Ditalini Dish

My latest obsession is the ditalini pasta. They are tiny and quick to get to al dente mode. Once drained through a colander, I place in a large bowl. I then throw in some walnut pieces from a bag. Then snip, snip whatever herbs you have (I had plenty of parsley). And you are ready to have a bowl of pasta ready to eat.

Amazed… It’s Berry Delicious

This frozen berry kale shake tastes like an ice cream shake!… Quite surprised how good it tasted.

A Mid-Autumn Lunch

It’s pretty cold here. Thank god I have some buckwheat noodles. As much as I love to eat raw plants and vegetables, sometimes I need something warm.

I had the noodles which would take about 8 minutes to cook. There was also a bunch of scallions (my raw greens for the day) and a bit of carrot that didn’t fit in my juicer from days ago. Luckily, there was one egg waiting to be used.

Oh, and yes, I had some coconut amino liquid that would replace the soy sauce.

So I boiled some water, threw in the dry noodles at boiling point and waited for 8 minutes. By the way, it helps to stir the noodles in the pot with wooden chopsticks in case they get stuck on the bottom of the pot. It’s a double-whammy if the noodles also get stuck together.

I also placed a cracked egg on a ladle and gently slid it in the boiling water at the 4-minute mark.

At the end, drain the buckwheat and egg through a colander and catch the hot water over a large bowl. With the ladle, draw out some of that hot water into a serving bowl for one.

Then pour a bit of the amino liquid for taste into that bowl.

Per serving size, coconut amino has less than 70 percent of sodium than the “low sodium soy sauce” brands. But don’t overdo it. Otherwise, you might as well go for the regular soy sauce in packets. And if that’s all you have, it’ll have to do - as long as you don’t have hypertension. Check with your doctor if you’re not sure.

With the same pair of chopsticks, place a serving portion just the noodles into the bowl that now has your “homemade" broth.

Julienne the carrot, cut up the scallions with a scissor and place on top of the noodles. Then place the poached egg over the veggies.

Use the same pair of chopsticks to eat the solids and then drink the liquid straight from the bowl. Less utensils to wash, the better. Because after this, you just want to go back under the covers.

Lazy Meals

A lot of my friends think I do juicing and blending because I’m a health nut. I am a health nut and I may be a nut at times. But the real reason I blend and juice is because I am pretty lazy in the kitchen. Yes, I will go out of my way to make a spectacular meal to wow my guest(s). However, due to this pandemic, I don’t have to be the hostess to people I do not regularly see. It’s already tiring to keep up with the latest on all the corona rules, so I just hang out with my family (although I don’t want to spend too much time with them). So, I just blend my food, eat when I’m hungry, and wash the kitchen wares right away. A stitch in time saves nine. Nine hours of shopping, prepping, cooking, scrubbing pots&pans, putting everything in the dishwasher, putting everything away once the dishes dry, etc.

Smashing Pineapples

My sister was telling me about her friend — someone I found admirable. She is a medical laboratory scientist in Louisville, Kentucky. Her name is Eleanor.

Prior to the pandemic, my sister wrote an account of this wonderful woman:

“Various cacti and lush plants notably display her keen sense of decoration throughout her home.  According to Eleanor, they are positioned purposefully to support a healthy equilibrium of aerobic respiration for all the eukaryotes in her household, pets and humans combined.  I am suddenly embarrassed that the only thing close to nature in my house is the sad artificial ivy hanging from my kitchen cabinet tops.” (Again, this was one of her many hobbies prior to the pandemic).

How she has time to take care of all the living creatures astounds me because she is constantly on her feet at work. Eleanor gets up before dawn — 5:30 am to clock in at her standing job of running centrifuge, LC-MS machines, hematology analyzers (checking for blood coagulation) and other things that lab scientists do. She had been doing this for years.

So, she comes from her essential job to see her non-essential hubby doing nothing but being down, drinking beer and watching the tele. We get it — sometimes people need to just be depressed and do nothing for a while. But Eleanor was pissed.

The grass on their lawn was up to her waist. She gave up and mowed the lawn after her 8-hour shift.

There’s a saying in our household: “If you need something done, delegate a task to the busy person.” Well, she was always busy and she took to the task without delegation.

By dinner time, she was fuming. Words were hurled. But that wasn’t all. Pineapples — the only fruit they had were hurled at each other. Fortunately, they both had bad aim because no one was hit. Both went to bed after.

Eleanor woke up for her essential job and wondered why there were pineapple pieces and juice everywhere. Then she remembered.

“Oh god. If a person like Eleanor — someone who has it altogether, totally consistent, intelligent, etc. — loses her sh*t, what hope is there for the rest of us during this nutty period?” I worried out loud.

My sister shrugged over the phone with a chuckle. She needed to get off the call to feed her kids and get them ready for school on Zoom.

I thought about all the smashed pineapples. I would just pick up the pieces, wash them off and cut the rhinds.

