Happiness is fair weather for the harvest

 If weather be faire and tidie, thy grain

Make speedilie carriage, for fear of a raine.

-- Thomas Tusser

Happiness is beans, beans the magical fruit

 A nutritionist shares the ‘underrated’ longevity food she eats every day to boost her immune system :

According to a 2022 study published in the journal PLOS Medicine, swapping out red meats and processed foods for legumes, whole grains, vegetables can increase life expectancy by more than a decade for people in their 20s or 30s. ...

In fact, the American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association recommend eating legumes as an alternative to animal proteins to help lower the risk of cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Happiness is the five pillars of a longevity diet

Whole grains like corn, rice and oats (complex carb)

Greens

Tubers, including potatoes and yams (complex carb)

Nuts

Beans (complex carb)

 

More.

Happiness is oats in England, if you are a horse

 

A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. 

-- Samuel Johnson

Happiness is crop rotation

 

 

If you sow one ground with the same kind of grain, it will produce but poorly.

-- Francis Bacon

When a superfoods breakfast is hard to arrange because you're in a hurry, try simple toast

Whole grain toast, slathered in raw honey, topped with ground cinnamon.

Three superfoods just like that.

The toast is loaded with fiber, the honey with antioxidants, and the cinnamon lowers glucose, triglyceride and cholesterol levels.

The Arable

Lo, how the arable
with barley grain

Stands thick, o'ershadow'd;
these, as modern use

Ordains, infus'd, an auburne
drink compose, Wholesome,
of deathless fame.

-- Philips

Buckwheat Yogurt Oatcakes

For about two months, I've been avoiding wheat on most days. Saturday night pizza has been the only exception. Otherwise I'm relying on less grain in the diet overall, using oat bran and oats as before but in smaller quantities, substituting brown rice pasta and corn tostadas for wheat pastas and wheat flour tortillas.

There's reason to believe that wheat is a major contributor to small LDL, which in its turn is suspected as a prime culprit in cardiovascular disease. The usual cholesterol panel you get at your annual physical tells you absolutely nothing about particle size, and doesn't even really measure LDL. It's a calculation, not a measurement.

So when I got the results of a special blood panel back in 2008 and found out my supposedly pretty good cholesterol numbers revealed many small LDL, I started to look into the subject more deeply. Most interesting has been the clinical work of a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, cardiologist named William Davis. His book, Track Your Plaque, has interesting dietary recommendations which frequently dovetail with the super foods menu. And his blog keeps us up to date on all the latest developments. I'm looking forward to my next blood test when we'll see if my small LDL particle count has gone down.

Eliminating wheat isn't easy, especially if toast, sandwiches and wraps, tortillas and pasta play a large role in your diet. And Saturday morning pancakes! So here's a recipe I love, in moderation, which the lady of the house adapted from "Whole Wheat Buttermilk Pancakes" by Marcia Beachy in the More-With-Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre.

Buckwheat Yogurt Oatcakes

.5 cup plain fat-free yogurt

.5 cup 2% milk

2 T canola oil

1 egg

.5 cup buckwheat flour

.5 cup oat flour

1 t baking powder

.5 t baking soda

.5 t salt

1 T ground flaxseed

1. Combine the yogurt, milk, oil and egg in a bowl and whisk together.

2. Combine the dry ingredients in another bowl and whisk in the wet ingredients for about a minute.

3. Fry on a lightly oiled griddle.

Makes about eight pancakes.

Lentil Barley Soup With Paprika and Rapini

I'm forever making soup with lentils and barley because they are super for you, inexpensive, taste good, and cook quickly. And you can marry them to a variety of herb and vegetable combinations to make healthy eating more interesting from day to day.

Sometimes it's sage and butternut squash, other times oregano and diced Italian tomatoes, or rosemary, bay leaf and parmesan rind with a pinch of cayenne or crushed red pepper flakes. Sometimes I'll leave out the barley, sometimes I'll use cooked leftover long grain brown rice instead. Soup is flexible.

In this recipe I use a little sweet Hungarian paprika with chopped rapini, otherwise known as broccoli rabe, a relative of the turnip family, a dark green leafy vegetable loaded with nutrition and a unique flavor.

When thinking soup, think three steps: the boil, the sweat, and the finish. The boil is where the "hard" cooking occurs, in which you avoid adding the more delicate ingredients which will suffer for the experience. The sweat is for softening the base vegetables like garlic, onion, carrot, and celery. In the finish, you add your herbs, spices and showcase ingredients to heat them through and simmer for a shorter period.

