Cooking Classes Hugely Popular in the Cities
Cooking classes have recently experienced a big surge in popularity, especially in Sydney and Melbourne.
“In a quest to hone their skills in the kitchen and discover the joys of relaxation through cooking, Australians are attending classes in record numbers. Middle Eastern, vegetarian, mod Oz, you name it – there’s something for everyone. “
Australian Traveller http://www.australiantraveller.com/news/cooking-schools-around-australia
As a cooking teacher and provider of cooking classes on the sunshine coast, at Sacred Chef Cooking School , I have seen first-hand the upsurge in popularity and have a few theories why this is so. I think some Australians are a little sick of the passive nature of dining out as a consumer and want more out of the experience. Combining a learning structure with the enjoyment, that cooking and eating can offer, provides a far more interactive recreational pursuit. I also find that cooking class attendees actually enjoy eating the food more, as they take pride in their involvement in its creation. The whole thing is a much more give and take adventure, rather than just sitting back and stuffing your face.
I personally derive a great deal of enjoyment and learning from my own interaction with my cooking class attendees, as they share their knowledge and experience with me, and not just about food either. A cooking lesson can be a microcosm of a person’s whole approach to life. I recently had a delightful Irish woman, of a certain age that is traditionally associated with wisdom, and she was more of a tonic to me than any self-help book I have read of late. The Irish have a way of expressing common truths that go straight to the heart of the matter. We may not immediately recognise it, but cooking and eating are quite intimate activities, and the sharing of these are rewarding experiences for all.
I would imagine a few people may still be disinclined to attend a cooking class, in case they ended up with some insufferable bore or pedant teacher, perhaps remembering the worst of their school years. I would only say to them that my own approach to teaching is based on respect for all individuals, irrespective of their talents in the kitchen, and indeed a lack thereof is why they would be attending anyway. Keeping a relaxed ambience is important and working with what people have got, rather than what you may wish they were capable of, is a good way to ensure successful outcomes for all parties. Having some tasty fun!
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE YOUR SACRED CHEF COOKING CLASS GIFT VOUCHER
Take Control of Your Diet
One of the most empowering things that you can do in your life is to take control of what you are eating. If you are eating a lot of processed foods bought in the supermarket, then you are not in charge of what goes into your body. How much salt and fat is inside that product and what kind of fat is it? How does the chemical balance, which has been put in place by the manufacturer to preserve that product, react with your own metabolism? There are so many variables to consider when you are not eating fresh food, and equally importantly, preparing it yourself.
Learning to cook and discovering the nutritional make-up of foods can really benefit you in so many ways, including losing weight and feeling more alive. Recently there have been huge leaps in the understanding of nutritional science and how foods are processed by our bodies. The importance of certain essential fatty acids, like omega 3, and redressing the imbalance of omega 6 essential fatty acids in our foods, with too much soy, grain fed livestock and vegetable oils – all rich in omega 6 – in our diets, which is often something like 40 times that of omega 3. We are generally not eating enough oily fish, nuts and seeds in our diets today.
What is the result of this? Too much omega 6 causes inflammation within our bodies and what are some of the chronic conditions this causes? Arthritis – inflammation of the joints; cardiovascular diseases – inflammation of the heart’s arteries; strokes – inflammation of the cerebrovascular; and there is speculation that depression may be caused by inflammation of the brain. Diet/ what we eat and how we eat is the most integral factor in our propensity to develop diseases. A lot of foods in the supermarket do not address this and their prime reason for existence is to make money for their manufacturers – food technology is about durability not nutrition.
Food is your best medicine, not some vitamin pill or pharmaceutical – these are again mainly about making money for their manufacturers – otherwise they would be free wouldn’t they? My advice is take charge of what you eat and how that food is prepared. You will find it can also be highly creative and you may derive some pleasure and pride in the act of cooking a great meal – which is healthy and delicious. You can also save money along the way.
Cooking classes are a great way to discover nutritional information whilst having some tasty fun. My Sacred Chef cooking school, here on the sunshine coast, focuses on preparing food that is both healthy and delicious – you will also receive a take home recipe pack with additional nutritional notes and articles, which I wrote for magazines like WellBeing, Conscious Living and Eco Living Health Aware; plus you receive a free health magazine too!
©Sacred Chef
Every class is full of healthy information and great recipes.
www.nofreudnoprozac.org for more information about omega 3
Why We Eat What We Eat
As a cooking teacher, who regularly meets people through my cooking classes, here on the sunshine coast, I get to see what a cross-section of society likes to eat and feels comfortable with on their plate. It is interesting to observe shared traits amongst the groups of people, who pass through my cooking school, and it gets me thinking about the whys and why nots. I wonder why most of us tend to eat from a similarly small selection of meals, despite the fact that we now have available in our supermarkets a far greater choice of ingredients than ever before. I think about what food represents, in terms of its psychological ramifications within our lives, and whether these settings can be adjusted.
It seems to me that many of us retain attitudes towards foods, which were garnered in the family home when we were children; and that the apple generally falls close to the tree. If mum and dad liked certain foods and cooked these foods more often, then for many people these influences remain strong throughout their adult lives. A bit like the children, who upon leaving the nest, build their own homes in the same street, suburb or town as mum and dad, keeping extended family close. Food like shelter is a primal need and is intimately tied up with our notion of emotional security.
As we expand the concept of family outwards and it becomes our cultural heritage, food choices again are inextricably linked to our regional and national identities. Here in Australia we can celebrate the rich diversity of our many multicultural strands and this happens most often through experiencing the foods and culinary dishes of these transplanted cultures, like Italian, Thai and Chinese foods – made available by the restaurants and takeaways, which have been created by the sons and daughters of foreign shores.
We are enriched by experience when we allow ourselves to move beyond the close confines of who and what we think we are. Just as our human species is strengthened biologically when we mate and breed outside of those whom we call our own. The cross fertilisation of genes, ideas and even recipes can make us all healthier, smarter and our lives definitely tastier. Our predominantly Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, have unfortunately, cursed many of us somewhat with limited culinary antecedents and if we do not break out of these restrictive walls, then we are condemned to eat poorly and to miss out on the more sublime flavours that life has to offer.
What and how we cook is often a bit like how we make love, we learn from experience a few things and then tend to groove these moves; somewhat unchangingly. Primal activities are a bit like that, not something that we muck about with too much, and what and how we eat falls into this category. We eat to refuel, to derive energy and sustenance from food, but eating is also a profoundly sensual activity. The nerve endings and taste buds inside our mouths feel every morsel as it slides about, and we experience our food in full technicolour, sensorama – if we are lucky enough to be in touch with our full five senses of taste, smell, sound, sight and feel.
So eating is a very personal activity, it is close to who we are, and yet we often eat in public, unlike other intimate activities like sex and going to the toilet. This sharing of the eating experience in communal structures, like cafes, restaurants and workplaces is a ritualised cultural activity. We bring our own mores, likes and dislikes, to this public performance of consumption. I am always reminded of the recounted experience of migrant children in the Australian school yard at lunchtime, as the contents of their lunch boxes were reviled by the Anglo kids because of their peculiar differences. As children we often fear what is not customary and uniform, and unfortunately many of us remain in this childish state, particularly around our foods and what we consider acceptable.
When people form intimate relationships, like marriage and close friendships, they are often confronted with the need to move beyond their culinary comfort zone in a bid to cement the stability of their relationship. The desire to share tastes and flavours is sometimes paramount to couples and their ongoing sense of emotional security. I regularly hear about the compromises being made by one partner or the other, and the effect that the changes to their diets has upon them, both positively and negatively. In fact this can be a major motivating impetus in getting people to come along to my cooking classes. A bit like going into relationship counselling I suppose, with both parties hoping that the inspirational influence of a neutral teacher may magically impart some shift in the culinary status quo of their relationship; and it sometimes does.
Seafood is a commonly held culinary ‘no go zone’, among many of the people who attend my classes. I hear again and again the refrain, “Oh I didn’t know that seafood could taste this way!” Whether they had an unfortunate early experience with a bad cook or perhaps have actually never tried the said example of fish or shellfish, due to the fact that mum or dad likewise had avoided the experience and did not cook these critters at home, the fear based result was the same. We often work out who we are by declaring the things we know that we dislike, “Oh I don’t eat fish, or oysters, or mussels.” I may have made this decision when I was 6 years old but I unquestioningly stand by it today. The walls around this individual are close and in yours and their face, perhaps it makes them feel safe. Eventually however there comes a time when the individual feels somewhat cramped by their stated dislikes, and this is when they often find themselves in one of my cooking classes, either alone or with their partner.
I speculate that the adolescent or young adult who has consciously rebelled against the tastes and predilections of his or her parents, usually has developed a wider and more far-reaching culinary diet – they still may not be able to cook but they may consume more different foods. This individual has broken away from the invisible ties that bind the obedient child to the emotional strings surrounding mummy and daddy. We are all on variable time lines regarding this necessary rebellion, some do it early and some very late, but eventually we all need to break the moorings and swim free; and perhaps then taste the sea.
Sacred Chef Cooking School on the sunshine coast.
©Sacred Chef
House Therapy – Discovering Who You Really Are at Home.
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE A SACRED CHEF COOKING CLASS GIFT VOUCHER
Sacred Chef Cooking School Features in Sunshine Coast Daily on Friday 2 Sept 2011
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE YOUR SACRED CHEF COOKING CLASS GIFT VOUCHER
Sacred Chef Cooking School will feature in Sunshine Coast Daily on Friday 2 Sept 2011
Recipes and information about the Sunshine Coast cooking school with the Sacred Chef will be featuring in their lifestyle section of the newspaper.
CLASSES AVAILABLE SEVEN DAYS A WEEK!
Cooking Great Cuisines from Around the World – a 4 week series
The Sacred Chef cooking school on the sunshine coast, is the perfect place for hands-on cooking experience in our well equipped cooking studio, here in Maleny. Fun learning in beautiful surrounds, overlooking the Glass House Mountains, and even better you get to eat what we make in relaxed comfort after the class.
For a great day of sensuous experience and stimulating learning in South-East Queensland, the Sacred Chef cooking school is the ideal outlet for those that love their food and cooking. You will be introduced to local produce, made here on the sunshine coast, like silky smooth buffalo milk cheeses and other great organic ingredients. Coffees, wines and exotic fruits are all to be sampled at the Sacred Chef cooking school in Maleny.
Classes are:
- 2 hours in the cooking studio hands-on
- apron & knives provided
- leisurely lunch follows each class
- fine wines by the glass
- take home pack of recipes & notes
- articles & food philosophy
- complimentary magazine
- goodie bag
- cooking class attendees at lunch
Imagine a day where you get to learn all these wonderful new recipes, with some helpful guidance, laugh and cry (in the presence of a few onions), share stories about kitchen triumphs and disasters in the company of fellow cooks, produce seven sensational dishes, before sitting down to one of the best lunches you have ever had. A glass of wine in hand, the delicious aroma of freshly cooked culinary creations and the appetite of the truly deserved.
Purchase a Sacred Chef Gift Voucher for your cooking class and arrange a suitable time & date when you are ready!
The perfect foodie gift!
5499 9280
Sacred Chef Vegetarian Cooking Class at the Real Food Festival Saturday 10 Sept 2011
Maleny’s premier cooking school
Cooking school only one hour’s drive from Brisbane
Sunshine coast hinterland cooking school for budding masterchefs
Cooking school for him and her on the sunshine coast, south east Queensland
The Sunshine Coast Cooking School presents the Sacred Chef
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Journal Weekender Interviews the Sacred Chef
Quest Newspaper’s Journal Weekender interviewed the Sacred Chef about his Vegetarian Cooking Class as part of the Real Food Festival on 10 & 11 Sept 2011
When did you fall in love with food and cooking?
I remember being drawn to restaurants and exotic menu items as a child, trying things like snails and steak tartare when I travelled to Paris with my mother on a trip away. I had this desire to experience great food and was very aware of just how bad Australian food was in the nineteen seventies. I started cooking in high school, doing home economics – which was also a great way to meet girls at the time. I started in restaurants when I was seventeen and was soon the sous chef at Zorba the Buddha vegetarian restaurant in Sydney’s Taylor Square, in the early nineteen eighties.
What’s the first dish you can remember making?
I think something out of a Margaret Fulton cookbook – probably a spinach pie or a quiche. I know that I made so much butternut pumpkin soup in my early years, cooking in restaurants and cafes, that I stopped making it for about 20 years.
What is your background in vegetarian food?
I started at the Rajneesh Meditation Centre as the commune chef, moved to their restaurant in Taylor Square, managed their cafe in Oxford St Paddington, before moving to start Doc Dinkum’s Natural Cafe in Willoughby, Laurie’s Vegetarian Restaurants in Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Randwick & Bondi before starting my own vegetarian restaurant in King St, Newtown called Rude Rumbles.
What is your favourite vegetarian dish?
I am currently doing a lot of tapas – goat’s cheese and tapenade grilled crostini; roasted red capsicum salsa, buffalo mozzarella and rocket pesto pizzettes; leek and tomato Spanish omelettes.
I also love Thai salads with crunchy raw veg, glass noodles, mint, chilli, fresh lime and toasted seeds and nuts.
What do you think is the biggest misconception about vegetarian food?
That it is an either, or, situation, when in actual fact 95% of all cuisines are about preparing vegetables, with the cooking of meat and flesh generally being for special occasions. Traditionally most people could not afford to eat meat every night, and whether it be French, Italian, Lebanese, Japanese and so on, these cuisines are rich in recipes for the preparation of grains and vegetables. Now we know, that it is far healthier to eat a diet with a wide array of vegetables, legumes and grains, so it is in everyone’s interest to learn how to prepare these ingredients.
