Black Bean & Kasha Stew

In the first week of a new year, many of my friends and colleagues are knee deep in detoxes and “cleanses” as part of their new years resolution to lose weight. I don’t go for that sort of insanity, for me those diets & detoxes never fail to backfire.

My resolution this year is really simple. I’m going to focus on growing food from seed and cooking food from scratch. That’s it. No calorie counting, no deciphering unpronounceable ingredients. This strategy should help me to save some money in the long run too.

Tonight, I whipped up a black bean & kasha stew. Kasha is roasted buckwheat groats, a grain that I usually cook with roasted vegetables (click here for that kasha recipe I posted 2 years ago). Kasha cooks up quickly, I was able to whip up this soup in less than 30 minutes. It will likely be my breakfast tomorrow as the weather will be below 10 degrees when I wake up. Kasha is a warming and strengthening grain that has as much protein as red meat.

Black Bean & Kasha Veggie Stew

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small onion, chopped

1 small red pepper, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon chili powder

1/3 cup kasha or buckwheat groats

4 cups veggie stock or water

1 1/2 cups cooked black beans, or 1 -15oz. can black beans, rinsed and drained (note: I use Eden brand because their cans have no BPA)

1 cup grated carrots

1 cup frozen corn kernels

1 bay leaf

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

juice of one lime

Heat oil in a soup pot and saute onion and peppers over medium heat, 3-5 minutes.

Add garlic, kasha and chili powder, and saute 3 minutes more.

Stir in stock, beans, carrots, corn, bay leaf.

Cover, and bring to a boil.

Reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer 20 minutes more or until kasha is tender.

Stir in cilantro and lime juice and serve.

Eat More Kale T shirt dude

In light of the recent David and Goliath battle that the Eat More Kale dude is waging against fast food chicken giant Chick Fil-A, I thought it might be a good idea to post a few ways to cook kale. I hope that you’ll support kale in many ways.

Eat it as often as possible!

Grow it in your garden!

Buy an Eat More Kale T shirt to help spread the word!

Sign the petition to support the Eat More Kale T shirt dude in his intellectual property fight against the fast food chicken giant, click here.

If I had to name one vegetable that is the all time best veggie, I would have to say it would be kale. It is easy to grow here in the northeast, it actually gets better tasting as the temperatures plummet. Although I’m not one to get suckered into terms like “superfood”, I’d have to say that kale is truly a superfood. Deeply green colored, this leafy is an exceptional source of chlorophyll, calcium, iron, and vitamins A and C.

There are many ways to enjoy kale. One simple way would be to toss it into your soup! Its the kind of green leafy that holds up nicely in warm liquids.

Another way is to steam it. Super easy and quick. I would recommend stripping the leaves from the stems first as the stems take longer to cook.

My youngest daughter, Mikey loves kale sauteed with carmelized onions. The slower and lower that you cook the onions, the sweeter they get. Toss the leaves of the kale in at the end.

Here’s the recipe that we use many times each week to get our kale fix:

Mikey Rubin’s Sauteed Kale & Onions

1 small onion, cut into thin slices

1 bunch kale

extra virgin olive oil

Heat a saute pan over medium low heat and add about 2 teaspoons olive oil.  Add onion slices and saute slowly until onion is soft and translucent and just beginning to brown. This should take about 20 minutes.  (Shorter if you put the heat up a little higher, but stir and watch carefully that the onion doesn’t brown.)

 Wash the kale, cut off the stems and chop into small pieces.  Tear the leaves into bite size pieces.  Add the stems first in with the onions and cook an additional 5 minutes until beginning to soften.  Add the leaves and mix well, cover and cook another 2 – 3 minutes , stirring occasionally, until the leaves have wilted and are bright green.

Happy kale eater

Veggies set up for for Stir Fry: bok choy, green beans, ginger, red pepper, cashews and more....

Friday was the last class of my Recipes & Strategies for Better Health series at Gilda’s Club. I always wrap up my classes with an extra special meal along with a mindful chocolate tasting. I also love  to make a stir fry.

A stir fry is, in my humble opinion, is one of the easiest, most versatile dishes to make. As for ingredients, anything can work in a stir fry. Either I check out the produce aisle or farmers market to see what looks good or I’ll simply take a peek in my fridge and see what’s there.

