Gluten-Free Breakfast Bowls

Many Americans don't eat breakfast, but we all should start out the day with some balanced nutrition. Here are some breakfast ideas you might not have thought of:

• Gluten-free oatmeal (Bob's Red Mill and other brands)


• Non-dairy Yogurt


• Lundberg's organic brown rice cereal


• a bowl of fresh organic fruit, or fruit and coconut milk yogurt


• Arrowhead Mills organic maple buckwheat flakes


• Arrowhead Mills sweetened rice flakes


• a bowl of rice dotted with lentils and dried cranberries, or a bowl of hot rice and vegetables, or a bowl of pho


• a gluten free tortilla rollup: nuke or grill a Food for Life brown rice tortilla and then roll it around anything you like: hummus or beans, for example.


• mochi


• Macadamia nut Daifuku (rice cakes with adzuki bean paste). Find these at a store like Uwajimaya in the grab-and-go refrigerator section.


• a bakery item from Flying Apron Bakery....


• a cranberry orange relish you can make by chopping up fresh cranberries and adding chopped orange. Mix in a spoonful or two of organic sunflower seeds, then drizzle with agave syrup or honey, mix thoroughly, and ... well, you get the picture

• yesterday's dinner is also pretty good for breakfast..

Spill the Beans

Is it easy to cook your own beans? Absolutely!

I say that because I tend to meet with disbelief when I promote the topic of home-cooked beans.

What many people don't realize is that on top of being simple to prepare, home-cooked beans taste delectable. They pack nutritional wallop -- especially in terms of iron, and they are an excellent source of fiber. The last time my doctor reviewed my lab values, she was surprised to hear that I don't take iron to supplement my mostly-vegetarian diet. I told her it must be the fresh-cooked adzuki and garbanzo beans I like to eat.

About flavor: You know how most chili recipes call for canned beans? You dump the beans into the cooking chili and know beforehand there is no reason tasting the pot because the beans will taste terrible until they've picked up the chili flavorings. Well, that's all different with fresh beans.

Even without having any salt added to the pot while cooking, beans I cook myself always taste delightful; the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle differences among beans really pop out to let you appreciate them. I'll find myself sneaking a spoon into the pot for one more bite before I set cooked beans into the refrigerator. Since I'm not a devotee of salt, these are mighty naked beans I am finding so tasty.

In addition, beans are probably the cheapest source of protein you can find. Check out the price of beans in your store's bulk food section, and you'll see what I mean.

Here's how I cook beans:

1. In the morning, I pour a cup of dried beans into a quart-size tupperware bowl, then I add sufficient cold water to drown the beans by several inches. I set this bowl out of the way for the day.

If you want to be all Suzy Homemaker, you could cover the bowl with a very cute kitchen towel, but remember it's just cold water and beans. I enjoy leaving the bowl open because if I'm home and popping in and out of the kitchen, I get to see the beans swelling in size and that's often fun. (I am easily amused.)

2. Eight hours later, I grab the bowl and dump the beans into a strainer over my sink, rinsing just a bit. Then I find a large lidded saucepan and pour the drained beans into the pan. I pour between 3 and 4 cups of fresh water onto the beans, put the lid on the pan, and set it on the stove over high heat until the water starts to boil.

3. When the water has started to boil, I turn the heat down to a low simmer -- low enough to keep the water moving but not so that bubbles crawl all the way up the sides of the pan. I'll simmer as follows:

• adzuki beans, 50 minutes


• garbanzo beans, 2-1/2 hours


• navy beans and kidney beans, 1-1/4 hour


• black-eyed peas, 1 hr

I usually set the timer on the low end of time and check the beans partway through the cooking process, adding the full time if necessary. Depending on the weather, how long I've presoaked the beans, and how I've set the heat, I'll have slightly shorter or longer cooking periods.

When done, I pour off the cooking water and use it for other purposes -- to add nutrients to my dog's food bowl, for example.

You can add a stick of kombu (dried seaweed), some sprinklings of sage, or some sea salt to the cooking beans towards the end of the cooking time to add flavor, but it's really not necessary!

Cooking lentils is just the same as cooking beans, without the eight-hour presoak. Simply rinse the lentils well before adding water and cooking. Lentils typically cook in about 35 minutes.

Enjoy and thrive!

Food's Incredible Health Secrets

Now this post contains gluten, dairy and soy content! But since it is also about the health benefits of eating certain foods, I think in that respect we're okay.