Our diet, unfortunately, reflects the industrial approach to food manufacturing we have taken in the west and we eat too much fast food because we are inundated by its advertising. We need to understand that market forces will not, and do not, take into account our required optimal levels of nutritional health, and we are paying dearly for it, in health costs in our hospitals; when it is too late. Heart disease and bowel cancer, are our top two killers, and they are a direct result of our poor diets, in conjunction with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles.
What’s the one thing you hope people take away from your Real Food Festival cooking class?
That preparing meals with vegetables is both easy and very tasty – that you don’t have to miss out on meat – rather you can add in lots of delicious dishes made with sensational vegetable produce. It is a mind set thing, more than anything else, we all get stuck in doing the same old things in the kitchen, that maybe mum used to do, and we need to realise that the world has changed. There are now hundreds of fresh ingredients available, that were not previously available in our parent’s generation, so we need to source good quality vegetables and try new ways of preparing them beyond meat and three veg. Cooking classes are a chance to tap into some information and inspiration, get enthused about being alive, eating, drinking and creating something beautiful.
Thanks Lisa!
Cooking school on the sunshine coast with the Sacred Chef, where everyday can be an opportunity to celebrate being alive!
Diet a Way of Life
The Greek root of the word diet is diatia, which refers to a way of life toward wellness, and is more than just a regime of eating do’s and don’ts. It understands the link between how you live your life and what and how you eat. Epicurus the Greek philosopher of BC 341-270 stressed the importance of eating with friends, and I personally know that when I eat with good friends that I eat with a greater degree of joy and dont eat as much as when I eat alone. Good conversation and the sharing of gratitude for a well prepared dish is the reason why, I think, that we first started eating out at friends places and restaurants in the first place. The level of noise in most restaurants in Australian cities has taken much of the joy of keen conversation away, above the ‘night club’ yell, “how’s the steak?” Where we eat and how we eat impacts on our digestion and therefore ability to benefit from good food. Dishes in restaurants have to be designed to excite and rise above the clamor of the hustle and bustle of busy eating houses, they are therefore usually rich and high in sugar and fats. How do you get noticed in a crowded room? By being extra spicy or so sensual that I melt in your mouth. The ambience within restaurants is part of a cyclical fashion trend and I am confident that it will shift again, away from the current din.
Cooking school on the sunshine coast with the Sacred Chef, where the ambience is perfect for conviviality and a life affirming pleasure in good food!
The Pleasures of Food
Pleasures of Food
By Sudha Hamilton
Published in WellBeing Magazine
I have always been passionate about food. It has, in fact, been a cornerstone of my existence. I recognised the signs early on, when I did not come off the bottle (alas breast feeding was out of vogue at this time) until I was about four years old, and I made quite a commotion about it then. That warm white milk spurting forth from that rubber teat was obviously a sensual and nourishing feed. Following that I remember a wonderful meal that mother used to make me, consisting of warm runny soft boiled eggs mashed up with torn crustless fresh white bread, the merest splash of milk and salt and pepper, mmmmm.
Ah food…it is a heady mix of psychological spells wound up in tasty matter. Foods that comfort us, foods that excite us and foods that calm us down. Our palate and our attachments to certain foods are I think all born of a time when we inhabited a yeasty humid world of milk sops and wet nappies. Textural considerations are of utmost importance when discovering dishes that provide us with inner sensual happiness: viscous soups and sauces, gooey eggs and soft steaming scoops of mashed potato, or balls of sweetened sticky rice and slippery steamed dim sum.
Eating food is pleasure and filling the empty tummy with something very scrummy is best. Pleasure. Is it a universal primary motivation? Or is it simply the avoidance of pain? Is hunger, once satisfied, the end of the matter? Or do we seek to enter that satiation by choosing just what we put in our mouths? The pursuit of pleasure: to achieve sensual gratification. Is it inextricably linked with our need for nourishment? Babies must have succour and must be touched to survive, and thrive to adulthood. Food in my opinion is not just fuel and not simply the sum of its parts. It is more than a list of kilojoules, fats, carbs and proteins. Like love it must be made pleasurable to do its work well.
Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) states: “The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together. The flesh receives as unlimited the limits of pleasure; and to provide it requires unlimited time. But the mind, intellectually grasping what the end and limit of the flesh is, and banishing the terrors of the future, procures a complete and perfect life, and we have no longer any need of unlimited time. Nevertheless the mind does not shun pleasure, and even when circumstances make death imminent, the mind does not lack enjoyment of the best life.” However, perhaps Oscar Wilde put it more succinctly when he said, “Pleasure is the only thing to live for.”
Has my passionate relationship with food ever got out of hand? Yes. I was a fat child for a couple of years, and I paid the price with my slim, bordering on acetic father, ridiculing me whenever possible about my new found weight. Lolly addiction was a real problem for me at this time, as my mother, who did not enjoy making cut lunches, would endow me with forty cents tuckshop money and I would invest it at the corner shop in a large white paper bag stuffed with mixed lollies. I would share these with my best friend at the time, and he would entertain me with half his lunch, which consisted of sliced white bread sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. So as you can see my flirtation with food as pleasure flourished a long time ago. Trips to the dentist, despite all that fluoride in the water, were far too common.
Appetite and control
Appetite – the desire to eat until one is full, or to eat a certain kind of food; to experience a particular feeling as that substance slides down your gullet. Control or denial – the decision not to satisfy that desire and to go without, or to distract oneself by exercising; having sex or working. Or to appease or tease, by allowing only one mouthful, or two or three mouthfuls, or just a homoeopathic dose of your bodies desired dish. The sins involving food and the bible’s condemnation of gluttony inhabit us culturally and permeate all realms of our western civilisation. The way fat people are ostracised in our communities and portrayed in popular media as sad laughing stocks, and perhaps we all secretly feel that our derision will inspire them to lose weight and return to the company of the slim.
Can you remember the power of the lolly? Or do you have children who have reignited your experience with this over whelming obsession with these sugared jewels? The startling variety of colours, shapes and flavours. Surely these are the building blocks of taste experience for us all, as we sit quietly on the footpath outside the local deli sucking upon that first lozenge of truth. Milk bottles; musk sticks; bananas and sherbets, cobbers, raspberries, snakes and jelly babies, just to name a few of these highly desirables. Of course these addictions were managed in a cloak of normality, whilst competing at sport and doing homework, but always at the core of the pleasure principle was the lolly… and for me pleasure was life. I remember going to visit my maternal grandfather who was a doctor and lived in another geographical state, and he had a huge jar of jelly babies on top of the fridge. I thought this was great as we didn’t have anything like this at home and he was a doctor after all. Such was the alluring power of the lolly that it permeated even the highest levels of society.
Later, working in a liquor store I came upon that same phenomenon again; but this time for adults. Shiny bottles of spirits and wines were their lolly equivalents. I could feel their hardly suppressed excitement as they fingered the bottles and read those colourful labels with gleaming tiny gold and silver medals stuck to them. Alcoholics; drug addicts and sugar fiends we are all dependent on the balance between our appetites and controls, and the psychology of our passions. What did the Buddha say, “that all life is suffering and suffering is caused by desire.”
What about the neurological pleasure systems in the brain? Michael A. Bozarth from theUniversity ofNew York’s Dept of Psychology says “Neurological research has identified a biological mechanism mediating behavior motivated by events commonly associated with pleasure in humans. These events are termed “rewards” and are viewed as primary factors governing normal behavior. The subjective impact of rewards (e.g., pleasure) can be considered essential (e.g., Young, 1959) or irrelevant (e.g., Skinner, 1953) to their effect on behavior, but the motivational effect of rewards on behavior is universally acknowledged by experimental psychologists.
Motivation can be considered under two general rubrics—appetitive and aversive motivation. Appetitive motivation concerns behavior directed toward goals that are usually associated with positive hedonic processes; food, sex, and wine are three such goal objects. Aversive motivation involves escaping from some hedonically unpleasant condition; the pain from a headache, the chill from a cold winter’s night are among the list of conditions that give rise to aversive motivation.”
Hedonism then appears to be something that we should understand. The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary defines hedonism as “belief in pleasure as the highest good and mankind’s proper aim”. Personally I have been a big fan of hedonism and have lived my life as hedonistically as possible. However, having been brought up in a Christian /Presbyterian household, where hedonism was given a pretty bad name, it was necessary to throw off the shackles of the church’s wowserism and to embark single mindedly upon the pursuit of pleasure. I imagine that many people reading this have felt similarly about their lives in terms of giving to themselves and grasping the true meaning of ‘charity begins at home’ – and in my case the kitchen.
One of the most fulfilling aspects of cooking that I have found is making up new dishes. When you are cooking everyday for hundreds of people, and although often making batches of the same dishes, it is in my nature to want to break out and try something completely different. I was at this stage in my own little restaurant cum takeaway and like many young people I found pleasure in novelty and variety. I had one particular customer, who by tacit arrangement, would receive whatever I could challenge myself to come up with. A dish or plate created right then and there with no prior thought, and as luck would have it, he would often arrive at the busiest possible time during service. I would be swearing sweating and smiling, and making haste with the pans. Usually the result would be rather good, and although frazzled by the experience it was ultimately rewarding. Creativity can be a hard task master, especially when you operate out of chaos. Cooking is however one of the few great arts that you physically put inside yourself, try eating a painting for instance.
So food has always been important to me and although when I first began cooking professionally I had not really recognised that, as I always thought that it would be something I would do until I found my true vocation. Cooking was not the supposedly glamorous job, that it is perceived to be today. Then, no, it was just another trade but I found it to be a very satisfying one. It was essentially creative once you had mastered technique, each day I would be challenged to come up with new and diverse dishes. Regular trips to the produce markets would have me coming across vegetables that I had never seen nor heard of. What does one do with a box of Kasava? Well here’s one fromAfricato get you started:
Kasava Cake
Ingredients:
3 cups (or 2lbs.) grated kasava or manioc root
1 cup shredded frozen fresh young coconut
1 12 oz. jar of Macapuno Balls
1/3cup evaporated milk
1 14 oz. can unsweetened coconut milk
1/3cup. whole milk
1/4tsp salt
1/2cup white sugar
3 eggs
1cup light brown sugar
1tbsp melted butter
Mix everything together, and bake in a buttered 9 X 13 inch pan for 2 hours at 325 degrees.
Other pleasurable delights…
Sudha’s Baked Spinach Pie
2 bunch field spinach washed and bottom stalks removed
2 med brown onions diced
½ cup strong white wine
4 large cloves garlic minced
1 Tsp ground cumin
1 Tsp ground coriander
2 Tbsp olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 cups fresh ricotta
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
2 free range eggs lightly beaten
1 cup chopped fresh basil
½ cup chopped fresh oregano
1 cup chopped walnuts
12 sheets filo pastry
½ cup melted butter
Sauté your onion, garlic spices in olive oil until translucent, cook in wile lastly before setting aside. Steam or blanche your spinach until just done immerse in cold water to stop the cooking process and then gently wring out excess water and chop into smaller segments and add a squeeze of lemon juice or a teaspoon preserved lemon rind finely sliced. In a large bowl mix together spinach, cheeses, egg, herbs, walnuts and your onion sauté and salt pepper to taste. I often add a little splash of a good quality soy sauce here and to most dishes really. In an appropriate baking dish spoon out your filling before laying sheets of filo pastry and brushing every second one with melted butter. Bake until golden brown in a moderate to hot oven. Serves 6-8.
Pumpkin and Pistachio Nut Soup
1 ripe butternut pumpkin peeled and chopped
2 large brown onions
1 Tsp minced fresh ginger
1 cup dry white wine (optional)
4 large cloves garlic minced
2 Tbsp olive oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
½ Tsp ground cumin
1 cinnamon quill
1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
½ Tsp ground coriander
1 cup peeled pistachio nuts
2 cups chicken or strong veggie stock
2-3 cups purified water
1 cup watercress
1 cup pouring cream (optional)
In a large heavy based saucepan sauté your onions, garlic, ginger and spices in olive oil until translucent adding your wine in a few minutes before they are ready. Add in your pumpkin, stock and cover with water and continue to simmer for at least 40 minutes. In a blender blend your remaining ingredients with the cooked pumpkin and onion mix, leaving your cream if desired to whisk in by hand at the end. Serve with a sprig of watercress, a few sprinkled sliced pistachios and a dob of sour cream and fresh black pepper.
Oven Dried Tomatoes
Doing these at home will fill your house with an irresistible aroma that will have you salivating against your will. Hedonistic terrorists could use this process in their battle against the forces of parsimony. This operation will take a considerable amount of time and consumes quite a bit of energy/electricity or gas, so you get maximum slow food brownie points and I recommend that you do a big batch at one time to conserve energy and because they are so delicious you will kick yourself if you only do a few.
Lots of tomatoes (Cherry Tomatoes or small Romas)
Corn of garlic
Bunch of fresh rosemary
Bunch of fresh oregano
Bunch of fresh marjoram
Salt and pepper to sprinkle
Set your oven really low to around 80 degrees Celsius. Slice your tomatoes in half or quarters depending on size but smaller is quicker, place on baking trays sprinkle with finely sliced garlic, chopped herbs and salt and pepper and bake or dry for around eight hours. Serve on fresh crusty Italian bread with the finest extra virgin olive oil and your favourite cheese.
Savoury Mediterranean Vegetable Muffins
I made these muffins recently to take along to a night of chanting for Guru Purnima day, an Indian religious festival celebrated by those in the Hindu faith. I took along a journalist friend, Chris, and he enjoyed them so much that he has been haranguing me ever since to include the recipe in one of my columns.
