A Question From a Friend

Late last week I received the following statement and question from an ex-pat friend of mine in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.

"I came to the realization the other day that I need to lose some serious weight. Except for cutting out bread and beer, I'm not sure what to do. You know what resources / foods we have here. Is there any approach you'd recommend?"

The first steps

The first thing I want to address is what my friend calls resources/foods in his question to me. While he may not realize it, much of the food in Ukraine that is available is probably available to him is closer to real food than many of us have in the West have had as we have been subjugated to a great deal of processed foods over the last forty years. In fact the idea of processed foods and what was provided to the average population, in my speculation, is that many of the companies providing rations for the troops in Europe provided a great deal of food stuffs and food like products during the war effort against the Nazis. The money they were making must have been a pretty penny and when the war was concluded they needed a new market for these food stuffs. Yes, I am using the world food stuffs here on purpose because they were no longer real food.

While I never did military duty in Canada, I can't recall one of my friends in either Canada or the United States of America who did, who ever actually peeled potatoes during that part of their stint in the army. On the other hand, I had plenty of friends who served in the Soviet Army before Ukraine's Independence who understood what it was to clean potatoes for their fellow servicemen. I am not saying that serving in the Soviet Army was better, but the fact that their society was not solely motivated by profit of big conglomerates, did clearly have an effect on the quality of their food supply; and at this point in my life I would say that it was for the better.

While, I spent nearly ten years living in Ukraine and understand what is available in the stores, at its markets and in general, the decisions of selecting real food will truly depend on my friend. He will have to learn to make healthy eating choices. We have all heard that more is not necessarily better, it's the quality that counts.

If he realizes that he really does have to lose some weight as I did a year ago, I think he will have to make some sacrifices. Some of those sacrifices, unfortunately for him will be those that I also made! Bread and beer! For the most part the bread that my friend has been eating is closer to real food than most of all the foods combined that North Americans eat. It is bread which is is produced from whole wheat that has had minimal processing, and this is much better than eating “Wonder bread”! Nonetheless, while I am not a nutritionist or dietician, research does seem to suggest that bread and something that some are calling “Wheat Belly” is caused by an intake of bread and wheat based products.

Last year, I had to travel to Germany for business. It was during that period that I basically took a close to a three month vacation from a North American lifestyle, I knew that I couldn't simply diet, but needed a complete lifestyle change. When you have a hard time bending down to tie your shoe laces sitting on the edge of your bed, you realize that you really do need to change. That trip was an ideal opportunity to make a change in my life. We all have to realize that change doesn't come without some sacrifice!

Ukraine's cornucopia of options

Wherever you live has a cornucopia of options when it comes to making healthy food choices. How you make those choices does of course depend on your budget, though nonetheless, if my friend wants to loose weight then he will have to make some sacrifices for about six weeks or so. I understand his love of beer; however, in order for him to pull his system into one that recognizes what he is feeding it he will have to give up beer, and bread for some time. I did it, it didn't kill me and I know for a fact that if he is fifty pounds lighter he will be much better off if the lift/elevator decides it is on strike for a few days due to the lack of service in the country. 

I would like to tell my friend that it is worth taking a break form beer and any alcohol, I did this while living in Ukraine and I lost about 10 kg during that period. I did so for about three weeks, and in the end it made it easier for me to walk everywhere in the city, and get to my fifth-floor flat when the lift was not working. There were a few other things I abstained from, added new things to my diet that I had not been eating before. The first of these was Oatmeal in the morning, on occasion with with some dried raisins, chopped up figs, or other fruits that I had available – and never adding any type of processed sugar to it. Last year when I was in Germany I would often prepare some polenta and supplement it with some bio-yogurt and fruits.

While in Ukraine some of the other things that I ate or didn't eat were very carefully selected. These were selected by a friend of mine who practices non-traditional medicine, though I full trusted him and still do. He is a gifted individual, and if you take the time to listen to him you can gain a great deal of knowledge. 

One of the most important things I learnt from my friend was to understand the health of my stomach. What what microbes were living in there and how it effected my health. There were things I could and should not eat. One of the should not's were wheat products, though buckwheat or hrechka as we all know it in Ukraine is not related and is fine.