I came across the most marvelous book about food and I wanted to share it with you. The book is called "The Jungle Effect", and was written by an American physician, Dr. Daphne Miller.

Because Dr. Miller is a family physician, her practice includes a number of patients with modern diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and the like. Not content to treat these diseases with drugs alone, she decided to investigate populations where there is resistance to disease -- her so-called "cold spots" (as opposed to hot spots) for disease.

By traveling throughout the world and working with experts in the fields of anthropological nutrition and disease, she has been able to dissect the diets of a number of indigenous populations and explain to us why these diets are so healthy.

For example, the island of Okinawa, Japan, is a cold spot for colon and prostate cancer. As it turns out, people on this island eat a diet that is different from the rest of Japan, a kind of fusion diet influenced by a number of nearby Asian countries. They eat far more fruits and vegetables of every kind, and especially those containing lycopene.

In men, lycopene concentrates in the prostate gland, and studies have shown between a 25 - 80% reduction in risk for prostate cancer in men eating a lot of lycopene. But that's just one antioxidant. Okinawans also eat foods high in glucosinolates -- for example, garlic, cabbage, brussels sprouts, bok choy, and broccoli, which have been shown to inhibit the development of hormone-sensitive cancers (i.e. breast cancer). On top of this, most Okinawans drink their water flavored with tea high in EGCG -- a flavonoid that has high anti-cancer properties. They cook their foods only briefly using a light steam or short stir fry (preserving the antioxidants) and they eat less food than they need to.

"The Jungle Effect" talks about these diets and methods of food preparation, along with indigenous diets from many other parts of the world: Iceland, Italy, Mexico, Senegal, and so forth. It has recipes and tips for finding indigenous foods in today's markets. The truth is, I had never understood how to cook my own beans before reading this book, and now I cook them all the time (with impressive flavor results!)

Tip: Mixing a tablespoon or so of vinegar with rice will make the rice slower to digest, reducing the rice's glycemic index.

Tip: Cooking vegetables such as carrots in a little olive oil makes the beta carotene easier for the body to absorb.

Where do these tips come from? Find out in the book and enjoy good health!

Any Nog in the Storm

I have a non-dairy version of Egg Nog -- which does contain egg -- that I can whip up in a snap using light Coconut milk, a little Horchata or plain rice milk, Cinnamon (sometimes Ginger and clove), a little raw egg, a dab of honey or agave, and, for those who like it, the booze du jour.

I start by whipping the egg with a wire whisk until it is light and frothy.

Then I slowly add the honey or agave.

After whipping some more, I'll slowly pour in "some" coconut milk -- perhaps 1/2 cup, then another 1/4 to 1/3 cup of Horchata or rice milk, and the spices.

I whisk and whisk, even though I know the mixture will start to separate as soon as I stop. I pour the frothy mixture into a mug, leaving about an inch at the top if I plan to add booze.

Right about this time, it is approaching evening and KPLU's All Blues is wafting in over the speakers, with a little Howlin' Wolf leading the hour.

Do you need more?

In Love With Fungi

So many times I've heard stories about people who subsist on rice cakes once they've been diagnosed with food allergies. My immediate thought is to put those poor folks on a plane to someplace exotic! Let them experience a different cuisine with the freedom of someone on vacation. Let them discover you can eat so much better once you experiment a little.

As your typical former fast-food American, my idea of a mushroom used to be the pasty white piece of rubber that I picked off of my pizza. But in researching a cancer-prevention diet for my dog, time and time again I came up against the mushroom's unquestionable nutritive value.

A friend made a suggestion to me that I'll pass along to you. For a first foray into mushrooms, start with a chantrelle -- probably the most delicately-flavored of mushrooms, with a soft and yielding flesh. Individual chantrelles range from light to dark gold in color and are quite distinctive in shape: the hats are wrinkled and fairly oval, with scalloped edges, and are cupped upwards. They have pizzazz. When cooked, they taste buttery and a little like trout. A chantrelle is not at all like what I expected a mushroom to be.

Below is how I prepared my first chantrelles.

First I made a dressing, using a teaspoon of organic peanut butter, a teaspoon of sesame oil, and a dollop of organic olive oil. I whipped that together, adding a heaping tablespoon of chili pepper flakes, some splashes of rice vinegar, and then a hint of honey.