11/2 cups plain flour
2 cups SR flour
1 tsp baking powder
200g unsalted butter
Salt and pepper to taste
5 whole 60g eggs
1 cup milk
1 cup sauted chopped onion
1 cup roasted chopped red capsicum
1 cup grilled chopped eggplant
½ cup black olives pitted and chopped
1 cup pecorino grated cheese
1 cup crumbled fetta
1 cup chopped fresh basil
1 cup chopped fresh parsley
Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C. Grease muffin trays at least 12 muffin spaces. Sift flours, spices, baking powder into large mixing bowl and rub in butter to form a bread crumb like consistency – can do this in your mix master if you like. In a separate bowl beat your eggs, milk and add in cheeses, gently pour this into your big bowl of dry ingredients and fold remaining ingredients in to form raw cakey base glug with visible chunks of vegetable. You may like to stir in a further splash of extra virgin olive oil for consistency. Spoon into muffin trays and bake until golden brown and cooked through for about 40 minutes check with skewer.
Cooking school on the sunshine coast with the Sacred Chef
For more recipes and food articles www.sudhahamilton.com
What will you be doing this Christmas?
Heart of Gold
What will you be doing this Christmas? Will you be sitting down at someone else’s table or will you be dancing around your own kitchen in prayer for a tender bird or at least for the presentation of a sumptuous feast? Summer can mean hot times in the kitchen, often with the added strain of several seldom seen relatives out there in the living room staring uncomfortably into space. Again my advice is don’t over do it, keep it simple, most people are there for the company and good cheer, not for elaborate fine dining. Our warm weather suggests small amounts of food that zing on the palate. Things like dips and exotic chips, marinated olives, grilled seafood, crudités, and finger foods of all persuasions, are guaranteed to please, especially when accompanied by a superior liquid refreshment. May your mantra be – relax, enjoy and allow it to happen organically, meaning don’t impose too many uptight rules of engagement, give life a chance to unfold unpredictably, it’s the secret to actually having fun.
For more Sacred Chef summer madness click here
Kitchen gods and sacrifice
Excerpt from – House Therapy – Discovering who you really are at home!
By Sudha Hamilton
House Therapy is Sudha’s soon to be published new book.
The Kitchen
The Ancient Greeks, who gave us many of the founding principles upon which we base our modern societies – democracy; logic; philosophy; literature and poetry to name but a few salient examples, had a rich collection of gods and goddesses. Hestia was the goddess of hearth and home, older sister to Zeus and first born of the titans Kronos and Rhea – perhaps not as well known today as her siblings Demeter, Hera, Haides and Poseidon. This may have been due to the fact that she was swallowed first by her titan father Kronos, who in a bid to avoid being overthrown by one of his children, as prophesied, ate all his children, she was thus the last to be regurgitated, once Zeus had forced his father to do so.
The Romans also worshipped her in their homes and knew her as Vesta. The areas of responsibility for which Hestia was worshipped and sacrificed to, were most aspects of domestic life and in particular what we now call the kitchen. For it is around the cooking hearth or kitchen that a home or house builds up or out. Hestia was always toasted at the beginning of a meal in thanks for the hospitality proffered. She was probably where the early Christians appropriated their ‘saying of grace’ before dinner from.
Homeric Hymn 24 to Hestia (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th – 4th B.C.) :
“Hestia, in the high dwellings of all, both deathless gods and men who walk on earth, you have gained an everlasting abode and highest honour: glorious is your portion and your right. For without you mortals hold no banquet,–where one does not duly pour sweet wine in offering to Hestia both first and last. And you, Argeiphontes [Hermes], son of Zeus and Maia, . . . be favourable and help us, you and Hestia, the worshipful and dear. Come and dwell in this glorious house in friendship together; for you two, well knowing the noble actions of men, aid on their wisdom and their strength. Hail, Daughter of Kronos, and you also, Hermes.”
Interestingly Hestia was a virginal goddess and refused the suits of both Apollo and Poseidon. Perhaps this is where we get the separation of the sexual roles of the wife and mother in the home and the focus on providing nurture and hospitality instead. Hestia was seen as the giver of all domestic happiness and good fortune in the home and she was believed to dwell in the inner parts of every home. She was also the first god mentioned at every sacrifice, as she represented the hearth where sacrifices took place – this is the direct link to our kitchens today and the genesis of the sacred chef. There are very few temples of Hestia extant and this is thought to be because every home was her temple in the Hellenistic world. I think we can draw some intuition from this in our view of our homes being places of divine inspiration.
The kitchen has of late become a popular focus of interest, with TV chefs and groovy restaurants grabbing the public’s imagination. For House Therapy the kitchen represents our centre, our practical and instinctual selves. This is where we prepare food for family and ourselves. It is also often where food is stored in the refrigerator and pantry cupboards. Food is about survival and security. There is no bullshit about these things and the kitchen is a place where the elements of nature still regularly intervene. Fire on the stove and in your oven; water at the sink, earth in the bench tops and structure; and air in the extractor, fan forced oven and all around. You can be hurt in the kitchen if you do not pay attention to what you are about. Unlike the faux furies vented in the kitchens on TV, you can experience some real passions in these hot and pressurised places at home. You might be burning fingers and dishes, dropping scoldingly hot plates and crying bitter tears over chopped onions. The kitchen is where we show our real reactions to strong emotions, pressure in our lives and our appetites and jealousies.
Have a look around now at your kitchen, the colour of the walls and general lay-out of things. What is your first impression? What does it say to you about your instinctive self? Are you clinical or passionate? Are the walls white/neutral or vivid/strong colours? Is it large or small? Is the instinctual, raw and pragmatic you an important part of your life? Or is it hidden away or missing? The trend in studio apartment architecture now, to build them without kitchens and have neutered mini servery’s instead, is a reflection of a missing essential in sections of our culture. Stripping away the practical ability to fend for yourself by cooking your own food and becoming dependent on pre-prepared meals is symptomatic of us having lost our way along the journey. Is your kitchen well equipped? Can you cook? Do you enjoy cooking for friends, family and yourself?
Returning to the rich historical connection our modern day kitchen has with Hestia’s hearth, as mentioned earlier it was the place where the highly necessary ritualised sacrifices took place. These sacrifices usually involved a calf or some other domesticated animal and those involved with the sacrifice would share in eating the meat of the roasted animal. So the power of the sacrifice would be in the ritualised slaughtering of the animal in dedication to the goddess for a particular purpose – to bring good fortune upon whatever was so desired for example. Today the cook or cooks go into the kitchen, risking cuts, perspiration and burns, to prepare a celebratory meal for our friends and or family – Christmas, birthdays and other days of ritualised festivities. We may not consciously invoke Hestia or any other gods but the overall intention is the same, we wish to share good cheer with those we love and bring good fortune upon us all.
It is interesting to ask oneself what is true sacrifice and what does it mean in our lives today? When we think of sacrificing something, we tend to see it as foregoing or missing out on something so as to have something else. “You cannot have your cake and eat it too.” Which I have always thought was an incredibly stupid saying, because what is the point of possessing uneaten cake? A sacrifice I hear you say, perhaps a slice for the gods. Interestingly the Greeks and Romans would eat the cooked flesh of their sacrifice, offering the bones and fat to the gods and goddesses, but it was the life itself, that was the real sacrifice in my view. The word sacrifice means to make sacred, so whatever we offer up in dedication to the gods becomes sacred. Actually the word anathema, was the Greek word for laying-up or suspending something in wait for the gods, and it is has now taken on the meaning of something that is accursed, through its contact, down through the ages, with the jealous Hebrew god, Yahweh; the Christian god. Our language, and lexicon of words, have taken an interesting journey over the last four millennia, and it is no wonder we are all a little confused at times. So we could make a correlation between sacrificing something in our life and that thing, which has been sacrificed becomes anathema to us or accursed. How do you feel about the things you have sacrificed in your life? A person’s love; a relationship; a career; types of food; alcohol; drugs; sex; lifestyle; freedom? We do not live in a particularly sacrificial age, more of a ‘you can have it all’ age, but can you really enjoy it all and be present for entirely disparate things in your life? Do we appreciate things more when we make room for them in our lives? Perhaps sacrifice still has a part to play in our lives today, better sharpen those knives.
The kitchen is also a place of transformation, where base elements are turned into the gold of love and nourishment. Is your kitchen a space where magic like this happens, regularly or just on special occasions? Domestic kitchens have a great tradition throughout the West of being incredibly impractical, lacking preparation space and adequate and functional cupboards. This is now being addressed in more modern homes, as the passion is returning to the kitchen. I think that we suffered for a few decades from the ‘American wonder of white goods’ syndrome, where no home was complete without these wonderful space and time saving machines and that a mentality of faster was better grew up around them. Fast foods, sliced white bread, whipped cream in a can, all these travesties were accorded the haloed status of modernity and progress. When in actual fact they were soulless short cuts that ripped the heart out of good cooking. Yes we still do have a lot of gadgets in the kitchen but we also now understand that good food still needs dedication and application. Bread makers are great, but bread cooked in a wood fired oven tastes better and if it is naturally fermented sour dough even better. Espresso coffee from your home machine tastes a lot better than instant coffee.
Your kitchen is a place where you can practically respond to the basic needs of living. Is your kitchen letting you do this? Is your kitchen supporting you in feeling centred and secure in dealing with the vicissitudes that life often throws up? Are your knives sharp and well balanced? Do you have enough bench space when preparing meals? Does your stove cook the way you want it to cook? If not then you are letting yourself down and going around with a bloody great hole where your centre should be. As a member of the human tribe you need to be able to fend for yourself, and the kitchen can empower you to be grounded in the here and now. Not wafting around on the ceiling hoping for the crumbs of human kindness to drop your way.
Things we can do to transform our kitchen
As a chef, who has owned and managed a number of restaurants and cafes, I know all about kitchens and their design downfalls. First and foremost it is about space and in particular bench top space where most kitchens, especially older kitchens, are lacking. Storage space comes a close second and it is in these areas that a solid beginning can be made in transforming your kitchen from a frustration trap into a pragmatic pleasure dome. Cooking is never completely easy, if it is, it isn’t real cooking, in my opinion, there must be some blood, sweat and tears in every great dish but not too much. Unnecessary suffering is not on anyone’s menu by choice.
Buy an island bench if you lack bench top space and cannot easily create more, they are great and I have several of them, and you can take them with you when you move.
Sharp knives, that are also well weighted in the overall heft of the knife, can bring a smile to any good cook and I always say, “happiness is a sharp knife.”
Obviously kitchens need to be clean and cleaned regularly for all sorts of reasons, hygiene, health and happiness. Clutter in the kitchen causes chaos and calamity, food takes longer to prepare and the energy around it is bad.
Trapped dead energy, in the form of rotting and old produce in fridges and cupboards, does not augur well for happy kitchen gods and thus producing yummy healthy and nutritious food; so clean out and clean up.
©Sudha Hamilton
For more articles www.sudhahamilton.com or www.sacredchef.com
Sacred Chef Introduces Real Food Guide
Even though I have been studying astrology for over twenty years, when I look up at the night sky the clearest constellation to me is the “frypan, ” which tells me that cooking is pretty important in my life. It is my connection with the earth. When I am sharpening my knives on a stone & hefting my stainless steel frypan I feel that connection with an essential human activity that has been going on for millennia. There is in my experience nothing as grounding as cooking, an endeavour that places you firmly in the moment, & if you slip into day dreaming a sharp cut or burn brings you back smartly.
In this Real Food Guide, my fourth annual collection of recipes for WellBeing readers, I hope to pass on a few more yummy dishes that suit the winter months & perhaps inspire you to make a culinary difference in your life & in the lives of those around you. Feeding your tribe, family or loved one is an important pastime & the more you put into it, the better the outcome for all concerned. If life is moving too fast in your neck of the woods & there are not enough hours in the day to fulfil requirements & you find yourself skipping meals, eating takeway most days, & looking for quick & easy recipes then STOP IN THE NAME OF LOVE! Reprioritise & put the shared meal back up at the top of your list. Bowel cancer is now one of the biggest killers in Australia & New Zealand & what we eat, how we eat it & when we eat it, all contribute to the state of our gastrointestinal health. Take the time to slow down when eating & preparing food, as our bodies are not speeding up for technology’s deadlines, no matter how much money is involved.
The slow food movement is more than just some arcane gourmet trip, it is as much about good health as it is about great flavours. So make something with your hands, touch the earth, feel the coarse skin of your wooden spoon as it stirs the sizzling victuals in your frypan & smell the delicious aromas of cooking food. Get out of your head for a moment (without the aid of psychotropic drugs) & get into your senses inside your kitchen. Good food can be a true work of art, what other art form do you take inside your body?
Bon appetite!
©Sacred Chef
Ganoderma – Miracle Healing Mushroom
Heading: Miracle Healing Mushroom
Subheading: Ganoderma.
Mushrooms or rather Fungi are intrigueing organisms, with certain species being the largest known on this planet (covering hundreds of kilometres) & with more species of fungi (1-2 million) than any other.
Even more bizarrely, the mushroom has been seriously suggested as one of our true visitors from outer space, with the spores having travelled here aboard meteorites millennia ago. Perhaps those mushrooms with psychotropic properties really do have something to say to us. Certain species of mushrooms are also known to have great healing qualities & the Lingshi(Chinese) or Reishi(Japanese) mushroom, which is known botanically as Ganoderma lucidum is perhaps the greatest of these. Widely revered & utilised in Traditional Chinese Medicine for over 4000 years, it is probably the oldest species of mushroom to have been utilised medicinally. Lingzhi in Chinese has been translated to mean’ “herb of spiritual potency.” In Shen Nong’s Herbal Classic, dating back 2000 years & considered to be the oldest book on oriental herbal medicine, the Linghzi mushroom is ranked number one superior medicine of all 365 listed healing herbs.
