On Barbecue

"A term used in the West Indies for dressing a hog whole."

     -- Samuel Johnson's Dictionary 

Oldfield, with more than harpy throat endued,

Cries, Send me, gods, a whole hog barbecued.

     -- Alexander Pope

3-ALARM BBQ SAUCE

Why pay for store-bought when you can make your own? This recipe, adapted from Lonnie Gandara's 365 Great Barbeque & Grilling Recipes (HarperPerennial, 1990), has been a "go-to" for me for years because it is simple, good and easy, with just four ingredients: ketchup, maple syrup or honey, garlic and cayenne pepper. And it is adjustable for heat: you start with 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper for the basic recipe, and ratchet it up by up to three more 1/4 teaspoons to a full teaspoon for a blazing three alarm fire, as you like it. The garlic and the sweetness can also be adjusted to taste.

You can use the sauce to baste in the traditional manner in the last fifteen minutes of grilling. The more the "sweet" in the sauce, the more the caramelization which will occur.  Or serve it alongside your grilled pork, beef or chicken to add that extra special zing, for example, on a hamburger. It works great too mixed in with the grilled and slow cooked pulled pork for sandwiches, which is on this year's 4th of July menu.

3-Alarm BBQ Sauce

1 cup ketchup (Heinz organic is our ketchup of choice)

3 T pure maple syrup (or honey)

1 T minced garlic (three large cloves is our preference)

1/4 to 1 t cayenne pepper (we like 3/4 t total--red pepper flakes can easily be substituted by grinding a quantity in the coffee grinder and spooning out the desired amount)

Add the garlic, cayenne and maple syrup to the food processor or blender, and puree. Add the ketchup and combine. Use immediately or store in the refrigerator covered for up to a week.

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.

New Year's Eve Broiled Curried Shrimp

This recipe is adapted from "Florence Fabricant's Grilled Cumin Shrimp" in The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins. That recipe uses, among other things, 1 t. ground turmeric, 3/4 t. ground cumin, and 1/2 t. ground coriander per pound of shrimp. I didn't have enough turmeric to use that combination, so I substituted a sweet curry powder from Penzeys Spices for all three to good effect. For hot curry lovers, that works splendidly, too.

Broiled Curried Shrimp

4 T unsalted butter

2.25 t sweet curry powder

.75 t salt

juice of half a lemon

1 lb large shrimp, shelled and deveined

1. Place an oven rack in the top position and preheat the broiler on high.

2. Melt the butter gently in a saucepan. Stir in the curry powder, salt and lemon juice and mix thoroughly.

3. In a shallow broiler pan arrange the shrimp in a single layer and pour the butter mixture over the shrimp. Toss to coat.

4. Broil about eight minutes, rotating the pan 180 degrees after four minutes.

Serve the shrimp with the sauce next to some rice with some steamed broccoli spears for a very easy, very colorful, very fast and very good meal worthy of a holiday, or any day.

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.

Sour Cream Blackberry Pie

I had no intention of making this. The blackberries were on sale, half off, and they were enormous. So I bought three packages, just over a pound, for three bucks. And they sat there in the refrigerator, screaming at me, "Make something with us already!"

So my first impulse was to reach for the Project Love Bethesda Cookbook, Volume III, courtesy of my cousin Ruth, in Iowa Falls, Iowa. And low and behold, there was the recipe, and I knew I had to make it because it also called for the left over sour cream which also has been waiting to be used up.

This is NOT a super foods recipe. It has fresh fruit in it, and some oat bran, which I used in place of the called for bread crumbs for the topping, but other than that, we're just talking fresh fruit delivery device here, that's it. But when you try it, you'll agree you've just had a slice of heaven. And for all you Sheboyganites out there, I guarantee it will remind you of the sour cream coffee cake we used to get from the bakery down by Prange's, and so? Same unique combination of sweet and sour, the German way. Mm. Mm. Mm.

Sour Cream Blackberry Pie

Filling:

1 cup sugar

1 cup dairy sour cream

3 T flour

.25 t salt

18 oz. fresh blackberries, washed

1 unbaked pie shell (or make your own, as the lady of the house did for me)

For the topping, mix together in a separate bowl:

.25 cup oat bran

1 T butter, melted

2 T sugar

In a medium bowl, whisk together the sugar, flour and salt, and the sour cream. Drop the berries into the unbaked pie shell prepared for the oven, and spread the sour cream mixture over the top. Sprinkle with the oat bran topping and bake at 375 degrees F. for 40 minutes.