I roughly chopped up a bunch of organic red cabbage -- perhaps a quarter of a head. Then I lightly chopped a handful of chantrelles that I had washed and gently cleaned with a brush.

Because I was in a hurry, I used the microwave instead of a stovetop.

The cabbage was tossed in with the dressing and the mixture nuked on my oven's Vegetable setting, until it started the final countdown. I paused the oven, tossed in the chantrelles, and let the bowl cook for the remaining twenty or so seconds.

That's it! I served this dish with wild salmon and added a splash of lingonberry jam. The cabbage turns purple with cooking, so with the gold of the chantrelles against the salmon, lingonberries, pepper flakes, and cabbage, it was an autumn feast for the eyes.

Other mushrooms I've tried since then include Oyster, Portobello and Shiitake. Oyster and Chantrelle remain my favorites, being so delicate and fragrant.

Vitamin D in the News

A recent physician panel revised downward their recommendations for daily intake of Vitamin D, to something like 800 IU per day. According to the panel, Americans are getting sufficient doses of Vitamin D from fortified foods and do not need to take higher doses of the vitamin.

I thought I'd post a note here before everyone tosses out their bottles of Vitamin D! The recommendations are for healthy people. If someone has a food allergy that compromises the gut's ability to absorb nutrients, they will not be absorbing Vitamin D properly.

The best advice I can give is to suggest you talk to your doctor and get your level of Vitamin D measured. Then have it measured on a regular basis. Your doctor can help you decide what level of supplement you need.

Undetected food allergies can keep you from absorbing Vitamin D. Once diagnosed, temporary high doses of the vitamin (50,000 IU taken once each week for eight weeks) help bring the system back to normal.

Chat with your doctor to get the real scoop on important matters such as Vitamin D.

Food Allergies

Here is a tip: you can tell if your body is sensitive to a particular food by checking your pulse a few minutes after eating that food. (You do need to know your resting pulse in advance to do this correctly.) If you have a sensitivity to a food, your pulse rate should increase fairly dramatically.

The body is recognizing the food as an immunogen, and beginning an inflammatory cascade of reactions designed to deal with that immmunogen. Lots of things are immunogenic: proteins especially, carbohydrates, bacteria, parasites, foreign tissue grafts, grass pollen, animal dander, you get the picture.

Somewhere I read that this response evolved so humans could fight off internal parasites such as tapeworms. These days we have many manufactured items assaulting our systems through inhalation, ingestion, and absorption through the skin -- via use of soap, shampoo, lotion, nail polish, application of makeup, walking on lawns, swimming in pools, wearing clothing, and so forth -- that we are activating the inflammatory pathway quite a lot.

Usually the first line of defense against an immunogen is a mast cell, one of many scattered all throughout the body under the skin, in the lungs, in the GI tract, in the nasal mucosa, and in connective tissues.

Mast cells are important because they contain granules of various inflammatory chemicals (for example, histamine), and because they quickly recognize molecules that are foreign.

The recognition of "foreign-ness" happens through molecules of the antibody IgE, which liberally coat the surface of the mast cells. The IgE molecules practically scuffle with each other to grab hold of the invading immunogen, creating a crosslink which opens up the mast cell wall. The granules inside the cell then swell up like toads and release their contents ("degranulate") to the cell's immediate surroundings.

When histamine is released, it causes smooth muscle contraction (to expel the immunogen from the body). Other chemicals in the granules cause blood vessel leakage (to dilute the immunogen) or increased mucous secretion (to sweep it away), or they might send out chemical signals to attract scavengers to eat the offending immunogen.

What the body will experience depends on where the inflammation is located -- or, which mast cells were the first line of defense. Whether symptoms are felt might depend on the dose of the immunogen and the ability of the IgE to recognize it. Symptoms include headache, increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, gut and stomach cramps, stomach ache, muscle pain, sinus and nasal congestion, earache, etc.

Over time, if the immunogen is always present in the body, it's like the body is in a state of constant alert. The temporary blood pressure elevation becomes permanent. Migraines become more and more frequent. You can see where this is leading: all those trips to the doctor because of an undetected immunogen.

One interesting fact about histamine is that it also increases the amount of stomach acid secreted in the stomach (I presume in an effort to make sure the invading immunogens are dissolved.)

People going on gluten-free diets for the first time can suddenly experience this huge wallop of stomach acid as their eating habits improve; it takes a while for stomach cells to regulate back to their normal acid production once they've stopped being bombarded with histamine.