Ganoderma is a bracket fungus, which in nature grows at the base of deciduous trees like the maple. It is however quite rare in the wild & is now cultivated commercially both indoor under sterile conditions & outside in controlled environments. It is the polysaccharides & triterpenes contained within Ganoderma’s fruiting body & mycelia that have shown to have efficacy in improving immune system functioning. Ganoderma lucidum is the only known source of a group of triterpenes, called ganoderic acids, which have a remarkably similar molecular structure to steroid hormones. Also contained within the mushroom are ergostol, coumarin, mannitol, lactones, alkaloids, unsaturated fatty acids & vitamins B1, B2 & B6 & a variety of minerals.
Numerous studies in medical institutions around the world have been conducted into the healing abilities of Ganoderma lucidum & it has shown a remarkable effectiveness in treating an amazing array of diseases & conditions. Western medicines desire to isolate compounds from nature so that they can be synthetically reproduced by pharmaceutical corporations have been frustrated by inconsistent results in the studies of the isolated ingredients within Ganoderma that were thought to be the active constituents. This leads many experts to speculate that it is the combination of these active ingredients that may be the answer to its magical healing qualities. Research has shown Ganoderma’s effectiveness in strengthening the respiratory system, with healing of the lungs & benefits to those with asthma & bronchial complaints. It is generally considered to be an excellent restorative, improving immune system functioning. It has also shown to be anti-inflammatory, antiviral, anti-parasitic, anti-fungal & anti-allergenic. Altogether a healing superfood of the highest order. Recent studies in Australia have included a clinical trial at the University of Western Sydney into the healthy maintenance of blood pressure, blood sugar & cholesterol levels for optimum heart function with the aid of Ganoderma supplementation. Also studies at the University of Sydney in its Herbal Medicines & Research Unit confirmed the presence of high levels of anti-oxidants.
In the preparation of Ganoderma extracts it has been found that the oil within the spores contains a greater presence of the active compounds that are thought to be responsible for its amazing healing properties than the body of the fruit itself & that there is a husk or spore wall around the oil within. When this husk is removed it allows greater absorption by the body of the active constitutes, recent break throughs in the extraction have now made this possible.
High quality extracts of Ganoderma are now available in supplement form & are beginning to be included as ingredients in teas & other beverage formats.
©Sacred Chef.
Appeared in Conscious Living Magazine.
Eco Living Health Aware Magazine
Cordyceps Stamina Mushroom
Heading: The Stamina Mushroom
Subheading: Cordyceps.
In the 1990′s a group of female, Chinese, distance runners broke world records in their events by considerable margins. The apparent ease of their wins attracted a great deal of suspicion in regard to possible illegal drug use, but what emerged was not a steroid or erythropoietin (EPO) tainted athletic performance rather a rediscovery of an ancient Chinese remedy centred around Cordyceps Sinensis. Cordyceps are very rare and unique fungi, also known in China as Dong Chong Xia Cao (“Summer Grass, Winter Worm”), it has been highly regarded and effectively utilised in Traditional Chinese Medicine for well over 2000 years. It grows in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, at an altitude of about 3,500 metres and can only be harvested in relatively small quantities. Its positive effect on increasing stamina was first observed by Tibetan shepherds, when their flock of yaks had consumed the fungi whilst eating the summer grasses and then proceeded to mate more vigorously than previously observed. In the wild it has a symbiotic relationship with a particular variety of caterpillars, which consume it and then become one with it on a cellular level.
What actually are fungi?
Fungi are a division of eukaryotic organisms, which grow in irregular masses, and are without roots, stems, or leaves; they are also devoid of chlorophyll or other pigments capable of producing photosynthesis. Fungi contain ergo sterol instead of cholesterol in their plasma membranes. They reproduce sexually or asexually (spore formation), and may obtain nutrition from other living organisms as parasites or from dead organic matter as saprobes. Fungi have a well-defined cell wall composed of polysaccharides and chitin; they can be moulds, yeasts, or dimorphic.
Cordyceps Sinensis is now being safely grown and processed to be available in capsule form, this process does not involve caterpillars. Its use in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) centres on its properties as a liver tonic and it stimulates the system encouraging greater stamina. Cordyceps has powerful active ingredients, which can help restore the normal functioning of the body, stimulate immune response, increases energy, vitality, and longevity. Recent research has shown that Cordyceps can improve peak performances during sports, and also has muscle-building capability. In TCM, Cordyceps has been used to help regulate blood pressure, strengthen the cardiovascular system, and improve sexual energy. Clinical tests performed at the Hunan Medical University have shown that Cordyceps significantly contributed to increased levels of libido in the test subjects. Further clinical studies, primarily with elderly patients with fatigue, showed that Cordyceps-treated patients reported improvements in their wellbeing, ability to tolerate cold temperatures, memory retention and cognitive capacity. According to the biochemical analysis of Cordyceps species it is noted that they contain interesting properties like Cordycepin, which has been used to create the pharmacological drug Ciclosporin – which is helpful in suppressing the body’s immune system during organ transplants. In 1950′s the chemical constituent of Cordyceps were determined by and a crystalline substance was isolated and named Cordyceps acid. This acid was later identified to be D-mannitol and further studies were performed to identify the constituents of the fungus. The chemical substances isolated were; ‘amino acids, steric acid, D-mannitol, mycose, ergo sterol, uracil, adrenine, adenosince, palmitic acid, cholesterol palmitate and 5α-8α-epidioxy-5α-ergosta-6, 22-dien-3β-ol’.
My own personal experience in taking a Cordyceps supplement was that it immediately acted on my liver and stimulated similar sensations to when I was on a liver cleansing program. I did then begin to feel greater levels of stamina in my day to day life and it encouraged me to be more aware of parts of my diet which were not in tune with a liver cleansing program. I would recommend a juice fast and/or a raw vegetable diet for a few days before beginning taking Cordyceps, to maximise its efficacy. It is also recommend, by TCM consultants engaged by the manufacturers, taking the supplement first thing upon awakening and last thing before retiring to sleep – two capsules a day drunk with plenty of warm water for the kidneys. Whether you are feeling run down and needing a potent natural lift or perhaps you actually are preparing for a marathon, Cordyceps could be the answer for you.
©Sacred Chef.
Appeared in Conscious Living Magazine.
Marine Phytoplankton Superfood of the Sea.
Heading: Marine Phytoplankton
Subheading: Superfood from the Sea!
What is it? Phytoplankton are single cell plants that inhabit the oceans of the world & are thought to be responsible for producing up to 90% of the Earth’s oxygen. Whales of course consume both plant & animal plankton in their diets. Recent nutritional studies are discovering that phytoplankton may indeed be a super-food for humans as well. Made up of many different micro-algae that are incredibly nutrient rich, phytoplankton forms the basis for all living life on our planet, through its vital role in photosynthesis. Their indispensable part in the carbon cycle is an indelible illustration of our holistic universe, with ancient dead algae over million of years forming fossil fuels like oil and coal, which when burnt produce carbon dioxide that is then transformed into oxygen by today’s marine phytoplankton. An ever repeating cycle of life.
If all life did indeed evolve from the sea as is theorised by science, there are signs within our physiology that provide a link to that origin, with the composition of human plasma (blood) and the fluid surrounding cell walls being remarkably similar to sea water. Diluted sea water contains almost the same concentration of minerals and trace elements as blood plasma and its sodium content matches that of blood also. Diluted sea water has been used in blood transfusions involving animals without any perceived adverse effects and there are calls for research into its use in humans. The micronutrients and electrolytes contained in phytoplankton are perfectly suitable for what our human cell membranes require when metabolising. What are our cell membranes made up of? Sugars, proteins and fats. Thus what we eat provides both the fuel that our cells need to function but also the very building blocks for their structure. A diet lacking in the necessary micronutrients will over time reduce effective metabolism and thus lead to disease.
What is the nutritional make-up of marine phytoplankton? The phytoplankton that we can now purchase is produced in sea farms or aqua-culturally and is pure micro-algae rather than cyanobacteria, which can be toxic. Within these micro-algae are a veritable cornucopia of nutritional riches – omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin B12, thiamine (B1), selenium, potassium, superoxide dismutase (SOD), zinc, vitamin E, vitamin C, iron, electrolytes, folic acid, magnesium, niacin (B3), calcium, arginine, beta carotene, chlorophyll, manganese, phenylalanine, pantohenic acid (B5), bioflavanoids, biotin, aspartic acid, alanine, boron, methionine, molybdenum, nucleic acids, phosphorous, gamma linolenic acid, glutamine, lecithin, tyrosine, pyridoxine (B6) to name most of them. The extraction processes used in these farms create a phytoplankton food product that is full of phyto-nutrients and sea minerals.
Good nutrition contributes directly to the function and structure of all the organs that make-up our bodies. As Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician who founded his practice on the principle of observation, said “let food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.” Every system within our body benefits from a balanced nutritionally rich diet, our immune system in fighting off colds and flu’s, our digestive system in providing optimal energy, weight management and letting go of wastes via healthy kidneys, liver and bowels, our nervous system effecting mental functioning, and our endocrine system for our skin’s health. Shiny hair, healthy nails, clear eyes, and restful sleep are all indicators of good health and are all influenced by what we eat and drink. Phytoplankton is the perfect food for healthy cell functioning and provides high levels of anti-oxidants for the maintenance of our bodies on this cellular level.
You know I was once very sceptical about all the positive health claims that many health supplements purport to induce but once I understood that true wellbeing is about our cellular health then it was obvious that all conditions are linked to this. Having grown up in a time when the prevalent view of allopathic medicine had reduced diseases into distinct specialised fields I could not then see the interconnectedness of these conditions. The recent expansion in our knowledge of nutritional science has dispelled that all too often cynical standpoint taken by some in the medical fraternity in regard to things like so called super-foods. In fact, many supplements, like marine phytoplankton, are now being championed by doctors around the world.
If our capitalistic economy has failed to deliver the necessary nutritional building blocks in the food that it produces and sells to us, and instead leaves us with supermarket shelves groaning with over packaged items made of refined sugars, fats and carbohydrates then we may need to source our own nutritionally rich foods like marine phytoplankton in concert with other organic foods. Otherwise we are likely to end up over weight, functioning poorly and eventually succumbing to disease. At a time of weak governments and overly powerful unfettered corporate giants, the need to take your own health into your own hands has never been more acute.
©Sacred Chef
Appeared in Conscious Living Magazine.
Spirulina Superfood
Spirulina the original Algae Superfood!
Spirulina is the name commonly used to refer to a food supplement produced primarily from micro blue-green algae, which lives on sunlight through photosynthesis in alkaline waters. It has been highly valued as an excellent source of nourishment by many different cultures for centuries. Now widely available in many different forms – tablet, powder, flake & liquid, it is fast becoming one of the better known so called “superfoods.”
Historically Spirulina is thought to have been a food source for the Aztecs, as reported by the Spanish in the 16C, during their occupation of parts of Central America. After its harvesting from Lake Texcoco, which is located in Mexico, it was sold in a cake form. The Aztecs apparently called it Tecuitlati, meaning stone’s excrement, perhaps indicating they were not mad on the taste of it but recognised the nutritional value despite this. Researchers in the 1960′s found a plentiful supply of Spirulina at Lake Texcoco & the world’s first large scale production plant was established there in the 1970′s.
The cultivation of Spirulina takes place on lakes & in open channel raceway ponds, with paddle wheels used to agitate the water. It grows naturally in lakes in China, Mexico & Chad & is now being cultivated commercially in these places. Further commercial cultivation of Spirulina is now taking place in Thailand, the USA, India, China, Taiwan & Myanmar. There has been much discussion over the last few decades about the ability of micro-algae’s like Spirulina to become superior food sources that could feed the hungry in the third world & hopefully end malnutrition & starvation amongst the poor. Indeed space agencies like NASA & the European Space agency have proposed Spirulina to be a likely candidate as a food source that could be cultivated aboard spacecraft during lengthy journeys.
Spirulina is a complete protein & contains unusually high amounts of protein in comparison to all other plant sources. The nutritional content of Spirulina are many and varied, with all 8 essential amino acids and 10 non-essential amino acids present. It is also a rich source of vitamin C, B complex & E. The provitamin Beta Carotene is also contained in Spirulina & this is turned into Vitamin A by our bodies. Its deep green colour comes from its rainbow of natural pigments – chlorophyll (green), phycocyanin (blue) and carotenoids (orange) – that harvest the sun’s energy. Spirulina is easy-to-digest, which means that the nutrients are absorbed quickly. Spirulina is also a natural source of iron. Spirulina contains anti-oxidants, which of course are important in reducing the effect of free radicals that contribute to the ageing process & setting up a conducive environment for diseases. It has many unique phyto-nutrients like phycocyanin, polysaccharides and sulfolipids that enhance the immune system, possibly reducing risks of infection and auto-immune diseases. It has cleansing chlorophyll which helps detoxify our bodies of ever present pollution.
Any contentious issues involving Spirulina are mostly directed at the purity, quality of cultivation, harvesting & manufacturing processes. Whether certain spirulina’s are from organic, natural sources or rather artificially grown, often to avoid the possibility of toxic blue-green algae outbreaks that can occur in lakes around the world. In either case today’s Spirulina is cultivated in man- made ponds or strictly controlled water-ways. There is continuing scientific research into improving all aspects of cultivation & manufacturing. This really is a superfood that has the potential to not only greatly improve your own health but quite possibly feed the world as well. As we continue to over populate our planet & pollute our traditional food sources it may be time to turn to the wondrous spiral shaped micro-algae for our trip into the future.
©Sacred Chef
Appeared in Conscious Living Magazine.
Oscillate Wildly
Oscillate Wildly
Modern Australian
Dinner Tues to Sat
BYO
Bookings essential
275 Australia St
Newtown PH 9517 4700
oscillatewildly@ozemail.com.au
Oscillating from fantastic to bloody brilliant, this is the cosy local bistro to die for. From the moment that Scott, — your lone captain of the floor — greets and seats you, you just know that you are in far more capable hands than you have ever been in before.
