Seed Bread & Buckwheat Crisps

I dreamt about non-urban lifestyle long before we moved to the countryside last year.

When I was a kid, my family had a small island where we spent our summers. There weren’t neighbors, electricity, or running water. Whether it shined or rained, my brother and I splashed in the lake, swimming and playing like a pair of trout. Once a week we made a boat trip to the mainland to buy staple foods from a store on wheels, and then my mother fermented yogurt, viili (Nordic sour curd) and buttermilk which we kept cool in an excavation, dug in the ground. Every July wild blueberries and lingonberries surrounded the cottage, and we munched them directly from the bushes. There was a bigger island nearby to where we rowed to pick bucketfuls of wild strawberries, raspberries, and mushrooms in the end of each summer.

When we reached puberty, my brother and I refused to go to the island. It wasn’t hip, and we couldn’t stay apart from our friends for three months a year. As teenagers, we viewed such a vacation as a punishment and, during our last holiday, I plotted how to flee away after reading a memoir by Henri Charriére, called Papillon, which described his escape from a penal colony in French Guiana.

Seeing our resistance, my parents sold the summer house when my brother was sixteen and I was fifteen years old. It took me three years to realize what a loss it was. That’s when I started to romanticize about country-dwelling.

Last December, after having lived in fairly primitive conditions for eight months, the reality of my rustic life-choice finally hit me. In an early morning, as I was going to the basement to burn wood, I became aware that this is how the rest of my days will look like. The goal of downshifting, gardening, chopping wood and shoveling snow had become a part of my field but, all of a sudden, it appeared so ordinary and even burdensome! For the first time, I saw the cellar wasn’t a sanctuary but a cold and damp dungeon where I sat two hours every dawn, meditating, while poking the fire after every 108^th mantra, and while having eight legged spiders crawling on me. The walls and the ceiling I had whitewashed in the spring were already stained with soot. In panic, I wondered if smoke and tar smudged my lungs, too. Will I be able to cope with this much austerity until the end of my life? Was it a mistake to move into this shack?

The novelty of everything wears out.

Although it’s human to misplace the desire for fulfillment in material objects, positions, relationships and achievements, I’m bothered how often I still imagine that I will attain contentment by getting one more piece of chocolate or a pair of shoes; or seeing the Himalayas, changing my worldview, studying a degree, and upgrading my significant other to the latest version of husbandhood (sorry, darling)! Unfortunately it won’t happen because the soul I am underneath the flesh, blood, bones, mind and reason is fully compatible only with spiritual energy. Matter, however mesmerizing it may appear, flows on a different, temporary frequency that will always leave the soul hungry. How much longer will I keep confusing things and situations for happiness?

Happiness is a challenge because it’s a mental disposition – a fluctuating emotion – in which suffering is momentarily absent. Like any state of balance, it flips easily out of equilibrium under the influence of an opposite force. Satisfaction, on the other hand, comes from knowing the self and the soul’s relationship with both, material and spiritual nature. Because it’s a conviction anchored in the core character of the self and the purpose of life, it remains unaffected by external circumstances and time factor. If any, my resolution for 2016 is to shift the focus from becoming happy to being satisfied with what is under my care right now.

Crisp bread is not culinary luxury, like pizza and crêpe that offer instant gratification, but a necessity the Nordic folks have dried and stored for survival since 500 AD. As a poor man’s diet, it reflects a short harvest season and the hardship of winter. To me, it summarizes (when compared to any other bread) the difference between happiness and satisfaction.

