Veganism Unprocessed

Corn-Free July's first-ever guest-authored blog post comes from my friend Krisha.  She's been successfully pulling off a diet of zero animal products for almost two years now, so she's no stranger to conscientious eating.  I tried the breakfast bars from her recipe below and they're great!

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"Taking your own advice is really, really hard.

As an educator for Whole Foods Market, I'm forever providing my Team Members with bits of information that cannot but improve their lives. Stay away from GMOs! Build a healthy plate around vegetables instead of meat! I'm filled to bursting with advice for everyone around me. Just last week, I hosted a small class on the importance of eating breakfast in the morning. I explain that, not only can skipping breakfast cause you to gain weight (very often the opposite result sought by those who wait until lunch to break their fast), but studies have shown that it can have negative effects on your neurological function as well. And then, in the midst of my class, it happens.

One of my Team Members raises his hand and asks “What do you usually have for breakfast in the morning?”

“Uh...well....when I do have breakfast....”

“When you do have breakfast? You don't have breakfast every day? Didn't you just say that missing breakfast was, like, really bad for you?”

Like I said, taking your own advice is really, really hard. I know that eating breakfast is important. They don't call it the most important meal of the day for no reason. But my priority list goes:
     1. sleeping
     2.getting to work on time and
     3. eating breakfast.
Typically when I do have breakfast, I have to grab something at work that I can eat while I'm prepping for my classes. Sometimes it's a bagel and peanut butter. Sometimes it's a Clif bar and some OJ. Very rarely is it something that's actually good for me.

At the same time that I was thinking that it might be easier for my Team Members to take my advice if I followed it myself, Jane sent me a link about October Unprocessed. As a vegan, I tend to eat fewer processed foods than other people I know, but I am just as susceptible to the siren call of convenience foods, especially for breakfast. So this seemed like the opportune time to make the switch from no breakfast or a hideously processed convenience breakfast to a regular, homemade breakfast.

Don't paint me in the kitchen at 5:00 a.m. cooking up a vegetable omelet and homemade wheat bread toast just yet. Like I said, sleeping is #1, everything else is secondary. What I needed was a breakfast that I could make ahead of time on a day off, grab on my way in and eat when I was actually hungry or had time. Checking through my favorite home cooking blogs, I remembered that Angela Liddon of ohsheglows.com has wonderful make & take or make & reheat recipes for every meal.

Determined to shake off the fog of hypocrisy, I spent about an hour and a half in the kitchen on my day off this week making two batches of homemade breakfast bars. For those measly 90 minutes and about $12 in ingredients (mostly dried fruits and a couple of bananas) I ended up with over two weeks’ worth of breakfasts. If I had shelled out the money for pre-made bars, I would have spent almost twice that much, and gotten massive amounts of sugar and processed chemicals in the bargain.

Both of these recipes can be found on ohsheglows.com, along with multiple other breakfast bar recipes & her brilliant Overnight Oats, which can be re-heated throughout the week with various different toppings, to keep you from getting bored with your breakfasts.

Healthy Banana Cranberry Oat Bars

Ingredients:

•    ¼ cup almond milk (or other)

•    ½ cup Sucanat or brown sugar (I used brown sugar with delicious results)

•    1 tbsp ground flax seed

•    ¼ cup coconut oil (or other light tasting oil), melted

•    1 tsp vanilla extract

•    2 medium very ripe bananas

•    1/3 cup cranberries or raisins

•    1 ½ cup regular oats

•    ½ cup unsweetened coconut

•    ½ tsp cinnamon

•    ¼ cup whole wheat flour (or other flour)

•    ½ tsp baking powder

•    1/8 tsp kosher salt

Directions:

-  Preheat oven to 350º F and line 8x8 baking pan with parchment paper.

- In a medium bowl, combine sugar, ground flax seeds, almond milk, oil and vanilla. Whisk together.

- Cut the bananas into chunks and stir into wet mixture. Grab a fork or potato masher and mash the  banana into the wet mixture. It is ok if some chunks remain. Stir in the cranberries or raisins, and set aside.

-In another bowl, mix your dry ingredients. Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and stir well. Scoop the granola batter into the pan. Smooth out with a spoon or hands and press it down firmly.

-Bake at  350º F for 35 – 40 minutes until the edges begin to golden and it is slightly firm to the touch. Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack to dry completely. Slice into 8 – 10 bars.

Fruit and Nut Energy Bites

Ingredients:

•    1/3 cup whole-grain Kamut flour (or whole wheat, all-purpose, etc. I used whole wheat)

•    1/8 tsp baking powder

•    1/8 tsp baking soda

•    ¼ tsp sea salt

•    ½ tsp cinnamon

•    1/3 cup Sucanat or light brown sugar (I used brown)

•    1 ½ cups toasted walnuts (can also used pecans, almonds or hazelnuts), chopped

•    ½ cup dried cherries or cranberries

•    12 Medjool dates (approximately 1 cup chopped dates), pits removed and chopped (or figs and/or    prunes)

•    1 cup apricots, cut into bite sized pieces

•    1 flax egg (1 tbsp ground flax + 3 tbsp water)

•    1 tbsp almond milk

•    ½ tsp vanilla bean paste or 1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325ºF. Line a square pan (8 or 9 inch) with parchment paper across both sides for easy lifting. In a small bowl, mix together flax egg and set aside.

