Eggs, Food, pulses, scratch cooking

Quick post about egg replacements…

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Well, the price of eggs is currently rocketing up, and it doesn’t look like they are going to come down for a while.

Now, eggs are marvelous things and it’s nearly impossible to replace them (over easy is my favorite way, and you can’t easily fake those), but for some things, you can use something else.

If you know me, you know I love my pulses. So I will let you know there is something lurking in a can of chick peas/ceci/garbanzo beans/ chana dal (I will never for the life of me know why the shortest names isn’t the one we settled on).

So get your can of ceci. Open it and strain it, SAVING THE LIQUID. That liquid is called ‘aquafaba’ or ‘bean water’. And 3 T of it will replace an egg in baking or cooking. Can you fry it over easy? No. Can you use it as a binder in your meatloaf? Yes. Can you use it in place of your egg bath when breading something? Yes. Can you use it in baking? Yes. Can you use it as an egg wash? Yes- but it will only brown, not get glossy.

Can you make angel food cake with it? Yes- but it will take a LOT of beating. But yes, meringues can be made out of it.

So, for scrambling and frying and dipping toast into, you’d have to splurge on real eggs. But for cornbread or brownies or breaded pork chops, you can use a little bean juice instead. And ceci just has no real color or flavor, so it works very well. It also freezes, so you can just pop a serving out when you need it.

And what to do with those beans (peas) that are leftover? Well, other than making hummus (who doesn’t love hummus?) I’m going to share with you a ceci salad and a ceci ‘scramble’— both good ways to eat them that are slightly eggy in their own way.

So get a medium sized fry pan and cook

      1/8 of an onion, diced

            1T oil

For about 3-5 minutes. Add

            2 cloves garlic minced

Cook about 1 minute. Add

1 cup ceci

            ¼ tsp turmeric

            Salt and black pepper

Mash and heat through. Add

            Pinch cayenne

            1 tsp lemon juice

1 ½ tsp parsley, minced

Serve it up. A bowl of that is a large breakfast and a great way to get your pulses in.

And a ceci salad that is decent on crackers or as a sandwich filling:

2 cups ceci (about 1 can), slightly mashed

1 dill pickle, minced (or pickle of your choice)

¼ cup red onion, diced

Mix those in a bowl. Dress with a mixture of these, and serve.

            2T mayo (use vegan if you are)

            2 tsp apple cider vinegar

2 tsp prepared mustard

            ¼ tsp each salt and pepper

1/8 tsp turmeric

That’s that. Of course, trade out ingredients you hate or don’t have, but the turmeric does help the color and flavor. I made the salad the other day, so I have a photo of that.  

And here is hoping the prices go back down…

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Book Review: The Gluten Lie And other myths about what you eat

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The Gluten Lie And other myths about what you eat

Alan Levinovitz, PhD

If you have friends like I do, this book has been in and out of your feed for a while now. If you are like me you’ve been waiting for it from the library eagerly looking forward to it the way you did Salt Sugar Fat, Paleofantasy, and other books about nutrition, diets, and obsession over both.

Alan Levinovitz is different than the other authors in that he is not an anthropologist or a nutritionist, but rather a specialist in ancient Chinese religions.  Which sounds terribly wrong at first, but oh so right when you think about it. He brings a slant that the ‘modern’ craze for dieting (going back a few hundred years) has many similarities with religion. I really liked the way he explained that the myth (in this case a diet) remains but the logic supporting it changes.

He also uses his expertise to clear up that no, a 5000 year old tome of Chinese medicine does not talk about using salt to control blood pressure. He says that the line “from the Huangdi Meijing, aka The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine: “Hence if too much salt is used for food, the pulse hardens….”
”This line, widely repeated in the literature on salt and blood pressure, has a great deal of persuasive power. Even the ancient Yellow Emperor knew this stuff would kill you! Compelling evidence, right? Wrong. Wrong in so many ways.
”First: the Huangdi Meijing says no such thing. The origin of the quote is actually a 1956 anthology called Classics in Arterial Hypertension, compiled by Arthur Ruskin, MD, of the University of Texas. One wonders where Ruskin got the quote, since it’s nowhere to be found in the Chinese text. When I checked the original, the only passage that could be construed as referring to high blood pressure— excess yang qi— recommended treatment with increased salt.”

Well, he can mike drop on that one.

