Fuji's Secret Experiment Log

CRACKERS !

2011-12-14T00:25:00.000-08:00

Sesame Multi-Grain CRACKERS !

All Hail the Mighty CRACKER ! Crackers are a great power food, If you keep crackers on hand you will always be ready to eat at a moment's notice. Dry crackers store well, and can be made durable enough to carry in a pocket so, if you don't mind having crumby pockets, you can even snack on the go!

Unfortunately, most crackers available in stores are not quite durable enough for pocket travel. We hunted for a good multi-grain cracker some time back and found that the packaged crackers out there weren't very durable, nor were they very substantial.

We decided to try to make some hardy crackers. Crackers are usually seen as a side treat to serve as a soup garnish, or as an edible plate for cheese snacking. We wanted a cracker that could pull it's own weight along side the soup and salad, as an equal member of the meal team, not just as an entertainer.

We are on our second successful batch of these hand crafted beauties. They are powerful indeed, the current batch contains:

Sesame Seeds

Sesame Paste

Wheat Germ and Bran

Powdered Almonds, Pumpkin Seeds, and Sunflower Seeds

Flax Meal and Whole Flax Seeds.

Magic 21 Grain Pancake Powder

Extra Virgin Olive Oil, a Few Forest Free Ranged Seedy Eggs, and Sea Salt.

The previous batch used butter rather than olive oil, the olive oil is a better choice, because the butter overpowers the sesame taste. We can save the butter for cookies, caramel, and in foods where it is really necessary.

We just mix them into a workable dough adding enough water to make them roll out nicely on a lightly salted and floured surface covered with Flax and Sesame Seeds.

We have been carrying these everywhere, because they are so nutty and delicious, We take them in the car when we go to town to eat on the road, we put them in our pockets to nibble in the stores, and they are also good to have when we are in the garden their nuttiness tempers the strong flavors of the mustard greens and Swiss chard. They also provide great energy for physical activities like raking leaves, riding bike, walking . . . . . .

Be aware that these are not light snack crackers, these are extra heavy duty crackers, to be used as a power food. They are good eating, but should be eaten with apples, or some other companion fruit, or vegetable, and always lots of water. If you pig out on these, late at night, all by themselves and skip the water, you could find something glued shut in the morning.

Anyway, They are great crackers, and when you make your own you get to keep all the crumbles generated in the packaging process, The crumbs make a very nice topping to garnish your soup.

Spiral Spring Garden from last year

2011-03-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

Last year we planted hardy greens in this garden and it has provided food for us all year. We chose leafy cabbages, mustard greens, Swiss chard, celery, collards, assorted hardy leaf lettuces, carrots and some leeks. Most of these plants wintered over well, with the exception of most of the lettuces.

We were able to shelter the garden, somewhat, from the winds, by putting plastic sheeting around the deer fence and setting up a temporary roof with poles, chicken wire, and sheeting to fend off the hard rains and snow, this winter which really helped with plant survival rates by preventing the direct rain fall from turning the covered soil to a fine mud, which would have smothered the roots as was the case in the previous year.

We planted a smaller garden with a similar selection of edibles, in the yard of our rental property. The little garden in town did very nicely all winter, the tenants enjoyed the vegetables, and I had chomping greens to snack on while working at the house.

We didn't need to cover the one in town because it is a not as cold at the lower elevation of town, where there was less snow, and the hard winds were slowed by all the warm houses.

Our garden up here, looks different now, then when the picture at the top of the post was taken, and the ratio of tasty greens to lush grasses has shifted quite a bit toward the grasses, Still, I am enjoying a nice plate of assorted steamed wintered over greens, with hot chili oil as I type.

We are starting the spring renovation of the spiral, and will be planting the same type of fare for the coming year. We highly recommend this kind of garden. These types of plants provide a continual supply of leafs, and as you pick and trim them they just keep on giving, All Year Long.

Zippy Peppy Juice

2011-01-28T21:15:00.000-08:00

We have been making ourselves this Home Made Energy Drink we call Zippy Peppy Juice most mornings for about a couple of months now. Zippy Peppy Juice contains: Fresh Beets, Carrots, Celery, Turnips, Rutabaga, Purple Cabbage, Mustard Greens, Collard Greens and Brussels Sprout Greens, Granny Smith Apple and a cup of Fresh Ginger Root.

The Champion Juicer is a simple, yet very powerful machine that can even handle a rutabaga smoothly.
We treat all our kitchen machinery as the power tools they are, and always put on hearing protectors that we keep hanging on the wall in the kitchen, that juicer uses the same motor as a shop grinder, and a blender is as loud as a skill saw.

All those roots and vegetables in the photo above produce enough juice for four cups like the ones pictured below. It is an easily ingested treasure trove of minerals, enzymes, and natural sugars that really get the bodies energy flowing.

With all that ginger this really packs a wallop!

It is sweet from the carrots, beets and apples and spicy from the fresh ginger root, and over wintered mustard greens.

The trick is that the celery gives a deceptively soothing, coolness, as it goes down.

The mustard greens kinda sneak up and take your breath away, and the Ginger leaves you in a cold sweat.

Zippy Peppy Juice makes sparks fly! *

and the pulp is for the birds

* Disclaimer: Don't drink Zippy Peppy Juice on an empty stomach. We always make sure to eat our seaweed soup FIRST !

Sprout Salad with Collards!

2010-05-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

Center stage is our hearty salad, containing Collard greens and flower tops, that wintered over, some very spicy Mustard Greens, Purple Onions, Celery, Cucumber, and Arugula, Leaks that we planted last year, Young chinese greens, Mungbean Sprouts. We make homemade Caesar Salad dressing and use lots of fresh garlic and anchovies. To finish it we topped the salad with a mix of chopped sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and raw almonds, and some grated Romano Cheese.