When it comes down to the number of different factors, the most important one that few talk about in diet or lifestyle change regimes is the most normal and one that can make sense to everyone. In order to loose weight, not only do you have to have a healthy diet that doesn't screw up your natural body functions; you must also find a way to be more active – burn more calories than you consume and the only real way doing this is to become aware of both your caloric expenditure as well as your caloric intake. It is only when the later is lesser than your expenditure of calories will you see a loss in weight. In the long run, the only way to loose weight and keep it off is a lifestyle change. That change for me came in the form of making better food choices and becoming more active.

A different mode of commitment

Clearly my friend is willing to cut out beer and bread, though it is more than that. It comes down to making selection of different foods. I am far from an expert in this realm but I do know from experience that when I am more active physically, I don't crave, what we can call -”bad foods”. Those are the ones that we prepare in bad ways, and not so much in the way they are in their raw form. My friend is on the right track, but unless you don't get out and move, things aren't going to go well for you in the long run.

He asked me for an approach that I would recommend, and this will vary from every individual though I believe that he is more or less in control of what we call our working day – very much like I am – so I will recommend the following and what I have found works for me. He will have to do a little bit of research to determine his BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate though I have sent him in the right direction with that link for understanding, but you won't have to do the calculations that is what you have a BMR calculator for. In addition to his BMR he should also know what his ideal BMI or Body Mass Index number is currently and what he should be aiming for. I still have a long way to go to reach my ideal BMI, and my goal is for that to happen sometime next spring to early summer.

Based on a great deal of reading, and self examination, I became to understand that the most important fact was caloric expenditure versus caloric in take. There is no other way for this to work in a metabolic process. After all our bodies are nothing but big chemical plants that try to process what we put into them! If we consume a great deal of empty calories that do not contribute to your body's operation, then we are clearly not heading in the right direction. In short you have to maintain the proper balance between what you are consuming, making sure that you are getting the protein, vitamins and nutrients your body needs as well as the carbohydrates needed.

Since I have practically eliminated all processed foods from my diet, there is seldom a time that I have a craving for something. I treat myself to things I like on occasion, but I make sure I don't over do it. There are plenty of tools online that can help you understand your caloric intake, when my friend or anyone else starts to understand that and really how much you really need to eat, and how much exercise you need to do in order to slowly but steadily loose weight that is when the real changes start to happen. It was my understanding of these two elements that lead me to experimenting more in the kitchen, because I realized that eating healthy food didn't mean that it couldn’t or shouldn't taste good.

Human food not fish bait

Went out for my walk this morning and it is very clear to me that autumn is definitely here to say, and what follows this season is the one many of us dread, while others make the best of winter. As I returned home I walked around the back of the house, picked some of the Swiss Chard from the garden, and a few of the yellow cherry tomatoes, one of those to items would become a part of my breakfast, which I had been thinking about during my walk. Today it would be something totally experimental, and therefore in my books fun. I wanted something warm, filling and good for me, on this what had turned into a cloudy and rainy Montreal day.

Some childhood memories

When I was young there were two uses for corn meal, one was for eating and the other was as a bait for carp fishing. Anytime I cook up Mămăligă or what the Hutsuls in the Carpathian mountains would call Banosh, conjures up some great memories of spending time with my father in the kitchen, be it because we were making breakfast together, or because I knew that we would be using that mămăligă as bait for fish, a type of fish that most of North American's simply didn't understand, nor seemed to care very little about as a food source. Somehow, there is a stigma about eating fish that are bottom feeders, though this is really selective discrimination, because while carp dos fit into this category of fish, no one seems to have a problem with eating bass, cod, halibut or sole. 

 

For anyone who has ever fished pound for pound a carp will put up one heck of a battle once hooked. Over the years that my father started fishing for carp in Canada, even before I was a twinkle in his eye, he understood that mămăligă could serve as bait for these fish. Over time the method of preparation of it as fish bait varied, from ensuring it was a gummy paste that would hold it's form around the fairly large hooks, or a combination of cooking it with cornstarch and baking it into like a one centimetre thin pancake. The later method seemed to work much better and held its form better than any of the other methods I remember us using when fishing for carp. 

 

In short mămăligă to me is what many others in the English speaking world would call polenta. The way I have developed to cooking it over the years for human consumption is much different than its preparation to be used when fishing for carp, but it might also get you hooked. Though my father's method seemed to serve its function well, because we would catch some one to two dozen carp during the fishing season, where probably just as thrilled of our mămăligă, until they realized they were hooked, as I am when cooking it now with a totally different purpose in mind.

