Good Food!

On the busiest, most stressful days, when I most need good nutrition, I’m more likely to eat something quick – like a pre-made Trader Joe’s Indian dinner or some other pre-packaged meal.  This Christmas brought me a Slow Cooker which allows me to eat whole, unprocessed food with very little prep time even on a busy day.  I add ingredients to the Slow Cooker in the morning while my tea water is boiling, hit “Go” and 8-10 hours later I have something delicious to eat that is completely made out of fresh ingredients.

Whole foods, by the way, is my favorite subject and I am very, very into it for good reasons.  I feel dramatically better when I eat unprocessed organic food and since I switched to this diet my health has improved radically.  In fact, I first started with the diet when I was very sick – and what the doctors could not do with their prednisone and other wacky chemical cures – my diet did for me.  I have been very healthy and mostly happy since I started migrating towards this diet years ago.

My friend and hair cutter, Liz Gingerich, calls this food “real food” and describes it as “Nothing from a jar, box, or wrapper!”   That means eating food left in the same state that it arrived on the Earth from the diety or scientific power of your choice (however you explain the miracle that is food!).  Foods that have been flash frozen, pre-cooked or have additives, preservatives, stabilizers etc. are not eaten.  Those processing methods and additives may make the food last longer or speed up preparation but they also take away alot from the inherent wisdom of untouched foods nutritional patterns.  I can’t recommend this diet highly enough whether you are vegetarian or not, especially if you don’t feel that great – tired, sick, depressed etc.

Back to Slow Cookers: slow cooking can help those most likely to eat fast junk food – the busy and stressed – to eat healthy, good tasting food without having to spend time they don’t have preparing it.  As an added benefit the slow, low heat cooking of a Slow Cooker helps food retain it’s naturally healthful profile which can be damaged by high heat.   I’m happy with my Hamilton Beach Slow Cooker.

The only thing that I wasn’t crazy about – was all the recipes provided were for meat – not interesting for me being a vegetarian.  This is not a terribly big deal since any recipe that has a somewhat liquid base should work.  I’ve made Cuban Black Beans, Corn Chowder and other soups using my standard recipes.

I also just got the cookbook “Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker” by Robin Robertson.  I’m trying my first recipe right now and some very tantalizing smells are coming from the kitchen so it looks promising.

Is a pressure cooker worth owning?  I would say YES!  You can fully cook black, pinto, cranberry, kidney, lima and red beans in 15-18 minutes including the cool down time after the pressure cooker gets turned off.  This is in contrast to 1-2 hours to fully cook hard beans.  In addition, pressure cooked beans come out consistently tender and evenly cooked.

The time saved cooking rice isn’t quite so extreme but like beans the result is almost always perfectly done rice without being mushy or underdone.  Short grain brown rice takes approximately 30 minutes.

This probably isn’t even the case anymore but I grew up hearing about pressure cookers exploding and make horrific messes and maybe even hurting people.  Pressure cookers are completely safe now.  There’s usually several built in pressure release valves so that if one fails there’s other ways to release built up steam.

We have a T-Fal Sensor 2 which we’ve had for 10 years and it still looks and works like new.

Procuring clean water is one of the nicest things you can do for yourself. 

A good water filter will remove any bad tasting chemicals like chlorine and will also remove contaminants like Cysts, Lead, PCBs, MTBE, Mercury, Asbestos, Chloramine and VOCs from your water.  We bought a Multi-Pure water filter in 1995 and have used it ever since.  The fact that Multi-Pure is still in business and still provides filters for the purification units it sold over a decade ago speaks to the quality of their product and their commitment to their customers.  They have excellent helpful customer service people and have helped us find the right hookups for our countertop unit in several houses we’ve lived in which had nonstandard hardware on the kitchen sink.

These units aren’t cheap.  I believe we paid close to $300 for ours but if you look at the price of buying water at the store – the unit will pay for itself quickly and then start saving money over the cost of store-purchased water.  Of course it’s also much easier to have a unit on your sink then to tote water jugs to and from the store.

It is significantly cheaper to grind your own specialty flours but you need a grain mill to do it.  A bag of organic quinoa flour from Bob’s Red Mill is $6.19.  You can buy a pound of organic quinoa at Trader Joe’s or even Whole Foods for $1.00.  So at 25% of the cost of buying the flour you can grind your own – with the added bonus that the flour is completely and absolutely fresh.  Just about any specialty flour: amaranth, coconut, almond, barley, brown rice, black bean, corn, spelt, millet, oat,  and rye to name some can be quickly and cheaply made yourself.

A good grain mill isn’t cheap though so a purchase of this type probably makes more sense for someone who plans to use non-wheat specialty flours on an ongoing basis.

The grain mill can also be used for other things including, of course, grinding your own wheat.

Back when I ate soy – I ground up soy beans and made my own homemade tofu using the recipe from The Farm cookbook.  The mill easily handled the soy and worked perfectly for tofu making.

We bought the Jupiter Family Grain Mill 8 years ago and are very happy with it.  You get quite a bit of control over the coarseness / fineness of the flour grains and the machine is sturdy, simple to put together and take apart, and clean.  I see that some website are selling it for around $200 and that sounds about right given inflation and what we paid for ours.