Spicy miso soup with tofu, potato (with the skins on) and mung bean sprouts served with 21 grain super rice on the side. Also, Apples, Oranges, and the ever present Green Tea.

I'm looking at this meal, and thinking that only a couple years ago when I was a heavy sugar consumer, (S.A.D Diet) I wouldn't have been able to digest this meal very well, now I have no problem at all, I ate my share of this and went on a brisk mile and a half walk. In the past I would have experienced a bout of reflux on the first hill if I even had diced onions in a salad. If I had only known . . .

Last Year's Garden

2010-01-17T14:40:00.000-08:00

Photo dedicated to all of our hard working chickens.

Last year's garden was such an improvement over the previous year, and it is time to give credit where credit is due. Thank You, All you chickens who worked so hard soiling the straw that fluffed our dirt, and provided the nutrients for our vegetables.

All Day Buffet

2009-11-17T10:37:00.000-08:00

Click the picture to see it bigger

Versatile Pantry Items

2009-05-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

Lemon Juice, Honey, Sesame Oil, White Popcorn, Molasses, Dried Plums, Dried Apricots,
Miso Paste, Olive Oil, Raw Goat's Milk, 21 Grain Pancake Flour Mix, Mixed Beans, 21 Mixed Grains, Turbinado, Peanut Butter, Cocoa Powder, Oranges, Green Tea, Home Made Yogurt, Canned Diced Tomatoes, Spicy Garlic/Pepper Oil, Free Range Fertile Eggs, Fuji Apples, Garlic, and lots of Hearty Leafy Greens.

By keeping these foods in our pantry we have been able to reduce our food budget, eliminate many trips to town, and most importantly it has helped us avoid purchasing any mass produced garbage foods.

We have consulted this website WHFoods It is a wonderful resource for learning about the nutritional benefits of many whole foods. I would say that this website was an important catalyst for change into our diets, We keep reading about different foods on the list, and then we find ways to include these foods into our diets. Since adopting these foods into our diets we have noticed many improvements to our health.

Lemon Juice - We use it to make, lemon aid, salad dressing, lemon custard, mayonnaise. . . We take straight shots as an energy booster.

Honey - A nutritious sweetener, we use it in: custards, salad dressings, and is makes a great marinade for smoked salmon heads (honey, salt, and black pepper.)

Sesame Oil - We make a nice dipping sauce for pan fried tofu, using sesame oil, soy sauce and squeezed garlic. We also like to drizzle sesame oil on, steamed vegetables, miso soup, and popcorn. (sesame oil is a great healthy substitute for melted butter on popcorn.)

Popcorn - This is what we keep on hand for those cold winter evenings when we're having a salty chip snack attack.

We stay away from the expensive, made up, snacks with non-pronounceable ingredients by keeping popcorn around. We keep ours healthy by having it with sesame oil as the substitute for melted butter, allowing us to save the melted butter for the things that truly require it like Lemon Custard.

We purchase it bulk in 25lb. bags, we like white popcorn the best because it has a good "fluff to husk ratio" making it easier on the teeth.

Popcorn keeps well, and pops up fresh and you don't have to run to the store all the time because a pound of un-popped popcorn equals a lot of bags-o-snack.

Molasses - Turns regular sugar into brown sugar. So it is good for making squash, but we like it in hot cocoa, smoothies, on cereal, or over yogurt. We use a lot when we make egg custard. Molasses is the good stuff that was taken out of the raw cane sugar in the process of making it white. It is high in iron and other minerals.

Dried Prunes - We like to have some dried fruit around, and we found that these had no high fructose corn syrup or other nasties. Anyway sometimes you just need a prune.

Apricots - These dried apricots are 100% natural like the prunes. Apricots are high in vitamin A so they are good for our eyes. Mostly we like them for their tangy sweetness, and for being so chewy and good.

Miso Paste - It goes in our special seaweed tofu miso and mixed bean soup, and in the Shang choo som paste, the simple tofu miso soup, and in the miso paste for our Snack Veggies.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil - We drink an ounce or two each day, with a raw egg, and four or five ounces of lemon juice before our walk. (If we do it right, and walk briskly, it makes mayo!).
Olive oil is also good for making salad dressings, garlic oil for dipping, and in our crepe batter.

Raw Goat's Milk - We have raw goat's milk available by owning a goat, It saves us a lot of trips to town to buy milk, heck we can hardly leave home because she needs to be milked frequently. But, we know what is in our milk, She eats everything on our property and turns it in to wonderful milk that contains:
Oak, Maple, Blackberry, Huckleberry, Bamboo, Moss, Twigs, Alfalfa, Hay, Zucchini, Cucumber, Swiss Chard, Mustard greens, and many many more! . . . But, she does not eat tin cans.

21 Grain Pancake Flour Mix - We put together this whole grain mix as a response to the fact that it is so hard to find bread products that aren't either full of bleached white flour or sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. Pancakes are an easy bread to make as a daily bread for eating as pancakes, or as bread for making sandwiches, or even as an instant pizza bottom.If we use more eggs and milk, we have batter for making crepes. We have used it with other flours to make a hearty 21 grain bread. and use it in our tasty hardtack sesame flax crackers. We have been able to avoid buying any mass produced bread products for two years since switching to the 21 Grain Pancake Flour Mix. So many things we get in the stores have HFC 's or high white flour content, I have a theory that empty calories = empty heads.

Mixed Beans - We read about each of the beans in our mix and found that each type of bean has it's own unique bunch of minerals and other nutrients. We also thought, Most of these beans are pretty similar come eating time, So why not mix them, like we did our Grains and Flours.
We cook them like beans, and add them to our miso seaweed soup, or we prepare them like black beans and rice with our 21mixed grains under the mixed beans, with thickened yogurt, cilantro, diced tomatoes, cheese and hot sauce.

