Get to know your lunch

There's only one way to pave the road to your most healthy body- you must roll up your sleeves and learn how to cook your own food. The reason is that you never really know what's in your food if you don't make it yourself. Case in point: A few months ago, i decided to quit sugar altogether (no honey, no agave, no nothin'- only fruit is allowed. Fake sugars, suffice to say, were out of question as well). I went to a healthy supermarket and perused the aisles for sugarless bread. Unfortunately, almost all breads include some type of sugar (evaporated cane juice, maltodextrine, barley malt, honey, etc). I find it really disheartening that stores and restaurants proclaiming to be healthy still douse their food with alternative sugars (macrobiotic restaurants are a breeding ground of agave nectar-ladden dishes!). So i went home and did what any self-sufficient girl would do. I busted out my faithful old bread machine and decided that the only way i could have my bread and eat it too, was to make it myself.

There is something so delicious about creating something that will nourish you. Okay, the machine helped. But seriously, it reminds me of a passage i read in another blog that really inspired me:

When you aren't the one making your food, you don't know where it comes from, how it feels to cut and wash. You can't watch the color or texture change as you heat or cool or mix it with other ingredients. When you don't have information about the food you eat, you are less likely to know its healing qualities (...) The more you stay connected to the original form of food, the more you can stay connected to your environment, your body, and your spirit. From The Life of Kiley

Beautifully said. Indeed, Ayurveda advises to cook your own food so that you know where it comes from and how it was made. The other day i went on a weekend trip to an Ayurvedic retreat where we all cooked together. It was nice and the food seemed to taste even better. On one of the days, i had a headache and went to take a nap. I came back a little late, just as lunch was being served and when i ate the lunch, it was a little bit of a shock eating food that i hadn't helped prepare. It was like the food just appeared and i hadn't primed my body into knowing what was coming.. from the textures, the smells and the ingredients you get to witness when you cook on your own.

I've always liked to cook from scratch, but cooking without sugar really forced me to learn how to cook new things. For example, the spinach curry from an indian restaurant nearby (not sure there's no sugar in it). Now i make it myself and can eat it several times a week if i chose to (it's my favorite dish). The other day, i tried making a pizza. Because i used whole ingredients, i was full after my first slice (I never thought it was humanly possible to eat just one slice when it came to pizza). Eating healthy should not conjure up the image of a limp piece of tasteless fish and steamed broccoli. You can make hardy soups, curries, vegetable quiches, sugarless apple tarts, etc! It doesn't even feel like you're denying yourself anything.

There are others bonuses ( or boni? lol) to cooking yourself. You can avoid all the extra preservatives and chemicals (Just because it says organic doesn't mean it's chemical-free! *cough* Organic frozen TV dinners *cough*). You can eat fresh and sattvic, avoiding old or frozen foods. AND you can impress all the people waiting behind you at the checkout stand while the clerk rings up all your fruits and veggies.

Finally, i wanted to post a recipe for delicious spelt bread that i conjured up this afternoon. The fenugreek powder adds a yeasty, nutty taste to the bread which i really like, but it might not be to everyone's liking. I added the fenugreek because my Ayurvedic practitioner suggested it to me as a way to cut the spelt. I don't really understand what that means, but i'll roll with it!

Ingredients:
6 cups of organic spelt flour
1 cup of flax seeds
3/4 cup of Fenugreek powder
2 teaspoons of sea salt
1 teaspoon of dry yeast
2 cups of water.

In a trusty bread machine, add your spelt flour and salt. In a small bowl, add the flax seeds and a cup of water. Wait until the water becomes a bit gelatinous. In another small bowl, add about two tablespoons of hot water to the yeast and set aside. After 5 minutes, add the flax seeds and yeast to the flour and add another cup of water. Start your bread machine and check on it a few times to make sure the dough isn't too dry or too wet. Add more flour or water depending on the dough. Your want the dough to be slightly sticky, but still round. I like to cook the bread on the "french bread" setting of my machine so it spends extra time kneading it. Then, voila! Bread that is nourishing, tasty and wholesome (i.e. not wonderbread paste with "fortifying" synthetic vitamins added in).