Princeton Immersion, Thanksgiving, soup, and stuff

I went to Dr. Fuhrman's Princeton Immersion last weekend.  It was a wonderful trip for many reasons!  It was a great road trip with my friend Suz.  We stopped in Pittsburg to see my best pal Gail, sadly, only for a few hours.  I worked with a student for a day at Princeton which was very productive.  We visited with Suz's parents in Philidelphia.  And the immersion was fantastic.  It was jam-packed with lectures. Dr. Fuhrman is so energetic and interesting, you really can listen to him for hours.  Even better was the food.  This is the main reason I go, though I did learn a lot from the lectures.  I thought I knew it all by now, but one thing I get out of the in-person lectures is what Dr. Fuhrman is passionate about, and what is less certain scientifically.  It helps reinforce what the most important things are to keep in mind.  But the food!  It was the best I've ever had at one of these events.  I think that was in large part due to Chef Martin Oswald's contributions.  He owns a nutritarian restaurant in Aspen, Colorado!  (called the Pyramid Bistro).  He gave a talk on the last day and I have been having fun putting his tips into practice!  We got the recipes from the immersion and slides from his talk.  They are worth a lot!

So today I'm back from the holidays and putting some of my new knowledge into action.  My soup today has Indian spices and I cooked up the onion as Chef Martin described:  first you heat up a stainless steel pot until hot, then put the onions and garlic in.  They sizzle up, slightly brown, and then release their juices.  You don't need oil, and they still gain a nice flavor.  Fun, it worked!  I did that with the leeks, celery, collards and kale too.  Then the pot was looking pretty burned and I thought, this will take forever to clean up.  But then I did the mushrooms the same way.  Well, they release so much liquid that it just ended up cleaning up the pot.  When they were done, the pot was clean.  ha!   a nice accidental discovery.  My soup was just my usual pile of things that I found in the co-op or my freezer.  I soaked beans, red himalayan rice, lentils, and purple barley overnight, and started cooking them in the morning.  Then cooked up the onions, garlic, celery, leeks, mushrooms, even the collards and kale, like Chef Martin described.  Added them to the pot one by one.  Oh I cooked up a festival squash in the oven, then added it to the soup after it cooled.  Oh yeah, and while cooking up the onion and other veggies, I added some graram masala and curry powder as they cooked.  Add the end I added some currants and fresh ground ginger.  It made for a nice hearty soup.  I froze most of it in single-serving containers.  yum.  I think I'll have it for breakfast every day.   I'll be doing my food prep at night this week.

My food plans for the week are soup for breakfast, and salad and roasted veggies for lunch and dinner.  The salads will be micro-salads made from lettuce, cabbage, maybe some broccoli and cauliflower, all cut up finely in the food processor; and topped with pomegranate seeds, grapefruit or orange, seed mixture, and flavored vinegar.  I love these.  The name should be changed from micro-salad to high-powered salad because it is so nutrient rich.  Tonight I'll experiment with roasted veggies.  I hope I can get this right.  I'm going to follow Chef Martin's advice to cover with foil at first so they essentially steam cook (before burning on the outside), then take of the foil to roast at the end.  I'll top with fresh herbs.  The veggies available now (that I like) are broccoli, brussels sprouts, carrots, onions, leeks, and sweet potato.  I'll do a little of each.  I am just learning to do this.  It would be nice to do a big batch and eat them for several days but I'm not sure how well they will keep.  I think I'll start off by just trying to do one day at a time and hope it isn't too time consuming.  I will add some flavored vinegar and mustard as marinate.  I got some fresh sage and rosemary at the co-op and have some basil from the garden in my freezer.  I hope this works!

Well, this post is long enough so I won't go into Thanksgiving much except to say I made apple sauce for my "brother-in law."  He had two 18 lb bags of apples!  holy cow, we had all the burners going:

It was fun though.  I nibbled a lot on the apples.  In fact, it was so much fun, we decided to make some for ourselves when we got home.  My batch has no sugar in it.  I'm not sure what I will use it in as I am not a great dessert maker or baker, the usual use of apple sauce.  But, heck, it probably could go in soup.