21 Mixed Grains - We use to eat steamed white rice. White rice is white because the husk, bran, and germ have been polished off, so much is missing in terms of nutrition.
We decided that we would like to catch up on all the whole grain goodness that we were lacking. We combined 21 grains and cook them like rice. They are much more nutritious and taste better too.
We have them like rice under stir fried vegetables or with steamed greens, and in soups. I like them like oat meal as a desert, topped with, yogurt, peanut butter, honey, molasses and a drizzle of evaporated milk.
These are packed with nutrition, and in time we found ourselves being satisfied by much smaller portions of the mixed grains, compared to how much it took to be satisfied with white rice. I feel that we became content with smaller portions as we enriched our bodies nutritional stores.

Turbinado - Simply a less processed sugar which still contains natural molasses. Some things just need sugar like cookies, candies (we mix peanut butter with a little turbinado to form peanut butter balls that we coat with cocoa powder or melted chocolate to make peanut butter chocolate bon bons - honey wouldn't work, too wet - messy)

Peanut Butter - We get the chunky Adams brand natural peanut butter that comes with the oil floating on top. We get several and store them upside down to ease stirring on opening day. It can separate but is o.k. if you mix it well enough, If it didn't separate then it would mean that the oil was hydrogenated to keep it mixed. Hydrogenated oils are good for stabilizing foods, but not good for putting in your body.
Put some peanut butter on your spicy stir fry, and you have instant tai food. We like it on our cereal as mentioned above, or just put a couple tablespoons in a small bowl, to eat by it's self, as a easy snack, with some apple slices on the side. Jin can nurse this last snack all the way through an episode of Kung Fu.

Cocoa Powder - We make our own mix for hot cocoa. Cocoa powder, turbinado, and a healthy dose of cayenne pepper powder, so even when the cocoa gets cold, it stays hot.
We use cocoa powder make some fantastic chocolate, chocolate chip cookies using: 21 grain pancake flour mix, chocolate chips, turbinado, butter, eggs, and cocoa powder.

Oranges and Apples - We keep oranges and apples on the table, whole fruits are better for you than juices. We don't buy juice or juice concentrate. You don't need to read a label on an apple or an orange to find out if it contains high fructose corn syrup, they're naturally sweetened. We check Rainbow foods (our local bargan food store) to see if they've received any good apples or oranges, and when they do we always buy big bags. If you buy too few you might hesitate, deciding to save it for later rather than just eating the fruit on the spot. We eat oranges and apples through out the day ,

Green Tea - This is the real "ancient chinese secret" It is so good for you to have a hot cup of green tea after a meal. We have been drinking it regularly for the last two years.
We drink a lot of green tea. If you find the right asian market you can buy a large five pound bag of loose leaf jasmine green tea for restaurants for around ten bucks. I wouldn't bother with teabags, you get better extraction from the leaf, and you don't have to pay for all the fancy packaging. Green tea really cuts the grease and helps us digest our food, it is also loaded with antioxidants.
We like to brew our tea by bringing a pot of water to a boil, throwing in the loose tea leafs and then turning off the heat. Then we just pour off the tea when the leafs settle to the bottom of the pot. We don't waste the used leafs, instead we put them in the Broth that we prepare for our chickens to drink.
There is so much to say about the goodness of this stuff I am just going to post the link: Green tea

Home Made Yogurt - Delicious and good for our guts. We eat it in smoothies and on our mixed grain peanut butter cereal desert. We get a starter mix from the health food store and make our own from milk in an electric yogurt maker over night.
Here is a link: Yogurt.

Canned Diced Tomatoes - We like to have some emergency tomatoes on hand in case we want to make
spaghetti sauce or a quick pizza, when tomatoes are out of season, or when the tomatoes are at the store and we want to stay home.
We prefer the diced tomatoes over tomato sauce cause we can easily make sauce from diced if we want to, and diced gives more tomato in the can, than can be packed the can in whole tomato form.

Spicy Garlic/Pepper Oil - This is our version to the hot chili oil that you find in the chinese restaurants.
We make ours using canola oil, chili pepper flakes, garlic, ginger, and fermented black beans.
We put this spicy oil on steamed vegitables, stir fry, or use it to spice up a soup. It all winds up tasting like spicy chinese restaurant food.

Free Range Fertile Eggs - We have a lot of chickens so we eat a lot of eggs. We have eaten so many eggs lately that we have all but forgotten about eating meat, we haven't even purchased any meat besides fish for eight months. They are a great source of protein and much more, here is a link: Eggs

Fuji Apples - Good dependable apples, they have a good crunch, they store well, and when they are ripe, they're sweet and juicey. These are our favorite apples, We named the blog for them.

Garlic - We look for the strongest, meanist. burn your whole mouth down garlic. We like it so strong that it makes you go sit down, to catch your breath. We use it wherever we can, diced and fried in an omelette, or squeezed fresh on a salad, garlic delivers flavor and has many health benefits. You can take your garlic that you buy at the store and plant it in the fall to harvest in the spring. Look up the nutritional information here: Garlic.
We put garlic in olive oil and zap it to use like garlic butter for dipping. That way we can save the butter for something really important like making lemon custard.

Hearty Leafy Greens - We eat as much raw as possible because cooking destroys enzymes, with the large garden we find that we do need to cook it sometimes to help with the chewing. Hearty greens like chard, mustard, and collards aren't like salad greens they can really fill you up and be the heart of a meal. We are surprised at how well they digest, it must be the enzymes.

Anchovies - We found a good source for getting the 13 ounce restaurant size cans of anchovies. We buy a case of twelve cans and it lasts us a year or more. We put it in spaghetti sauce, salad dressing. or on our pancake pizzas. We don't use any beef or pork in our spaghetti sauce, but the anchovies give it the right salty twist to round down the sharpness of the tomatoes.