Lentil Barley Soup With Paprika and Rapini

3 quarts prepared Quick Chicken Stock

1 cup lentils, washed (French green lentils du Puy hold up best)

1 cup organic hulled barley, washed (use pearled barley if you must)

3 cloves garlic, pressed

1 large onion, diced

3 large carrots, peeled and diced

.5 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 t salt

.5 t black pepper

1 heaping teaspoon sweet Hungarian paprika

.5 cup tomato paste

4 oz. chopped rapini leaves and heads, washed

1. Add the lentils and barley to the chicken stock in a large stainless steel pot, bring to a boil, and bubble on the boil gently about one hour, until the barley is tooth tender.

2. Heat the oil over low heat in a heavy sauce pan, press the garlic, chop the onions and carrots, and saute these together, covered, over gentle heat, about ten to twenty minutes, stirring now and again, until the onions are translucent and the carrots softened. Let rest covered off the heat.

3. Wash and dry the rapini, accumulate 4 oz. of leaves and heads and chop up finely.

4. To the cooked lentils and barley, add the salt, pepper, paprika and tomato paste. Stir and adjust seasonings to your liking. Then add the onion and carrot mixture and stir. Bring to a boil and simmer for fifteen minutes, and then add the chopped rapini and simmer for ten minutes more.

It's a pretty soup to serve, with little green, orange and white colors bobbing in a reddish brown sea. Perfect for today's blizzard in Michigan.

Vila's Banana Bread

I love this recipe as much for its simplicity as for the fact that it comes from my mother-in-law. It's on an old, yellowing, 3 x 5 card in her delightfully unmistakeable script. The style of the list of ingredients and instructions is terse and to the point. It's all no fooling around, because she had places to go, and people to see. "This is your favorite mother-in-law calling" is how she addressed me whenever I happened to be the one picking up the phone. I'll never get to hear her say that again. She passed away unexpectedly recently, at the respectable age of 83.

The recipe is wholly lacking in super foods in its original form of sugar, butter, eggs, bananas, baking soda and flour. But add some chopped walnuts, dried fruit like cherries or cranberries, and substitute some whole grain flour for the all purpose unbleached variety and you've got a passable super foods platform going. And a potassium platform, to which topic Steven Pratt devotes over three pages in his SuperFoods HealthStyle, ranking bananas in the middle of the list of potassium-rich foods with 422 mg in a medium sized one. Walnuts have 124 mg in one ounce. When you consider that you need 4700 mg of potassium daily for controlling blood pressure, balancing the body's acidity and alkalinity, and preventing osteoporosis, every little bit helps.

Recipes from Vila are keepers for another reason: she was a discerning judge of character. Not long after making our first acquaintance, she spied a piece of religious propaganda in my possession while seated next to her in the backseat of a car, the title of which had something to do with finding true happiness. After we got underway she non-plussed me with the question, "Have you found true happiness, John?" The tone of her voice was more the knowing tone of adult skepticism than of unalloyed innocence. She already had me pegged.

Blessed with copious amounts of serotonin, one couldn't fail to like her. She was easy to talk to, and her company a pleasure to keep. She never changed, and neither did I. "Cheer up, John" she regularly told me throughout over thirty years of our relationship. And if she could talk to me now, I'm sure that's what she'd say, adding "What I have done you also will be able to do."

Vila's Banana Bread

1 cup sugar

.5 cup butter

2 eggs well beaten

3 large ripe bananas mashed

1 t. baking soda

2 cups flour (one of which can be finely stone-ground whole wheat flour)

.75 cup chopped nuts (walnuts preferred)

.75 cup chopped dried cranberries or other dried fruit (optional)

1. Preheat the oven on bake to 350 degrees F.

2. Cream sugar and butter.

3. Add eggs and bananas.

4. Add sifted flour and soda.

5. Add nuts and mix well (and fruit if using).

6. Pour in greased loaf pan and bake approx. one hour till done.

Ground Flaxseed Meal

Flaxseeds are the second person of the whole grains super food trinity which includes oats and wheat germ. Just a tablespoon or two each day goes a long way. Steven Pratt calls them "the best plant source of omega-3 fatty acids," in the form of ALA, the plant analogue to the wild salmon we so zealously value for its rich stores of the same acids in the form of EPA/DHA. Omega-3 fatty acids are important for cardiovascular health, and for cellular health generally throughout the body, especially in the brain.