Here's tonight's quick salad I threw together, which is yummy, as salads always are:

That's got lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, blueberries, banana, small orange, seed mixture, and d'angou pear vinegar.

whew.  time to go fold laundry, then start tomorrow's food prep.  whew!  

Dr. Fuhrman's weekend immersion

The early bird pricing for Dr. Fuhrman's November weekend immersion ends on 9/15/11.  I'm going to this and I want my friends to go too, so that's why I'm telling you about it.  For purely selfish reasons.

hee hee

Can you find the picture of me in this post from diseaseproof?

I'll give an update this weekend about how my meal prep is going with my new gone-all-day-and-night schedule. I just had to make a few tweaks to the plan.

Glorious summer

Hi Folks,

Sorry I've been absent so long. This is going to be a busy, busy year. I've been taking pictures of various things I've been preparing, but just haven't had a chance to sit down and post! So I decided just to write a quick post here without pictures.

Well, the highlight of the last few weeks is that I went to Dr. Fuhrman's Health Getaway. That was so much fun. I was expecting to be inspired, to learn a lot, and to enjoy not cooking for a week! But it turned out even better than that. I had sooooo muuuuuch fuuuuun making new friends and gabbing at each meal and exercising with them every morning. It made an impact on me how important community is. It's hard for people to adopt this program of eating, because you feel so alone doing it. So that's a reason we need to support each other. I'll try to keep posting more and please feel free to write comments and questions.

Some highlights of the Health Getaway were: 1) great lectures, as always. I got reinforced how important it is to eat healthy to make up for the first 45 years of my life when I did not. Cancer takes about 30-40 years to show itself after exposure to all the harmful toxins in our environment and diet. Fortunately, a healthy diet works to reverse cancer, so we need to flood out bodies with phytochemicals and micronutrients to allow our cells to repair. Onions, mushrooms. garlic, and cruciferous vegetables work to reverse cancer. The lectures on osteoporosis, heart disease and diabetes were disturbing to me because of what he told us about the harmful effects of the drugs used to commonly treat these illnesses. Wow. It is shocking and upsetting to me how our medical system is set up to feed the pharmaceutical companies, rather than heal people. 2) A screening of the movie "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead"' but Joe Cross. This is a must-see and will be available to the public in about 6 months I think. 3) A lecture by John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. They are doing and planning great things to encourage people to eat healthy. You can watch these changes happen by visiting your local Whole Foods. 4) The great food, which I didn't have to cook. and 5) best of all, hanging out with my new friends. 6) Oh yeah, and I entered the talent show. It was a blast, well, not my performance, but watching and laughing with everyone else.

Foodwise, I've been enjoying simple delicious foods from the garden and co-op. Tonight I had onions, garlic, greens, and herbs from the garden cooked up in the pressure cooker for a couple of minutes, and added my yummy beans, a Tbsp of pine nuts, and a bit of spicy pecan vinegar. It was yummy! I've got lots of greens in the garden--collards, kale and chard, so am eating them every day, cooked or in smoothies. We also have eggplant that I sometimes steam and blend up with a Tbsp seeds, making a sauce to add to the greens. Here's another yummy thing I made this weekend: cabbage salad made with cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli (optional), cherries, grapes, apple, orange, and vinegar (d'angou pear and blood orange). Just throw it all in the food processor using the grater blade. This was soooo good with the cherries and grapes, like dessert! I've also been making smoothies with greens from the garden and yummy berries from the co-op. Add a little vinegar, lime or lemon to cut the bitterness of the greens. A note on the smoothies: I mix collard greens half and half with romaine lettuce. All collards is a bit too strong. I use about 2 oz of collards, 2 oz of romaine and 1/2 lb of fruit per smoothie (though I make a double batch at a time). That's about it right now, just eating lots of greens, beans, nuts&seeds, and fruit.