Dried Anchovy, or Anchovy powder - These are a must have ingredient for miso seaweed soup, and kimchee soup. the dried whole anchovies are a good snack, with a little red pepper paste for a dip, I wouldn't snack on the anchovy powder though.

Dried Seaweed - Gotta have this if you want to make the miso seaweed tofu soup. Sea Vegetables are so good for you, that you should really consider making seaweed soup. Link: Sea vegetables

Cheese - We keep two kinds of cheese on hand. We like to get Tillamook Sharp Cheddar Cheese, and keep a around a couple wedges of nice hard Romano Cheese. Romano is good on salad or in the salad dressing. (The picture above was taken when we were using the Medium Tillamook Cheddar Cheese, But we switched to Sharp for the stronger flavor and lower fat content, Making Pan Fried Cheese really shows off the fat content of your Cheese.)

When we crave Cheetoes, we make pan fried cheese instead, by grating some Sharp Cheddar and a little Romano in to a well seasoned pan. Learn how to fry cheese here: Pan Fried Cheeze

Canned fish - We keep canned salmon, mackerel, sardenes and of course Anchovies on hand. Canned fish is good for putting on Shang choo som because the bones are soft enough to ignore.

Tofu* - Tofu is an important part of the miso seaweed tofu soup, it is also good fried up in a pan, and served with a soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic and green onion dipping sauce.

Dried Soybeans* - We keep some good quality soybeans on hand so we can make soymilk. It is not hard to make if you have a good blender and some strainers.

* Not Pictured

Pan Fried Cheeze season is here

2009-02-17T21:51:00.000-08:00

It's Pan Fried Cheeze season once again.

When we want to have a cheezie chips or diner food we like to get straight to the point, and just fry up some cheese.

Super Duper Anytime Pancakes

2008-07-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

The Super Rice give us a great source of varied grain nutrition. We decided that grinding them into flour might make them more easily digested. Buying the flour already milled and then mixing them turned out to be a better way to go, we were able to find all these flours at Bob's Red Mill, with the exception of Quinoa, Lentil, and Mung bean which we mill ourselves in a coffee mill.

Amaranth
Barley
Brown Rice
Buckwheat
Corn
Dark Rye
Flaxseed
Garbanzo
Green Pea
Kamut
Lentil
Lima Beans
Millet
Mung beans
Oats
Quinoa
Rye
Soy
Spelt
Triticale
Wheat
Wheat Germ

We have been eating them for most of our meals as our daily bread for about six months now. We have found added energy, and have been losing our old fat.*

We have been finding new ways to eat these. Usually we just keep them on a strainer and eat them as a finger food, They also travel well so we put them in our backpacks when we go on outings.

We will be posting other serving suggestions later, but eating them plain is a good basic way to have them available all day. Make a big batch in the morning and you are set for grains all day long!

*We also eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, Drink a lot of water, and exercise to distribute the nutrients to all parts of our bodies and to convert the fat to energy.

Fruit Smoothies

2008-02-14T23:51:00.000-08:00

A few years back in the middle of the winter we caught ourselves eating hard sweet fruity candies and we realized that our bodies were asking us for fruit. We decided to find a way to put more fruit into our diets. In the winter fresh fruit is scarce and even the frozen fruit gets expensive. We bought strawberry preserves to try to get some berries into us but we read the label and found that we were also getting a fair dose of High Fructose Corn Syrup.
We decided to start making our own jam and went Strawberry Picking the next season. We picked so many berries, we knew that we didn't want to make, or eat that much jam (jam has a lot of sugar too), but having all these fresh berries around we started making smoothies out of them, and freezing the rest. We found that the berries that we froze made good smoothies too.
Then came Blue Berry Season. We added blue berries to our freezer and of course the smoothies. While picking blueberries we saw that the peach season was starting and so we added peaches topping off the freezer and rounding out our smoothie.
We have done this now for the last two years and have been having daily fruit smoothies year round to make sure that we are getting enough fruit.

In the course of this time our smoothies have evolved and now contain:
Strawberries, Blueberries, Peaches, Bananas, Apples, Homemade Yogurt, and Honey.

We have lost all cravings for the fake hard fruity candy.

{It is now two years later and we just thought we had to make a comment about the honey}

Honey is sweet, but it is a very fast release, high calorie food. If you drink it to cool down in the summer, the smoothie will be cooling when you drink it, but when you digest it your body is going to get hot.

We recommend relying on the sweetness of the ripe banana's for this drink. It is good to lower ones sweetness baseline overall in your diet, because then all the other fruits you eat, and other foods can stand on their own sweetness, with out help from sugars or other sweeteners.
The best way to lower your sweetness baseline is to avoid adding sweetness to fruits, or consuming un-naturally sweet foods such as soda pop, and hard candies.
Getting used to a lower level of sweetness is a great way of avoiding unnecessary calories.

We now save our honey for when we want to make bread soft, or for salad dressings, and things that are not naturally sweet.

Also, we like to use bananas in our smoothies because we can find them year round.

Superice

2007-12-24T10:09:00.000-08:00

Click the image above for closer view.

We have identified these grains in our Superice so far:

Barley
Brown Rice
Buckwheat Groats
Green Split Pea
Kamut
Lentils
Long Grain Sweet Rice
Mung beans
Millet
Quinoa
Oat Groats
Rye
Spelt
Wheat Berries
Yellow Split Pea

Do you recognize any that we have missed?
Post a comment and tell us.

Superice is something that we make, to put a wider variety of grain nutrition in our diet.

Superice is like having a grain collection in a pot.