Then I’d slice them into small cubes and freeze ‘em. Once frozen, they’d go through an Omega juicer with the Blank Cone piece instead of the strainer.

And there’ll be something for Eleanor and spouse to cool off with. Pineapple ice cream is a non-essential, foodwise. Essential for times like these? Absolutely.

I scream. You scream. But let’s do it with ice cream.

The Widow's Last Meal

Someone once said, we are all creative beings. That person went even further: She said if one doesn’t create, she becomes a menace to society.

So, I finally tuned out the news and social threads about what is going on and started to tap into my creative side again. God, I had to detox from the news - if just for a day.

I looked into my fridge and pantry. There were a couple of potatoes, my homemade sour cream made of cashews from a month ago and frozen blueberries. And I always have ginger to cut the sweet from the blueberries.

For some crazy reason, I was craving potato pancakes, latkes, jun - whatever you want to call them.

I had a savory pancake mix from 2014. It was probably going to expire like never. Given all the hoarding and scarcity at the supermarkets, I sometimes think of this widow visited by biblical Elijah during a famine. I think it was a famine. Alright, I won’t be too lazy - I will have to google her story to jog my Sabbath school memories. (Nominal Seventh Day Adventist). Well, with this staying home, everyday is the Sabbath. But I think I made the pharisees mad cooking a lot on the sabbath.

Anyway, prophet Elijah is called to see this “Gentile woman of a foreign land.” He’s hungry and she has only a handful of flour, a bit of oil and one roll of toilet paper. Imagine how annoyed she is with this stranger who knocks on her door. But she’s less grumpy as he’s just a prophet and not a census taker. The widow had already filled the census electronically which only reminded her that the household was minus one, thanks to the husband who croaked too early.

Sometimes I offset my anxiety during this crazy time with a dark sense of humor. I think I’m this widow of Zarephath saying something morbid like “I am gathering sticks to make this last meal for me and my son so we can then just die.”

This sense of humor makes me thrilled to find a pack of flour with baking powder — and no son or offspring whatsoever. Yes, I try to be gluten-free, but sometimes, I just need to eat what’s available.

I took 2 small potatoes and made them into fine matchsticks with a mandoline.

Then I took 180 mLs of this un-expired savory pancake mix and made a runny batter by adding 300 mLs of water.

I spritzed the frying pan with avocado oil and set it to warm on the range.

With a spoon, I shaped 4 round latke-like molds and flattened them onto the frying pan.

Ever so gently, I poured a thin amount of the batter over each “pancake.”

I flip them over when one side is crispy brown.

Then I lay them on a dish. I top each one with a scoop out of the homemade cashew/sour cream.

Instead of applesauce, I use the frozen blueberries, some grated ginger and whiz them into a little blender.

Add salt and pepper onto the latkes/pancakes/jun. And there you have it — a savory, crunchy, yummy potato treat with a ginger-y blueberry sauce. The ginger offsets not only the sweetness of the berries, but the oily texture of the potatoes.

So yummy, if Elijah were to stop by, he’d hunker down here too. But he’d have to have God bring more toilet paper if that were the case.

Springtime Lemonade

It’s Spring and nature’s pom-poms try to cheer us on. Here is a fresh “lemonade” recipe I use with a blender to cheer me up when I need something refreshing. It was dubbed the Electrolyte Lemonade by the Jubbs’ Longevity Center.

I came across it in the early aughts at Jubbs (East Village, NYC) and went on a cellular feast (aka fast) for 14 days when my vacation plan fell through. So this lemonade recipe came to mind as flying plans are on hold indefinitely for many. If one felt nostalgic about TWA, all the more so as the only airline now is TBD. To Be Decided.

On to the task at hand. You will need:

3 organic lemons so that you can use them all: pith, pulp, pit and peel. However, if you have no access to organic lemons, just use the conventional ones and peel the outer skin.

3 tablespoons of fractionated coconut oil. It’s also known as MCT - medium chain triglycerides used in bullet coffee and ketogenic foods. Although I’m not a keto-convert, I do like the taste of fractionated coconut oil for this recipe. You can use virgin coconut oil, but if it’s put in the fridge, there will be clumps. Lemonade is something I like cold, so fractionated coconut oil stays liquid. (One can also use flax or olive oil, but again, I think the coconut oil makes the lemonade taste better, but you may prefer the others).

1 organic apple. If an organic apple is not accessible, just peel the outer layer.

1 teaspoon of Celtic sea salt.

6 cups of water. The original recipe from Jubbs Longevity calls for “charged” water. However, I no longer have my ionic water filter because it was truly high maintenance: calibrating for alkaline pH, buying test trips, testing the water, buying cartridges - what a chore! And it would talk to me in an electronic voice that was super annoying. Then there is the “simpler” way of charging water with New Age crystals and placing it North in the water jar, but unless I have my GPS turned on, I have no idea where North is. We’re charged enough for drinking water so I’m thankful we live in a country where water is easy to obtain.

