Cheese Interrupted...

Quote du Jour
   If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. 
                                                                           ~ Gautama Buddha
Oh yum...
Looking for a plant-based Pad Thai recipe, I came across this fun blog by the author of Veganomicon (don't you love this title!)

     Post Punk Kitchen blog

Scroll down the blog for the Pad Thai recipe...I'm going to make this today!

Coming this week: Deconstructing cheese to rebuild with plant-based ingredients

What in the Word...I can't remember what the characters mean on piggy's noodle bowl...I drew the original bowl for another purpose...please translate for me!

A Doctor's Doctor: Dr. Michael Klaper

Quote du Jour
   Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life. ~ Albert Schweitzer

From a doctor who inspires...
At last February's McDougall Study Weekend, John McDougall MD, a doctor who inspires me and has been a 'voice in the wilderness,' introduced his longtime friend and closing weekend speaker, Michael Klaper, MD. 

...a doctor with heart and integrity
Dr. Klaper reminds us of what it truly means to be a physician. Five minutes into the talk, you'll be captivated. At the conclusion, doctors and nurses - everyone in the audience - gave this humble man a standing ovation. You'll be thinking about his presentation for a long time.

Observing their patients, both doctors switched to plant-based eating
Healthy eating was not part of medical school curriculum - wait a minute, it still isn't!

VeggieBound.org 

VeggieBound *Best 2012 Video pick
This 80 minute video takes us through 40 years of one remarkable physician's experience in medical practice. 
His experience is our shared journey through American healthcare, and the many improvements in medicine,
in the last half of the 20th century. Watch it this weekend!
            

Michael Klaper MD - From Operating Table to Dining Room Table
Click this link to watch: Dr. Michael Klaper at a McDougall Study Weekend

Recipe du Jour
Pictured in the previous post, for fun, serve with a straw in a Mason jar. 

Savor this delicious beverage while you enjoy Dr. Klaper's talk
Lemon Blueberry Spritzer 

6 cups (1 1/2 quarts)

SIMPLE SYRUP
Heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved, then cool
     
     1 cup sugar
     1 cup water

While the simple syrup is cooling, prepare and add to a 1+ quart pitcher

    1 cup fresh lemon juice, freshly squeezed
    1/2 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen
    1 sprig fresh mint and/or basil, optional

When cool, add the Simple Syrup. At this point, you can cover and cool this mixture in the refrigerator until ready to serve.

To serve, add
    1 cup ice cubes
    1 liter Club Soda

Variations 
Get creative!

   Instead of lemons, use lime juice, freshly squeezed
   Replace blueberries with raspberries, sliced strawberries or sliced peaches

Enjoy!

*Since 2006, I've been making a documentary pick of the year (then it becomes a gift to family and friends). Dr. Klaper's talk, though technically not a documentary, provides inspiration, perspective and soul. Here's my list...

2006:  A Man Called Pearl

2007:  In the Shadow of the Moon

2008:  Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill 

2009:  Winged Migration (released in 2003, I didn't see it until 2009)

2010:  Queen of the Sun

2011:  Buck

2012:  Michael Klaper MD - From Operating Table to Dining Room Table

That's All Folks!

Don't Say Cheese!

Quote du Jour  
  I don't want the cheese, I just want to get out of the trap! ~ Spanish Proverb

Put yourself in the drivers seat
Think: What are the characteristics that you like about cheese?

Creamy rich, velvety smooth; except for melting (casein provides the melting ability in cheese), all the attributes we love about cheese can be found in plant-based ingredients.

Food does NOT need cholesterol to be tasty

Test for yourself

This amazing recipe - modified from the outstanding Winter 2013 Vegetarian Times Special Encore Edition Healing Foods Magazine recipe for Almond Feta Cheese - has all the wonderful flavors and smoothness of mozzarella or cream cheese, minus the casein and cholesterol. 

Sinfully Delicious Schmear, center, topped with 
     chopped smoked almonds and served with grapes, 
apple slices, baguettes and brown crackers.     

Recipe Notes: This recipe takes 2 days to make, so plan to make extra. A blender is needed for this recipe - high-powered blender is helpful to produce a velvety smooth schmear, but not necessary. Just in time for the holidays, this is the perfect spread for crackers, bagels, croustada, you name it. Several suggested variations follow the basic recipe.