Allow the pie to cool down completely before serving, or the filling will not hold together and ooze out all over the place. Really good ooze.

Quick Chicken Stock for Soup

A big bunch of rapini on sale means you've got left overs after you've made my Italian meatloaf. And leftovers means soup, which I consider fundamental to the menu everyday, despite the comments of a young French visitor to Michigan a few years ago who scoffed at me saying, "Soup is for old people!" Hot liquids have been shown in studies to satisfy and turn off the hunger impulse, which makes soup, as well as hot liquids like green tea, a daily imperative if you are trying to watch your calories.

Soup from scratch is easy, but requires a little planning. The plan always begins with the cheapest chicken I can find. The right price is about 79 cents per pound, and the right quantity is about five pounds. But I usually buy fifteen or twenty pounds and throw the chicken in five pound flats into my freezer for future use. With five pounds you can make copious amounts of broth quickly, and better and much cheaper than the best broths and stocks found on the shelf in aseptic packaging.

I use a poultry shears to cut the chicken into individual pieces as necessary, and I layer them skin side up in a large stainless steel roasting pan. Under the broiler they go for about fifteen minutes, and then on bake for about 45 minutes at 350 degrees F. Roasting the chicken first intensifies the flavors, and when it comes out it goes right into the crock pot on low for about eight hours, covered in fresh, clean water. Alternatively, you can use a large dutch oven with a heavy lid in a gas oven set on warm for eight hours if you prefer. Don't forget to scrape the roaster pan clean into the crock pot or dutch oven. Every extra bit of the caramelized stuff just adds to the flavor of your broth.

At the end of eight hours, scoop out the chicken from the crock pot into a large stainless steel stock pot. Then strain the broth from the crock pot through a colander or sieve into heatproof bowls and allow to cool a while before refrigerating overnight. In the morning you can easily skim off the hardened fat from the surfaces leaving some very fine broth behind. Use this to start your soup, in combination with an equal amount of fresh water.

Back to the chicken in the stock pot. Using your poultry shears, cut up all the chicken into pieces, making sure to cut the bones in half. Cover with two quarts of water, bring to a boil, and simmer on the bubble for at least one hour, two if you've got 'em. The marrow of the chicken bones will produce a second batch of broth which is creamy and gelatinous. Strain and cool as with the first batch, and supplement with equal parts water when making your soup. The chicken meat, by this point, has had it. It won't even satisfy the cat, so just pitch it.

You can get much fancier in the making of broth by adding onions and garlic and other vegetables to the roasting pan to make your broth more complex if you wish, but for people in a hurry this bare bones method works very well without too much fuss. And did I mention how cheap it is?

Italian Meatloaf

Wow. What a revelation this was after preparing it for the first time this evening. So full of flavor, almost sweet even, which was surprising because the usual meatloaves made with ground turkey just don't have any zing, and for this one I also used bitter greens.

The idea for it started to come to me when I saw the rapini on special today. I remembered how my sister-in-law in New Jersey at one time had served up some hot and sweet Italian sausages the old world way with sauteed rapini, otherwise called broccoli rabe. But instead of sauteing the rapini with the onions and the garlic in the oil, it seemed better to me to skip the saute altogether and incorporate all these raw into the meat mixture. The result was amazing. The boy said, "Dad, you could make some money with this one."

That'll do, for me.

Italian Meatloaf

1 egg, beaten in a large mixing bowl

1 T extra virgin olive oil

2/3 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese

.5 cup oat bran

1.25 lbs. ground turkey

4 T tomato paste (.25 cup)

.5 cup onion, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, finely chopped

4 oz. rapini leaves and heads, finely chopped

.25 t black pepper

.5 t fennel seed

.5 t crushed red pepper flakes

1 t salt

1 t sweet Hungarian paprika

1. To the beaten egg, add the oil, cheese, oat bran, tomato paste, and turkey. Gently mash with, you guessed it, ye olde trusty potato masher, until thoroughly mixed.

2. Add the black pepper, fennel seed, crushed red pepper, salt, and paprika to a coffee grinder. Pulse until fine, and add to the meat mixture. Mash in until mixed.