6 tablespoons of raw honey. I am not a sweets person so I cut it down to 3 tablespoons. The purist calls for the raw flower honey that is gritty and chunky, but I like my raw buckwheat honey - smoother but thick like molasses. Stevia can also be used, but the taste in food products doesn’t agree with me.

Chop the lemons and apple. Place all ingredients into a large blender. If your blender is smaller, reduce the quantity of each ingredient according to capacity. For example, if your blender only holds 1000 milliliters, then just use 3 cups of water (720 mLs) and half of all the other ingredients.

I do hope I gave the recipe justice with the adaptations. The Jubbs named it Electrolyte Lemonade because of a much needed cofactor. The Celtic sea salt contains the wonder of all wonder-lytes: magnesium.

Magnesium not only relaxes our muscles and promotes elimination - and helps us sleep better — it is required for several hundred enzymatic reactions in our body. It is an amazing cofactor. That is why I feel more like myself after having foods like kale (high in magnesium). On a side note, I’ve found blending steamed kale the best way for me to ingest and absorb the nutrients. But that’s for another post.

So, take this downtime to take care of yourself. Yes, make lemonade out of lemons. It’s electrifying.

Summer Sidepiece

Walking down a very familiar street, I was hit with the most heavenly scent.  It came from the Muscadet Lily someone had planted right outside of the townhouse. 

The scent was intoxicating and took me back to those times I played hostess with the mostest in my West Village apartment.

The dinner party involved several dishes - I was too ambitious for my own good as far as the menu was concerned. 

But there's one thing I wouldn't regret.  The summer centerpiece. 

I should really call it the sidepiece as it was placed by the window overlooking the best corner of town.  And the dining table was placed right next to the window.

The day of the dinner event, something possessed me to walk to the jungle on 28th St. - New York's famous flower market.

The lily took my breath away.  The scent was intoxicating.  So much so I bought forty.  I remember carrying all those heavenly stalks in my arms on my trek back home. 

I would spare nothing for creating a sumptuous fare, but when it came to the cab fare for 24 blocks, I found it wasteful.  Back then (over a decade ago), I was happily nuts.

It was all worthwhile.  The fragrant lilies towering over the night lights in the heart of the WV,  the food, the extraordinary company - they left an indelible memory of summer pleasures. 

Even when I had to pick up the messy orange pistils a week later,  I was still enjoying the afterglow of such a successful dinner party.

Years later, I'd changed.  I did mind the orange pistils.  I never brought lilies into my home.  One recent acquaintance from the Upper East Side had a tall vase of the same lilies but the pistils were gone.  I asked her how this was possible. 

She said she had the maid cut them off.  "Ohhhhh, I see,"  I murmured.  I remembered why I couldn't stand living in the UES.  So sterile.  On many counts.

Anyway, back to the present.  I start thinking about Eliza Doolittle's young admirer - swooning, crooning, twirling on lamp posts.  Just making a happy little ass of himself. 

As far as Manhattan's concerned, enchantment certainly doesn't pour out of every door.  But if the neighbor grows Muscadet Lilies, it's just on the street where you live.

Energy Smoothie

In our forties, there is nothing my friends and I want more than energy.  We don't covet designer clothes, jobs, guys, babies, or great hair.  After some catch-up, it's been confirmed:  we just want our energy back.

Pure energy that has us spring out of bed at daybreak.  The kind that keeps us going to work, to play, with all the sparkle and enthusiasm of our twenties.  

So I go back to basics.  I just hedge my bets on good sleep and a lot of green juice.  I imagine all the chlorophyll is bringing some much needed oxygen into my poor mitochondria.  And to think there's plenty of iron and B vitamins helps support my new obsession - the green smoothie.

The building blocks of a green smoothie are very simple.  You need a liquid, a fruit, and a choice of greens.  

For the liquid, I find it very bland to use water.  So I have a jar of freshly squeezed honeydew and limes in the fridge.  My favorite fruit right now is the frozen mango.  It gives the smoothie a depth of flavor and it's so unusual than the banana.  

My favorite green base is the spinach.  Spinach is a very accommodating green.  It doesn't force its own flavor on others so it is quite versatile for any combination.

I've also realized that adding an herb lends a more complicated smoothie with interesting nuances to taste.  I added the cilantro here and it just complements the mango so well.  Cilantro is also great for chelating heavy metals like mercury.  

If you like things with a little heat, try adding a small nob of ginger.  The ginger and cilantro give the mango an exotic twist.  So here's the recipe. 

Energy Smoothie

Ingredients:

8 ounces of freshly squeezed honeydew melon and 1 lime

1 cup of frozen organic mango

a small piece of ginger

1 cup of spinach

handful of cilantro

Instructions:

Put everything into the Vitamix and whiz until liquified, and enjoy.