When I could eat again…!

I am doing extremely well.  Not only do I jog 1 hour/4 miles daily non-stop, I study the bible non-stop all day and cook for my kids.  One of the ladies at the healing room prayed over my swelling leg and declared that I should no longer fear what I could or couldn’t eat for I am healed.  So….!!!  These days, I’ve been reaching for anything I feel like.  Dark chocolate, chicken, even pork.  I could eat home made char siu bao (roasted pork buns), Chinese glutinous rice rolls.  When I went to the Bay Area last time, I scoffed off a whole bag of Hong Kong’s signature egg puffs off the sidewalk in Oakland Chinatown, just with minimum sweetness.  I was in heaven.  These days, I noticed that when my leg swells up a little bit due to bread or cream cheese or the irritable egg, I just need to down some homemade kim-chi with rice cakes Korean style and the swelling goes down.  Magic food for inflammation.  If you have arthritis and swelling and the like, eat super spicy food.  Last time I had Pakistani food and Thai food at restaurants  and even though they were not organic, I had no swelling at all because of the spice.  Life is incredibly delicious!!

Bless My Food

For those of you who do not eat organic food yet, or have to go out and eat from unknown kitchens, my friend Eric last night told me of the best prayer I have learnt this year.

“Father, please bless this food that we are sharing among my brothers and sisters and please kill everything in it that could kill us. Amen.”

Only your Father in Heaven, the Lord our God has this power.  Don’t believe it? Well, then, eat at your own risk.  My family is doing it right now.

And if you are at your friend’s house and they’re cooking, I’d say, say the same prayer.  We all need protection.

 

 

 

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

I was chatting with the pedaetrician of my kids and he was telling me that the doctors were using this book In Defense of Food for their monthly book club discussion and it turned out to be a very popular book with a decent message. The book examines the old food traditions of the world and the pitfalls of our present diet. Basically, if your grandmother could not recognize it as food, don’t buy it. If it has a health claim, run away from it. Buy only fresh food as much as possible.

Today, the American diet is heavily loaded with soy and corn subtitutes and you add rice and wheat to it, 80% of our meal is deficient of nutrients and vitamins. The animals that are fed on soy and corn has less good stuff than the animals that fed on grass. The plants that we eat today have  less than most vegeables put on the table 40 years ago because the soil has been simplified with chemical combinations nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium (NPK). The organic vegetables allowed to form its own defenses against pests have much more nutrients. Their roots allowed to seep deep underground absorb better nutrients from the soil.

Good fast read of an hour or so.

Reposted from an earlier blog dated September 9, 2008.

The Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson

An entire book about sushi!!

Sushi is to be eaten with fingers and the dipping sauce is actually diluted with wine and sugar. You are supposed to dip it fish side and not the rice side. The chef prefers that you don’t put wasabi in your soya sauce because they already put the right amount in the sushi itself.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

If you are at all interested in how a cook gets to become a chef, and discover all the ins and outs of the kitchen, then don’t miss Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.  When Bourdain writes, he writes as he thinks along with all the necessary swears and expletives in normal conditions. He tells you not to order fish in a restaurant from Saturday to Monday because you are basically eating fish sold on Thursday. The bread basket on your dining table very likely is recycled bread, bread that previous customers have not yet consumed. It’s an industry wide custom to reuse bread.  My husband blushed when I read aloud Bourdain’s diatribe against anyone who dares peel garlic days in advance or put the garlic through a press to ooze out something unrecognizable. He recommends the Japanese knives made by GLOBE, light and handy. His description on the politics of the kitchen is so hilarious!

Food sites

If you are into Vietnamese street food and haven’t visited yet, I highly recommend Noodlepie. Click along the navigational bar on the right and you will see a lot of great food entries. The author is now compiling a book on just that.

Posted July 11, 2013:

Thanks to Jean for sending me this link to juicing. At our cancer support group, everyone juices power kale with avocado or banana, with a touch of ginger and a dollop of whey protein.  I tried it once and had great difficulty finishing the drink.  I like to see my greens in leaf shape and be able to chew them.  Having said that, I clicked around the site and really like the link to alkalizing food.  I’ve been plagued by stomach pain because of stomach acid or something and have needed more alkaline food.  Now I realize why I like watermelon so much.  It actually soothes my stomach, despite it having the highest glycemic level which is bad for cancer.  And now I have to pick the nuts – only Brazilian nuts and almonds.  And no wonder why I couldn’t stop making Vietnamese rolls filled with lots of green onion and cilantro and leafy greens.  My body actually crave for those things.

Here is a digital magazine preview site that has all kinds of magazines and I found one that has 76 pages of cooking with cheese.  You could zoom in and look at the color spread here.