Gazpacho Memories

The humidity of this current summer has called for some cool creative cooking or uncooking as the case may be. I have lived off salad greens with homemade dressings, smoothies, and gazpacho.

This last batch of gazpacho took me back East to my days in Boston. The summers I spent there weren’t unbearable, but I would make gallons of gazpacho with my handy dandy handblender. Returning with bags of produce from Haymarket, I spent my weekends and every evening in the kitchen combining this amazing bounty into dinners. I would sit on my back porch sipping the cool liquid with a little jalapeno bite while my cats lounged under or chased squirrels in our canopy of trees.

So today with my hand dandy Blendtec blender I conjured up some memories with 3 Beefsteak tomatoes, 1 red pepper, ½ medium yellow onion, ½ English cucumber, juice of 1 lemon and 1 lime, ½ cup liquid from some jalapeno sweet pickles (Can use a sliver of jalapeno and a dollop of honey), ½ cup Italian parsley (stems and leaves), 8-10 small red dandelion leaves, a pinch or two of pink Himalayan salt, 1 cup or more of water. (From the veggies above, I minced by hand ½ a tomato, ¼ red pepper, ¼ of the cucumber and added those to the pureed mix)

Thanks to the dandelion leaves this version won’t be the light bright red of a traditional gazpacho, it will be brown. The dandelion leaves are internally cooling and a diuretic and a great toning medicinal for the Liver, high in Vitamins A, K and calcium and iron. The parsley is high in Vitamins C and A and folic acid and increase the antioxidant capacity of the blood.


Blendtec Home TB-621-20 1,560-Watt Total Blender, Black

Bastille Day

I am a francophile. I celebrate Bastille Day. It is one of my favorite days to create food and share with others. Marinated beans, pates, fruit, cheese, crusty bread and wine. Accordion and piano cafe music. Friends. 

That day's event over 220 years ago is seen as the symbol for the uprising of the modern nation. At the foundation of all that cooking and celebrating I do each year, I envision  that this year will be the uprising of a more enlightened consciousness. 

So here's some food to create and share as you envision that uprising.

                                                    celebrate!

Marinated White Beans

Sometimes creative cooks don't write recipes down. When the person who enjoyed this left my circle, I stopped making it and the mental recipe vanished. This is pretty close:

1 cup of white beans, dried

4 cups of water

1/2 cup olive oil

2 cloves garlic

Wash the beans and soak overnight. Combine the beans with the water, oil and garlic and salt. Simmer until tender up to 2 hours. You do this slowly because you want them intact. Try a few; you want them tender not mushy or soft. Drain and remove the garlic cloves. Place beans in a bowl.

Marinade

 1/2 cup olive oil

1/2 cup of white wine vinegar (sometimes I used tarragon vinegar)

3 T. chopped parsley

several sprigs of chopped rosemary

salt and pepper

Mix all the marinade ingredients and pour over the bowl of beans. This should completely or just cover the beans. Cover the bowl and refrigerate overnight.

Fava beans and Olives

I wasn't a big fava bean fan but with olives anything is amazing! 

2 cups of cooked fava beans

1 cup of green olives, pitted and sliced (get some good ones from the olive bar at your local grocer or deli)

Olive oil

Salt

Combine the four ingredients. Place in baking dish large enough that everything is just one layer. Bake for 30 minutes at 350. Watch it closely and stir occasionally. Garnish with chopped parsley and lemon slices. 

You can also puree either of these beans, fresh herbs, garlic and olive oil and make a bean pate. YUM! slather it on crusty bread or flax or sprouted crackers with olives and tomatoes!

Figs and Fennel

Figs are one of those short season fruits. Right now is the time to grab a pint of Black Mission Figs, a bulb of Fennel and a Red Pepper and make this salad.

