Focusing in for Food Happiness

I’m certain a mathematician can work this into a formula, perhaps a beautifully plotted graph that demonstrates in didactic elegance the relation one experiences with recipes and ingredients, with passing time as a factor. Like the rest of my generation, following from milk, I started out eating nothing but Cerelac, a simple, bland sort of food that my mother used to get me onto solids. Soon after came fruit, then rice dishes, vegetables, yoghurt, cheese, meat and the rest. And there was no stopping progress. Retrospectively, Cerelac was my Big Bang moment, a taste experience before which there was nothing, but after which nothing would be the same. Unknown molecules start forming and binding to each other into new recipes and dishes, pushing my personal Food Universe into an ever-expanding state in both breadth and height, giving rise to new experiences.

When you start cooking for yourself, and if you have that kind of obsessive grain within you, you might throw yourself at it whole-heartedly. What was ultimately a nutritional exercise quickly transcends the Get-It-In-Ya experience as you discover that so-called Joy of Cooking. Your one bedroom studio closes in as more and more recipe books pack against the wall and more and more utensils are stacked above the kitchen bench. Your fridge will almost certainly contain foods with exceedingly exotic origins, superbly interesting qualities and utterly unpronounceable names. (While we’re on the subject, how DO you pronounce galangal?). With the ammunition well-stocked, experimentation ensues and with it, the inevitable successes and failures.

To me, that seems to be the era of chaos that precedes universal order. At one point in time, not too long ago, a cookbook mutiny threatened to over-throw my sanity; I had over 50 ingredients in my fridge, the same amount in my pantry and more pots and pans than you can poke a slotted, wooden dessert spoon at. But gradually, things changed. I stopped buying utensils and use a frying pan and a cast iron pot for most of my cooking. Instead of purchasing more cookbooks, I rely on 2 or 3 that I own already and love the most. I make stir-fries with 4 or 5 ingredients instead of 10. My fridge stocks a limited variety of food. It seems my Food Universe has reversed and is now shrinking. And I love it that way. My dinner might be a pastured steak fried in good butter with some hot English mustard on the side. If I am feeling adventurous, some glazed carrots might find their way to the plate. Good quality eggs make a meal, with need for little else. Some good cream mixed in there, and a just-set, custardy omelet is a decidedly brilliant dinner. Dessert need be nothing more than Pepe Saya’s phenomenal mascarpone with some berries on top. Or a slice of good cheese. If the ingredients are of high quality, there’s no need to diversify. Focus on the singular and you will find happiness, that’s my new mantra. Sure, I might not be heading straight back to Cerelac, and perhaps the universe is getting more focused rather than shrinking. Order. There’s a quiet enjoyment to be found in minimalizing a repertoire; a kind of meditative calm, an asserted certainty; and if you look closely enough, an infinity of choice.

How about you? Are you eating more variety than you did a few years ago? Do you find you are happier with more food choice or with less?

Roast Bone Marrow with Smoked Eggplant – Recipe

In keeping with yesterday’s theme, here’s another great ingredient, full of fat’s goodness: bone marrow. I saw a documentary a few days ago which showed that eating bone marrow was one of those factors that guarded man’s ancestors from extinction. You see, when food was scarce, and when fierce predators would get all the meat around, our ancestors had an advantage. The lion would go home and leave nothing but bone. Our ancestors were unique among mammals in that they knew how to smash a rock against those bones and extract the nutritious bone marrow. Smashing rocks, a unique evolutionary trait…

As you have probably guessed from the photo, I didn’t smash a rock against the bones. Mine were cut in half by my butcher’s vertical saw. A much more elegant, though less stress-relieving approach, wouldn’t you agree?

The following recipe is my creation. I smoked some eggplants under the grill, mixed in some butter, walnuts, cumin, salt and lemon juice. I topped that with roasted bone marrow, more lemon juice and some olive oil infused with garlic and rosemary. The dish came together beautifully, mostly soft, but with the occasional crunch from the walnuts and fried garlic. I’ll be cooking more bone marrow and trying a few different recipes with it. How about you? Do you eat much bone marrow? What do you think of it?