Collecting the grains has been an invitation to adventure. We love getting out and hunting up different kinds of grain. We found pre-mixed rices and grains at an asian market. After that we started going to the bulk food sections at the grocery stores to look for grains we hadn't tried. If we find something that looks interesting, and it looks small enough to cook with the others, then we get a pound or so and add it to the collection. We find less common types of grain at the health food store.
As we use it up, we just keep adding different grains that we find to the mix. The amount of grains in the pot goes up and down , but, the variety of grains in the pot always goes up.
We cook Superice in a pot as you would cook rice. We use an older electric automatic pressure cooker with a manual timer*, because, when we used pot on the stove the grains was more likely to burn.

Put a scoop in your Soup.
It's Nutritious and Delicious, it's Nutrilicious!

12/24/09

Sesame Oil on Popcorn

2007-11-23T17:38:00.000-08:00

Popcorn with Sesame oil

We always seem to want to eat popcorn when the snows arrive at our house.
Maybe it is the white fluffiness of the snow that reminds us of popcorn, perhaps it is just that when it is cold outside, snacking inside feels kinda cozy. Whatever it is, we always go for the popcorn.

We don't just zap a bag of the microwave stuff, with the buttery flavored salty goo and carcinogenic teflon coated bag. We prefer to make our own on the stove top, and salt and butter it to taste. We Always used Real butter and hand crushed kosher salt.

Until one day. . .
We wanted to have popcorn, but didn't have any butter in the house. Town is too far away to go for just one item, so it seemed that popcorn wasn't an option, but the urge was so strong. I didn't want dry popcorn, Think John Think. then it struck me. Sesame Oil tastes buttery so why not try some on the Popcorn. I told Jin about my idea, and she said I was nuts, and that she didn't want any, but I should go ahead and try it anyway, just to get the idea out of my head.

Well I tried it, and I liked it. I just sat there eating it, as she watched me from a short distance. She was trying to decide if I was really enjoying the stuff, or just doing a great job of pretending, in order to cover up a horrible mistake.

Finally she decided to try a bite, and she was immediately hooked. We never even think of using butter on popcorn now.

Replacing the butter with a little toasted sesame oil is gives a wonderful nutty flavor. It is easier to prepare, because there is no need to melt the oil as you would butter.

Popcorn is a great alternative to other expensive salty snack foods, in their fancy plastic wrappers, with the foil on the insides, and fonts all over the outsides. We avoid a lot of garbage by keeping the un-popped kernels on hand, and pop them up fresh anytime the notion strikes us. It is very economical especially when purchased in a 25 pound bulk bag (Around $20.00). We use "White Popcorn" instead of the yellow popcorn.. The White Popcorn is easier on the teeth, yellow popcorn pops up with harder centers.

Popcorn is touted as a great diet food, but always with a warning about avoiding the butter, Sesame Oil is a very nutritious and healthy fat.

Try some, it's easy, you can thank us later.

11/23/10

Hand Salads

2007-11-07T22:49:00.000-08:00

These are like little mouth sized salads.
(Not bite sized, Mouth sized, You Stuff them in and start chewing, and make another and so on till you feel full. I don"t make the rules, this is just how it's done)
These contain a variety of garden greens, Mixed whole grains, canned mackerel, Miso with red pepper paste, and kimchee.

They make for a quick breakfast, a good lunch, and a fine dinner.

We've been eating them throughout the day, for weeks now. It is a good way to balance out our diet, each one is like a little food pyramid, a little meal on it's own. Lots of hardy greens on the bottom, some 21 grain mix in the middle, and a small amount of fish on top. Each bite has a proper proportion of each of the food types.

I took these with me for lunch today.

They were delicious with canned wild salmon on them.

11/7/09

Multi-Veggie-Miso-Soup!

2007-10-03T15:33:00.000-07:00

(Click to see big enough that you can almost taste it!)

This is our multi-vitamin soup, and it is made from vegitables and miso! We start by choosing at least twelve vegetables for our soup. Whenever we get twelve vegetables we always seem to end up with enough to fill a 20 quart soup pot.

It is a large soup, but the preparation is simple enough. Take your biggest pot and, using some good olive oil,saute some onions, leeks, and tons of garlic, and ginger. Add water, about a third of a pot, and boil it. Add Miso, seaweed, and tofu to the boiling water. Add the the chopped up veggies. Cook it till the hardest vegetable is almost soft enough to eat. (It is going to get reheated. and some of it is going to get frozen.) When we finish a batch of the soup we divide it into three smaller pots, one to eat, and two to freeze. There so much soup that we need freeze some of it. One batch of the soup fuels two of us for a couple of weeks.

We have been eating three small bowls of this soup each day for the last eight months and the changes to our over all well-being has been amazing. People ask us if we don't get tired of eating the same thing everyday। The answer is surprisingly, no. The soup is not the only thing that we eat everyday. We eat anything that we want to eat. We just try to eat three small servings of this each day. It is like having a delicious little bowl of multivitamins.

In order to really broaden the nutritional spectrum of the meal, we eat this twelve (or more) veggie soup with a scoop of Superice, ground seed, ground seeds, and sunflower seeds on top of the soup to complete the meal. It is so good this way, that we don't get tired of it.

Since we have this much soup on hand, we don't need to ask ourselves, "What should we eat?" today, we just eat the soup. Having a full spectrum of nutrients constantly available for our bodies provides the tools that our bodies need to operate more efficiently. We have noticed changes. When we eat this way. We don't run out of energy, our concentration has improved, people ask us if we have been losing weight (really. it's true), our hair is growing thicker, our fingernails are growing a little too fast, and we feel great.

We have found that making this soup has other benefits besides providing great nutrition. We save both, money, and time. We save money because a pot of soup only costs around $40.00 to make and provides us more than half of our meals for two weeks. We save time because we make a big pot of soup on one day, and only need to re-heat the soup for most of our meals. There is also a fair amount of time and money saved on shopping trips to town.