Yesterday, I added red peppers, green beans and cashews to the stir fry. We had it over some soba noodles made with buckwheat and mugwort (which gave them a green color)

Here’s a basic stir fry recipe.

1 onion sliced

2 cloves garlic, finely diced

3 or 4 heads baby bok choy

2 carrots sliced

Small chunk of ginger, peeled and diced

A splash of soy sauce and some toasted sesame oil (or some teriyaki sauce)

Stir fry

Noodles or rice

• Lightly sauté onion, ginger and garlic until soft, 3 –5 minutes
• Add carrots, sauté 2 minutes
• Add white parts of bok choy, followed by green parts, sauté 3-5 minutes
• Add a splash of tamari and toasted sesame oil for flavor
• Serve over rice or noodles

I had such great plans for today. My intention was to head down to visit the sustainability folks at Occupy Wall Street and then go hear a discussion by the Reverend Billy, Savitri D and Jeff Sharlet about  about religion and politics in the Occupy movement and beyond.

But instead, I woke up to find that Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD had cleared out the park where Occupy Wall Street had been occupying in the wee hours of the morning. In addition, my chest totally hurts now. Last week’s head cold was moving into becoming this week’s chest cold. Not good.

Jason's Bronchial Blaster: contains mullein, licorice, ginger, cayenne, wild indigo and much much more.

I headed over to Jason Elias, my  healer, acupuncturist and herbal expert for some help. He set me up with some spicy but yummy herbal tonic to help the congestion in my chest.

Being an expert on five element theory and an author of many books on the topic, he reminded me that the lungs are connected with grief in Chinese medicine. I’ve had my share of grief lately with losing my dog Edgar but also grief for our environment. The weird weather continues to be a powerful messenger about climate change. Despite my advocacy and activism around the issues of fracking and the Tar Sands,  its hard not to grieve for our future on this planet.

So today, I’m taking a sick day. I’m sipping  spoonfula of Jason’s Bronchial Blaster in a cups of hot water. And I’m making a pot of Miso Onion Soup.

This soup is easy to make, and its ingredients help with a chest cold. Make yourself a pot next time you feel a cold coming on.

Soup ingredients: Onions, garlic, ginger, chicken stock, miso

Miso Onion Soup

2 medium onions, sliced

1 tablespoon coconut oil

5 cloves garlic, smashed

thumb sized piece of fresh ginger root, minced

2 tablespoons miso ( any variety) dissolved in 1/3 cup water

1 quart chicken stock (good thing I made that the other day!)

Sea salt and fresh ground pepper

1. Heat the oil in a soup pot.  Add the onions and sauté over medium-low heat until golden.  Add the garlic and continue to sauté slowly until the onions are lightly browned, stirring often, 15 to 20 minutes.

2. Add chicken stock and the ginger.  Bring to a simmer. Cover and simmer gently for 15 minutes.

3.Remove from the heat, add the dissolved miso and season.

Allow the soup to stand for 15 minutes, covered, and serve.

Miso Onion Soup

Fashion diva, Mikey Rubin (before she became a crazed teen)

My youngest daughter would never ever want to be considered an outfit repeater. As for me, when it comes to food, I’m not afraid to admit I’m a recipe repeater.

We buy a chicken at the farmer’s market just about every Saturday from Feather Ridge Farm. It’s not an inexpensive bird, but I do know that these chickens are well fed and cared for, so we spend the extra moolah. Besides, I get my money’s worth out of the bird by making at least 3 meals from it.

Usually Sunday night, we roast up the bird with some veggies. I often use this You Tube Roast Chicken recipe by Julia Child with garlic and lemon. Yum.

After dinner, we cut the remaining chicken off the bone and I take the bones and pop them into my slow cooker or pressure cooker to make chicken stock along with some veggies from the fridge. Here’s a recipe I posted last year on making  stock.

So here it is Monday, and I’ve got lots of leftover chicken. That means its time for Chicken Pot Pie.  I always make sure I’ve got spinach on hand, either fresh or frozen, for my pot pie. That’s because back in the late 1980′s when I was a dental student,  I waited tables in a teeny little restaurant in NYC’s West Village. They made the best chicken pot pie and it had spinach in it!

