Easy Pickles!

These were a real hit at Paul Pitchford's Healing with Whole Foods intensive in New York. Probably because they were so garlicky and pungent with apple cider vinegar!

Since garlic fosters desire, perhaps the appeal for these grew deeper the more you ate them?

In an attempt to rid some cucumbers, Sharla quickly sliced them on a mandolin along with some spices and garlic, and then topped up the jar with half water and half apple cider vinegar.

That's it!! Use raw/unpasteurized apple cider vineger, and it will ferment the vegetable so that it will keep for quite a while. Healthy, crunchy, tasty and desire-y!

Food for yer yin-yang

Aduki beans and well cooked rice. Need I say more?

Shooting peas with flying ninja stars

Food can be so simple. It really should be. This post will be a reflection of this concept:

Cook peas in a little water, and add something fun to dress them up, like carrots shaped like ninja stars. Add a little space if need be, like black pepper, and enjoy!

Tatters

Stove-top Sharla, and oven-Mike. Did you know that sauteeing and stirring your food gives an invigorating effect to the food, and thus the person, where as long, patient cooking in the oven gives a patient quiet quality to the food, and thus person? Perhaps Sharla's cooking is a source for her upbeat energy, and Mike's oven dishes are a source of his... what, am I just going to flatter myself in a blog because I cook in the oven? Whatever, yes, it is a source of my good looks and robust figure. Just kidding... it just makes me really really smart.

I LOVE potatoes, perhaps because this was the staple food growing up for me, and for my parents too, coming from a German background (might be pronounced 'Cherman' at my grandma's house, and washed down with a bratwurst and pint of beer) anyways, I do potatoes, that is my thing. Especially in the colder weather because of the warmth they bring to the body when out of the oven, yet they are one of the best yin-builders known to the Asian (the West still deems this food as unnecessary because of the high starch content, which is ridiculous, just stop eating sugar and crap, and you'll realize potatoes are so nourishing and a far better 'sweet' than any granola bar or any other sweet garbage on the grocery shelf). Yin-building = immune boosting and hormone supporting by the way. Did you know two German lads survived during the war for THREE years on just potatoes alone? JUST potatoes, no health concerns. Or was it three guys for two years? Whatever, that's a long time for just potatoes. I digress...

If cooked for a long period of time, potatoes require almost no seasoning - the time will bring them to life. I cooked these with onion and cumin I believe, and then slipped into the oven for an hour at 350F. Grease is not necessary, just use water.

Crawckers

Rawesome. Just rawesome. I mispelt crackers as 'crawckers', cause well, they were raw, but can be done in the over too. Leftover kamut sprouts, soaked flax seed, soaked buckwheat, and variations on all of the above, made some incredible crackers that we enjoyed with nut milks, or with cheese, or just plain. The students made these in our cracker workshop, and of course, they sweet-starved students made ALL sweet crackers and almost no savoury!! haha... carob, cardamom, orange juice, stevia, yacon, vanilla, and anything else non-Dampening yet sweet they could find! They were good, I'll admit, and were gone pretty fast!!

To learn how to make these, you pretty much need to attend one of our workshops or retreats. Bo! Really, they're easy, but so much easier to teach in person than blogging about it. Maybe we should make a video about it. Yeah, that's what we'll do... stay tuned.

The Kefir Queen

Clouds from the gods? A gift from Allah? A miracle food made in heaven? Yes to all of the above. Kefir is a culture made up of yeasts and bacteria, and the cloud looking picture is my baby kefir when I first got it, and because they grow, it is now the size of my fist! Time to give some away, and sharing with your friends (and students) is what you're supposed to do!

We made 1L of kefired goat milk with it daily, which resembles yogurt, but so much more sour and bacteria rich, and of course Sharla - the Kefir Queen made aged cheese from kefir laban, and I'm sure we'll more about this in posts to come, as I hear she's working on making a bridge for the city of Chicago using kefir and some cheesecloth. She can make anything. Not only did she kefir goat milk at the intensive, she kefired coconut milk, almond milk, ginger water, and pretty much any other fluid sitting unused in an open vessel. Yum! Luckily, we had enough to give to most of our hungry students to take home and spread to their loved ones too.

Raw, Fermented, Sprouted bread

Because our guests at the intensive ate almost a full 1L of oatgurt everyday, it was necessary for us to make enough rejuvelac (used in oatgurt) to do so, and as a result, we had ample sprouted and fermented kamut grains leftover to do whatever fun things we wanted to!! Here Sharla is making sprouted bread dough using a juicer (only use the masticating kind!), and then season (if you wish) and form into loaves and either bake on low for a long period of time (2+ hours) or dehydrate over night, however you wish. That is it! Very simple! We have a video on how to make this sprouted bread if you click our videos link in the main menu or from our homepages. Sprout grain, blend/mash it, form it, dry/bake it. Easy peasy.

