Pantry Basics: Real Ingredients for cooking success

pantryIf diets don’t work, what ARE we supposed to eat?

The answer is simple.

Whole. Real. Food.

Prepared with human hands.

With the intent to nourish.

If you’re accustomed to eating out of a box, preparing food can be daunting. I suggest cooking classes, tutoring from a chef or a good cook you know or even watching people cook on TV or You Tube.

Cooking isn’t even the best description of the process. Ideally half your diet comes from raw foods. I generally begin my day with fruit. I picked that up from the Diamonds, authors of Fit for Life. It works for me.

Fruit is simple to prepare. It often comes with its own package/protection so it’s easy to carry. Most fruit can be eaten out of hand, with no cutting. Even though some fruit requires cutting, that’s usually the end of the preparation.

Vegetables are also an important part of your raw food intake. That’s easy too. Salads are easy to make. Wash veggies; chop veggies; toss veggies.  To save time and effort tossing, you can make platters of veggies for dipping. Making fresh dips is easy. Throw stuff in blender; blend; dip veggies in dip. All easy.

If you decide you want cooked veggies, there is another step: put in pot; steam. None of this is hard.

Of course you can juice all these fruits and veggies, but I’m pretty lazy about cleaning the juicer so I just eat the whole fruit and the whole vegetables. Also easy.

To eat healthy, it helps to start with a pantry of essentials. Over the years my pantry has changed considerably. I gradually shed the processed unfoods and replaced them with real ingredients that show themselves useful in many recipes.

Here are some of my pantry essentials and what I do with them:

  1. Lemons: I drink lemon water in the mornings to prime my digestive system. Lemon is an ingredient in my favourite salad dressings and veggie dips: hummus, babaganouj, and guacamole. Lemon complements lamb and fish.
  2. Garlic: in salad dressings, soups, stews, main dishes, spaghetti sauce; roasted with crackers and veggies; raw, sliced as medicine for warding off colds or poultice for healing wounds.
  3. Onions: in some form in almost all salads and main dishes. Green, red, white and yellow onions. Easy to grow.
  4. Olive oil, extra virgin: for salad dressings, dips, sautéing (at low temps). Buy from reputable company as olive oil is often diluted with cheaper oils. It should harden when refrigerated.
  5. Coconut oil, extra virgin: use for frying, baking oven fries, in place of butter or shortening in any recipe. Also use it for skin/hair, and teeth (oil pulling).
  6. Greens and Herbs, variety: spinach, arugula, mesclun (mixed greens), kale, baby lettuces, red leaf, green leaf, butter and romaine lettuces, fresh parsley, basil, oregano, mint. They all add crunch, enzymes and vital nutrients to any dish.
  7. Other fresh veggies: mushrooms, celery, carrots, with garlic and onion form the base of many soups, stews and main dishes. Broccoli, turnip, tomato, cauliflower, asparagus, cabbage are other favourites. I especially seek out local seasonal vegetables.
  8. Fruit, variety. Bananas are the perfect fast food. “An apple a day…” is proven to be more than just a nice quote. Organic berries are some of the world’s most nutritious foods and can be incorporated into any meal in any course.
  9. Avocado: great source of healthy fat. I use in guacamole, salads and desserts like “chocomole” See link.
  10.  Nuts and nut milk. Use raw cashews to thicken salad dressings, desserts and non-  dairy sauces. Nuts transform gluten-free desserts. Nut milk is a great dairy substitute that serves well in most recipes that call for milk.

By no means is this list exhaustive but most of these ingredients are valuable in my kitchen because they serve many purposes. I don’t have room in my small kitchen for too many one trick ponies.

I also must have in my kitchen at least one Aloe Vera plant, vital for treating burns. I must have baking soda, which I use to clean pots and pans and sinks, to prevent boiling eggs from cracking, and to brush my teeth. Vinegar is another multi purpose item in my pantry, mostly for cleaning inexpensively and safely.

Banishing all packaged food from your pantry might be too big a step for you. I certainly didn’t purge my pantry overnight. After decades of conscious purging, there are still a few items that are yet to be banished.

I suggest working on one thing at a time. When you run out of something, replace it with something from this list. For example when your cooking oil runs out, replace it with olive and/or coconut oil. When your salad dressings are gone, start making your own.

By taking these small steps eventually your pantry will serve your goal of eating for optimum health.

Garlic is Grand: 11 Reasons to Eat Garlic Everyday

garlicMany years ago a doctor on TV declared that the single easiest action we could all take for our health is to eat more garlic. If everybody ate it, he reasoned, the notorious garlic odor would be a non-issue and we would enjoy myriad health benefits.