As an insoluble fiber (fiber which does not dissolve in water), ground flaxseed meal contributes to a shorter transit time of food through the body, and just two tablespoons a day provide four grams of the suggested daily intake of twenty-five grams, or 15%. On top of the ALA, you also get protein, iron, magnesium, potassium, and, listen up ladies, lignans, the latter thought to help prevent and/or treat breast cancer.

Incorporating it into the diet is easy. You can add it straight to your morning oatmeal or other cereal, include it in a smoothie, or in cakes on the griddle. In fact, if you bake anything requiring oil or butter in the recipe, you can use flaxseed meal as a substitute, using the ratio 3 to 1. In other words, if using ground flaxseed meal instead, triple it (A recipe requiring 1/4 cup canola oil will require 3/4 cup ground flaxseed meal instead). Recipes "tend to brown more rapidly," as the Bob's Red Mill package says. I frequently substitute part of the oil or butter needed in a recipe with the ground flaxseed meal and never notice the difference, not even in my homemade bread.

I buy my ground flaxseed meal at an Apple Valley health food store near our home in Michigan, where I always find it refrigerated. And that's how I store it at home. Otherwise it can go rancid. Choose Bob's Red Mill. You won't be disappointed!

Brown Rice, in the Microwave

In previous posts we have described the preparation of the pinto beans and the dry seasoning mix for Monday night Mexican style burritos. In this post we turn to the other elements used in the filling: brown rice and ground turkey.

Although raised in a "meat and potatoes" household in Wisconsin in the 60's and 70's, in our home today we rarely eat either. In place of potatoes, we eat brown rice, a super foods "sidekick" of the grain superstars oats, wheat germ, and ground flaxseed. Brown rice serves as a nice side dish along with simply steamed vegetables at a variety of meals. After it's cooked, you can stir in seasonings like fresh pesto to liven it up. And in a burrito, it functions as a filler to stretch the recipe. The notion that combining rice and beans is necessary to provide the body with a complete protein is now challenged.

The turkey in the final product we will describe is optional. We include turkey because it is another one of the super foods, which just also happens to add a taste kick reminiscent of the ground beef many people are accustomed to in a burrito. Because most beef today is corn fed, not grass fed, the amount of saturated fat in beef is much higher than it used to be, according to evidence presented in films such as "King Corn." Ground turkey makes a better substitute, in our opinion. And like the rice, it stretches the volume even farther. You can routinely find 5 lb. containers of Jennie-O brand fresh ground turkey at Sam's Club for less than two dollars a pound. I bring it home and divide the contents of the two containers into four equal parts and freeze them. It's not as lean as the turkey breast meat recommended by Steven Pratt in his books, but he's not a food Nazi, and neither am I!

Brown Rice, in the Microwave

1 cup long grain brown rice (do not rinse)

2 cups fresh water

1/8 t salt

1 T extra virgin olive oil

To a microwave-safe covered one quart casserole, add the rice, water, salt and oil, and give it a stir. Cover and place in the microwave. Set the oven for three stage cooking: 5 minutes on high, 20 minutes at 40% power, and 20 minutes at 30% power. When complete, allow to rest as is in the microwave to cool. Refrigerate if not using immediately.

The cooking power may have to be adjusted up or down, depending on the output of your microwave. For lower power countertop microwaves, try the percentages as described. For microwave hoods, start with 5 minutes on high, 20 minutes at 30%, and 20 minutes at 20%. If the power is too high, you'll get boil-over. If it's too low, you'll get underdone rice. Adjust accordingly.

Ground Turkey, Prepared

1.25 lbs. fresh ground turkey meat

2 T canola oil

Heat a large cast iron dutch oven over medium heat for two minutes. Add the oil and spread it around with a spatula, then add the meat. Let it brown for a few minutes and then turn the heat down a little. Take out ye old trusty hand-held potato masher and a hot pad and start mashing and stirring the meat as it cooks. (If you're using a fancy Le Creuset dutch oven with a finished cooking surface, don't use metal tools; they'll damage the surface). When it's all browned and nicely uniform in size, you are done!

At this point, you proceed with the combination of all the elements of the burrito filling, right in the cast iron pot, which we'll describe in the next post.