3. Then add the rapini, garlic, and onions. Mash to blend in.

4. Heat the oven on bake to 375 degrees F.

5. Load the mixture into a well-greased glass loaf pan, or into a non-stick loaf pan. I used a non-stick gold finish loaf pan from Williams Sonoma with good results.

6. Bake for about 50 minutes until an instant read thermometer stuck in the middle of the loaf reads 180 degrees F. Use a heat-proof silicone spatula all the way around the loaf to loosen it a little and turn out onto a plate to cool for five minutes. Slice like bread and serve with your favorite tomato sauce on top, or with ketchup dontcha know, and a nice spinach salad on the side. That's livin!

The Bees Knees of Honey

The darker the better, as in buckwheat honey, because the darkest honeys contain the most antioxidants.

We like a brand called Some Honey, which markets raw, natural, unadulterated buckwheat honey in 5 lb. jugs from Wisconsin for about $13 at Fruitful Yield stores in Illinois. The aroma is distinctive, oddly reminiscent of a barn, which is why we jokingly refer to this stuff as Illinois cow shit honey.

Steven Pratt points out that honey "contains at least 181 known substances, and its antioxidant activity stems from the phenolics, peptides, organic acids, and enzymes. Honey also contains salicylic acid, minerals, alpha-tocopherol, and oligosaccharides." The latter "increase the number of 'good' bacteria in the colon, reduce levels of toxic metabolites in the intestine, help prevent constipation, and help lower cholesterol and blood pressure."

Pretty impressive qualities, courtesy of the bees.

Pratt recommends 1 to 2 teaspoons multiple times per week. We like it on toast, in tea, and on baking day in a bread recipe.

Butternut Squash, Sage and Lentil Soup

Family from Provence visited and brought along some lentils du Puy, the world's finest, and Mr. Wenger kindly shared some of his hefty butternut squashes with us . . . time to make some soup with these memorable gifts!

Baking squash is easy. Wash them in cool water. Slice them lengthwise and place them cut side down in a large oiled broiler pan. Bake at 350 degrees F for an hour and twenty minutes, until a knife passes through easily. Let them cool on the counter, scoop out the seeds and strings and discard. Then spoon out the flesh to use and/or store. Bada bing, bada boom. Just like downtown.

Butternut Squash, Sage and Lentil Soup

6 cups chicken stock

2 cups, firmly packed, baked butternut squash

.5 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 cloves garlic

1 dash cayenne pepper (aka 1/8 teaspoon)

.5 t ground sage leaf

1 t salt

.75 cup lentils, washed (if you don't have the French variety, domestic green lentils will work)

1. In a large covered stainless steel pot, simmer the lentils in the broth until tender, about 45 minutes.

2. To the reservoir of a blender, add the garlic cloves, cover and puree. Then add some squash, and broth from the pot, and puree. Add the oil, cayenne, sage and salt and puree some more. Add the rest of the squash, more broth if needed, and puree until combined and smooth.

3. Pour the blended mixture into the soup pot, stir and heat until bubbly. Serve with some nice buttered toast and an apple.

Soup makes me happy. Mm. Mm. Mm.

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.

Yogurt

As proof of its status as a super food, Steven Pratt cites evidence that yogurt plays a role in improving a wide range of problems from cancer, to lactose intolerance, allergies, high cholesterol, inflammatory bowel disease, diarrhea, vaginal and urinary tract infections, obesity, and helicobacter pylori infections, which are involved in gastritis, ulcers, and cancers. It's the bacteria in yogurt which do all this work, and it's important to eat yogurt which has as many live active cultures as possible.

Our favorite brand, Stonyfield Organic Plain Fat Free, has no less than six different strains of live active cultures, and costs less than four dollars per quart. When I buy a new container, I always try to make extra batches from it with my yogurt maker using some fat-free milk because at the recommended cup consumed per day, one person can go through two quarts per week. Our Salton brand yogurt maker turns out a quart each time I use it, and it has been chugging along now for over three decades, saving us tons of money while providing an excellent source of calcium and protein as well.

Yogurt is really easy to make, too. Just heat your milk to between 180 and 185 degrees F and then let it cool to 120 degrees F. I use a cheap instant read meat thermometer with good results. Drop a teaspoon full of fresh yogurt in each 7 ounce reservoir and stir in the cooled milk, cover, place in the yogurt maker and cover with the lid. The yogurt maker "cooks" the yogurt by keeping it at a constant temperature somewhere between 105 and 122 degrees F. After ten hours you simply remove the containers and chill them before use.