Sinfully Delicious Schmear
Makes 1½ cups

SCHMEAR-BASE

Two days before serving, in a medium sized bowl, place

    1 cup whole blanched almonds 
    and cold water, enough to cover almonds

Cover and let sit overnight up to 24 hours. Drain and rinse the almonds in clean
water. Place the almonds in the container of a blender along with

   ¼ cup lemon juice             3 Tbsps. olive oil
   1 clove garlic, peeled         1 ¼ tsp. salt
   1/2+ cup cold water

Blend on high, adding additional water if needed, until velvety smooth and

creamy. If you’re not sure it’s smooth enough, blend again on high for several

more minutes.

Line a large strainer with cheesecloth, and place it over a medium-size bowl.

Scrape the schmear-base into the cheesecloth. Bring corners and sides of cloth

together and  twist and secure with a rubber band. You’ll have a sort of turban! 

Twist tightly to help extract moisture. Place in the strainer over the bowl, and

chill 12 hours, or overnight. Discard excess liquid.

Serve!

Or, make several variations for an appetizer or brunch spread

Variations 

Flavor one cup of Schmear-Base with

Basil   

   1 cup fresh Basil leaves, finely chopped

Herb    

   1 clove garlic, minced                1 Tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
   1 Tbsp green onion, chopped      salt to taste

Maple Walnut   

   ¼ cup walnuts, chopped            3 Tbsps Maple Syrup

Pumpkin

   1/2 cup pumpkin puree              1 tsp vanilla
   1 tsp cinnamon                         1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
   2 Tbsps brown sugar or 1 Tbsp agave nectar or honey

Sun Dried Tomato
    ¼ cup sun-dried tomatoes, finely chopped (not packed in oil)
   1 Tbsp onion, finely chopped     1 clove garlic, minced
   1/2 tsp dried basil                     salt to taste

Health Note: This recipe contains no cholesterol. However, almonds, the main ingredient, are high in plant-based fats. Too much of any kind of fat, well, it makes us fat! Limit fat intake. For special occasions, this schmear is tops!

Wheeeeeee!

Navigating Our Way to a Plant-based Diet

Quote du Jour
   Knowing where you're going has a lot to do with getting there. ~ Unknown

How was I going to do this?
I love to cook, I enjoy shopping for produce and trying new flavors, I really love to cook for my family, and I truly love that they look forward to several traditional holiday dishes. I now realized that all of these recipes include animal-products as ingredients, and are what I now call, *cloggers.

Approaching this as a math equation, setting A, B, C and D as criteria...

    Can A+B+C+D - (all animal-based products) = VeggieBound Excellence?

A. We're eating plant-based for the long-haul...
This is NOT a fad "Diet du Jour" 
Our long-term health is at stake. I'm going to make this work for us, but golly gee, I want my food to taste good.

B. home is a safe place for all in our family...
I want my husband to be able to eat every item served in our home
I want my family to continue to enjoy the favorite dishes they look forward to having at family celebrations. And, I want to serve foods that taste good! Boring food is just not going to help this cause.

C. would eating a plant-based diet be healthy for the rest of us...
We did our homework
To fully understand how healthy plant-based eating would be for all of us, and to implement this important dietary change in our life, my husband and I:

1. read science-based diet information
2. attended lectures and seminars and listened to Books-on-CDs on roadtrips
3. collected science-based diet literature and videos
4. took fieldtrips (my favorite part of this project!) to non-chain restaurants to sample plant-based meals prepared by professional chefs 

D. and can long-time family favorites be revised to be plant-based?
Revisit Favorite Family Recipes
Revise favorite family dishes to be plant-based, and retain all the deliciousness that made the dish a family favorite to begin with. I want my food to taste good, and I am convinced that good food can and should be healthy!

= YES!

Our food tastes even better!
And our family’s favorite recipes don’t clog our arteries, we have more energy, and we all feel much better than we have for quite some time. Food coma? I can't remember the last time I've had one. Best of all, deleting animal-based foods does NOT mean eliminating flavor

So, how can I help you get there from here?

I developed strategies to implement plant-based eating 24/7

Because changing any habit necessitates developing thoughtful strategies and support structures to succeed, we found cooking tools and appliances to do most of the work for us,  collected new recipes, tried new herbs and spices, then finally applied our new knowledge to revising old family favorites.

Let's start with cheese

VeggieBound Challenge to You
Chew on this: What are the qualities of cheese that you like? 

Coming next week
The promised "to die for" plant-based schmear recipe

This little piggy went to market...

In season: This week at your grocery story
Apples 
Winter squash, all kinds, including
   acorn
   butternut
   hubbard
   etc. 