The Gluten Lie covers not just gluten but all the recent dietary demons that we’ve been taught to avoid: Salt, sugar (including high fructose corn syrup), fat (barely touching cholesterol) and carbs, concentrating on gluten. He effectively covers Michael Moss’ 350-page Salt, Sugar, Fat in 220 pages. Moss’s work took me a bit to read, and was fascinating (and introduced me to Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal, which I loved). The Gluten Lie took hardly any time to read. It reads like a blog, friendly and simple. He isn’t negative or skeptical about either celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, so those criticisms are out. However, if you are like me, you may have some issues with his footnotes and references. I know, I should be glad that there are footnotes at all, but I can’t be. Now these are what just jumped out at me, not a definitive list. He supports a statement about meat not being bad for you twice, once with the BBC, and once with a doctor’s quote. He neglects to mention that the BBC article is about that doctor, and that doctor’s quote is from the article.

The second one is when he quotes three full paragraphs of a 1922 herbal medicine pamphlet, and there are no records in his note of what that pamphlet is. Admittedly, a Google search allowed me to find it (it’s The Herb Doctor and Medicine Man by the Indiana Herb Company, published in 1919) but it doesn’t bode well for what I didn’t research.

Now, that’s important to me, and it may not be to you. In any case, it’s fairly negative towards people like Vani Hari and things like low sodium diets, but fairly positive towards people suffering from real diseases. I do like his facetious diet at the end. I highly recommend if you like skipping around a book (like I do) you don’t mistake it for a serious recommendation.

Food, pulses, weight loss, weight loss, whole grain

Intermittent fasting: Gina’s take.

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My takeaways from the book about fasting: Life in the Fasting Lane by Jason Fung, Eve Mayer and Megan Ramos.

Recently I was in an internet squabble with a woman who declared that pulses (do NOT come at my pulses!) were bad for you and you should never eat them. Then she told me to look up Dr. Jason Fung and I would learn everything. So I did. And because we live in the future, I was able to grab three of his books from the library.

Fung and his coauthors are selling a system they promise will work with your hormones and do not involve a calorie deficit. They will allow you to eat all the food you want. They claim that modern doctors have no clue how to deal with weight loss, and that anyone who tells you calories in calories out is misinformed.

Ok, that’s an interesting take.

They then proceed to teach an intermittent fasting method. In their method you fast for anywhere from a few hours to a week or more. Perhaps the biggest thing that hit me is the emphasis on eating normally* on the days you ‘feast’ (‘feast days’ are just days you eat a normal amount, not a day you splurge, like Thanksgiving). Oh, and you need to cut out all snacks- they want you eating 2 healthy* meals a day, not too large, and that’s it. So what do you get if you go from 2-3 meals a day with 1-2 snacks a day to 2 meals a day with no snacks AND skipping 2+ meals a week?

Say it with me- a calorie deficit!

How they managed to convince the thousands of people who like their program that this is not a simple calorie deficit is beyond me. There’s a lot of talk about hormones and basal metabolic rates and how fasting isn’t going to make your body think you are starving because literally ‘starvation isn’t voluntary, fasting is’ I don’t get. I don’t get how one of the authors ‘cured her PCOS’ by fasting- PCOS is currently incurable. You can reduce the symptoms with diet and medicine, but no one can possibly cure it. I have it. This woman who made this claim is a ‘clinical researcher’, so she ought to know.

Another thing that ‘clinical researchers’ ought to have caught is the authors interpretation of the studies which say that insulin causes weight gain. The studies they referenced watched diabetics gain eight after receiving insulin. The researchers continued to explain that as a result of the insulin, the people studied were more able to absorb nutrients from food, and the weight gain was prevented by reducing calories in a high protein, high fiber, moderate fat and carb diet.

I was also concerned with the ‘don’t talk to your doctor’ suggestion in the book. Saying that your doctor will think fasting is a fad (when it’s been around for 1000s of years) and advise you not to do it is a red flag to me.

Another red flag to me is the attitude towards food through out the book. People are not eating, they are ‘stuffing their faces’. Birthday cake should be avoided at all costs. Eating lasagna is a ‘bad day’. Remove yourself from dinner with the family so you aren’t tempted to eat. These just sound like they are promoting a poor relationship with food. And, of course, saying to avoid my beloved pulses, in addition to not eating potatoes, rice, mangoes, oranges, or bananas, just demonizes foods that are not in the least bad for you.  

Overall I found the book to be not helpful. It seems to be a warmed over Keto/Atkins style diet with little advice on how to have a healthy relationship with food.

Surviving independently in a city.