Roast Bone Marrow with Smoked Eggplants Recipe

For the Garlic and Rosemary Oil: Add 3 tbsp olive oil, 2 cloves of garlic and a sprig of rosemary (de-stemmed) into a pan and heat until it sizzles nicely. Remove from heat and leave aside. The garlic should be come golden and crunchy

For the Eggplants: cut 1 large eggplant in half and roast for half an hour under a hot grill. Make sure it blisters, but doesn’t burn. Scoop out the flesh into a bowl. Add 1 tbsp cumin, 1 tbsp butter and salt and lemon juice to taste. Add a handful or two of chopped walnuts. Taste and adjust seasoning. Keep warm.

For the Bone Marrow: preheat the oven to 170c and roast the bone marrow for 15 to 20 minutes. Remove marrow from bone and keep warm. You can use the bones in stock.

Putting it All Together: In a bowl, spoon some eggplant, top with some bone marrow, squeeze a bit of lemon and add some of the olive oil you prepared earlier, along with some garlic flakes and rosemary sprigs. Enjoy.

The Tradition of Eating Pure Fat

One of the most revered traditional breakfasts in Lebanon is a platter of raw liver, raw lamb muscle meat and raw liyyeh, sheep tail fat. Middle-Eastern sheep are a particular breed with tails that grow to a massive size. I’ve heard it said that up to one quarter of the sheep’s weight could come from its tail. The tail is pure, soft, white fat. For breakfast, along with the raw meat and liver, the liyyeh is sprinkled with salt and pimento and eaten with bread. It’s not for the faint of heart, especially the liver, but the initial reaction subsides when you take the plunge and eat some. I personally find that the flavour of liver, or anything for that matter, is milder when the food is raw.

Raw sheep tail fat is delicious, but, I also really like it barbecued on charcoal. The outside caramelises beautifully, and a bit of salt brings out a sweetness in the fat. It’s not greasy or oily, but rather creamy with a round, buttery mouthfeel. Here in Australia, sheep tail fat isn’t something you can find. My Lebanese butcher tells me that they tried, but failed, to raise Middle-Eastern breeds of sheep in Australia. Something to do with the weather and humidity causes the sheep to get sick… Don’t quote me on that.

So a few days ago, I find myself at AC Butchery in Leichhardt looking at a piece of lardo: cured pig fat. The fat is subcutaneous, which is the soft fat from underneath the skin of the pig (as opposed to visceral fat, which is intramuscular). The fat gets cured with salt. It’s  sometimes flavoured with herbs and sometimes it’s also smoked. I couldn’t resist buying it – $15 a kilo for fat from a free range pig sounded like a financially wise investment. Today, I had a craving for the good old days back in Lebanon. No tail fat for me unfortunately, but the lardo did the trick. The Italians slice the fat thinly and eat it for antipasti, or use it as a topping for bruschetta, among other uses. I tried something else with the fat: seared on a hot pan until it goes slightly crisp and golden, flipped and then served with sauerkraut and hot english mustard. Delicious, and so nutrient and energy dense, I probably won’t have to eat anything else until winter arrives. Maybe I’ll hibernate for the afternoon…

Red meat is blamed for one in 10 early deaths and other fairytales

Doesn’t the photo of that beef look amazing? I just had to say that before I started. I’d love a slice of that.

You have most probably seen this study that just came out showing that eating red meat is going to kill you, eventually. Having read the numerous alarmist articles published on the topic, I thought it is my duty to say something, since so many media outlets have started going crazy for this piece of news. Here’s the link to the article by The Telegraph.

I don’t know how this rubbish is even considered a study. What the researchers did was survey 100,000 people over a period of 28 years, asking them every 4 years about their diet and lifestyle. Asking them? So, the study wasn’t a double blind, laboratory based study? Already, I’m skeptical. Many issues are known to happen with survey studies. Namely, people lie in surveys. They do! I know I have…

OK, but putting that aside. Let’s look at this line from the Telegraph:

Cream Cheese Sorbet Recipe

Those of us who take ice cream seriously know the delicate balance of ingredients required. Do it right, and you end up with ice cream, luscious and velvety. Do it wrong and you end up with ice (sans cream). You know what I mean, just a frozen bit of flavoured stuff that you need an icepick to even chip away at the surface.