My number one way to use yogurt is as a key ingredient in a smoothie, but it can be used to make dips and salad dressings, or as a substitute for sour cream, or to make yogurt cheese to stand as a substitute for mayo.

Green Tea

Like all things "super food," I did not come to green tea naturally, nor did it become a habit "just like that" because I read about it somewhere and decided it was the smart thing to begin drinking. I worked up to it gradually, to the point now where it is a part of my routine which I actually enjoy.

That's what all habits are, things which are routine which you do because you enjoy them. Good habits are not established overnight. And bad ones aren't broken of a sudden. I quit smoking over the course of a month one summer by drinking 1.75 liters of Bombay Sapphire Gin. Ten years later I stopped drinking booze while recovering from the after effects of a particularly nasty stay in the hospital because it was making me a fat slob. How people get to the point of making such decisions is as variable as their number. But in my experience what mattered was getting to the point of that intangible inner movement of the soul where one simply decides "enough of that." In other words, you have to get to that place and time in your life where you have really got to want to change something. Nobody can do that for you, nor can anyone else get you to that point. You have to come to it and want it for yourself.

For me, breaking a bad habit lead me to tea after dinner. At first it was herbal tea of one kind or another, without caffeine. At the beginning I think I was drinking five or six cups of the stuff in the hours before bed, just to have a glass in my hand. What this did for me was enormously important because it spelled death to the old patterns. As a consequence, I stopped the input of a tremendous number of useless calories. I naturally lost weight. Without alcohol to interfere, I slept better, which meant I lost more weight (you burn calories even while you sleep). I had more energy, to the point where this "morning person" now makes a good show of productivity also in the evenings.

Another thing hot tea does for you which is much underestimated is sabotage the hunger reflex. If you want to curb after dinner snacking before bed, hot tea is the way to do it. Any hot liquid will do this, which may be why so many people also fail to eat a good breakfast. The first thing I do every morning is make a hot cup of coffee, and I can go for hours without feeling hungry afterwards.

Green tea is not an "herbal" tea. It derives from the same plant as black teas. And "it's the antioxidant flavonoids in tea that give it its health-promoting power," according to Steven Pratt. Green tea is especially high in these, and its consumption is correlated with lower blood pressure, effective blood sugar management, reduced body fat, healthy skin, prevention of cancer and cataracts, and resistance to viruses, inflammation, and allergens. Pretty potent stuff for such a small, inexpensive package.

Not all green tea products are created equal, of course. Some, frankly, remind me of the smell of a freshly mowed lawn in my cup. Yuck. But not the Good Earth brand of green teas. I especially enjoy the decaf version blended with lemongrass in the evenings. The caffeinated version is also excellent, until two in the afternoon. Try them. I think you'll like them.

Flaxen Oat Bread

Two of three I baked today, one in a clay baker.

When I was a boy I'd wake up on Saturday mornings to the smell of fresh white bread baking in the oven, just one of my mother's many talents on routine display. When I'd finally come downstairs I'd find her in the kitchen with the loaves on the breakfast table, smearing melted butter across their already golden brown tops. There they'd glisten in our cozy Wisconsin home on a cold January morning, just begging to be sliced, and made into French Toast. Perhaps the memory of it is more vivid because of the sun streaming in the windows from a cobalt blue sky today, but I'm guessing it was the whole package made special because mom was at the center of it, the choreographer of our lives. No one will ever love you like your mother.

Shortly after she died in September 2008, a book arrived in the mail, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois (St. Martin's Press, 2007). I've been baking bread ever since. The following recipe is my adaptation of their recipe for oatmeal bread. Unlike them, I let the dough rise only the one time and in the greased pans I bake them in. I also bake all the loaves at once, and freeze them after they have been cooled and sliced. You can modify some of the ingredients from their original recipe as I have below, by using 2% milk, buckwheat honey, and flax, among other things, in favor of the super foods. Her highness loves it.

Flaxen Oat Bread

1.75 cups lukewarm water

1 cup 2% milk
2 T canola oil

.5 cup sugar, light or dark brown sugar, or buckwheat or clover honey, or maple syrup

2 T yeast

1 T salt

6 T ground flaxseed meal

1 cup oat bran

1.5 cups whole rolled oats

5 cups unbleached all purpose flour

1. Combine the water, milk and oil in the bowl of your KitchenAid Mixer.

2. Add the sugar, yeast and salt to the bowl and mix using the triangular head. Add the flaxseed meal, oat bran and whole oats and mix for a couple of minutes to allow the oats to soak up the moisture.