Households originally baked thin crisps from wholemeal rye flour, salt and water, and hang them on sticks under the roof. Nowadays various grains and seeds are used. Here are my two gluten-free recipes:

SEED BREAD AND BUCKWHEAT CRISPS (each recipe makes about 15 breads of 20cm / 8”)

Ingredients for the seed bread:

1 Cup (250 ml) sunflower seeds

½ Cup (125 ml) green pumpkin seeds

½ Cup (125 ml) sesame seeds

4 Tbsp flaxseeds

5 Tbsp chia seeds

1 Tbsp fennel seeds

1 Tbsp dry rosemary

1 Tbsp kalonji seeds

1 ½ tsp Himalayan salt

4 Tbsp ghee, oil or melted butter

1 Cup (250 ml) boiling water

Ingredients for the buckwheat bread:

2 ½ Cups (625 ml) buckwheat flour

2 Tbsp sesame seeds

2 Tbsp chia seeds

1 ½ tsp Himalayan salt

4 Tbsp ghee, oil or melted butter

1 ½ Cup (325 ml) boiling water

Method:

For the seed bread, grind rosemary and all the seeds, except kalonji, into fine powder. Add kalonji and salt, and rub in the ghee, oil or melted butter. Finally pour in the boiling water and mix into a smooth paste. Set the dough aside to rest for 10 minutes.

For the buckwheat crisps mix the flour, seeds, salt and ghee, oil or melted butter. Pour in the boiling water and mix into a smooth paste. Set the dough aside to rest for 10 minutes. 

Make lime size balls from the dough and roll them into as thin disks as you can. It’s easier to roll the dough if you place it between two sheets of baking paper. Remove the upper layer afterwards. If you want perfectly round breads, cut them out with the help of a plate or a lid.

Bake the breads at 175 C (345 F) until they are light golden. Because they burn easily, keep the temperature steady. 

Note:

You may vary the ratio of seeds as you like, and use spices like jeera or caraway instead of what I've suggested. By adding more ghee, oil or butter, the breads will become richer and crispier. Instead of water, you may use sour cream or milk (they don’t have to be boiling hot).

Thank you.

Sunchoke Chips

After Sophie Charlotte Elisabeth Ursinus married an elderly privy councilor at the age of nineteen, she enjoyed the upper class privileges of Prussia for decades, until her fate changed on the evening of March 5^th 1803. While she was hosting a card game at home, police stormed in and arrested her. The trial that followed shook Berlin. No longer did “Lotte” draw attention as a well-dressed widow, a pietist and a poet, but as a serial killer.

A scientist Valentin Rose was an expert witness on the trial. He submitted a report stating he was unable to prove that Madame Ursinus had poisoned any of the victims – Officer Rogay (her lover), her husband, or her aunt. The suspicion, though, was overwhelming. When Benjamin Klein, a servant and a murder attempt survivor, stepped forward to testify that his mistress had served him a bowl of prunes she had first marinated in arsenic, Mrs. Ursinus was convicted and sent to prison. Although pardoned thirty years later, she failed to recover her social standing, and died alone.

After the trial, Valentin Rose became obsessed with developing a method of detecting arsenic in the body. He succeeded in 1806 but, before the breakthrough, he discovered another peculiar – yet less harmful – substance, inulin, while distilling horse-heal extract in his laboratory.

Inulins are dietary fibers that occur naturally in many plants, such as agave, banana, garlic, asparagus, chicory, wheat, onion and sunchoke. Inulin acts as an energy reserve and regulates the cold resistance of these plants.

Enzymes in the human alimentary system, designed to metabolize starch, cannot digest inulin which is a different kind of complex carbohydrate, called fructan or a polymer of fructose molecules. It passes through the upper gastrointestinal track all the way to the colon where the local flora feasts on it. If you have ever thrown such a party in your hindgut, you know it releases a lot of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane – to put it politely. John Goodyer, an English botanist, says it more bluntly in John Gerard’s Historie of Plants from 1621: “which way so ever they be dressed and eaten, they stir and cause a filthy loathsome stinking wind within the body, thereby causing the belly to be pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine than men.” Although he referred to sunchokes, the phenomenon applies to all inulin-contained foods.

Native Americans, long before Europeans arrived, cultivated sunchoke tubers and used them as root vegetables. When the early colonists learnt that these underground nubs were edible, they sent seeds back to the Old World. Now Jerusalem artichoke (another name for sunchoke) is a popular crop around the continent. Pleasing to harvest, each root can produce hundreds of tubers a year!