Of course first you have to secure a table, and at this highly desirable but diminutive Newtown establishment the Boy Scout motto, “be prepared and book”, is a must.
Quality of ingredients and culinary execution are at these prices rare; very rare indeed. With a choice of six entrees at $13 and six mains at $21, with the odd ‘delectable cut of meat’ dish bearing a $2 extra tag, you find yourself asking how do they do it for the price? Then asking yourself, if they can do it why can’t anybody else?
As I placed that first mouthful of onion and goats cheese tartlet in aforementioned orifice I was immediately struck by the crunchy then melt in the mouth pastry, after that the flavoursome filling just swam into place . The entrée platter of quail rillettes, rabbit empanada, tomato relish, and duck liver pate served with toasted sour dough was exceptionally tasty. For mains we were rewarded with the duck confit and crisp pork belly with pumpkin gnocchi — perfectly cooked, and the baked veal on artichoke mash, again just so well executed. The menu, which changes every two weeks, offers a nice balance of seafood and meat dishes, with a vegetarian option available.
Desserts $9 or as part of 3 courses for $40 – extraordinary value. Lemon curd with crème fraiche and honey was the essence of home comfort, and a baked banana and hazelnut tartlet served with chocolate gelato was, well that superb pastry again set the oral stage for the sublime.
So good it could be in Melbourne!
©Sacred Chef
Appeared in Sydney Eats.
Chia Magic Seeds
Heading: Chia Magic Seeds
Subheading: Nutritional Superfood.
This is no ‘Jack and the bean stalk magic seed story’ – but there are some parallels with reaching a giant nutritional understanding from what appear to be very little seeds. There is an exciting buzz about Chia seeds, and the more I researched, the more I discovered that there is good reason to get excited.
They are like little black and white magic granules, that you can sprinkle over ordinary food, to make it like Jack’s beanstalk; extraordinary! These seeds are an ancient superfood, rediscovered and we now have the science to understand their incredible properties, and to explain the magic. Chia is also being grown in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, making it an Australian superfood.
Chia (Salvia Hispanica), a plant of the Salvia genus in the Mint family, originated in the Valley of Mexico and was traditionally cultivated by the Aztecs. The seeds of the Chia plant are incredibly rich in nutritional value. Chia was one of the Aztecs’ most important food sources and had great value as a super food. It was said that the equivalent of a tablespoon of seeds could sustain a warrior for 24 hours. Due to its unusual properties, it was used as a medicine for both oral and topical applications. It was even used, as a monetary currency; such was the esteem with which it was held in Aztec culture.
Known as the running food, its use as an energy rich endurance food was well known amongst the Indians of south west Central America and Mexico. Chia was forcibly removed from the diet of the Indians by the conquering Spanish, because of its important cultural and religious links to their previously established kingdoms.
The chemical basis underpinning its qualities as an endurance food is revealed by the following experiment: if you add water to a teaspoon of Chia and leave it for half an hour you will find not seeds in water but an almost solid gelatinous mass, due to the soluble fibre (mucilage or long chain polysaccharides) in Chia. The same process is thought to occur in the stomach once we have ingested Chia. This gel then forms a physical barrier between the carbohydrates and the digestive enzymes that break them down, slowing down their conversion to sugars. Similar to a sustained release vitamin pill, the energy is available for a longer period, and the metabolic changes are stabilised – avoiding the highs and lows commonly associated with digestion. Chia would have positive effects for diabetics.
Chia also has the ability to absorb twelve times its own mass in water, and this hydrophilic quality helps you to remain hydrated for longer. With the vital importance of fluids and electrolytes to healthy cell life throughout our body, the Chia seed’s ability to help the body regulate its absorption of nutrients and fluids, becomes a wonderful natural helper in keeping a healthy cellular balance. Chia seed’s hydrophilic colloidal qualities can aid in the digestion of foods that may cause indigestion or heart burn in some people.omega 3,
Chia seed’s high oil content makes it the richest vegetable source for Omega 3 essential fatty acids – a great tool in the vital restoration of balance to a diet containing an over-consumption of Omega 6 fatty acids. Both are important but many people have diets with twenty times the amount of Omega 6 to Omega 3 fatty acids present. Chia seeds are rich in the unsaturated fat linoleic, which our body cannot produce itself, and a diet rich in this helps us to absorb Vitamins A, D, E & K. It also helps in the respiration of our vital organs and in the distribution of oxygen through the blood stream to all cells, tissues and organs.
Unsaturated fatty acids are essential for healthy glandular function, in particular the adrenal and thyroid glands. Chia seeds also contain long chain triglycerides, which can help to reduce cholesterol on arterial walls. Chia is a rich source of calcium, as it contains the mineral boron, which aids the body in absorbing calcium from foods.
Chia is an incredibly versatile food, due to its ability to absorb large amounts of water and become a gel. The Chia frappe is probably one of the best known yummy applications and here is a selection of recipes to delight your palate.
Chia Avocado & Honey Frappe
Blend
½ cup chia gel
1 peeled deseeded ripe avocado
1 tbsp honey
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 cups soya milk
1 cup crushed ice
Chia Chai Tea Frappe
Blend
1 tbsp chai syrup
½ cup chia gel
2 cups soya milk
1 cup crushed ice
Chia Berry Smoothee
Blend
½ cup chia gel
1 cup fresh or frozen mixed berries
½ cup yoghurt
1 tspn honey
2 cups soy milk.
Chia seeds are fantastic sprinkled over rice noodles in your Vietnamese rice paper rolls.
Vietnamese Rice Paper Rolls with Sate Dipping Sauce.
Mix in a large bowl.
1 packet rice noodles- rehydrated.
1 tbsp minced fresh ginger
2 tbsp chia seeds
2 tsp black pepper
2 cups chopped fresh coriander
1 cup chopped fresh mint
½ cup soy sauce
1 tbsp sesame oil
½ cup fresh lime juice
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 cup julienned celery
2 cups bean shoots
1 cup julienned red capsicum
1 cup julienned carrots
½ cup minced Spanish onion
1 packet rice paper wrappers- rehydrated
Roll mix into finger shaped rolls.
Sate Sauce
In a saucepan gently heat and whisk together until creamy.
1 tbsp minced ginger
1 tbsp minced garlic
4 minced red chillies
½ cup soya sauce
2 tbsp palm sugar
1 cup peanut butter
1 can coconut milk
With a mild slightly nutty flavour Chia seeds are great sprinkled over salads, added to cakes, muffins, breads and just about anything else you can think of.
Chia, Fetta Bran Muffins
1 cup wholemeal plain flour
1 ½ cups wholemeal SR flour
2 tbsp chia seeds
½ cup bran flakes
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp finely chopped fresh rosemary
1 tsp grated lemon peel
200g unsalted butter
4 whole 60g free range eggs
1 cup soy milk or alternative
2 medium sized brown onions roughly chopped & liberally braised in olive oil
1 cup parmesan grated
1 cup crumbled sheep’s fetta
1 tbsp chopped fresh basil
Preheat oven to 180C. Grease muffin trays & or line trays with muffin cases. Sift flours & dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Either rub in softened butter by hand to this dry mix or whizz together in a food processor until you achieve a breadcrumb-like consistency. In a separate bowl whisk eggs, soy milk, lemon peel & herbs, before folding in fetta & parmesan cheeses & cooled braised onions. Slowly & gently fold this wet mixture into the dry ingredients. Add in extra grind of black pepper & sea salt. When thoroughly mixed spoon cake like mix into individual muffin rings. Bake for 25 to 35 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
©Sacred Chef
Christmas Madness in Summer’s Kitchen
Heading: Christmas Madness In Summer’s Kitchen
Subheading: Summer Snack Food
As the seasons turn and we emerge again from spring’s enchanted and energetically aroused embrace, we are once again warmed to the core by our southern hemisphere’s hot sun. It is a sensual time of bodies exposed and a social time of being out and about. Eating food for its nourishment factor is not a priority, as in the colder months; it is more an adjunct to the pleasure of celebrating and relating. We want smaller morsels of tasty victuals that delight & sometimes challenge our palates with extremes of salt & spice, amid the crunch of carbohydrate. Yummy things interspersed with cold draughts of refreshing drinks, be they soothing or stimulating substances.
To quote the ever-present question posed by our own Socrates, the late Dr Julius Sumner Miller. “Why is this so”? What is happening physiologically within us to determine these seasonal and somewhat universal cravings? Well, when we perspire we lose sodium and our bodies need to replace this salt to balance the ship – so to speak. Where do we find this necessary ballast to keep our bodily systems doing what they do best? In our diet of course, and this is where our love of snack foods is rightly in its element. It is signalling that our changing desire for different foods is totally appropriate at these times, in accordance with the changing seasons. In summer we are often more physically active and therefore we are sweating and burning more calories and expunging mineral salts from our bodies. Now is the time to enjoy salty snack foods in delectable moderation.
Appetites, our conscious mind, our emotional brain beneath & our stomach – layers of being that interact in their own unique manner. We do not generally behave like astronauts or nutritional scientists, when we are confronted with a restaurant menu or the display in our local delicatessen, counting calories and phytonutrients like Dr Smith on the Jupiter Two. Rather, we are instinctively stimulated by desires to consume particularly yummy looking things. Good food, like love, works better upon the poetic sides of our nature and it is often a dry struggle to maintain left-brain regimes, like diets.
Can we afford to listen to our body’s desires? Well, yes with understanding and an overview of what our bodies need at various times and seasons. Of course, we also need to slay the dragon of our psychological dependence on comfort foods, which can prevent us from really listening to the nutritional needs of our bodies. What does this mean? It is recognising habitual appetites for foods from childhood that are not serving you well nutritionally. For example whenever I am stressed or emotionally overrort I may crave things like hot chips, sex, chocolate, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, junk food or the like. Why do I want these things? They may have, in the past, temporarily assuaged one or more symptoms of, “ah! I am an imploding bucket of yesterday’s vomit over my mother/father, please shoot me kind sir?” Once I have ingested them will I feel better? No, usually I feel worse. They are leftover cravings from less conscious times in our lives, that still have a real pull over us when we are struggling with aspects of our lives. Learning alternative techniques like meditation, yoga, self-awareness and the like will help you move beyond these oral fixations. Once you have garnered some space from these cravings you can return to listening to your body’s desires for optimal nutritional direction.
Another factor interacting with our ability to truly listen to our bodies needs is that of ritual.
How will you cope this Christmas? Is the coming together of family & friends a time of wonder & peace for you? What’s on the menu this year? Traditional fare from generations past, or a break with yore to rediscover you!
The summer months fall, in our neck of the woods, during the high season of celebration, with Christmas, New year and, of course, my birthday. These heavily proscribed events (possibly with the exception of my birthday – 30 December & all presents are greatly appreciated) are times when what to eat, when to eat, and for how long, are virtually written in stone. The mish mash of festival rules that have filtered down through the ages to us, are an eclectic, didactic collection involving turkeys, egg nog, presents, Christmas trees, crackers or bon bons, mistletoe, sparkling shiraz, midnight, fireworks, kissing strangers and smiling a hell of a lot. Confused, indigestible in more ways than one, and often making it mighty difficult to listen to your body’s needs. It is a time of family, friends, and perhaps prayer to a God well supported by a Christian based capitalistic economic megalith – at least here in the west anyway.
It is one of the very few times when the state and church support us to lay down tools and take up glasses of good cheers to acknowledge the point of what we are working so bloody hard for anyway = family, friends and an abundant land. Many people are confused at this time of the year because they are so completely out of practice at enjoying themselves. Perhaps not overly familiar with their families – “this is not my beautiful wife, this not my beautiful house” – which I suppose is why Christmas is regularly reported to be a particularly busy time for police and welfare workers. My advice, to ease this burden, is to begin slowly and be true to yourself, don’t spend your time in that last minute shopping marathon, stumbling around a tinsel toe festooned department store, asking yourself for the very first time in your life, what your sister’s new husband, whom you have never met, would really like for Christmas. Give up, forget it, and get off the spinning wheel in the materialistic rat’s cage of life because you will not get it right anyway. Go home, have a drink & perhaps smile at your kids or partner.
What will you be doing this Christmas? Will you be sitting down at someone else’s table or will you be dancing around your own kitchen in prayer for a tender bird or at least for the presentation of a sumptuous feast? Summer can mean hot times in the kitchen, often with the added strain of several seldom seen relatives out there in the living room staring uncomfortably into space. Again my advice is don’t over do it, keep it simple, most people are there for the company and good cheer, not for elaborate fine dining. Our warm weather suggests small amounts of food that zing on the palate. Things like dips and exotic chips, marinated olives, grilled seafood, crudités, and finger foods of all persuasions, are guaranteed to please, especially when accompanied by a superior liquid refreshment. May your mantra be – relax, enjoy and allow it to happen organically, meaning don’t impose too many uptight rules of engagement, give life a chance to unfold unpredictably, it’s the secret to actually having fun.
Carbohydrates these days, are usually considered food types to be avoided, with many diets focusing on the complete omittance of these to the exclusion of proteins to assist with weight loss. However “polysaccharides” are providing a new avenue of research that is showing some very interesting nutritional results. What are polysaccharides? Basically complex carbohydrates and these carbs are in certain cases proving to be vitally important in providing essential cell nutrition. Which continues to indicate that there is still so much that we do not know about nutritional science and is why we seem to be receiving a great deal of supposedly conflicting information. Many of the recent studies into so called “superfoods’ are putting these combinations of sugars (complex carbohydrates) or polysaccherides under the microscope to see what they do when absorbed into our cellular structures. It seems that certain combinations are more effective than others in feeding and repairing particular vital cell functions in our bodies. Research into polysaccherides is continuing today at Southern Cross University in NSW.