Basil Pesto Sockeye Pie

Wild Alaskan Red Sockeye Salmon in the 14.75 oz. can is acknowledged to be one of the cleanest and most potent sources of omega 3 fatty acids, calcium and protein. But did you ever open up one of those things? Eek! Its price is often compelling compared to the putatively dirtier, farm-raised fresh salmons, but how do you serve this stuff, skin and bones and all?

I came up with a solution, and you know it's got to be good if my young son looks forward to eating it. We have it twice a week! The best part is the recipe combines no less than 6 super foods in one neat package, 7 if you make the pesto with spinach. My mother's meatloaf was the inspiration, may God rest her soul.

Basil Pesto Sockeye Pie

2 eggs, beaten in a large bowl

1 can (14.75 oz.) Wild Alaskan Red Sockeye Salmon, drained

.5 cup Basil Pesto Sauce recipe

.5 cup Tomato Sauce, Semi Home Made

2 cups organic quick oats

To the bowl of beaten eggs, add the salmon and mash with ye old trusty cheapo hand-held potato masher until it no longer looks 100% disgusting. Stir in the basil pesto sauce and the tomato sauce. Then add in the oatmeal, mashing away, until thoroughly mixed.

Let it stand and soak while you do the following:

Preheat the oven on bake to 375 degrees F. Grab a 10" Pyrex pie plate and thoroughly grease it with vegetable shortening, like Crisco. Plop the salmon mixture into the pie plate and flatten it out using the potato masher. You can smooth the surface more finely to finish using a silicone spatula. Place the pie in the oven on the middle rack and bake for 35 minutes, checking that a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool for five minutes or so and slice it like pie. Serve with ketchup generously drizzled on top, two slices per adult.

Additional notes:

1) Canned salmon is often very high in sodium, containing nearly 1900 mg. per can, according to the label on the brand I buy. How much of this gets tossed out when you drain the salmon is not stated. Doctors often say a healthy adult should consume no more than 2000 mg. per day. You can reduce the sodium in this recipe if you need to by leaving the salt out of the basil pesto recipe (the teaspoon of salt in that recipe amounts to 2360 mg. distributed over approximately 1.25 cups, or approximately 944 mg. in .5 cup prepared pesto). Otherwise your minimum sodium intake per slice could be as high as almost 400 mg., plus whatever's in the ketchup and the Pecorino Romano cheese.

2) Your choice of oats is also important. I often use 100% rolled oats instead of quick oats to give the recipe a "toothier" quality. Since these take a little longer to "cook" when you make oatmeal, in this recipe you can help them along with a little more soaking time in the mixture (covered in the refrigerator) and an extra half cup of the tomato sauce. The added benefit is all the goodness of the whole grain.

Pesto

The principles of pesto are all the same: garlic and nuts, hard cheese and extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and the greens, traditionally basil, as in Basil Pesto. We grow our own basil because it's better, and cheaper, and after washing and drying the leaves, they are easily stored in freezer bags. But we inevitably run out, usually by Christmas, and then we have found that baby spinach is an acceptable substitute, which is just fine, because spinach is a super food.

And you can make other substitutions as well. For the traditional pine nuts, try walnuts, another super food, or almonds. And for the traditional Parmesan cheese, which should be grated from a solid wedge, you can substitute Pecorino Romano, to liven up what the spinach loses from fragrant basil. If you're adventurous, experiment with other greens, like Italian flat leaf parsley. I've even done it with dill! Whew!

At any rate, spinach, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, and nuts are all super foods, combined in a neat and delicious little package. Use it on some whole grain pasta, or in my famous Basil Pesto Sockeye Pie (recipe forthcoming!).

Basil Pesto (Baby Spinach Pesto)

2 cups fresh basil leaves, lightly packed (or baby spinach)

3 cloves garlic

.5 cup grated Parmesan cheese (or Pecorino Romano)

.75 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 T pine nuts, or blanched almonds (or walnuts if you like)

1.5 t salt

.25 t ground pepper

In your food processor, pulse the garlic and nuts together, then add the salt and pepper and some of the oil and pulse some more. Then add some of the basil and cheese and more of the oil and pulse. Continue until everything has been added, and pulse til creamy, but do not pulse minute upon minute because this can make the oil bitter.

Since I use this sauce .5 cup at a time, I immediately freeze the sauce in little Glad containers of that size, and defrost it gently on the counter before I cook.