3. Scoop into the flour with your measuring cup, tapping with a butter knife and scraping cleanly across the top, and add one cup at a time allowing the mixer to incorporate the flour for at least a minute for each cup. I find that as you approach the fifth cup it takes longer to incorporate, and I move the bowl up and down as needed to keep the added flour from poofing out the top.

4. Scrape the dough off the hook into the bowl with a silicone spatula, and scrape the sides of the bowl, too.

5. Grease your baking pans (I use glass bread bakers) and then grease both hands with the Crisco. Grab a grapefruit size wad of dough and manipulate it with your hands and shape it to fit your pan, and drop it in.

6. When all the pans are full, I put mine in the microwave above the stove to rise, where the preheating oven to 350 degrees F below helps the bread rise. It takes about 45 minutes to rise.

7. Then bake in the oven at 350 F for about 40-45 minutes and when done turn out onto a wire rack to cool. I like a longish bake as opposed to a shorter one.

This bread is moist, and likes to be thoroughly cooked and thoroughly cooled before slicing.

Fiber-Packed Morning Oats

Come, says Puss, without any more ado,

'tis time to go to breakfast; cats

don't live upon dialogues.

-L'Estrange

Readers of this blog know that oats aren't just for breakfast anymore. We eat them twice a week at dinner in Basil Pesto Sockeye Pie, which is a super food grand slam all by itself. But let's face it, oatmeal for breakfast is probably the best opportunity we have on a daily basis to get this important super food.

Oats are classified among the foods primarily responsible for providing soluble fiber to the body. Other common foods doing so include peas, beans (like pintos), barley, prune juice, plums, berries, bananas, apples, pears, broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, and onions. The importance of soluble fiber, which is fiber which dissolves in water, is that unlike insoluble fiber, it ferments in the gut and produces short chain fatty acids which do a veritable host of important things for you.

Short chain fatty acids help control blood glucose levels, working on both the pancreas and the liver. They nourish the cells lining the colon walls. They suppress the synthesis of cholesterol and reduce levels of LDL and triglycerides. They increase the colon's acidity which in turn protects the lining from polyp formation while improving mineral absorption. Increased acidity also stimulates production of crucial elements of the immune protection system and improves the health of the colon's mucosal layer which helps inhibit inflammation and irritation.

As you can see, the health of your gut doesn't just make you happy in the toilet. It affects your over all health, touching on issues as diverse as diabetes, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and compromised immunity generally. You can improve your odds against these by making soluble fiber a daily habit. And oatmeal for breakfast is a fast and easy way to start doing that. The basic recipe includes quick oats and oat bran, which can be supplemented from day to day to keep it interesting and boost the levels of optimum nutrition. To accomplish that I always add some kind of berry and an ounce of nuts, and often some cinnamon and a tablespoon of raw wheat germ and/or ground flaxseed meal. As listed, the ingredients in the recipe below provide about 15 grams of dietary fiber. Everyone needs 25 grams per day, men even more. Eating this sort of breakfast gets you well on your way each and every day.

If you have more time, use whole oats and simmer them on the stove for about six or seven minutes. For a really delicious form of oats, try the steel cut variety toasted in a cast iron pan in a little butter and then cooked in milk on the stove for about thirty minutes, stirring constantly. I buy my oats in all their forms in bulk at Apple Valley stores, and I buy organic if they've got them.

Fiber-Packed Morning Oats

.25 cup quick oats--2 grams dietary fiber

.25 cup oat bran--6 grams dietary fiber

1 cup water

dash of salt

stir into a bowl and microwave for about two minutes

then add:

.5 cup fresh blueberries (or 1/3 cup dried cranberries)--2 grams dietary fiber

1 oz. (=.25 cup=30 grams) walnuts (or 1 oz. almonds)--2 grams dietary fiber

1 T raw wheat germ--1 gram dietary fiber

1 T ground flaxseed meal--2 grams dietary fiber

dash of cinnamon

sweetener if desired (I use Splenda)

stir and add a little water if necessary, and microwave if needed another minute or so

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!