The goods and process

Unlike banosh, I used to make while still living in Ukraine, mămăligă and polenta are both prepared on a water based liquid which could be a vegetable or other broth, or in many cases simply water. Polenta is primarily corn meal however, I like to do a few different things with it other than simply cook it up and eat it as a porridge, and that is what I did this morning.

There are plenty of different types of polenta from slow cook to quick and ready in a very short period. I happened to have just enough for an nice wholesome meal. While we haven't hit any sub freezing temperatures in Montreal yet, there is this certain dampness that is starting to permeate our lives and this being the case, I decided this morning that I would be using the oven as part of my brunch creation. I turned the oven up to 375 degrees Fahrenheit before I started the prep of all my other ingredients. Remember, timing is extremely important in the execution of any project – and this includes cooking. In doing so it would and a bit of warmth to our kitchen along with the fragrance of something that would get my olfactory glands working and ready to enjoy a meal well deserved.

The other things included here on this day are simple things, as I have posted in places, that I love simple foods that anyone can cook and not something that will break your bank.

Unlike some things that take a long time to prepare, polenta even the slow cook type can be fulling cooked in between 6-8 minutes from my experience. So today we have no long or short cook parameters. I had a lovely wholesome meal in about 35 minutes total, and I don't mind spending the time because I find preparation of food to be a healing and meditative process.

Olive oil – about a table spoon

Polenta – corn meal – 1/2 cup

Yellow onion – 1 medium - yeild about 2/3 of a cup diced

Swiss Chard stems – about 1/4 of a cup chopped into 1/4 inch pieces

Turmeric – 1/4 teaspoon or to colour and flavour

Eggs – 2 medium

Unsalted butter – about a table spoon

Cayenne pepper – just a smidgen

Basil – fresh leaves about a tablespoon when finely chopped

Before having started to cook my polenta, I diced up my onion and cut off the stems of the Swiss Chard which I had picked from the garden. In a six inch diameter cast iron skillet, I started cooking the onions in about half table spoon of olive oil, nice and slowly, they would continue to cook later together with everything else in the oven. Shortly after adding my polenta to the boiling water I added the stems of the Swiss Chard to the now softening onions. I could see how the natural dies of the chard began to effect the colour of the onions. It only took about two to three minutes to that point, once the two ingredients had somehow come together naturally, it was time to turn off their heat source.

It is such experiences that help us understand now our ancient ancestors began to understand how to colour the cloth that they had began to weave into clothing could be changed by the natural dyes in certain plants. Many of us take too much for granted in this day and age, and as a result we make big problems out of those that should not exist at all.

Just to the point before when my polenta was about half cooked I emptied the cup or so that I had with the remaining liquid into the mixture of my onions, chard and turmeric. I mixed all this up ensuring that it was all one nice mass, the polenta becoming that kind of more of an orange colour then the yellow of the turmeric. While mixing the ingredients together I added the other half table spoon of olive oil, knowing that this would be going into an oven and wanting to be able to separate it all from its cast iron baking vessel.

With my wooden spatula I carefully hollowed out two little trenches, or maybe hen holes would be a more appropriate term as I would be laying one egg into each of these. Once I broke the egg shell and place the egg and its yolk in the first hen hole, I could see how the latent heat was cooking the egg white. I repeated the process with the second egg, and then like a mother turtle covered my eggs with the polenta from around the sides of the skillet. Once I was ensured that they were covered and safe from the demons of the oven world, I placed my dollop of butter between those two little mounds and topped it off will a little cayenne pepper.

Into the oven it went! And baked for for just about 18 minutes at max. Had I wanted runny yolk eggs, 12 minutes would have been sufficient. In any case, experiment and have fun in your kitchen. Don't be afraid to try new things. New foods, new spices; something simpler in our very complicated world.

Hummus with a bit of a bite...

Yesterday as I was writing up my long story about how to use what was on hand I had a number of different types of beans cooking. The black turtle beans were to be used for dinner this evening, but the chick peas and white navy beans were going to experience a different fate.

They were both going under the rapidly spinning blades of my food processor, together with three cloves of garlic, some cold pressed virgin olive oil, and a few red hot chili peppers. Two to be exact!