Ice crystals – that’s what you need to manage in order to avoid having a piece of Antarctica sitting in your freezer. Ice crystals form when you freeze a liquid. The larger the ice crystals, the icier the ice cream. The smaller the ice crystals, the better. The size of ice crystals can be influnced by churning – the quicker a liquid freezes, the smaller the ice crystals – so an ice cream machine is great help. Another piece of the puzzle is the ratio of solids to liquids in your ice cream mixture. Water is the liquid, fat and sugar are the solids. The more solids you have, the softer the ice cream. Try to be healthy and reduce the amount of sugar you have in a recipe and you will attract the wrath of the gods. Of course, there is a whole arsenal of tricks to manage the texture (alcohol and salt lower the freezing point; pectin, salep, cornstarch and gums like xanthan and guar gum can all be used as thickeners), but it feels a bit like cheating.

I no longer use sugar in anything, including my ice creams and go for xylitol instead (which, despite the chemical-sounding name, is a great natural alternative to sugar with a very low glycemic index). Xylitol, however, doesn’t have all the properties of sugar (it doesn’t caramelise, for instance). Since it’s also a bit sweeter, less of it is required when making ice cream, which means ice crystals are larger. The end result just isn’t as satisfying as normal ice cream.

When I saw a recipe for cream cheese sorbet on the Saveur website, I knew I’d hit the jackpot. It was obvious that the huge amount of fat from the cream cheese would certainly result in a sorbet with good texture, with or without sugar. I tried it with xylitol, and, yes, it’s awesome and tastes like a frozen New York cheesecake. If you want to use sugar, go for the recipe on the Saveur website. My adaptation is for a xylitol sweetened sorbet. I buy my xylitol here.

Cream Cheese Sorbet with Xylitol Recipe (adapted from Saveur)

Ingredients

• 2 packets Philadelphia or your favourite cream cheese (500 grams total), softened to room temperature
• 1 cup xylitol
• 1/2 cup lemon juice and equivalent lemon rind
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

Method

• Add the xylitol and 1 cup of water to a pot and heat until the xylitol is dissolved
• Using a wooden spoon, mix the cream cheese until no lumps appear
• Bit by bit, add the water and xylitol mix, incorporating slowly with a whisk to ensure there are no lumps
• Add the lemon juice, lemon rind and vanilla essence
• Churn in your ice machine and freeze for 3 hours or so before you eat it
• If you don’t have an ice cream machine, I suspect it will still work really well if you put it in the freezer and churn it by hand every hour or so for around 6 or 7 hours

On Carbs

Massive Health - Carbs Are Killing You

I like Dr Mercola. Despite him pushing products, I find his advice generally well considered. “Pasta, Not Bacon, Makes You Fat. But How?” is the name of his latest blog entry. It’s a must read. But for those of you who are more visual, or want the abridged version, the above infographic from Massive Health that tells it like it is.

How I lost 24 Kilos and a Recipe for Macadamia Oil Mayonnaise

This blog post may change your life.

Back in April 2010, Amanda from Lamb’s Ears and Honey posted a Facebook link to an article in the New York Times with the title “Is Sugar Toxic”, written by a science researcher called Gary Taubes. Amanda doesn’t know it, but by posting that link, she saved me from almost guaranteed diabetes and heart disease. Thank you Amanda! At the time, I weighed 122kg and had a waist circumference of 122cm, and with those measurements, I was obese. After reading Taubes’ article, I watched the amazing video, “Sugar, The Bitter Truth” by Dr Robert Lustig that discusses the health dangers of eating high amounts of fructose. I also saw that Taubes had written a book entitled “Why We Get Fat: and What to Do About It”. Having always thought that getting fat is all about calories-in/calories-out, I was intrigued to find that there may be another explanation to the problem I had suffered with all my life (having dieted non-stop for 15 years) so I bought Taubes’ book and read it. That book changed my life forever.