*See VeggieBound September 8, 2013 post, FaceOff: Clogger vs Unclogged
    Clogger = recipe includes animal-based ingredients
    UnClogged = only plant-based ingredients in recipe   

Menu Musings

Quote du Jour
   Every chef I know, their cholesterol is through the roof. And mine's not so great.
                                                                                         ~ Anthony Bourdain
Eating out
Study the restaurant menu next time you're eating out. Notice what ingredients are featured repeatedly throughout the menu.

It surprises me to realize the most popular ingredients also contain the most cholesterol!

These 5 ingredients - bacon, butter, cheese, sour cream and eggs - cause me wonder what is creative about restaurant eating, if all you're offered are variations of animal-based products?

Many cuisines use NO dairy or meat
One of the top-ten best meals of my life was at a very special Korean Restaurant in Los Angeles. My lovely daughter-in-law's parents treated us to an incredible lunch at Yong Su San. What an experience of flavor, color, and texture!

I had the notion - from awesome Korean BBQ and Kimchee - that Korean food is highly spicy. Not so! In Korean cuisine, creating delicious vegetarian dishes is an art form. In fact (from Wikipedia) there are hundreds of Vegetarian restaurants throughout Korea!

From the menu, which includes animal-based ingredients, too, the plant-based dishes ordered at Yong Su San were a symphony of carefully and thoughtfully balanced flavors, textures and colors. Every item on each dish had a reason for being there, including the size, shape and color of each plate or bowl. It was a delicious revelation.

Here are some challenges for you

Allez Cuisine Veggies!

VeggieBound Challenge to Iron Chef
     Instead of a secret ingredient at a competition, 
     eliminate all animal-products!

VeggieBound Challenge to You
A ) Study restaurant menus. Notice what ingredients
      are used most often

B)  Visit a *non-chain restaurant, order a plant-based
     dish (no animal products) and take time to identify
     the blend of flavors, textures and ingredients and 
     how the herbs and spices are applied.

*Many chain restaurants do much of their food preparation off-site, offer controlled portions and have little flexibility to tweak their offerings.

The Only Protein NOT Present in Plants: Casein

Quote du Jour
   I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. ~ Albert Einstein

Navigating through protein wonderland
What is protein?
Protein, defined by Wikipedia, are molecules of amino acids and are "the chief actors within the cell."

I'm Curious
What's a complete protein?
A complete protein, defined by Wikipedia, is a proportion of 9 essential amino acids.

Curiouser
If plants have incomplete protein, what's missing?
Not knowing what protein is absent in a plant-based diet, I kept thinking about it, until one day, watching the excellent film documentary PlanEat, I got the answer.

Aha!
Casein
In a scene in PlanEat, T. Colin Campbell discusses the results of a study where the one protein, present in dairy products but missing in plants, was added back into a diet. The missing protein, casein, present in milk, promotes rapid growth in babies.

Mother Nature had it right all along?
Milk was not designed for adults
In several different studies, adding casein to a plant-based diet is showing the same results…that although casein does not cause cancer, research consistently shows that casein is a cancer "promoter." In adults, if cancerous tumors are present, casein promotes their rapid growth.

Milk, It Does a Body Good...or does it?
Casein Promotes Growth
T. Colin Campbell (who grew up on a dairy farm) reports in the book The China Study:

    "... we were finding that high protein intake, in excess of the amount needed
   for growth, promotes cancer. Like flipping a light switch on and off, we could
   control cancer promotion merely by changing levels of protein. The effects
   of protein feeding on tumor development were nothing less than spectacular...
   [In one experiment] all animals that were administered [the carcinogen] aflatoxin
   and fed the regular 20% levels of casein [a cow's milk protein] either were dead
   or near death from liver tumors at 100 weeks. All animals administered the same
   level of aflatoxin but fed the low 5% protein diet were alive, active and thrifty, with
   sleek hair coats at 100 weeks. This was a virtual 100 to 0 score, something
   almost never seen in research.

   …I would never have dreamed that our results up to this point would be so
   incredibly consistent, biologically plausible and statistically significant…Let
   there be no doubt: cows milk protein is an exceptionally potent cancer 
   promoter."

For a very good reason
Casein has Addictive Qualities


Don't have a cow, man.
from Wikimedia
VeggieBound.org

Mother Nature added an addictive quality to casein
as a way to keep babies drinking milk - it makes them
feel good!