6 large figs, I prefer Black Mission

Olive Oil and Balsamic vinegar and salt

2 T. minced sweet onion or shallot

Slice in rounds about 1/4" thick. Place on plate, drizzle with oil and vinegar, cover with the onion or shallot, sprinkle with salt. Marinate at room temp for an hour

Red Peppers

You can buy these already roasted and marinated or you can do this yourself:

2 peppers, slice and core out seeds, stem and white part

Coat with olive oil

Place cut side down on foiled baking sheet.

Bake at 350 for 15 to 20 min til peppers soften and skin starts to raise. Remove from oven and place peppers in covered dish to steam the skin separate. When peppers are cool enough to hold, remove the skins.

2 roasted peppers

2 T minced onion or shallot

Olive Oil and Balsamic vinegar and salt

Toss the roasted peppers with shallots, oil and vinegar and salt to taste. Marinate for 1 hour.

Fennel

1 small fennel bulb, trim top down to the bulb

Olive oil and Balsamic vinegar and salt

Cut into paper thin slices until you have a 1/2 cup of shavings. Place fennel into bowl of cold water and will keep for a few hours. 

Reduce some balsamic vinegar until you have about a tablespoon of glaze, mix with a 1/4 cup of oil (fennel oil if you have it). Pat the fennel shavings dry and toss with this oil and glaze.

Place a few fig rounds on a plate, place the peppers over the figs and top with another fig round and stack the fennel shavings on the top of it all!

Dare to Feel Alive Again!

The majority of my practice and the majority of the people I come across in my daily life have something in common. They each tell me their own unique story of having too much to do in too little time, not getting enough sleep, and their minds are just ricocheting from thought to thought and from task to task. This is followed by a varied through rather typical list of physical and emotional concerns.

That's not what life is meant to be! My heart goes out to each person who shares their story, and I try to offer a sentiment or a technique that will guide them through. Knowing that I have plenty of insight on nutrition and herbs can be useful for the physical symptoms of stress and overwhelm and techniques for the mind and the spirit, I decided to do more.

Join me in my tele-training seminar

Tuesday, August 10 at 7 pm Eastern Time 

Dare to Feel Alive Again 

Simple, yet Powerful Techniques to Reduce Symptoms of Stress and Dis-ease & to Feel Alive Again!

Quotes

I do have some blogs in progress, really. I've been re-reading and re-watching favorite books and movies, here's a few quotes until I post my other posts.

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. ~Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky

If no one loved, the sun would go out. ~Victor Hugo Les Miserable

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. ~Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Man... probably the most mysterious species on our planet. A mystery of unanswered questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we think we know? Why do we believe anything at all? Countless questions in search of an answer... an answer that will give rise to a new question... and the next answer will give rise to the next question and so on. But, in the end, isn't it always the same question? And always the same answer?~Narrator Run Lola Run

Hey did you know Ice Cream is really good for you, lots of calcium ~The Ice Cream Man Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Cultivating Energy

Last week, a few friends and I attended a weekend Qigong workshop. We couldn’t pass it up. Thirty-two hours of continuing education class for under $100 – unheard of! If that wasn’t enough, Green Smoothies and food healing were on the agenda. I was sold.

Qigong, a system of self healing encompassing gentle movements, breathing, and meditative practices, was part of my master’s in Oriental Medicine curriculum. Last weekend’s workshop taught the same movements as I learned in school but I understood and could perform the movements better/more fluidly this time around. Qigong works and to be honest I don’t exactly understand it and I’m ok with that. I’m a pretty accepting person. I believe “Each to his or her own”. And, I will try just about anything without question, well sometimes with a slight raise to the eyebrow.

I didn’t feel the energy flow during the class way back in school, but I did experience symptoms of cultivating energy. The world was much more vivid when I left class at 8 pm, I experienced amazing clarity, and I was wide awake all night energized. Not the best use of energy, but still yes it works. In last weekend’s workshop I experienced the presence, the density, the movement of energy emanating from my hands and moving within my body. It was a remarkable feeling to know where I had blockages and which side was more receptive. And, yes, I was wide awake at night for 3 days and the exercise prompted other physical symptoms of flow as well. I now engage in qigong exercises only in the morning so I have that clarity and alertness all day instead of all night!