Here’s the recipe.

Chicken Pot Pie in the Oven

SuRu’s Chicken Pot Pie

Ingredients:

Leftover chicken, cut into bite size pieces

Olive oil

Chicken broth

1 medium onion, chopped

2-3 carrots sliced

1 cup green beans, or broccoli, or whatever veggie you might have around

1 package frozen spinach, or 3 cups fresh spinach.

Puff pastry- I’m picky about this. I use good puff pastry, made with BUTTER, not vegetable oil. The product I buy is DuFour Pastry, its a bit pricey, but this is a special treat!

Saute the onion in olive oil until translucent. 3-5 minutes

Add the carrots and other veggies.

Add the chicken,

Add the spinach. Saute until spinach is no longer frozen.

Add a bit of broth if you need some liquid.

Take this mixture and put it in some oven proof class containers.

Cut the puff pastry into strips, and weave it across the top of the pot pies.

Put pies into the oven until the puff pastry rises all sorts of puffy! (follow package directions)

PS: if you don’t want to use puff pastry, a layer of yummy mashed potatoes works well too.

This is the ticket to healthy bones: green leafy veggies.

Want strong bones? Don’t drink milk, take your cow for a walk instead. ~ Walter Willett MD, Harvard School of Public Health

Dairy is nature’s perfect food — but only if you’re a calf.~ Mark Hyman MD

Building strong bones is not just about calcium! We’ve been brainwashed by dairy industry marketing that it’s all about the calcium and to drink lots of milk and your bones will be fine. Too much calcium can encourage kidney stones and gall stones. Milk might not be the optimal calcium source. Keep in mind that the countries with the highest rates of osteoporosis, USA, UK and Sweden, consume the most milk. China and Japan have much lower rates of osteoporosis, they eat very little dairy products.

Instead of calcium,  its better to focus on magnesium, in your diet. This mineral is found in abundance in green leafy vegetables, whole grains and beans.

Magnesium is refined out of highly processed ingredients like sugar, white flour & white rice. Both sugar and alcohol cause magnesium to be excreted in the urine.  Sugar, baked flour, soda and alcohol are all known to weaken bones

But it’s not just about magnesium either. Healthy bones also need phosphorus, boron, copper, manganese, zinc, plus the vitamins C, D, K, B6,  and folic acid.   

In no way am I suggesting that you run out to the health food store and buy bottles of the above supplements! We shouldn’t have to be a biochemist to eat! Taking all of these nutrients in supplement form won’t be effective.There isn’t one study that demonstrates that supplementation can improve bone health. Our bodies know how to absorb nutrients from food and have been doing so since the beginning of time. It’s unlikely that we can effectively absorb these nutrients in the right proportions from supplements. Trust Mother Nature over chemical companies with big marketing budgets.

Also note that fluoridated water is correlated with a higher risk of hip fracture. If you’ve got fluoride in your town water, contact the Fluoride Action Network, they’ll help you to create a campaign to get the fluoride out!

So what to do for healthy, resilient bones?

• Eat veggies, green veggies especially.

• Eat real foods, not fake edible foodlike substances.

• Walk every day, in the sun whenever possible.

• Stay away from soda, sugar, baked flour and alcohol when possible.

Here’s a great bone healthy recipe:

Hummus is yummus! Great ingredients for strong bones!

Melanie’s Yummy  Hummus

1 ½ cup chick peas cooked, rinsed, drained

3 cloves roasted garlic

1 chipotle pepper, canned in adobo

1 teaspoon ground cumin

2 teaspoon honey

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 tablespoons tahini

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

1 ½ tablespoon coarsely chopped flat leaf parsley

Place first 7 ingredients in food processor  and process.

Add the oil slowly to desired consistency.

Garnish with parsley.

It all boils down to this:

I’m teaching a five week program at Gilda’s Club Westchester about Recipes and Strategies for Healthy Living. Today is week #1 and we’ll be talking about beneficial and hazardous ingredients and how to distinguish between them.

Its not rocket science to eat in this way. But it can be challenging because it requires you to cook and prepare most meals from scratch. Or, to put it simply, don’t eat processed crap!