Crocky Breakfast

How to make breakfast delicious and fast - prepare the night before!

Pictured here, is an oatmeal dish with blueberries and vanilla bean. All things in time are better than all things rushed, so why not spend all night making your breakfast! The flavours deepen with time, so a lot of seasoning is not required, which is usually required with instant foods. Just add the vanilla, or maybe some cardamom and fruit, and let it cook all night for you!

We ate a full pot of this every morning at the intensive - and rightfully so, it was delish!

Sideways Recycled Bean Burgers

What do you do with leftover beans? Burg them!! Keep any leftover beans aside, even if they have veg and grain in them, and mash them up to make beans.

At the retreat, we continuously made bean burgers by adding chopped onion and carrot to the leftover beans, added bread crumbs, oat flakes, or even best - flour (we used fresh ground whole kamut). Play with the quantity of grain to get them tough enough to form balls in your hands - if they do, place them on a baking sheet (with parchment paper is best), and bake them at about 375F for 20 minutes or so, as per your desired firmness of burger. Pictured here, is a baking sheet for a giant oven, forced into our little home-sized oven - it worked just fine, but there were a few wonky burgers from it. Also - you can add seasonings to bring them to life, like ground cumin and black pepper - or curry powder etc. Easy as pie!.. actually, easy as bean burgers!

Sourdough, Recycled Brown Rice bread!

Throughout the retreat, we started to get a little burdened with leftovers. We weren't sure how to use 2 servings of rice, or a tiny bit of left over vegetables, so we started finding creative ways to use them in our cooking. Here's an application for left over grains, especially non-glutinous! Since we had a celiac person in our retreat, I felt a little bothered that all of our bread had gluten in it (kamut) and so began making brown rice sourdough bread. However, as grains ferment in the process, it doesn't really matter what grain it is, and if it's cooked or not. So I began putting grain leftovers in a large bowl to ferment, and would make them into bread. The first morning I made it, I didn't think it was really anything special, as was kinda weird... however, that same morning I happened to drop an entire scalding hot crock pot full of cooked brown rice congee on the ground while carrying it to the dining hall, and it smashed all over the place (including my bare feet, which gave coincidentally gave me a lovely little liver moxibustion treatment), anyways - I felt so bad that I thought I'd better serve this strange congee bread, and low and behold, they ate all of it - 2 full loaves. They loved it, and I continued making it throughout the retreat from then on.

As it really is a tactile thing to make, and working with leftovers really offers no quantifiable, measurable methodology to making it, I just simply add brown rice sourdough starter to the leftover grains (about 1 cup) and then add fluids to bring it to a batter like consistency, maybe a little wetter. For fluids, I would use leftover, starting to ferment homemade brown rice milk, or some left over vegetable cooking water - as it was a little starchier to help the bacteria nosh on the soon-to-be dough. After a day of sitting, or when I see it rise, I add fresh ground brown rice to bring it to batter consistency, and again, add a little fluid if need be. I think some dry ground grain is necessary to make it tough enough to bake, as the cooked grains were too wet and soft to make a loaf unto themselves. As a batter consistency (maybe slightly firmer than batter) pour into loaf pans and let them rise (you can rise as many times as you like, but it MUST rise in the bread pan before baking), and then when risen (usually in the morning) bake it at 450F for at least an hour. It will be extremely wet and doughy when you take it out, so it MUST cool and set IN the pan for at least 1/2 hour or so, and even still, it might pull apart a little, so be sure to grease your pans and get them out carefully. You can check to see if their done without taking them out of the pan simply by inserting a chop stick and checking to see if any doughy residues remain on the stick. You'll know, and it does take practice to get it right. It took me a whole year to get this down, but then again I didn't know what I was doing when I started! Good luck, and email Whole Foodies for questions if you have them!

Masters of Breakfast.. and the Universe

Twenty-two breakfasts and a whole lot of snacks. Whole Foodies Michael and Sharla answered their calling by attending Paul Pitchford's three-week intensive entitled "Healing with Whole Foods" in New York for the month of August, and had the honour of teaching 11 hours of workshop classes, but also preparing all breakfasts and snacks, plus special foods for the entire duration. YAY! We'll try to capture some of the meals on the blog here, but as we were producing almost 10 dishes per morning, and flying by the seat of our pants most of the time, we rarely had time to document what is was we made. Pictured here is Paul Pitchford spooning up some goodness, and a picture of what might have been a typical breakfast (and our lovely faces).