Despite the name, Jerusalem artichoke doesn’t hail from Jerusalem, nor is it a close relative of artichoke (although the two have a similar – sweet and nutty – taste). Italian settlers in America called it girasole, which in Italian means a sunflower. If you twist your tongue, you may hear how “Jerusalem” and “girasol” sound alike. Some other names are French potato, topinambour, lambchoke, sunroot and earth apple. How can such an ugly lump have so many names?

You can substitute sunchokes for potatoes in some recipes. The two have a similar consistency and texture, and become mushy when boiled. However, introduce sunchokes in small doses to your diet, and examine how you react to them. If you are sensitive to fructose, your body may respond in a more hostile way. The zero glycaemic index of sunchokes offers no solace if you have to suffer from gastric pain and flatulence!

SUNCHOKE CHIPS

The ingredients for the chips:

Sunchoke tubers

Little olive oil

Himalayan salt

Cayenne powder

The method:

Wash the tubers carefully. You don’t have to peel them if they are young, and organically grown. Slice them very thinly, either with a sharp knife or mandolin.

Sprinkle very little olive oil on the slices and rub it in.

Roast the slices in a hot oven (225 C / 400 F) until they are golden on both sides. You may have to turn them during the process.

Add salt and cayenne before serving the chips (with tomato chutney, for example).

Thank you.

Lunch Wraps

Like all patterns of behavior, you can change food habits, too.

Last October I went cold turkey on sugar. I didn’t intend to quit sweets permanently, but wanted to experiment what – if any – short-term benefits reduction of glucose has on my health. Little did I know how much it would affect my cooking, eating and well-being!

Up until I was 40, I had a healthy relationship with sugar, and honored a sweet treat usually on Sundays during a feast in the temple ashram. When my interest in cooking developed, I found desserts to please most people: serving a knock-out cake or fudge would patch whatever shortcoming the main course might’ve had. When I started to organize cookery courses, baking pies and cobblers along with preparing candies and puddings became everyone’s favorite class. To the degree I enjoyed inhaling the scent of caramel, cardamom and butter in the kitchen – who wouldn’t – my tongue acquired more and more sweet taste, and sooner than I realized, I was buying ice-cream, chocolate bars and vegan gummy bears from the shop – something I hadn’t done since my teens.

Within a couple of years an innocent pleasure transformed into sugar addiction. Instead of supplying energy for the body, the constant munching of confections made me chronically fatigue and contributed to all sorts of ailments from brain fog to eczema, hot-waves, insomnia, heartburn, over-weight and other endocrine complications. Finally, when a blood vessel in the wall of an ovarian cyst ruptured and caused me to bleed all September and the beginning of October last year, I was inspired to break up the love affair with sugar and carbohydrates. In fact, I was ready to do anything to alleviate the physical mayhem, hoping that paying a closer attention to nutrient intake would help my hormones to moderate energy reserves and balance out the metabolism.

Of course I had cravings at first. Every afternoon around 4 pm, when the blood glucose levels hit rock bottom, the mind knitted hypotheses to refute my new found sugar-free lifestyle, and statements like “you are seduced by righteous eating” and “you have orthorexia nervosa or abnormal attachment to health food”, and “eating is a social experience you are ruining by your fanatic attitude” ambushed my determination. At the same time, there were results that counteracted these arguments: the eczema I had battled with for six years cleared out; I regained a normal sleep rhythm; and all premenopausal symptoms such as hot flashes, heartburn, irregular periods and moodiness ceased. When I figured out, in two or three weeks, how to maintain a steady energy level by increasing fats and proteins in the morning, and consuming highly concentrated nutrients from items like raw beets, avocadoes and cruciferous greens on each meal, I no longer hankered after creamy tarts and pastries. My body started to burn fat instead of sugar and, as a bonus, I lost 12 kg (26lb) within six months. It seems that by replacing excess sugar and carbohydrates with more substantial elements, the body will gradually burn its fat supplies, and find its ideal state.

From the point of view of food-blogging, I’m facing identity crises. The most viewed posts on this site have been infused with sugar. Some of you may wonder if I’ve become a food-fascist that will  torment you by condemning all syrup-dripping desserts by uploading only vitamin-laced recipes from the platform of entitlement!