The health benefits of garlic (Allium sativum), a member of the lily family, have been known for millennia. From the Egyptians to Hippocrates, from the battlefields of the American Civil War to the First World War, garlic holds an important place in health history. Even Western medicine acknowledges garlic’s ability to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of further heart attacks.

Here are just some of the health benefits of garlic.

1. Control Blood pressure: Garlic is rich in sulfur compounds that give garlic its odor but also many of its health enhancing benefits. Garlic sulfides create hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S), which helps to dilate blood vessels. This dilation helps to keep blood pressure under control. Garlic normalizes high and low blood pressure but does not disturb normal blood pressure.

2. Safely lower cholesterol: studies have found garlic effective for lowering cholesterol levels. In one German experiment, volunteers taking an 800-mg garlic tablet saw their cholesterol levels drop an average of 12 percent over four months, as effective as cholesterol medications, without the deadly side effects.

3. Prevent/treat heart disease: controlling blood pressure and cholesterol are just two ways garlic works to prevent/treat heart disease. Raw, dried, aged, and macerated garlic as well as garlic oil have all demonstrated anti-platelet effects, further enhancing garlic’s heart protection.

4. Prevent/treat cancer: Epidemiological studies find that the ingestion of garlic reduces cancer risk. In a study of 40,000 postmenopausal women, those who had a consistent intake of garlic had almost a 50% reduction in colon cancer risk. Cancer cells are vulnerable to the allyl sulfur compounds present in garlic, which slows and even prevents the growth of tumors. Animal studies conducted at Penn State University concluded that garlic helps stop the growth of tumors and contains substances that actually destroy tumor cells and promote the invasion of immune cells such as lymphocytes and macrophages to the tumor site.

5. Garlic is a powerful, natural antibiotic: Garlic has very strong antibacterial, antifungal, anti-parasitic, and antiviral properties. The antibacterial action of garlic makes it an ideal substitute for dangerous antibiotics. Garlic helps to fight such illness as colds, flu, bronchitis, chicken pox, and urinary tract infections.

6. Garlic has micronutrients: Garlic is also an excellent source of micronutrients including manganese, vitamin B6 and vitamin C. It is also a very good source of protein and thiamin (vitamin B1), as well as phosphorus, selenium, calcium, potassium, and copper.

7. Garlic kills parasites: Soldiers used garlic as an antiseptic during World War I and also as an aid to kill parasites (worms). Hookworms, pinworms, roundworms and tapeworms perish in the presence of garlic.

8. Prevent and treat colds: Garlic’s antiviral properties make it a natural cold remedy.

9. Even more: Garlic is helpful for conditions including diabetes, allergies, toothaches, impotence, and MRSA.

  1. Save money: a one-month supply is a few dollars at your local organic market, a pittance compared with a prescription for blood pressure or cholesterol pills. Or grow* your own.

 

For garlic to be effective as a healing agent and general antibiotic, it needs to be raw. Crushing or chopping activates an enzymatic process that converts alliin into allicin, which is the component responsible for most of the health benefits of garlic. For maximum allicin activation, allow the crushed or chopped garlic to sit for ten minutes to complete the enzymatic process. If cooking, do not expose to heat for longer than five minutes.

 

When I make my own salad dressings I often include a crushed garlic clove. It’s an easy way to include garlic in my diet. I also make garlic butter to put on fresh steamed veggies or a slice of fresh-baked whole-grain bread, my favourite way to eat raw garlic.

 

I also cook with it. Garlic imparts such wonderful flavour and aroma to food, it’s a staple in my kitchen.

 

Whenever possible, I eat garlic with or followed by parsley. The chlorophyll in parsley combats the sulfur of the garlic. Cilantro works too, but I don’t care for it. We give our dog a clove of garlic everyday in her food, along with a few sprigs of parsley. She doesn’t have garlic breath.

 

I encourage you to add more garlic into your diet. It’s a small step you can take to leap into better health.

 

Sources:

Natural News

Wikipedia

Wake-Up World

Easy Health Options

Mother Earth News

 

*How to grow your own garlic:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/growing-garlic-zbcz1309.aspx?newsletters=1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=HE%20eNews&utm_campaign=09.23.13%20HE#axzz2fjGqUFRE

http://wakeup-world.com/2013/10/08/garlic-beats-best-selling-blood-pressure-drug-in-new-study/

http://wakeup-world.com/2013/10/18/how-garlic-can-save-your-life/