Zoom forward to today, my nutritional re-education continues as I weigh 98kg and my waist circumference is 98cm. My diet has switched from one focused on carbohydrates to one that that uses fat for energy. My energy comes from grass-fed and free-range animals, fish, eggs, low-starch vegetables, olive oil, coconut oil, nuts, and berries. To a lesser extent I also eat full-fat dairy (cheese, cream and sour cream), bananas and sweet potatoes. I eat around 2700 calories a day, so by any definition, I am not on a diet. Having lost the weight I did without caloric restriction may seem to defy the laws of thermodynamics, but what I found out during my reading is that the well-established adage of calories-in/calories-out is a big fat lie. For almost all people, we gain weight because of hormonal issues. The main way to lose weight is to reduce insulin levels and make our body more receptive to the action of leptin (which, being a hormone discovered only relatively recently may not be known to most doctors).

Having (effortlessly) lost the weight is great, but I realize now that weight was not a problem in its own. It was merely a physiological indicator that my body wasn’t healthy. The health of our body is greatly determined by our diet. Using my newfound way of eating, I have helped many friends with their weight and health issues. My father, a long-term diabetic, now has stellar blood sugar levels. I personally enjoy vastly improved energy levels, no longer have the acne problems that plagued me throughout my life, no longer have plaque, have less/no joint pain, and I feel more clear-headed and happier.

As I continue to learn new things, I try to keep it simple to introduce people I care about to the diet that I know will change their lives for the better. I try to explain that there are 3 things I believe cause most of the health issues we encounter

1- Fructose – this is a sugar found naturally in fruit (and natural sweeteners like agave). It is used in massive quantities as a sweetener for soft drinks, junk food and mass-produced food. Though it doesn’t cause insulin spikes on its own, it does cause fatty liver disease. I highly recommend you watch Dr Lustig’s video “Sugar, The Bitter Truth“ as it will give you all the info you need on why you should avoid fructose.

2- Omega 6/PUFA oils. For years, we have been told to eat margarine as a healthier alternative to butter. Poly-unsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) found in margarine, canola, corn oil and other seed/grain/nut oils. These fats are easily prone to oxidation and as we consume them in the large quantities we do, we create an unfavorable ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 (found in fish) oils in our body. The right ratio is crucial for our liver function and the makeup of our cell membranes and many other bodily functions. I have personally cut out all PUFAs (no more margarine, canola, grapeseed, rice bran or vegetable oils) and the fats I eat are either fully saturated (butter, animal fat and coconut oils are saturated and that makes them stable and not prone to oxidation) or mono-unsaturated oils like macadamia or olive oil. I do not fear cholesterol. Cholesterol is a healthy, healing substance and is largely misunderstood. I suggest you read Gary Taubes’ life changing book, Why We Get Fat: and What to Do About It to re-educate yourself on the real science of fat.

3- Grains – It amazes me to see a diabetic being prescribed a diet high in complex carbs and whole grains and low in fat! Seriously? Diabetics have a problem with blood glucose and insulin. Why are they being fed food that will turn into sugar in the body at all? My diabetic father made the switch and only gets his carbs from leafy greens and non-starchy vegetables. The rest of his diet is protein and fat based and his blood sugar levels are now AMAZING. If you are not diabetic, there are still plenty of compelling reasons why grains are not a good idea for you. Grains increase gut permeability (they penetrate the gut wall and allow dangerous material in our gut to leach into our blood stream which leads to chronic inflammation) to grains’ anti-nutrient properties (which depletes the body of vitamins and minerals). People with acid reflux, coeliac or autoimmune diseases can reverse or control their condition by eliminating grains. For more details on the dangers of wheat and grain, and the amazing health benefits to be gained by eliminating them, read Dr William Davis’ book Wheat Belly.