Veggie-Table

2007-10-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

Click the little veggie chart to see a bigger veggie chart.

Napa Cabbage, Swiss Chard, Collard Greens, Tofu, Seaweed, Broccoli, Beets, Miso, Fuji's Chili Oil Paste, Onion, Kale, Jalapeño Peppers, Brussels Sprouts, Head Cabbage, Dried Anchovies, Garlic, Carrots, and Green Beans. (Mustard Greens, & Ginger not pictured.)

Multi-Veggie-Mega-Vitamin-Soup

Simple Soy Milk

2007-09-27T01:30:00.000-07:00

We have found a simple way to make soy milk. We started experimenting with soy milk because soy is such a healthy food. We wanted to make it ourselves, because we tasted some of the bottled stuff and it just seemed kinda fake, flavored and sweetened. We prefer the taste of soy milk in it's pure form, when it is freshly made, and has a natural sweet and rich flavor.

We experimented with making soy milk from whole soy beans, but found that it was very time consuming and messy. When starting from dry beans it is necessary to soak the beans, then run them in a blender, boil them until they foam up (but not over). Ours always seemed to boil over because the pot never seems to want to boil until we turn our attention away, and then does so quickly.
After a repeated attempts with the whole bean, Jin thought that perhaps we could simply use soy flour and a pressure cooker to make soy milk. It works!

We are using an automatic pressure cooker, because, the older stove top pressure cookers require careful monitoring, and the soy slurry that is being cooked has a lot of fiber that could plug the vent. These factors along with our experience, with pots boiling over, helped us decide that the Automatic Pressure Cooker seemed a little safer because we can just set it, and forget it.
Besides, we already owned an Automatic Pressure Cooker.

We use Full Fat Soy Flour, to make the soy milk, rich and milky. It only takes about a cup or two per batch so a large bag will go a long way.

We asked the guy in the bulk foods department at our local Winco Foods store to order a bag of soy bean flour. They get it from Bob's Red Mill and it is full fat, and comes in a 35 lb. bag. (Which we have found lasts us about 45 days.)

The other ingredient is water, but the water quality is very important. Hard water, like that which comes our of our well, has too many minerals in it to effectively absorb the soy fats, and will separate so you end up with a lot of solids, and a very watery yellowish milk like whey. Since we started getting softer water, from town, the milk comes out much fuller, with the fat molecules suspended in water, instead of sticking to the soybean fibers. We had a heck of a time until we figured out about the water. Our water quality changes from time to time (we are on a well), so sometimes the milk would be fine, and then later it wouldn't work. We kept trying different cooking times and stuff, and it was very confusing. We haven't had any trouble at all since we changed out water source.
So if you have trouble getting a good batch of soy milk, go find some softer water. (Tap water from town works for us.)

We put a heaping cup of the Soy Flour in to the pressure cooker, whisking in water, until the fluid reaches the MAX line in the pressure cooker.

We always remove any foam generated by exuberant whisking.

Then we just lock on the lid, set the timer to 15 min. and wander off for awhile. . . .

IMPORTANT: When the pressure cooker is finished cooking wait until the pressure escapes naturally, do not tip the weight (or remove it, Yikes) to let off the steam. What will happen if you release the pressure too quickly is the hot pressurized fluids containing all the soy fibers and milky protein strands will start to foam up inside the cooker and spray all over the walls. and modge podge your kitchen.

. . . when we return the pressure has dropped enough to remove the lid, and most of the solids have settled to the bottom of the pot. So we ladle off the first two cups while they are nice and hot.

When we experiment with something new we like to have a kind of test run. Like in this case we started making soy milk from soy flour in a pressure cooker, and drinking it, three batches a day, for thirty days. That came to about 8 to 10 cups of soy milk a day for each of us.

So after 30 days, here are our observations:

Soy milk is delicious, especially when fresh and warm.

It is really much less expensive to make the soy milk from soy flour. then it is, to buy it in paper-foil cartons. as it turns out since we make it ourselves we drink more of it, so much more, that if we were buying it in cartons, we would have drunk ourselves into the poor house last month.

Soy milk is actually a great food source, we noticed that our cravings for other foods like eggs and grains declined during the experiment.

Our energy levels seemed higher, because we have been getting a lot of stuff done, burning the candle at both ends, and still not getting all that tired recently.

We have read that soy is a good source of magnesium, which is supposed to help combat stress. We have been feeling calmer lately, sleeping well too, soy is loaded with tryptophan, a well known sleep aid. Also there is choline which is good for the brain and we have been having a lot of good ideas lately, perhaps that's why we have been so busy. . . . yet somehow still less stressed out.

Making this simple soy milk is something that we will continue to do, we have formed another habit, and it has become a part of our daily routine.

We make a batch before bedtime, so we can have a fresh hot cup to help us sleep, That leaves some left over to re-heat and drink the next morning, now we are no longer doing morning chores on an empty stomach. We make a few more batches during the day, which really helps out between meals, because it is such a good energy booster. We have been making and drinking it about four times a day, and don't expect to slow down anytime soon.

We can't stop making it anyway now, because our chickens already expect the pulp. Besides, it tastes so good.

Adding Soy Pulp to Soy Ocean Soup

9/27/10

Blueberry Season

2007-09-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

Blueberry season arrives in July in this part of Oregon, just a little after the strawberry season.
You get a little more shade to pick around blueberry bushes than strawberry bushes.
Still it can get hot so take a lot of water especially if you intend to do any serious picking।

It took two of us about
four hours to pick 100 lbs।

Orbiting

2007-08-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

We like to walk for exercise. A nice long, brisk, steady walk gets the blood moving, and leaves us feeling invigorated and ready for the day. Sometimes we need a walk, to digest a meal, walk off some sitting, or think up an idea. Sometimes we don't want to commit to our usual mile and a half loop.
We came up with Orbiting when my wife injured her ankle. She needed to start walking again a little at a time until the ankle could get strong. Orbiting allowed her to walk enough to exercise her ankle a little bit at a time, because she could stop anytime her ankle got tired.