Chop and toast the walnuts for 8-9 minutes at 325ºF. Remove from oven and set aside. Toasting the nuts really brings out the flavor, so you don't want to skip this step.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Stir in the walnuts and dried fruit. Make sure the nuts and dried fruit are all coated with the flour mixture.

Mix the vanilla into the flax egg after it has thickened up about 10 minutes.

Add the flax egg mixture and the 1 tbsp almond milk to the fruit and nut mixture and mix well. Spread into the pan, pressing with fingers to even it out.

Bake for about 33 – 35 minutes at 325ºF or until golden in color. Remove from pan and allow to cool on wire rack for 10 minutes. Now transfer back into the pan and place in freezer to set for 10 minutes. Remove from the pan once again and allow to cool for 10 minutes. Now slice the bites up with a sharp knife.

You can absolutely make these two recipes simultaneously, to save yourself the time and sanity. I set my oven to 325ºF and just baked the Banana Cranberry Oat bars for an extra 5-7 minutes, keeping an eye on them to make sure that they weren't getting too dry or brown.

Every once in a while, it feels good to take your own advice."

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World Food Day

Today is Blog Action Day.  Started in 2007, it encourages bloggers to post on the same day about the same global issue.  As it coincides this year with World Food Day, a movement run by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to raise awareness of food shortages around the world, this year's topic is food.  I hope you'll forgive me if I get a bit more political than usual.

First of all, World Food Day could not have come at a better time.  There's so much in the air lately: world population approaching the seven billion mark, the race for the 2012 Republican nomination, and the exponentially expanding Occupy movement to name a few key points.  And it's getting more and more apparent how much the food system plays a part in all of it.  So much of our global economy and the state of our environment are tied up in the industrial system that has taken over how the average person is fed.

We all know the health benefits to the individual that can result from cutting back on processed foods (poor white flour. I'm starting to feel bad for it, with the reputation it's getting. It's not like the stuff asked to be separated from the nutritious part of the plant), but it's not always as obvious that our everyday food choices are part of a much, much bigger story.

The July 2011 issue of National Geographic ran an excellent article by Charles Siebert entitled "Food Ark," which sheds light on the real-life consequences of growing just one variety of certain plants, as opposed to the genetically diverse array of heirloom varieties that small farmers have been using since the dawn of agriculture, and, to some extent, still do.

Let's take a hypothetical example.  A farmer wants to plant corn.  He uses some seeds that he saved from last year's harvest, he trades some to his neighbor in exchange for seeds from the neighbor's previous harvest, and buys still others at a local market.  Now this farmer has a least three different varieties of corn. 

Maybe the seeds he bought at the market do best under dry conditions.  If there is a lot of rain that year, then those seeds will not flourish.  Maybe the neighbor's seeds need a lot of water.  Those won't produce a good yield if there is a drought.  And maybe the farmer's own seeds are particularly tasty to a certain kind of bug.  If that bug happens to migrate this year to the farmer's field, then those seeds will die. 

In any of these scenarios, most of the crop stays healthy; healthy enough to produce seeds that will be planted the next year, and theoretically yield a better harvest because they will be better adapted than their predecessors to the environment of the farm. 

But if there were only one variety of, say, the seeds that need plenty of water?  In the drought year, most of them will die, severely affecting the farmer's yield.  Luckily, it's still unlikely that they will all die, because each seed is slightly genetically different from the next, and there will be some variation in hardiness.  These seeds are a lot like biological family members, who share many, but certainly not all, of the same genetic characteristics.  Again, only the best will survive to reproduce, making for a healthier harvest next year.  That's how natural selection works, right? 

OK. Now think about the fact that the vast majority of the field corn grown on an industrial scale in the united states is not just of the same variety, but genetically modified to be exactly the same.  Sure this particular variety was chosen for its hardiness under any kind of weather condition, ability to resist pests and disease, etc., but still.  Aren't we tempting fate just a little bit here?  Do we really think that there is never going to come a time when our national corn crop fails?

And of course, the kind of corn we're talking about isn't just corn.  It's meat, ethanol, shampoo, chewing gum, all of which add up to a huge part of the U.S. economy, which we all know is tied up in the economy of the rest of the world.  And when something goes wrong, the people it hits first and hardest are the people who were poorest to begin with, in this country and abroad.

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Harvest Time

A rare three-day weekend finds me in my hometown of Guilford, Connecticut, enjoying some time away from the city.   It being apple season, I decided to kick the foraging for local produce up a notch and visit Bishop's Orchards.  Apples were always my favorite fruit to pick at Bishop's as a little kid, because you get a ride up to the orchard on the back of a tractor.

Still fun.



I guess apple picking was a popular activity this year, because a lot of the trees were picked clean.  There were plenty of Staymans and Ida Reds left though, both crispy, tart varieties great for making desserts. 

My mom and I got a bag each, and then went home to figure out what to do with them, keeping the October Unprocessed challenge in mind.

I found some cocoa powder in the kitchen claming to only contain that one ingredient, and a package of grass-fed butter, and decided to give them the unprocessed ok. ("Unprocessed" really has an aggravatingly loose definition, but I suppose part of the excercise is making yourself think.) 

After melting four tablespoons of butter in a small frying pan, I mixed in seven tablespoons of cocoa, and about six ounces of maple syrup for a sweetener.  When the mixture was nice and smooth, we shined up a couple of apples and dipped them in it, then sprinkled on some raw oats for texture, and left them in the fridge for about an hour so the chocolate would set.

The chocolate sauce was still quite dark, which, together with the tang of the apples, made a really interesting bite.  A great fall snack, if you ask me!

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