I am not giving anyone medical advice. I firmly believe that health is a journey and that people need to make their own decisions on where they want to go. What is clear to me is that a carbohydrate centric, fat fearing diet is not the answer. Read through the links and books I suggest. You’ll feel like Alice going down the rabbit hole. If you decide that you are convinced and want to follow the advice in these websites and books, let me know. I’d love to hear from you and to learn about your journey.

When you are convinced and want to start straight away, here’s a great recipe to help kick-start things. Macadamia Oil Mayonnaise. When I stopped eating oils rich in Omega 6, I found that I can no longer eat mayo. All commercial mayo is made with either canola or soybean oil and that’s just poison. Olive oil doesn’t make good mayonnaise – the flavour is too strong and bitter. Macadamia oil, on the other hand, is a wonderfully aromatic oil with a beautiful buttery texture and a heady aroma. It’s not a neutral oil (because it’s not chemically processed unlike vegetable and seed oils). This delicious mayonnaise takes 1 minute to make, is high in monounsaturated fat from the macadamia oil and saturated fat from the eggs, and, yes, it’s SUPER-HEALTHY! Just don’t eat the bread.

Macadamia Oil Mayonnaise Recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 egg yolks (if you are worried about bacteria, simply pasteurise the whole eggs by keeping them at 63 degrees C water for 5 minutes)
• 1.5 cup macadamia oil
• 2 tsp dijon mustard
• 2 tsp apple cider vinegar
• salt (to taste) – use real salt like Celtic Sea Salt.
• lemon juice

Method

1. Put the egg and mustard in an upright blender and whiz it up.
2. Add the oil (shouldn’t take more than 20 to 30 seconds) from the top opening until the mixture thickens.
3. Add apple cider vinegar and salt
4. Add more oil if thicker mayonnaise is needed
5. The process should take 1 minute or less
6. Once done, you can adjust the salt and lemon juice. Heck, you can even add more mustard if you want. Go crazy!

Resources

Neolithic Food

The excerpts below from Bill Bryson’s book At Home is especially interesting to me. My diet over the last year has largely been Paleolithic – pastured animal fat and protein, roots, greens and berries – with some Neolithic food thrown in, namely butter, cream, cheese and olive oil. Health-wise, I’ve never felt better. Have a read. There is such an obvious link between Neolithic food and disease and Bryson describes it so wonderfully. You’l enjoy this one.

“It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards. … A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much vitamin C as the average person today. Even in the bitterest depths of the ice ages, we now know, nomadic people ate surprisingly well – and surprisingly healthily. Settled people, by contrast, became reliant on a much smaller range of foods, which all but ensured dietary insufficiencies. The three great domesticated crops of prehistory were rice, wheat, and maize, but all had significant drawbacks as staples. As the journalist John Lanchester explains: ‘Rice inhibits the activity of Vitamin A; wheat has a chemical that impedes the action of zinc and can lead to stunted growth; maize is deficient in essential amino acids and contains phytates, which prevent the absorption of iron.’ The average height of people actually fell by almost six inches in the early days of farming in the Near East. Even on Orkney, where prehistoric life was probably as good as it could get, an analysis of 340 ancient skeletons showed that hardly any people lived beyond their twenties.

“What killed the Orcadians was not dietary deficiency but disease. People living together are vastly more likely to spread illness from household to household, and the close exposure to animals through domestication meant that flu (from pigs or fowl), smallpox and measles (from cows and sheep), and anthrax (from horses and goats, among others) could become part of the human condition, too. As far as we can tell, virtually all of the infectious diseases have become endemic only since people took to living together. Settling down also brought a huge increase in ‘human commensals’ – mice, rats, and other creatures that live with and off us – and these all to often acted as disease vectors.

“So sedentism meant poorer diets, more illness, lots of toothache and gum disease, and earlier deaths. What is truly extraordinary is that these are all still factors in our lives today. Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven – corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats – account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. Exactly the same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.

“We are, in the most fundamental way, Stone Age people ourselves. From a dietary point of view, the Neolithic period is still with us. We may sprinkle our dishes with bay leaves and chopped fennel, but underneath it all is Stone Age food. And when we get sick, it is Stone Age diseases we suffer.”