Orbiting is walking a large circle around a fixed point. A forty foot or larger circle is comfortable, too small will just make you dizzy. We now have a path around our house that we can use for orbiting. Orbiting seems strange at first as you pass by the same things over and over, but after awhile your eyes settle on a spot ahead of you, and your mind starts to wander, and it feels as if you are on a trail hike, anywhere in the world, just hiking along a never ending trail.

The trick is that it is a big round circle, there should be no corners to break your pace or interrupt your wandering mind, neither do we count laps, as this can spoil the trail illusion. We like leave for about an hour of orbiting, it always feels good, when we get back home.
    The beauty of Orbiting is that, if you orbit your house like we do, the path is always just outside the door, you can walk as far as you want, you don't need to pack water or anything with you because you can always stop in the next door for water, a snack, or even a nap, and also it is never far to the next restroom.

Next time you feel the need to jog things up a bit consider Orbiting.

Oh ... one more thing, it is a good practice to reverse direction in the middle of your walk. When we walked in a slight curve for an extended time, we noticed that we had a tendency to develop a Lean. Reversing the direction that we Orbited about half way thru our walk helped us to counter the Lean and restore balance to our equilibrium.   I was concerned that if we Orbited too long in one direction then we might develop a permanent Lean that could make it difficult to negotiate straight sidewalks, of which there are many.


8/22/09

Eating Raw

2007-08-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

This is our veggie plate, with a miso based dip.
We've started keeping one of these by the computer so we can get some raw veggies while we blog. It is so important to eat a lot of your vegetables raw, because when we cook the vegetables we loose enzymes that aid digestion and absorption of vitamins.

The miso dip also contains: red chili paste, green onions, crushed garlic, vinegar, honey, flax, pumpkin, and sunflower seeds.

8/20/09

How to make Crepes

2007-08-17T23:35:00.000-07:00

1/4 cup Magic 21 Grain Pancake Powder

We just read that two tablespoons of Flax seed has 146 percent of our daily value * of Omega 3. so we decided to put 4 tablespoons of flax seed meal in to the Crepe Batter at this point of the recipe. We'll both get our Omega 3's with our crepes abd iu also makes the crepes taste nuttier . . . the Nuttier the Batter! he he

Anyway. . .

Add a Pinch of Salt
2 tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil
5 or 6 Eggs and a 1/4 Cup of Milk
Mix
Ladle in some batter and swirl to coat the pan.
When the edges peel away a use a fork to get the spatula started
Dish it up and start another
Enjoy with Real Maple Syrup and a little butter.

* Here is a link to the Omega 3 information: whfoods.org ---- Omega 3

8/17/09

Tofu!!!!!

2007-08-10T21:18:00.000-07:00

Today we made our first Soy milk and then we made Tofu ! ! !

I used a tie-dyed silk scarf to line my tofu mold so the tofu received a faint tie dye art print on top, well we live and learn.

Still it was very yummy!

Strawberry Season

2007-06-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

We picked 100 lbs of Strawberries.

Here in Oregon the strawberry season runs from about June 1st to June 20.
It is a small window of time so pick'em while you can.
If you freeze enough of them then you can eat them all year!

Fuji's Secret Revealed

2007-06-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

Fuji's basic theory is this: Our bodies use food for more than just fuel. When our body receives a nutrient it puts it to use. Sometimes our bodies need to use multiple nutrients to produce some compound or other in order to make some hair, or to repair some tissue.... It is hard to predict what or when our bodies may need something in particular, So here is the idea....One should eat as wide a variety of everything, everyday, and let the body decide what it wants.
Keep available to the body as wide a variety of vitamins, and minerals, then our body will have a better chance of finding whatever it wants whenever it needs anything.

A Fish Tale

2007-05-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Marinade with salt, pepper and honey.
Salmon heads are smoked with oak chips in the oven.
(Fish head eating not shown)

Salmon Broth

Bones Broth

The chickens pick the BonesAnd then we eat their eggs!

5/16/09

The Secrets of Growing Bean Sprouts

2007-03-16T22:22:00.000-07:00

We like to eat bean sprouts, but in order to get decent sprouts we used to have to drive to the Asian foods market in Salem, where frequent produce turnover insures fresher sprouts. There are sprouts available in local markets but they are in smaller packages that don't seem to be produced locally, and aren't usually that fresh. We don't make the trip to Salem very often, but still wanted to eat fresh sprouts on a regular basis. The solution was to simply grow our own. We have been growing them successfully for a few months now and have learned some of the the secrets to growing good sprouts.

mung beans are easy to sprout at home, if you know a few simple tricks.

Here are a couple of jars of mung bean sprouts that we grew in about 5 days time.
It only takes about a half cup of mung beans for each gallon jar of sprouts. This is a great way to get some fresh vegetables in the darkness of winter. They do most of their growing in the dark anyway.

They are wonderful in a stir fry, a salad, or in your soup.

Just to wet your appetite, I created a youtube for making plain a egg roll.
Sprouts and eggs make a great combination for an appetizer, bon appetite.

Click the link to see the movie!

EGG ROLLS!

use your back button when the movie is over to return here and learn how to grow sprouts!