And while I know all the hummus aficionado’s will lambaste me for not including tahini, I believe in using what is on hand and not running around the face of the planet to satisfy tradition. We have to remember that not everyone has the budget or access to certain products.

I had cooked up all my pulses yesterday so this morning when I got up I really wanted to get those things into a more spreadable form. While I have read people who go t the trouble to take the husks off of all these legumes using all kinds of methods, from high pressure water, to giving them all a good going over in a bath of water in order to get really smooth hummus, that is a complete waste of time, and possibly are removal of a good portion of dietary fibre we should be consuming.

The main goods...

Primarily I cooked up a cup of dry chick peas and as a cup of white navy beans the other day. I put them in separate bowls and the following morning I figured that they would complement one another in two different ways.

Take a look at this data that the World's Healthiest Foods has compiled:

Food source – 1 cup or 164 grams	Nutrient and % DV	Nutrient and % DV	Nutrient and % DV	Nutrient and % DV	Nutrient and % DV
Chick peas Aka Garbonzo beans	Molybdenum 164%	Manganese 84.5%	Folate 70.5%	Fibre 49.8%	Tryptophan 43.7
White Navy beans	Fibre 76.4%	Folate 63.7%	Tryptophan 56.2%	Manganese 48%	Protein 29.9%

Though if you want to see just what else these two different types of beans pack, take a look for yourselves on the two different prime ingredients of my version of hummus. Over the last number of years we have been hearing a great deal about the importance of dietary fibre, so in putting together a hummus that you can use as a dip or spread on your toast in the morning you will be contributing in a positive way to your well being. Oh and yes, some other hummus aficionado will want to slaughter me for using garbanzo beans as opposed to real chick peas – apparently there is a difference, but I am certain they could never tell the difference in a finished product.

The bite...

While so many talk about the smooth texture of hummus, that is fine; though, somewhere along the line you may want to be going over the edge and and give your hummus a bit of a bite.

My way to do this was to to add nearly double the usual amount of garlic about two cloves to the pound of beans, as I never like hummus to simply taste like garlic. I can eat that raw without a problem. Though I did add two dried red hot chili peppers to the mix, to make sure it had a good bite. In this case the two different types of cooked beans come to close to two pounds, and thus I used four cloves of garlic.

While some people have some chopped parsley with their hummus I decided to do something different. Yes, you know you want to see a picture of this, but it won't happen right away, because of some technical problems I have been having lately with my phone... But I often throw things like steamed Red Swiss Chard and beet greens into dishes sometimes having interesting results as well as nutritive benefits. With what I have left in my garden at this time of year and with frosts just around the corner I will be using these for a soup in the next day or two, so none of that in today's hummus.

Under the blades

So what is it that we have here that is going under the blades to be turned into a puree of sorts? As I mentioned earlier, I will be listing long cook ingredients first. The were for the record:

Long cook ingredients

Garbanzo beans or chick peas – one cup dry

White Navy beans – one cup

As I mentioned the softness of beans will be attributed to the length of time that they cook, so take your time cooking those two types of beans. You can do them in tandem in two separate pots, or one at a time. They both have different cooking times, to soften them up, but it is all up to you. Don't be afraid to be in the kitchen and start learning about how the foods you prepare for yourself cook – time, temperature and the effect both of those have on the produce you are preparing to feed yourselves!

Once these are cooked and nice and soft, they will all fall victim to the blades of your food processor, together with the other ingredients that are not cooked at all.

Virgin olive oil (cold pressed) two table spoons

Garlic – four cloves

Dried Red Hot Chile Peppers – two whole de-stemmed

Lemon juice – one freshly squeezed

Execution

I eye ball about two table spoons into my food processor, then I drop both the garlic and the red hot chili peppers into the food processor while pulsing it. My desire is to get those two ingredients with a bit of a bite mixed in well with the oil. In turn I slowly alternatively add both type of beans trying to ensure that they become a paste. This was the first time using this particular food processor with this volume of beans, and there were a few times that I had to take the top of and push some of the surviving beans down closer to the centrifugal forces of the rapidly spinning blades. Ensuring they were torn asunder and that they became part of what we call hummus.

It was during these moments of removing the top that I would drip in some of my lemon juice, adding a bit more fluid to the mixture and lending it some viscosity. Within about ten to fifteen minutes my hummus was ready. It was time to clean up and enjoy the fruits of my labour.