I haven’t worked it out yet how to proceed or whether I will ever cook with sugar again. Probably when time goes by, I might start adding a teaspoon of sweetness to cancel overly sour ingredients like tamarind or tomatoes, but for now I’m happy to stick to recipes that don’t require even that. My objective is to be stronger and more active in my 50’s than I ever was in my 40’s and, somehow or other, I hope this blog will reflect the mood, too.

Letting something go is never one dimensional. Omitting sugar from the diet bound me to fresh foods – salads, sprouts and all kinds of greens, and fruits – which I hardly ate before. In some ways I think I have been “a carbohydrian” or “a protenian” rather than a vegetarian, because grains and pulses covered my plate in a larger extent than vegetables. Now I find myself thinking of food in a different way, and couldn’t imagine a meal without an uncooked component that gives the instant burst of vitality. Instead of eating cooked beans and lentils daily, I prefer them three or four times a week in small portions. Unlike before, I can well skip rice and bread.

I’m developing new recipes every day. Here is one of them:

Butterbeans, cashews and oven dried cherry tomatoes wrapped in lettuce leaves

Ingredients:
250 - 500 ml (1 - 2 cups) butterbeans + water for soaking and cooking
Lettuce leaves
A bunch of watercress
A bunch of sage leaves
Oven dried tomatoes (recipe here)
2 Tbsp olive oil
¼ tsp hing powder
¼ tsp cayenne powder
250 ml (1 cup) cashew nuts
1 Tbsp desiccated coconut
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
½ tsp dry roasted jeera (powder)
½ tsp amchoor powder (green mango powder)
1 tsp kala namak powder
1 ½ tsp Himalayan salt

Method:

Sort, wash and soak the beans overnight. Cook them in a pot or pressure cooker until they are soft but not mushy. Drain and set aside.

Wash the lettuce, watercress and sage. Set aside to dry.

Heat up the olive oil over a moderate heat and add the hing and cayenne powder, immediately followed by the cashews. Roast the nuts until they are light golden on all sides.

Add the coconut and toast until they change the hue and become fragrant.

Add the beans, tomatoes and sage leaves. Sprinkle everything with black pepper, jeera, amchoor and kala namak powder, and salt. Remove the pan from the stove.

Place a spoonful of beans in the middle of each lettuce leaves, and add a couple of stalks of watercress. Wrap up the leaves and secure them with cocktail sticks.

If you cook the beans and roast the tomatoes in advance, it takes only couple of minutes to assemble a quick lunch or snack.

I sprinkled the tomatoes with olive oil, cayenne powder and Himalayan salt before roasting them. You can use other spices and herbs for variety.

Thank you.

Ekadasi Cake

Those who follow a discipline, sadhana, designed to realize one’s ideal in the bhakti-tradition, observe a fast from grains, pulses and certain spices every eleventh day of the bright and dark fortnight of the moon. Ekadasi tithi is the day of Sri Vishnu and stands for an intensified spiritual practice. Sadhus or saintly persons of higher order often uptake a voluntary vow, vrata, beginning at the dawn of the preceding day and ending in the sunset of the day following ekadasi, during which they minimize bodily demands in favor of enlightenment. The commitment advocates increased devotional activities like meditation; studying Srimad Bhagavatam, Mahabharata, Ramayana and other Puranas aiming at redeeming the perception of life; and singing lyrical expressions of love for the Divine, kirtan or bhajan, throughout the ekadasi night. Devotees sometimes make a bold statement of mauna, a promise of silence, by avoiding idle and unbeneficial words.

Many of today’s sadhakas or sadhu-aspirants live and work in the secular society that rarely accepts or endorses the interests of a modern yogi. We lack the luxury of taking three days off every few weeks to carry out self-control of such precision, but constantly balance our lifestyle and worldly obligations without compromising the goal. Thankfully, ekadasi is auspicious whether performed elaborately or simply. In fact, it is said to be fortunate even if adhered to unknowingly or accidentally by abstaining from grains.