Here are a few recipes for some tangy nibbles that could enliven the palates of your guests this Christmas.
Shallow fried wakame with wasabi dipping sauce.
1 packet dried wakame rehydrated
500 ml canola oil for frying
30 ml sesame oil for frying
1cup tahini
½ cup lemon juice
1 tbsp tamari
1 tbsp wasabi
Mix together tahini, lemon juice, tamari & wasabi to form your dipping sauce.
In a fry pan suitable for shallow frying heat up your oils & when ready add chopped wakame pieces for a couple of minutes until crunchy, drain on absorbent paper. Arrange around sauce in a ramekin on a plate.
Cassava or manioc root is an interesting source of carbohydrates, which is widely eaten all over the world, native to South America but also widely cultivated in Africa and numerous islands around the globe. It cannot be eaten raw, as it contains glucosides than can be converted to cyanide, but in the case of smaller cassava roots cooking is enough to remove all toxicity. The soft-boiled root has a lovely delicate flavour and is great in stews and soups. Cassava flour or tapioca flour is likely something you have tasted or heard about, widely used as a thickening agent in sweet dishes due to its flavour neutral quality. Cassava flour is also gluten free, making it an ideal alternative to wheat flour in many cases. Cassava is now the main ingredient in several lines of yummy commercial vegie chips that you can purchase in your supermarket. Cassava root is one of those exotic vegetables that you rarely come across, and personally, was one of my celebrated failures in my early days as a chef. Imagine if you can the scene, it is 1983 in down town Darlinghurst, NSW at the Rajneeesh Commune Centre, a young 17 year old novice cook is preparing the evening meal for 200 orange clad disciples of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Having earlier that day come across something new at the Flemington vegetable markets & purchased a box of these gingerish, sweet potatoish looking tubers called cassava, & with the brash confidence of youth, said “yeah I’ll cook them up for the hungry hordes, no worries baba!” Well as an accompaniment to a tasty quiche I thought this would be a fresh not oft had delight. Upon pulling out of the oven, after 40 minutes or so, 3 large baking trays of these elusive roots I tried to put a fork into one of them and it was akin to an attempted penetration of a slightly singed piece of wood, straight out of the fire, the prongs merely bounced aside and the fire engine siren like message was, “warning highly inedible fare do not approach with mouth.” The next evening, having survived my first encounter with culinary failure, I tried boiling the tubers and was rewarded with a stringy, gluey mess of grey fibres – that to me, was as far away from cuisine nouvelle (which at that time was the in thing) as possible. I surrendered complete defeat to the manioc root and left it alone for a very long time. Recently however, somewhat older and wiser, I have returned to a staple carbohydrate enjoyed by so many ancient cultures and with greater respect have begun to work with its many qualities both nutrition and culinary. Cassava roots do not keep well and need to be prepared and eaten within days of reaching market – a sacred root that belies its ordinariness and challenges one to have a go!
Bolinhos de mandioca e queijo
cassava fetta cheese fritters
500g fresh peeled cassava
200g fetta cheese crumbled
4 FR eggs beaten
1 tbsp chopped flat parsley 1 tbsp chopped spring onion
salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
canola oil for deep-frying
Boil the peeled cassava for 20 minutes, then drain and let rest for 5 minutes in a colander, to make sure it is thoroughly dry.
Mash the cassava with a potato masher.
Add your cheese, eggs, herbs & onions & mix well.
Heat your frying oil in a pan. Shape the dough into dumplings.
Drop the dumplings into the hot oil and fry for at least five minutes.
Serve with a spicy roasted red capsicum sauce.
Pickled Lemons
Pickled lemons are all about transformation, with salt being the catalyst for drawing out the bitterness from the lemon & leaving behind the wonderful piquancy that is the essence of lemon, a bit like good psychotherapy – where we do not lose the unique character but just the chip on the shoulder. Pickled lemons are a fantastic condiment to have handy to add to your cooking or to a finished dish. The complexity of flavour that a little pickled lemon creates really intensifies the enjoyment that your guests will derive from your food. Now this is the ultimate in slow food as it may take up to three months for these lemons to get really pickled. You will need a very big jar with a seal tight closure to hold as many lemons as you can fit, because if you have to wait that long you will want to do a lot.
12 med sized lemons
2kg rock or sea salt
1 bunch fresh rosemary
1 bunch fresh thyme
2 Tbsp coriander seeds
1 bunch fresh thyme
2 Tbsp coriander seeds
2 Tbsp whole black pepper
1 Tbsp whole cloves
1 Tbsp star aniseed
1 Tbsp cumin seeds
Take each lemon and make two incisions as if to quarter the lemon lengthwise but leave a couple of centimetres so that the lemon remains whole. Then mix your spices and herbs through the salt before packing this salty mixture around the lemons inside the jar. You will want the lemons completely covered by the salt before sealing your jar and storing in a dark place for its lengthy sojourn. You will notice after a few days that the salt leaches out the moisture from the lemons and that your jar fills with a brine solution, this leaching out takes the bitterness with it. At the conclusion of the pickling time you use the lemon peel not the flesh, as the flesh is very salty but the pickled peel is piquant and wonderful.
©Sacred Chef
Appeared in WellBeing Magazine
Midas Word
frisson online magazine
Organic Sommelier – Terroir or Regionalism.
Organic Sommelier
Organic Sommelier
For the freshest fruit flavours available in your wine drinking experience it is hard to go past good organic wine. When the fruit on the vine has been treated with knowledgeable care sans the chemicals it often takes the wine making to a whole new level. By the same token being organic does not turn ordinary wine into great wine and cannot replace wine making proficiency. The number of organically grown wines is increasing all the time and I counted well over fifty wineries making organic wines during a brief bit of research. However distribution difficulties for many wineries mean that you do not find much of a range in your local bottle shop and it is something that can be greatly improved upon.
I am a strong advocate of regionalism or the eponymous terroir – meaning that certain regions and certain soil types produce better examples of certain varieties of wine. It took me a while to realise this and since I have pretty much committed myself to following this course of action I have had a whole lot less disappointing wine experiences. Of course there are always wonderful exceptions to any set of rules and some tragic ones too. We all have different likes and dislikes as well in our wine tastes and whatever I recommend here are really only my own opinions and I encourage you to follow your own taste buds.
White wines
Sauvignon Blanc – Upfront fresh tangy fruit driven style – New Zealand’s Marlborough, SA’s Adelaide Hills, WA’s Margaret River/Pemberton, NSW’s Orange, TAS’s Tamar Ridge.
Semillon – A clean crisp lemony style when young but ages into a complex burnished beauty– NSW’s Hunter Valley,
Semillon/Sauvignon Blanc – A blend of these two varieties best exemplified by – WA’s Margaret River
Riesling – Dry apple, lime, mineral sometimes floral style – SA’s Eden Valley, Clare Valley, WA’s Frankland
Chardonnay – Versatile style of wine ranging from full flavoured, creamy, buttery and big to peach, melon and lemon – VIC’s Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula, Beechworth; SA’s Adelaide Hills, WA’s Margaret River; TAS’s North and South.
Viognier – Full blown peach/apricot fruit and honey style – VIC’s Yarra Valley, SA’s Barossa Valley
Red wines
Pinot Noir – Wild strawberry and cherry aromas and a flavour spectrum from young and fruity to elegant and complex – VIC’s Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula, Geelong; SA’s Adelaide Hills; TAS’s North and South; NZ’s Marlborough, Central Otago
Cabernet Sauvignon – Deep inky colour and black current flavour, classic wine that blends exceptionally well with merlot, high anti-oxidant rating – WA’s Margaret River; SA’s Coonawarra, Padthaway, Wrattonbully, McLaren Vale, Barossa Valley, Riverland; VIC’s Pyranees, Goulburn Valley, Bendigo, Yarra Valley; NSW’s Orange, Mudgee, Cowra, Hunter Valley
Merlot – Soft, dry and dark fruit variety of wine that has few great examples in Australia except when partnering cabernet sauvignon – SA’s Coonawarra, McLaren Vale, Barossa Valley, Clare Valley
Shiraz – Blackberry and vanilla aromas in this red variety which ranges from chocolatey, prune, high alcohol in warm regions to peppery and coffee in cooler areas – SA’s Clare Valley, Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Adelaide Hills, WA’s Margaret River, VIC’s Yarra Valley, Heathcote, Mornington Peninsula, Grampians; NSW’s Hunter Valley, Canberra District
Grenache – Great blending variety with shiraz, earthy fruity flavours – SA’s Barossa Valley
Sangiovese – Italian varietal full of red fruit flavours with a herbal savoury finish – SA’s McLaren Vale
Tempranillo – Savoury black cherry Spanish variety blends well with shiraz – SA’s McLaren Vale
Zinfandel – Spicy and black berry big flavoured, alcoholic variety with massive plantings in California – WA’s Margaret River; SA’s McLaren Vale.
REVIEWS
Temple Bruer 2007 Cabernet Merlot Preservative Free.
This is an incredible wine with cabernet berry fruit flavours that seem to be dancing in your mouth and a lovely medium bodied balance that can keep you drinking it all night long. This is my wine of the year so far and I recommend it highly to lovers of wine who want a flexible companion to great tasting meals of many persuasions.
I am looking forward to trying the 2008 vintage of this wine – now out.
RRP $20.00
Cullen Wines 2007 Margaret River White
As with all Cullen wines finesse is to the fore, and well before their decision to go biodynamic and organic they were making some of the finest wines in Australia. This predominantly Sauvignon Blanc and Semillion blend is a gorgeous wine, complex and refreshing. This will lift any extraordinary lunch or dinner to the sublime and you will thank existence for your taste buds.
RRP $25.00
Happs 2007 Preservative Free White
Another stunner from the west, this Chardonnay with amazing fruit flavours will reinvigorate the most jaded pallet. Drinking these wines you feel purer inside and it can be akin to a religious experience. The Happs vineyards are located in Dunsborough and Karridale WA.
RRP $22.00
©Sacred Chef Cooking School Sunshine Coast
Appeared in Eco Living Magazine
Eco Living Health Aware Magazine
Spring Food
Fresh Strawberries
Celebrating spring is very much about the birds and the bees, sowing seeds and enjoying the fecundity of nature. So what foods stimulate the arousal of life inside us by their essential chemical make-up and perhaps by their shape and form? Eating well – beautiful organic food presented naturally and eaten after some blood pumping exercise is the first step. Food tastes so much better when you have a healthy appetite for it. Don’t eat out of habit. Don’t eat the same boring thing every day. Don’t eat if you are not hungry. Food like love making is better when it is special. Food is an essentially visual art medium, like painting it is an arrangement of form and colour on the plate. Glistening green spears of asparagus with a dollop of basil, macadamia nut and honey mayonnaise; freshly shucked oysters alive in their sea salty liquor; ripe red strawberries perfect in their natural state; a salad of warm artichoke hearts, goats cheese, fresh figs and baby spinach leaves; or a tangle of fettuccine slippery with extra virgin olive oil, cherry tomatoes, chillie and chunks of ocean trout. Each dish can be a moment of poetry involving all the senses – what other art form do we literally consume. Let the smears on your serviette be a testament to the abundance of your life.
Zinc is one of the most important minerals to be aware of in relation to our libido and fertility levels. It helps maintain sperm count and levels of testosterone in men and in women it is involved in a healthy menstrual cycle; it is vital for cell division during pregnancy. Zinc is also needed for the parts of our brains that activate our sense of appetite, taste and smell. Oysters are packed full of zinc as are fish, green leafy vegetables, lean meats, nuts and pulses. Organic veggies have higher levels of mineral content than those grown with chemical assistance. Why not grow your own organic veggies? Spend a weekend digging in a patch and readying the soil for sowing – you will be amazed when green things start sprouting and you will feel a quiet pride when you first serve the progeny of your garden. The taste, oh the taste will blow your mind. You get the complete package – exercise by honest toil to build appetite, pheromones from perspiration to attract the opposite sex, superior nutritional value from organic produce and the best flesh for taste and colour.
Avocadoes were known as testicle fruit by the ancient folk in Central and South America. They are rich in phytochemicals and are linked to lowering cholesterol. Their creamy texture, gorgeous colour and reputation as an aphrodisiacal food make them an ideal ingredient in dips, salads and wraps. Three quarters of the avocadoes’ which we consume in Australia are of the Hass variety – with distinctive purple black skin and oval shape. Other varieties are the Shepard – green skin with golden buttery flesh and the only avocado not to turn brown once cut open – it is available from Feb to April; Reed – green skin when ripe, round shape and peaks in November; Sharwil – smaller pear shaped avocado with a rich nutty flavor, winter/spring variety; and the Wurtz – a smaller winter avocado grown in Queensland. Try spreading avocado, a good local honey and cracked black pepper on some lightly toasted sour dough rye bread for a delicious and nutritious start to the day.
Tropical fruits are pretty much sexy per se – things that like to grow and ripen under the sweaty equatorial sun. Biting into beautifully coloured fruits that explode in your mouth and send streams of juice running down your chin are experiences to surrender to. Fresh pineapple slices are particularly like eating sunshine and of course mango is the queen of the slippery fruit affair. These fruits are full of antioxidants, vitamin C and a diet rich in them can make you feel vital and youthful.
©Sacred Chef Cooking School Sunshine Coast
Appeared in Eco Living Magazine
Eco Living Health Aware Magazine
Pleasures of Food
I have always been passionate about food. It has, in fact, been a cornerstone of my existence. I recognised the signs early on, when I did not come off the bottle (alas breast feeding was out of vogue at this time) until I was about four years old, and I made quite a commotion about it then. That warm white milk spurting forth from that rubber teat was obviously a sensual and nourishing feed. Following that I remember a wonderful meal that mother used to make me, consisting of warm runny soft boiled eggs mashed up with torn crust less fresh white bread and the merest splash of milk and salt & pepper, mmmmm I could murder a bowl now.