And it's the casein, the milk protein that makes cheese so meltingly smooth and elastic, that is the reason many adults say, "Oh, I could never give up cheese."

Casein, in the digestive process produces casomorphins, which have an opiate-like effect on humans. Because cheese is denser than milk, the casein is more heavily concentrated, meaning that eating cheese produces a larger amount of casomorphins in the body compared to eating other dairy products.

I know, yada yada yada...
Moderation
I don’t advocate completely giving up anything, but why keep having something that’s harmful? When I was little, cheese was for special occasions. It was expensive and I can’t remember there being so many varieties available. We thought we were fancy when we had the Parmesan cheese that is still sold in shiny green shakers!

Today’s diet includes cheese in - or on - nearly every meal. Little bits, here and there are fine, just not at every meal.

Oh yum!
Satisfaction
Back to that Wikipedia link above on Complete Protein (defined by Wikipedia,). Under the heading Sources of complete protein is this information:

   "Certain traditional dishes, such as Mexican corn and beans, Japanese
    soybeans and rice, and Cajun red beans and rice, combine grains with
    legumes to provide a meal that is high in all essential amino acids."

And all these traditional dishes are delicious!

Restaurants: A New Link (check the upper right margin)
Eating Out
    Veggie Fajitas, minus cheese and sour cream, extra guacamole
    Veggie Burritos, minus cheese and sour cream, extra guacamole

No Recipe du Jour today...I'm leading up to a plant-based cheese schmear recipe that is "to die for!"

Coming Soon
Don’t Say Cheese!

At photo ops, say wheeeeee instead

Whee!



Think a Plant-based Diet CAN'T Provide enough Protein? Hogwash!

Quote du Jour
   I was misinformed. ~ Humphrey Bogart in the film, Casablanca

Everyone's first question: Where do you get your protein?
Since Mark's change in diet in May 2009, we’ve learned more about nutrition then we’d ever have imagined, and now we wonder: Where did we get our original ideas about healthy eating? What is it that we think we know about protein? Have we been brainwashed by advertising?  

In junior high school Home Economics, we learned about four food groups and were given a visual: a graphic of a food pyramid that has changed many times over the years, and recently morphed into a plate divided into 4 unequal portions. The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) nutrition recommendations have been revised so often, that they provide a history link on their website, documenting the changes to their guidelines, going back to 1916. 

 

The USDA provides phenomenal services to Americans, but it's important to remember that they offer dietary guidelines. And don't wait for them to go through their processes for updating their information. Take advantage of all the online scientific research and make your own conclusions.

Rooted in Research: A Plant-based Diet is Healthy
Somehow, I had the idea that meat is the best source of complete protein. But every living thing - animals, plants, single cell organisms - contains protein. So, if we eat plants, we must be taking in protein, right? But is it enough protein?

It's easy to do an online search to find out what the protein requirements are for a healthy adult. An adult requires a diet of 5-10% protein, coincidently the same proportion of protein in breast milk. Beans, and almost all vegetables, contain 5%+ protein, so it’s extremely easy to meet this requirement.

Meat and dairy products do have a higher protein content than plant-based foods. However, plant-based foods provide all the protein humans need.

Can a "top of the food chain" creature do well on a plant-based diet? Yes! Think of large herbivores: for example elephants. Look what elephants do with 5% protein. A "gee whiz" fact: Current paleontological research shows that dinosaur herbivores grew larger than dinosaur carnivores!

Recipe du Jour
Despite taking 14 months to compile all my recipes into a family cookbook, I forgot this one! My daughter remembered it though - because it's delicious - and my daughter-in-law asked for it. Similar to Waldorf Salad, this recipe needs no mayonnaise.

Fall Fruit Salad
Serves 4-6

   Juice of one lemon
   1 cup apple (2-3), cored and cubed - don't peel, go for color, red, green, yellow
   1 cup orange (2), peeled and cubed
   1/2 cup raisins, try golden raisins 
   1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
   1 cup celery, chopped (2-3 stalks)
   1-2 Tbsp honey, to taste

Put the fresh lemon juice in a 6 cup bowl. Add the cubed apple and, to prevent browning, toss with the lemon juice. Add the rest of the ingredients, mix, cover and give a few minutes to allow the flavors to blend. Serve at room temperature, or make early in the day, and chill in the refrigerator.

Coming Soon
I've heard that only meat and dairy provide complete protein. What about that?
The Only Protein NOT Present in Plants: Casein