The origin of ekadasi is discussed by the sages Vedavyasa and Jaimini in Padma Purana. If you are not familiar with the puranic literature, note that it approaches the philosophical themes of Upanishads from a personal point of view, depicting them as a part of interaction and relationships, rather than intellectual enigmas. This story, like many others, is a classic account of good and evil, personified by a beautiful goddess, Sri Ekadasi, whom Sri Vishnu manifested, out of compassion, to relieve the suffering of those who violate the laws of nature and fall in the hands of the embodiment of sin, Papa-purusha.

Left invalidated and unemployed because of Sri Ekadasi’s blessings upon the wrongdoers, Papa-purusha sobbingly begged Sri Vishnu to restore his control over those who are apt to negative karma. Being fair to all creatures, Sri Vishnu permitted him to enter food every eleventh phase of the waxing and waning moon, on ekadasi tithi, and instill destructive sensual desires in whoever eats grains on those days. It is said that all disharmony and imbalance of the material world take refuge in rice, wheat, corn, beans, peas, mustard seeds and other heavy foods on ekadasi.

Bhakti-yogis are not driven by the fear of karmic implications per se but see ekadasi as an opportunity to come closer to the Transcendence. Fasting pacifies the connective line between the tongue, belly and genitals, and helps the body to respite from dietary irregularities while releasing energy to subtle, conscious processes that nourish the soul’s thirst and hunger for self-realization. When the moon is quarterly full or dark, it gravitates very mildly and its rays sooth the nerves and feelings of the heart; when the mental tides are calm, it is easier to contemplate.

Cakes may not typically be on the menu during the fasting days but sometimes the situation calls for a sweet treat. Being gluten-free, the recipe serves guests with sensitivity to wheat on any occasion.

I have used milk-powder that has 26 % fat. I can’t confirm whether any other type of milk-powder will yield as good result. Be aware that the cake becomes dry if over-baked; keep it in the oven only as long as it takes to become firm. The exact duration depends on the height and width of the form. A regular 25 cm / 10” tin cooks in 170 C / 338 F for 30 to 40 minutes; cupcakes are ready much quicker. Insert a toothpick to determine a proper consistency. If you want to make a layered cake, it may be a good idea to bake each layer separately.

Due to the content of potato starch, this cake is delicate and somewhat sand-like. It is best eaten soon after baking.

Terry, if you are reading this: I will take up the subject of coping with a loss in another post soon. Thank you again for suggesting it.

Sabudana – Seasoned Tapioca

A failure contributes to learning. It is an impetus for analysing a mistake, making a change and trying again. If you wish to master the trial and error method of acquiring knowledge, start with a bag of tapioca pearls and attempt to achieve a dry, light and fluffy side dish. This kind of problem solving is known as guess and check in elementary algebra.

Needless to say how many times I’ve ended up with slimy, sticky porridge before getting the recipe right. It was a triumph when my husband commented a few days ago, “It is delicious”. Until then, he loathed tapioca.

In India, tapioca is called sabu or sabudana. To add to the confusion, sago, which comes from another plant (Metroxylon) and cooks differently, goes by the same name. Tapioca and sago look alike. They are usually interchangable ingredients. I’ve seen countless recipes confusing them.

Tapioca is a starch extracted from cassava (Manihot esculenta). It is used worldwide as a thickening agent. It is gluten-free and low protein.

We use sabudana on Ekadasi and other days of fasting from grains. However, by adding green peas, fried carrot sticks, cauliflower bites, herbs and nuts, it turns into a colourful side dish at any meal.

The trick of preparing sabudana is to rinse tapioca well with cold water. It doesn’t have to soak. Rinsing will give it enough moisture to double or triple in size. Before cooking, it has to drain and dry. To mix it with roasted coconut and peanut powder before adding it to the pot, will aid the pearls to remain separate. Once in the pot, it doesn’t require cooking. It steams to perfection on the top of vegetables within a couple of minutes. If it comes in contact with too high heat, hot ghee or oil it will immediately turn into a sticky mass. Therefore, special attention is required when adding it to the pot.

Thank you.