Ah food…it is a heady mix of psychological spells wound up in tasty matter. Foods that comfort us, foods that excite us and foods that calm us down. Our palate and our attachments to certain foods are I think all born of a time when we inhabited a yeasty humid world of milk sops and wet nappies. Textural considerations are of utmost importance when discovering dishes that provide us with inner sensual happiness: viscous soups and sauces, gooey eggs and soft steaming scoops of mashed potato, or balls of sweetened sticky rice and slippery steamed dim sum…
Eating food is pleasure and. filling the empty tummy with something very scrummy is best. Pleasure. Is it a universal primary motivation? Or is it simply the avoidance of pain? Is hunger, once satisfied, the end of the matter? Or do we seek to enter that satiation by choosing just what we put in our mouths? The pursuit of pleasure: to achieve sensual gratification. Is it inextricably linked with our need for nourishment? Babies must have succour and must be touched to survive, and thrive to adulthood. Food in my opinion is not just fuel and not simply the sum of its parts. It is more than a list of kilojoules, fats, carbs and proteins. Like love it must be made pleasurable to do its work well.
Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) states:
The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together.
The flesh receives as unlimited the limits of pleasure; and to provide it requires unlimited time. But the mind, intellectually grasping what the end and limit of the flesh is, and banishing the terrors of the future, procures a complete and perfect life, and we have no longer any need of unlimited time. Nevertheless the mind does not shun pleasure, and even when circumstances make death imminent, the mind does not lack enjoyment of the best life.”
However, perhaps Oscar Wilde put it more succinctly when he said, “Pleasure is the only thing to live for.”
Has my passionate relationship with food ever got out of hand? Yes. I was a fat child for a couple of years, and I paid the price with my slim, bordering on acetic father, ridiculing me whenever possible about my new found weight. Lolly addiction was a real problem for me at this time, as my mother, who did not enjoy making cut lunches, would endow me with forty cents tuckshop money and I would invest it at the corner shop in a large white paper bag stuffed with mixed lollies. I would share these with my best friend at the time, Scott Stewart, and he would entertain me with half his lunch, which consisted of sliced white bread sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. . So as you can see my flirtation with food as pleasure flourished a long time ago. Trips to the dentist, despite all that fluoride in the water, were far too common.
Appetite and control. Appetite – the desire to eat until one is full, or to eat a certain kind of food; to experience a particular feeling as that substance slides down your gullet. Control or denial – the decision not to satisfy that desire and to go without, or to distract oneself by exercising; having sex or working. Or to appease or tease, by allowing only one mouthful, or two or three mouthfuls, or just a homoeopathic dose of your bodies desired dish. The sins involving food and the bible’s condemnation of gluttony inhabit us culturally and permeate all realms of our western civilisation. The way fat people are ostracised in our communities and portrayed in popular media as sad laughing stocks, and perhaps we all secretly feel that our derision will inspire them to lose weight and return to the company of the slim.
Can you remember the power of the lolly? Or do you have children who have reignited your experience with this over whelming obsession with these sugared jewels? The startling variety of colours, shapes and flavours. Surely these are the building blocks of taste experience for us all, as we sit quietly on the footpath outside the local deli sucking upon that first lozenge of truth. Milk bottles; musk sticks; bananas and sherbets, cobbers, raspberries, snakes and jelly babies, just to name a few of these highly desirables. Of course these addictions were managed in a cloak of normality, whilst competing at sport and doing homework, but always at the core of the pleasure principle was the lolly… and for me pleasure was life. I remember going to visit my maternal grandfather who was a doctor and lived in another geographical state, and he had a huge jar of jelly babies on top of the fridge. I thought this was great as we didn’t have anything like this at home and he was a doctor after all. Such was the alluring power of the lolly that it permeated even the highest levels of society…
Later, working in a liquor store I came upon that same phenomenon again; but this time for adults. Shiny bottles of spirits and wines were their lolly equivalents. I could feel their hardly suppressed excitement as they fingered the bottles and read those colourful labels with gleaming tiny gold and silver medals stuck to them. Big spenders would choose their mixed dozen and then stand in the check out queue, quietly bubbling with childlike joy. Alcoholics; drug addicts and sugar fiends we are all dependent on the balance between our appetites and controls, and the psychology of our passions. What did the Buddha say, “that all life is suffering and suffering is caused by desire.”
What about the neurological pleasure systems in the brain? Well, quoting Michael A. Bozarth from the University of New York’s Dept of Psychology:
“Neurological research has identified a biological mechanism mediating behavior motivated by events commonly associated with pleasure in humans. These events are termed “rewards” and are viewed as primary factors governing normal behavior. The subjective impact of rewards (e.g., pleasure) can be considered essential (e.g., Young, 1959) or irrelevant (e.g., Skinner, 1953) to their effect on behavior, but the motivational effect of rewards on behavior is universally acknowledged by experimental psychologists.
Motivation can be considered under two general rubrics—appetitive and aversive motivation. Appetitive motivation concerns behavior directed toward goals that are usually associated with positive hedonic processes; food, sex, and wine are three such goal objects. Aversive motivation involves escaping from some hedonically unpleasant condition; the pain from a headache, the chill from a cold winter’s night are among the list of conditions that give rise to aversive motivation. The notion that hedonic mechanisms might provide direction to behavior can be traced at least to the Greeks (e.g., Epicures); Spencer (1880) formalized this notion into psychological theory and suggested that two fundamental forces governed motivation–pleasure and pain. Troland (1928) suggested that pleasure was associated with beneception, events that contributed to the survival of the organism (or species) and thus ‘benefited’ the organism from an evolutionary biology perspective; pain was suggested to be associated with nociception, events that had undesirable consequences for the organism. This schema—emphasizing hedonic processes in the regulation of behavior—lost favor with the advance of the Freudian and later behavioristic schools, although variations on this theme have occasionally resurfaced among motivational psychologists (e.g., Bindra, 1969; Young, 1959). “
Hedonism then appears to be something that we should understand. The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary defines hedonism as “belief in pleasure as the highest good and mankind’s proper aim.” Personally I have been a big fan of hedonism and have lived my life as hedonistically as possible. However, having been brought up in a Christian /Presbyterian household, where hedonism was given a pretty bad name, it was necessary to throw off the shackles of the church’s wowserism and to embark single mindedly upon the pursuit of pleasure. I imagine that many people reading this have felt similarly about their lives in terms of giving to themselves and grasping the true meaning of ‘charity begins at home – and in my case the kitchen.
One of the most fulfilling aspects of cooking that I have found is making up new dishes. When you are cooking everyday for hundreds of people, and although often making batches of the same dishes, it is in my nature to want to break out and try something completely different. I was at this stage in my own little restaurant cum takeaway in King St Newtown and like many young people I found pleasure in novelty and variety. I had one particular customer, who by tacit arrangement, would receive whatever I could challenge myself to come up with. A dish or plate created right then and there with no prior thought, and as luck would have it, he would often arrive at the busiest possible time during service. I would be swearing sweating and smiling, (we had an open kitchen), and making haste with the pans. Usually the result would be rather good, and although frazzled by the experience it was ultimately rewarding. Creativity can be a hard task master, especially when you operate out of chaos. Cooking is however one of the few great arts that you physically put inside yourself, try eating a painting for instance.
So food has always been important to me and although when I first began cooking professionally I had not really recognised that, as I always thought that it would be something I would do until I found my true vocation. Cooking was not the supposedly glamorous job, that it is perceived to be today. Then, no, it was just another trade but I found it to be a very satisfying one. It was essentially creative once you had mastered technique, each day I would be challenged to come up with new and diverse dishes. Regular trips to the Flemington produce markets would have me coming across vegetables that I had never seen nor heard of. What does one do with a box of Kasava?
This turned out to be a thankfully humorous failure, as I was working as the head cook in the Rajneesh commune in Darlinghurst back in the early nineteen eighties. Each day I would make a buffet selection of vegetarian dishes for around hundred and fifty orange clad disciples of the master. After a previous stint in the Zorba the Buddha restaurant in Taylor Square, where I had learnt the basics, it was going pretty well. On this particular day with my box of newly found treasure; the Kasava Root, (which is grey and looks like a cross between white sweet potato and really old ginger), I was challenging myself to present a rare and tasty experience for my fellow devotees, who, it must be said, worked long and hard, albeit joyous hours in the service of the master and our own spiritual ideals; and were generally a hungry lot. It was dinner, and as an accompaniment to baked spinach and fetta filo pie I thought I would roast my Kasava similarly to how I would treat sweet potato. So into the oven on a baking tray brushed with olive oil went my Kasava, salted and peppered and ready for a juicy bake. Forty minutes later I checked my Kasava to find it still hard as wood but a little singed, and after an hour an a half these burnt roots were like charred bits of four by two. This stuff was a mystery. Next night, after humble apologies to my waiting guests, I decided to tackle this Kasava on a different front and into my large boiling pan I deposited the remainder of the box, covered in salted water. I set a match to my gas burner and plonked down the heavy pan for some serious cooking; to make tender this obstreperous root. What wonder, what reward would my meditating family be in for now that I had found the culinary key? Well after a seemingly adequate time of cooking, I lifted the lid to discover a grey steaming sludge of fibrous matter that I would not classify as cuisine of any type that I was even remotely familiar with. Once again I apologised to the hungry and the meal was serve… sans Kasava. My foray into the exotic world of Kasava was at an end, and I satisfied myself with vegetables of a more common nature. What do you do with Kasava I hear you say? Well from Africa & Fiji come these recipes:
Kasava Cake
Ingredients:
3cups.(or 2lbs.) grated kasava or manioc root
1cup. shredded frozen fresh young coconut
1 12 oz. jar of Macapuno Balls
1/3cup. evaporated milk
1 14 oz. can unsweetened coconut milk
1/3cup. whole milk
1/4tsp. salt
1/2cup. white sugar
3 eggs
1cup. light brown sugar
1tbsp. melted butter
Mix everything together, and bake in a buttered 9 X 13 inch pan for 2 hours at 325 degrees.
Recipe: Vakalolo
Ingredients:
- Kasava
- Sugar
- Coconuts
Method 1. Peel the kasava and put it in a basin of water.
2. Grate the kasava in a large basin.
3. Scrape 4-6 coconuts and squeeze out the juices.
4. Heat sugar in a pot until melted, then add the lolo and stir it, until it is thick enough, remove from the heat and cool it.
5. Put the grated kasava in a ‘vasili’ leaf and wrap around and then tie it properly.
6. Heat a pot of water till it boils, put the wrapped kasava in and cook for 1 hour.
7. When the kasava is still hot, beat it with a clean wooden stick so that it becomes soft.
8. Roll into balls and dip it into the basin of cooked lolo.
©Sacred Chef
Appeared in WellBeing Magazine
Summer of Salt.
Heading: Summer of Salt
Subheading: Our bodies need for sodium.
Summer is, if you boil it down to one of its essential components, all about salt –the salt on your sweating skin, which tastes especially good when making love; the salt of the sea, after a day at the beach: and of course the salt in your food. Salt accentuates tanginess, and it is refreshing tang that we often seek in our summer fare. It’s that salty, spicy lift that when combined with a splash of coldest fluid revives and relaxes us at once.
Standing outside on your patio, balcony or in your backyard, summer is also a time of celebration. When we gather together as families and friends and seek the sensual heat of the sun to toast our good health and good fortune. It falls here, in the southern hemisphere, at the same time as the calendar signifies the greatest Christian festival of them all, Christmas the nominal birthday of one Jesus Christ. This date was of course borrowed by the Christian church and replaced the earlier pagan celebration of Saturnalia. So this December time of year has been a focus of good cheer for eons.
Unlike our northern hemisphere cousins this time of celebration is not climatically conducive to lashings of roast turkey and pudding, rather it cries out for salad, seafood and skin all to be salted and spiced.
Now salt has of recent modern times been given a bit of a bad name, health wise that is, and with good reason with salt being added as a flavour enhancer to just about every packaged food that you can think of, but really the bottom line is if you are eating a lot of packaged foods you are asking for trouble, and don’t really care about your health in my opinion. Preparing food is an opportunity to give creatively to those around you and to give to yourself as well, don’t you want to explore, discover and offer something wonderful in these circumstances? So with that little diatribe out of the way, lets move on to more about salt.
Salt or more exactly sodium chloride is the only rock directly consumed by humankind. It is an essential element in our diets and is an important part of digestion, as it increases the hydrochloric acid content of our digestive fluids. Sodium ion in our blood is one of four ions that we must have to survive, the others being magnesium, calcium and potassium. Sodium is a mineral that our body cannot produce itself and so must be ingested from external food sources. With salt, it is a balancing act, too much in relation to fluid levels in the body and we eventually die, too little and the same applies. So we excrete salt through our urine, faeces and sweat when the concentration becomes too great. Sodium also assists with the re-absorption of water in the kidneys, which would otherwise be excreted. Thus salt is an integral part of our biological make-up, in fact, our bodies need for salt links us to this earth, and is a clear example of the holistic connection.
So with salt being one of the bedrocks of humanity, it is easier to understand the numerous literary references to salt down through the ages that appear in every culture. Pythagoras said, “salt is born of the purest of parents: the sun and the sea.” For this is where we derive our salts from, with sea salt being evaporated or distilled from sea water. Geologists believe that all salt deposits were originally formed by the oceans before being covered by strata’s of rock over time. Rock salt is mined from deposits that have formed salt domes. Unrefined it is grey in colour and contains many impurities, and these so called impurities are a source of many other essential minerals. How do we get our salt? Well, in underground salt mining, a shaft is sunk into the deposit, where the salt is drilled, and then the broken salt is carried to a place where it is crushed and screened into varying grades. The salt is then taken to the surface for packaging and shipment. In solution mining, fresh water is injected through a pipe into the salt deposit. A second pipe removes the brine formed when water dissolves the salt. The brine is then evaporated in large pans where the salt crystallizes into small granules. The salt is dried and sold in packages, like table salt, or bulk for food processing. The third method is solar evaporation of sea water or natural brine. Large earthen ponds are flooded with a shallow layer of sea water or brine. Sun and wind successively concentrates the brine by evaporation. The brine is moved from pond to pond, and finally, the salt crystallizes on the floor of the last ponds in the series. The salt is then harvested, washed and stored before shipping.