I’m going to tell the group about October Unprocessed Month over at the Eating Rules blog. Andrew Wilder came up with this idea last year, it is simple but brilliant.

1. When you eat grains, eat only 100% whole grains. Or as I like to say, no baked flour or boiled flour. By the way, Cheerios and other cereals are not whole grains! Don’t listen to the cereal makers, they lie!

2. Don’t eat anything with High Fructose Corn Syrup.  That cuts out LOTS of processed foods. HFCS does serious damage to your liver, we were not meant to ingest fructose in such high quantities in the absence of fiber. And guess what? Juice is another source of too much fructose with no fiber. Eat fruit instead.  If you want to learn more about the hazards of fructose, have a seat and make yourself a nice glass of water and watch Dr. Robert Lustig’s presentation, Sugar: the Bitter Truth

3. Don’t eat hydrogenated oils, trans fats, or anything deep fried. Don’t get sucked into the “zero trans fats” claim on the label! If the ingredient list has the word hydrogenated, then don’t buy it! Plain and simple.

I’ll be doing my best to post simple easy recipes here that fit into this paradigm. I’ve got tons of recipes on this blog, just type in the word “Recipes” in the search box on the upper right of this blog.

Today, we’ll be having one of my most favorite soups: Butternut Squash Soup with Curry and Coconut Milk

In addition, we’ll had some simply steamed kale,  along with some quinoa that had some frozen organic peas  tossed in. A light and nourishing lunch that cost less than $3 per serving.

A great cookbook: Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair

I created a little sesame sauce for the kale that was a huge hit. The inspiration for it came from one of my favorite cookbooks, Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair. Cynthia also has a fun cooking show in the internet called Cookus Interruptus that will make you smile and will easily inspire you to good great things with real ingredients.

Here’s my version of her recipe for Sesame Sauce for Greens

1 teaspoon brown rice syrup or maple syrup

1 teaspoon brown rice vinegar

1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

Mix all three ingredients ina small pan and warm over low heat and gently whisk until blended.

Pour dressing over greens and toss.

You can serve this dressing, warm, cold or room temperature.

Enjoy!

Cabbage, limes peanuts and cilantro: the makings of a cool dish for dinner.

On a hot sweaty day in which there was no way I would be turning on the stove or oven, I noticed a couple of small heads of cabbage that I picked up at the farmer’s market sitting in my fridge.  The endless days of extreme heat were getting to me, I couldn’t think of a good use for my nice cool cabbages, so I reached out to my friends on Facebook with the question:

I’ve got some cabbages that are looking to be turned into coleslaw. What’s your fave recipe? I’m looking to bust out of a cole slaw rut.

Within less than an hour I had 26 suggestions, recipes and inspiring ideas.

My pal Mihoko suggested cooking in in a veggie broth and Nanette suggested a warm Asian slaw. Others posted their sauerkraut recipes. There was no way I was turning on the stove in my un-airconditioned house!

Adriana, a foodie friend from Brooklyn,  passed on a recipe for Napa Cabbage Salad with Buttermilk dressing from the Smitten Kitchen  I had no buttermilk in the house so that was out, but the Smitten Kitchen looked to be a cool site with great recipes.

Haruka suggested I try Okonomiyaki, Japanese pizza. You can eat loads of cabbage this way and add anything you like into it. I’d heard of it before from when my daughter visited Japan. She set me up with this recipe for Okonomiyaki on the Closet Cooking website. This Japanese pizza is  definitely on the to do list but not for tonight.

Lynette said she does a thai peanut dressing,  add lots of shredded carrots, fresh peapods with the slaw, toss over the top of some greens and you can even add some grilled chicken on the top if you are feelin carnivorous, throw on some chopped peanuts, and some sesame oil , and hmmmm, goood!  Now this was getting closer to my idea of what to do with what I had on hand.

Larissa suggested  shredded cabbage with lime juice and sea salt, as a side to tacos.  Its too late to make a run for taco ingredients but will definitely file that one for another day.

Jill hit the nail on the head when she suggested Lime and Peanut Coleslaw from Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks website. I made a version of this slaw without the tomatoes ( because I didn’t have any), it came out light and yummy. Just the right light crunchy meal when it is too darn hot to eat.

