sometimes.  Though she’s made it very clear that she still prefers her toast and jam. 

These Gluten Free Flatbreads, on the other hand, my grandmother has always enjoyed.

Gluten-Free Spring Onion Flatbreads
(makes 6 large flatbreads – great with spreads)

1 C brown rice flour
½ C chickpea flour
½ t arrowroot powder
½ t baking soda
½ t xantham gum
¼ t salt (or to taste)
1 T olive oil
½ t balsamic vinegar
4 spring onions, finely chopped
1 ½ C water

Preheat the oven to 120 degrees Centigrade (248 Fahrenheit).

Combine the dry ingredients.  Add the olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then add the spring onion. 

Mixing as you go, add the water gradually until the batter is almost watery, but still thick. 

Heat a non-stick pan until water spatters on the surface.  Keeping the heat on medium, ladle ½ cup of the batter at a time into the pan.  You know it’s time to flip the flatbread once the edges start getting hard. 

Once each side is starting to brown, put in the oven.  Bake for about ½ hour. 

If you eat meat and care where it comes from and how it's treated, you'll want to read this article from ecosalon.com  

We hadn’t walked three steps before my friend asked his first 'health' question. 

“Should I take milk thistle for my liver?”

I cringed, not because I didn’t want to answer him, but because I knew he was looking for a clean yes or no, and that wasn’t what I was about to give him.  I have known this person since I was a teenager.  We smoked cigarettes together in high school and drank way too much “tehila” (a cheap Israeli tequila-like substance) in college followed by greasy falafels and shawarmas made from mystery meat.  That was then.  These days, we talk much more about green powders, Vitamin C and, yes, milk thistle. 

(Note: Whoever does the PR for milk thistle should win some kind of award or something because it outranks other herbs three to one when it comes to people asking me about it.  What about dandelion or burdock?) 

I cringed, not because there was no answer but because I didn’t want him to feel judged, a challenge I was finding difficult.  In truth, I wasn’t judging him – far from it.  However, when you’re me – The Picky Foodie – people like to tell you how “bad” they’ve been, how much they need to change in their lives (but don’t really want to), or about that one little thing that changed their lives for the better (one man talked to me about how blueberries had cured his two burger a day habit for an hour and a half.). 

I wanted to tell him yes, because milk thistle can strengthen your liver, and help you clear out toxins.  But a little milk thistle won’t cure addictions; it won’t counteract a bottle-a-day o’Chardonnay seasoned with cigs and anti-depressants.  Most of all, I wanted to tell my friend that I wished he would quit and treat his body better.

I know.  I’ve been there.  I’ve done the Micky D’s and the terrible red wine, the waking up feeling like you’ve morphed into the bottom of an ashtray.  And now that I don’t do those things anymore and it’s January, everyone wants to know how to “detox.”

Detoxing doesn’t just come in a bottle, though many manufacturers of those tinctures, pills and programs want you to believe that they do.  When you do decide to partake in one of those one-size-fits-all prescriptions, nobody tells you that although the milk thistle et al are technically clearing out toxins and chemicals from your liver, chances are a hell of a lot more will come out.  Like emotions that you have swallowed and tried to forget, feelings and memories and fears lodged deep inside your body. 

Seriously.   

When you embark on one of those detoxes, the thing is that lots of shit does come out.  And I mean SHIT.  You might feel worse before you feel better – a lot worse.  While the physical is relatively easy to deal with – a colonic, an enema, a walk, a good cry, some liquids and a lot of rest – it is the emotional that nobody expects and that is, in many ways, harder to face. 

Not to sound too New Agey, but our bodies and our minds are inseparable, and toxins take many forms.  From memories to pesticides, from lies we tell to that fabulous date a few months back, from the Christmas party that you can’t quite remember to the fry-up and the chips you enjoyed at two a.m. to the guilt and regret you felt the next day. 

December hits and people celebrate the end of the year by opening the floodgates of excess.  Then in January we complain that we’re a little down, sluggish, that we’ve gained weight.  We reach for milk thistle and that detox created by Dr-whatever-his-name-is-that-worked-for-so-and-so-who-lost-twenty-pounds-in-two-weeks. 

I wanted so much to tell my friend to take the bloody milk thistle because more than anything, I wanted my friend to feel good.  I know, however, that there is no magic pill.  That taking milk thistle while continuing to ignore the pain of his recent breakup, and visiting that same wine bar night after night would be one hell of a long shot.  In the best case, it might temporarily alleviate some symptoms, but in terms of proper, long-term healing, he would probably achieve very little.

When I finished my explanation, he paused for a moment.  “So are you saying I should take it or not?”

*sigh

A true detox should be undertaken with proper guidance and supervision.  But for those of us short on time and resources, there are small and simple ways in which we can help ourselves. 

Here are a few ideas to “detox” gently:
-  If you really want to do one of those detoxes, try starting with a short one – a one-day liquid fast for example
-  stop drinking / smoking – even if you don’t want to do it forever, do it for a day, a week, a month, an allotted time (how about no cigarettes after 6?   No alcohol on weeknights?)
-      cut out dairy, gluten and sugar for a week or a month.
-  declutter -- clean out your closets, your wallet.