Historians record that the earliest known use of salt in China was around 6000BC, where a seasonally evaporating salt lake in Northern China left salt crystals that were gathered up by the local inhabitants. The Chinese however, do not generally sprinkle salt directly on their food, rather it is added through the use of various sauces and pastes. This is generally thought to be due to the great cost of salt at that time and that it was stretched through this process. Indeed I would say that salt was one of humankind’s earliest white crystal addictions with reports of primitive tribal men selling their wives and children into slavery in return for salt. Salt is of course the great preserver and fermenting fish in salt was popular in the ancient world from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia. In China they began adding soy beans to ferment with the fish and this was called Jiang and over time they dropped the fish and it became Jiangyou or as we know it soya sauce.
Soy is a legume that produces beans that are grown in 4cm long furry pods. Different varieties produce yellow; green; brown; purple; black or spotted beans and Chinese cuisine makes great distinction between them and for their culinary uses. Jiangyou is made from yellow beans. Soy was taken to Japan in the sixth century BC by Chinese Buddhist missionaries and by the tenth century BC the Japanese were making it and calling it Shoyu. The process that they used to ferment the soy beans in earthen pots is known today as lactic acid fermentation or pickling. This occurs as the vegetables begin to rot the sugars breakdown and produce lactic acid, which acts as a preservative. Without salt being added yeast forms and you get alcohol instead of pickles. ©Sacred Chef.
Appeared in WellBeing Magazine.
Eco Living Health Aware Magazine
Food as medicine!
Heading: Food as Medicine.
Subheading: Nutritional Medicine.
Great leaps in understanding have recently occurred within nutritional medicine. For many years what we ate was studiously ignored by the scientific community, & with the funding for many of their studies coming from pharmaceutical companies, who focus on patenting artificial derivatives we can see why. There is no serious money to be made from food as medicine & this is another shining example of where the free market economy does not serve the whole person within the whole community. In matters of nutritional health we need some guidance beyond the money making principle, we need in my opinion our governments to get up to speed on these matters & to offer some leadership. Which we are now seeing to some extent here in Australia, with the senate enquiry into childhood obesity. The huge costs we as a community are now facing in maintaining a national health budget that continues to blow out in managing hospitals in particular, which are basically dealing with things when they have reached the ‘too late’ stage, may finally spur our political leaders to seek a preventative health strategy. It will not be cheap to begin with, we will have to spend more educating doctors, health professionals & the media so that they can pass that knowledge onto the general public. Eventually however in ten to twenty years it will save billions of dollars & improve the quality & life expectancy of our societies.
A perfect example of the institutionalised neglect of food is in our hospitals, where meals are still served with scant regard for their potentially healing properties. Unappetising fare produced by those without the most up to date knowledge of nutritional medicine & with definitely little understanding of the importance of colour, freshness & presentation is not serving us well in our healing instititions. The highly publicised TV chef Jamie Oliver & his recent attempt to revolutionise a British school canteen highlights a similar need to reappraise our attitudes to the diets of our children. It has been quite a journey that so called health food has been on, since the nineteen sixties & seventies when those who consumed mung beans & lentils were derided as hippies, up until now, where we see the large supermarkets rapidly expanding their range of organic foods to cater for ever growing demand. We in the general community tend to receive nutritional health information in piece meal bits that have filtered through by word of mouth, stray news reports & the like. For example suddenly the concern may be the high level of salt in processed foods, then it is bad fats like monounsaturated fats versus polyunsaturated fats, low carbohydrate diets or high fibre diets and so on. We hear the alarm bell warning, “don’t eat this or that,” but we do not understand the whole picture as it is either considered too complex for the media or we just want the result and can’t be bothered how we got there.
Recently the focus on polyunsaturated fats has been refined to take in Omega –3 fatty acids and Omega-6 fatty acids which are essential to our bodies cellular make-up and needs. Common Omega-3 fatty acids within our body are alpha linolenic acid (ALA); eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Gamma-linolenic acid is an Omega-6 fatty acid, as is arachidonic acid, and the latter is an important precursor of anti-inflammatory prostaglandins. It is the anti-inflammatory activity of the Omega-3 fatty acids that has raised the attention of scientists in regard to many common diseases in the western world. Coronary artery disease; myocardial infarctions or strokes; cancer and arthritis are all caused or worsened by inflammatory reactions within the body. It is now also being posited that depression may be an inflammatory condition of the brain and there have been several randomised placebo-controlled studies into the effectiveness of EPA in the treatment of severe depression that have showed profound results. These tests have been written up in leading journals like the American Journal of Psychiatry and the United Kingdom’s Archives of General Psychiatry.
The key to understanding the effects of Omega-3 fatty acids within us is to look back into our very origins and our first diet. The two essential fatty acids Omega-6 & Omega-3 are all present in our foods. Omega-6 are derived primarily from grains and today we consume most through oils and animal fats and through the meat of grain fed animals. Omega-3 are found in algae, plankton and some leaves including grass. Although both are vital for our cellular wellbeing, too much Omega-6 can provoke inflammatory responses throughout the body. At the time when the modern human brain developed, early humankind lived in Afrika, around the lakes of the Great Rift. Scientific evidence points to their diet being balanced on a 1 to 1 ratio between foods containing Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids. This combination is now seen to have provided their bodies with the perfect nutritional resources to develop the new kinds of neurons that enabled them to evolve new skills like language; self-awareness and the utilisation of tools.
However today we have lost that balance in our diets between the two essential fatty acids Omega-3 & Omega-6. In fact it is now so far out of kilter that in some countries like Australia, USA, and the UK for instance it is thought to be one Omega 3 to every ten or twenty Omega-6 in our diets. Why has this occurred? Once again it is due to economics, this time in the livestock industry, where the practice of feeding animals grain, rather than pasture grass has taken root. Also the over whelming presence of Omega-6 rich vegetable oils in all our processed foods, with the likes of soy beans being in just about everything. Basically we are feeding ourselves the wrong ingredients because it is superficially seen to be cheaper, but of course in the long run the consequences to our health will & is now much more expensive.
If we look to coastal Asia where the diet is seafood rich, there is not the prevalence of depression and heart disease that we see in our own western communities. Fish is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids because of the diet of the fish, eating plankton and algae or other smaller fish who have eaten plankton and algae. Seafood stores the Omega-3 fatty acids in their fat tissue. The best source of Omega-3 are smaller fish as they are the least contaminated by mercury, dioxin and organic carcinogens. Flax seed is an excellent vegetarian source of Omega-3, but like all non-animal sources they do require a further metabolic step to become part of our neural membranes. Green leafy vegetables contain precursors of Omega-3 fatty acids in small amounts. Organically raised grass fed animals are a good source of Omega-3 and the eggs of free range chickens contain up to twenty times more Omega-3 than their grain fed counter parts.
Omega 3 Food Table
· taken from Healing Without Freud or Prozac by Dr David Servan-Schreiber
Food Source Omega 3 level
100g mackerel 2.5g
100g herring 1.7g
100g tuna 1.5g
100g anchovies 1.5g
100g salmon 1.4g
100g sardines 1g
1Tbsp Flax seed 2.8g
1Tbsp Flax seed oil 7.5g
1 Tbsp Canola oil 1.3g
100g Walnuts 2.3g
40g Spinach 384mg
1 Tbsp Seaweeds (dried) 268mg
1 Tbsp Spirulina 260mg
40g Watercress 528mg
Olive oil has more Omega-6 than Omega-3 but has very little of either so can be used without adding further to the imbalance in our diets. It is this imbalance that we need to address in our own diets if we are to return to a time and place within our own bodies that is not headed toward so many of the potentially fatal diseases that our community so often suffers from. Limiting the use of processed foods from your diet, if you cannot comfortably eradicate them all together. Becoming far more aware of what is actually in the foods that you eat, as coeliacs soon discover the prevalence of wheat additives in processed food is endemic. It is not only about adding more Omega-3 rich foods to your diet it is also reducing the many Omega-6 foods that is important
I think one of the underlying messages here is that we are of the sea, that we originated from the oceans & that our bodies work best when we feed them foods from the sea. “Never forget where you came from,” someone famous once said. With this in mind it is another timely reminder to stop polluting the oceans of the world. For if we are truly dependent upon the sea as a food source, it will be a bugger if we mess it up with our petro-chemical toxins and the like. There is so much to learn from looking at ourselves instead of always out at the world. Let’s teach our children about themselves, how their bodies work, before we teach them anything else. In the words of Dr David Servan-Schreiber, “On the day historians begin to analyse the history of medicine in the twentieth century, I believe they will point out two major events. The first one, without any doubt, was the discovery of antibiotics, which practically eradicated bacterial pneumonia- the leading cause of death in the west until the second world war. The second is a revolution that is still in the making: the scientific demonstration that nutrition has a profound impact on practically all the leading causes of disease in western societies.”
.In terms of the possible anti-depressant effect of Omega-3 fatty acids you would need to imbibe between 1 and 10 grams of the combination of DHA and EPA, which are the two Omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil. These can be taken as supplements but as with all nutrition it is better consumed as wonderful food.
Here are a few of my recipes that will boost your intake of Omega-3 fatty acids & hopefully provoke your taste buds into delicious new territories. If the salty fish in My Omega Pie are too daunting for you, why not swap them for a less offensive but still oily fish like trout or tuna. Vegetarians can leave the fish out & use spinach & other green leafy vegetables instead.
Recipes:
My Omega Pie
Pastry
1 ½ cup plain wholemeal flour
1 cup Linseed Sunflower Almond Meal
100g unsalted butter
1 tbsp Linseed Oil
2 freerange eggs whisked
1 tsp purified water
Filling
4 fillets fresh sardines or 2 tins
4 fillets anchovies
1 lge desiree potato cooked & sliced
1 can diced tomatoes
1 tbsp canola oil
1 spanish onion diced & sauted
3 cloves garlic minced & sauted
1 punnet cherry tomatoes sliced & sauted
1 cup chopped continental parsley
1 tbsn fresh rosemary chopped
1 tsp fresh oregano chopped
1 cup fresh ricotta cheese
1 cup walnut meal
½ cup parmesan cheese
sea salt & black pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 180C
Beginning with pastry, sift flour into mixing bowl or food processor & combine remaining ingredients to form a soft dough. Knead until smooth & place in fridge for 30-60 minutes. Remove & roll out pastry to about 5mm in thickness & cover a 15-20cm pie dish, prick pastry & bake blind for 10-15 minutes or until golden brown. Remove blind beans & bake for a further 5 minutes. Then set aside to cool. While the pastry is resting in the fridge you can begin your filling.
In a large fry pan or saucepan, saute your onion, garlic, & cherry tomatoes in oil for 5 minutes. Then add in your can of tomato, rosemary, oregano, salt & pepper & simmer for 10 minutes. Stir in parsley & set aside.
Lay your sliced potato & fish fillets inside your pastry case, top with the tomato sauce, then crumble ricotta over this before sprinkling walnut meal & parmesan to finish. Salt & pepper to taste before baking for 20-30 minutes or until golden brown.
Serves 4.
Marinated Salmon with Spinach & Watercress
2 fillets of salmon sliced into 8 wafers of 1cm in thickness
1 lemon juiced
1 lime juiced
sea salt & black pepper to taste
2 cups baby spinach leaves washed
2 cups watercress washed
2 tbsp flax seed oil
1 tbsp tamari soy sauce
2 tbsp lime juice
1 tbsp sliced pickled ginger
1 tbsp capers
sea salt & black pepper to taste
Place your salmon wafers in a shallow flat container & cover with lemon & lime juice. Cover & refrigerate for 30 minutes. Remove, drain & dry with paper towel. In a salad mixing bowl toss your washed & dried spinach & watercress, add capers & pickled ginger, sprinkle with flax seed oil, tamari, lime juice & salt & pepper. Arrange salmon & salad on plates & serve at room temperature.
Serves 4.
Steamed Mackerel with Pan fried Shitake Mushrooms & Seaweed
4 mackerel fillets
1 punnet fresh shitake mushrooms sliced
1 cup wakame seaweed, rehydrated in water & chopped
1 bunch bok choy washed & chopped
1 tbsp canola oil
2 tsp minced garlic sauted
2 tsp minced ginger sauted
1 tbsp tamari soy sauce
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tbsp rice wine
sea salt & black pepper to taste
Have your steamer ready to cook. You will need to cook your fish & the pan fried mushrooms at the same time to coordinate the serving of this dish.
In a large saucepan or frypan saute your garlic, salt, ginger & oil for 3-5 minutes before adding in your mushrooms, seaweed & finally bok choy. Finish with rice wine, tamari & lemon juice. Pepper to taste.
Place your fish fillets inside your steamer & cook for 3-5 minutes depending on the thickness of your fillets. Place your fish on the plate & spoon over mushrooms & seaweed.
Serves 4.
I would like to acknowledge the inspiration & source material that I garnered from Dr David Servan-Schreiber’s book Healing Without Freud or Prozac, Rodale, Pan Macmillan Books. The Revolution in Nutrition, is but one chapter in an extra-ordinary book that I highly recommend.
©Sacred Chef
As appeared in WellBeing Magazine.
Eco Living Health Aware Magazine
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