I will definitely use this system again when I need some inspirations.  My friends in cyberspace know good food!

One of my gardening Facebook friends just posted this one:

on the hunt for some new recipes. have lots of green beans, basil, cukes, zucchini, chard and kale in the garden. have a good recipe to share?

I wonder what she’ll come up with!

As we enter another week of hot and humid weather, its important to find ways to make food without heating up the kitchen.  Here at the Rubin Rodeo, we live comfortably most of the summer without air conditioning.  But when the temps hit the 90′s for more than a couple of days, it gets a little dicey.

My strategy is to get up early while it is still cool and do whatever cooking I need to do in the early hours of the morning. Today, I made this potato salad. It was finished and off to the fridge before the kids woke up.

We’ve got leftover grilled chicken to go with this for dinner. I know by this afternoon, I won’t feel like cooking. Dinner is all ready to go.

Potato Salad

serves 6

1 pound small white boiling potatoes
1 pound small red boiling potatoes
2 tablespoons good dry white wine
2 tablespoons chicken stock
3 tablespoons champagne vinegar (regular vinegar will work too)
1/2 teaspoon Dijion mustard
1 teaspoon sea salt
3/4 ground pepper
10 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup minced green onion, use green and white part ( I used some freshly cut chives from my garden instead)
2 tablespoons minced fresh dill
2 tablespoons minced flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons of fresh basil leaves

Boil potatoes whole in salted water for around 10 minutes until just cooked through.

Drain water then put a towel over the top of them so they continue to steam them for about ten more minutes.

As soon as you can handle them cut them in half, or quarters if really large and place them in a meduim bowel.

Gently poor the chicken stock as well as the wine (if no wine use extra chicken stock) on to the warm potatoes and allow them to soak up the liquid.

In a separate bowl put vinegar, mustard, 1/2 teaspoon sea salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and then wisk in the olive oil.

Add your vinaigrette to the potatoes.

Then add green onions, dill, parsley, basil, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper and gently toss.

Refrigerate and serve later with dinner.

Tonight I taught a small evening class for guys only at Gilda’s Club. My goal was to inspire them to get into the kitchen and make some summer time food that was easy to prepare and most importantly, delicious.

The seafood counter at Whole Foods

We used three basic ingredients: shrimp, spinach and quinoa. I’m going to split this blog post into three separate ones so I can expand a bit about these ingredients.  Let’s start with the shrimp!

I started out by visiting the seafood counter at Whole Foods the day before the class. I needed a pound of shrimp, cleaned and de-veined, I let the guys behind the counter to all that messy work! My choice was between sustainably farmed shrimp from Thailand or wild shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico.

Due to environmental concerns, these are not easy choices. The Pacific Ocean is now at risk of contamination from the ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan. Is it still safe to eat seafood from the Pacific?  It’s difficult to get accurate information at this time. Fishmongers are now testing Pacific seafood with geiger counters.

As for the Gulf shrimp, there are lingering concerns whether seafood from the region is safe to eat. It’s been over a year since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill left more than 200 million gallons of oil and 2 million gallons of the dispersant Corexit in the Gulf of Mexico. Like the Fukushima situation, it can be tough to get an answer from an independent source as to whether there is contamination with oil or with the toxic dispersant.

Another source to help you clear up the question of what to buy is Seafood Watch, they have a cool pocket guide to seafood selection. You can even get it as a downloadable “app” for your smart phone!

Seafood Magic + Garlic

I chose the wild Gulf shrimp. Once I brought them home, I poured half a bottle of Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Seafood Magic on the shrimps and tossed them with some olive oil and a small amount of crushed fresh garlic.

That’s it! That’s all you have to do! I set it up the day before so that the flavors blend, you can do it the same day too.

From there all you need to do is saute the seasoned shrimp over medium heat until they are cooked through.  Insanely easy!

You can enjoy these shrimp as an appetizer and skewer them with some toothpicks. Use some corn tortilla chips to dip in the leftover sauce!

OR, you can have these yummy shrimps for dinner which is what we did at Gilda’s. It was part of a meal along with some spinach and some quinoa.  Click here to learn more about the rest of our meal.