So here are the directions for Growing Sprouts:
Soak your mung beans. You will need about a 1/2 cup of mung beans for each gallon jar. Rinse them well in a big bowl of cold water. We soak our beans for a day to a day and a half in the bowl. It is important to rinse them. Change the water a few times each day to keep the water fresh. The beans will tan the water like when you make sun tea, also some bubbles will appear on the surface of the water as the beans release some proteins and starches into the water, which could lead to the water spoiling . . . the beans are happier in fresh water.

We have found that the long pre-soak results in fatter and crunchier beans, also the beans go in to the jars having already leached off the excess proteins and stuff so we don't need to rinse the beans as often in the later stages of growing. Three to four thorough rinses a day should be plenty, But you may need to rinse a little more in the warmer summer months to keep them from spoiling.

You will need some equipment, but, it is easy to make while the beans soak.

We are using plastic gallon jars, they are lighter and don't make a mess when we drop them on the concrete, but most importantly they warm up more quickly than glass jars when we place them back in the racks after rinsing.

(Added Note: We are in Oregon and the climate is cool here, so the plastic has been working well for us, However if you are having trouble with spoiling, and are living in a warm and humid climate, like in Georgia for example, Glass jars would probably be a better choice, as they will stay cooler and be easier to keep sanitary, especially in the sticky heat, Also watch the airflow in your growing area, the sprouts need to breath.)

You will be rinsing the beans frequently so put a screen on the jar to make it easier to fill with water, and empty again, without spilling the beans.

We are using the mesh bags that our garlic came in, and elastic to help hold them on, If you have big rubber bands from Broccoli (White or Blue) or Asparagus (Purple) you could use those.

Whatever you use, hold your hand on top when you dump water out of the jar so you don't end up pouring the beans down the drain, they could still sprout in the drain, but you won't want to eat them when you get them back out of the pipe, trust me, I know.

Bean sprouts grow best in the dark, We made the rack out of pots to help maintain an even temperature by blocking drafts, and to keep out the light.

We hung the rack in a dark, warm spot (around 70 degrees), behind the water heater. I believe that a lot of our success in growing Mung Beans is because of finding a warm, spot with good air flow. I don't think they would do as well in a small closet for example.

When we put the jars in the pots we pull a curtain that is light weight enough to allow good air flow, yet dark enough to keep out the light. We used a black silk bathrobe that doesn't fit either of us, but was too nice to get rid of, if you still have your old graduation robe, that would probably work too. (Bet you thought you would never use that robe again, did you?)

HERE IS THE IMPORTANT PART:

Rinse the spouts with cold water. It might seem funny to chill the beans, and then put them in a warm place, but I think that warming and cooling are part of the growing process, like when the beans are in the ground as it warms, and cools during the day/night cycle.

Turn the faucet to full so the turbulence gently scrubs the sprouts clean. Swirl the jar around and repeat if the water is cloudy, when the water is clear, fill the jar with cold water.
Give the sprouts a good drink by leaving the jars to sit full of water for 5 to 10 minutes. Letting them drink this way helps the sprouts grow fatter and crunchier.

After the sprouts drink. empty the jars and put them in the rack.

After a day or two the sprouts will outgrow the husks, which will float to the tops of the jars during rinsing. Skim these off they just get in the way, and could cause the water to spoil.

Rinse the sprouts three to four times a day, When you wake up, when you go to bed and a couple times in between. As the sprouts grow they will cloud the water and want to be rinsed even more thoroughly.

The reason that it is so important to rinse is that the sprouts are growing in an unnatural environment,(a jar), normally sprouts are in the dirt and digest stuff in the dirt by producing enzymes. Without dirt to digest, the enzymes start to work on the sprouts themselves, which get slimy and then spoil.

It is important to get the jars really clean between uses, any dried sprout residue will reconstitute and spoil the next batch.

When they are done (4 to 5 days) Rinse them in a large basin to remove the loose hulls that float to the top, shake or spin them dry, and put them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, for the first few days they will be great fresh in salads, after that, in the stir fry, and after that soup. After the soup stage comes the chicken stage, where you feed them to the chickens. After the Chicken Stage your next batch should be ready so you can go back to salads again.

If anything goes wrong and they come out a little off, too tough or small and heady, feed them to your chickens, if you don't have any chickens, get some chickens. If your town doesn't allow chickens, move to another town, and get some chickens. I cannot stress this enough, Everybody should have chickens!

But, don't give up, grow more sprouts! Keep trying until you find out what didn't work for you.

3/16/10

Seaweed Miso & Mixed Bean Soup

2007-01-16T11:56:00.000-08:00

Such a satisfying soup, and delicious too! We have been eating it almost daily for close to three months. When our supply of garden vegetables declined in the cold weather we started using sea vegetables as an alternative. Sea Vegetables grow in the ocean so they are as rich in minerals as seawater.
This soup contains: Lots of seaweed, mixed beans (about 10 kinds), celery, onions, garlic, anchovy powder, Miso (Soy, not wheat based) and our Hot Chili Paste added at the end.

We make a big pot of this soup and it lasts us about ten days. We like have a bowl over a scoop of our Superice, topped with a little Sesame Oil. It's good for a nutritious breakfast and a souper supper.

1/16/10

How to make egg roll

2000-03-24T12:46:00.000-08:00

A simple demonstration on how to make egg roll.

A Note about an Ex-Experiment:

2000-01-01T20:42:00.000-08:00

A Note about an Ex-Experiment: If you are here to take a closer look at how to set up a bean sprout grower, you may notice that some of the jars in the background are wearing sweaters. These sweater sleeves were an experimental attempt to provide darkness to help the sprouts grow longer. We found that when jar sweaters become damp, the water evaporates, which cools the jars. Bean sprouts grow better when it is warm.

We got rid of the sweaters so, the jar surfaces stay dry, and use a curtain to block the light and drafts, and hold warm air around the jars.
(The jar rack is hung near a hot pipe behind the water heater)

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