Health

Speaking of fools (as in yesterday's gooseberry delight), who takes up ballet at the age of 48? This crazy bitch does. Uh-huh. I was so pigeon-toed as a child that the family doctor prescribed an iron brace to be worn at night that essentially forced my legs out in a painful and unnatural (for me) position. As an alternative to this medieval contraption, my mother offered ballet lessons. So for 7 years, until I was 14, I was a regular at Wendy Barrett's ballet studio in a little cabin in the woods. I was never very good—and my hips, knees and feet still turn more in than out—but I do have excellent posture. (And to this day, The Red Shoes is one of my favorite films.) Having now discovered the excellent Shain Fishman at Highland Yoga & Dance, I once more find myself heading to a little dance studio in the woods. I have been taking yoga from her for over a year, and recently left my pride at the door and signed up for her Adult Beginner Ballet class. (As with diapers and movies, when you preface something with "adult" it immediately becomes creepy and pathetic. Joke stolen from Jimmy Fallon, btw.)
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You're sitting in your screened in porch, or on your tiny terrace, front lawn or tar roof. The sun is high in the sky. Maybe you've worked up a sweat gardening or playing badminton or thinking about your in-laws' visit. What you need is a nice cool glass of something. Not a soda, for crying out loud. Those eat the enamel off your teeth and cause osteoporosis. Not lemonade which is, frankly, too much work on a day like this, what with all that squeezing. Need some new ideas? Pick up Fany Gerson's latest book, Paletas: Authentic Recipes for Mexican Ice Pops, Shaved Ice and Aguas Frescas, recently published by Ten Speed Press. You may remember I referenced her book on Mexican sweets, here and here. Not only does this popsicle queen of the Hester Street Market have loads of great recipes for cooling ice pops—like pineapple-chile; fresh coconut; and sour cream, cherry and tequila—but you can also learn how to make raspados, Mexico's answer to Italy's granità, and some wonderful traditional drinks called aguas frescas. These are essentially fruit or herbal infusions in water; not too sweet and very refreshing. This one, called agua de jamaica, is made from dried hibiscus flowers, also known as Jamaican sorrel.
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In my quest to offer you more alternatives to the dreaded, over-processed, denatured, cardboard-like breakfast cereals we should all be rejecting forever, I hereby tempt you with a delicious bowl of nutty, nutritious and quite comforting grits. As you can see, I've gotten all fancy with purple rice and, though you need not be so esoteric, I highly recommend you source your grits from somewhere like Bob's Red Mill or Anson Mills. Both offer a variety of organic heirloom rices and grains, all painstakingly milled and very fresh. The taste really illustrates the difference, as does the quality of the nutrition you get from products like these. Please don't feed your kids (or yourself) instant oats or Rice Krispies or cornflakes when you can give them healthy, whole foods instead. And grits are a great vehicle for other flavors, like soft-cooked eggs, crispy bacon, spicy Tabasco, creamy yogurt, maple syrup, strawberry jam, cultured butter—pretty much anything tastes good plopped on top of or stirred into this yummy bowl of mush. This particular bowl I ate with a dollop of crème fraîche and some crunchy smoked sea salt.
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This blog has been live for about 18 months now, and I was accruing posts for about 6 months prior to that. So it's about time I organized some of this material in more user-friendly ways. It's happening incrementally, so even though there is a seasonal archive listed, I have to go through and code all the recipes before they actually appear there. Sigh. There are only about 300 of them so I should be finished sometime before the apocalypse. And I got my gorgeous new multi-tasking domestic goddess illustration up, but my banner images went all wonky and reverted to seasons past. Bear with me. It will all come right before you know it. Not the most professional approach, but the best I can manage at the moment. There is a new print icon next to recipes, which now allows you to print only the recipe and not the entire post. And soon there will be more new and improved features: stay tuned. I would really appreciate any feedback or requests in terms of how this site functions. It's a work in progress and I value your input, gentle readers. Without you, I'm nothing (except a harried woman running between the stove, the computer and the garden). Have a fantastic weekend!
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Much has been said already about Heidi Swanson, a talented writer, photographer and designer with a popular blog, 101 Cookbooks, and cookbook, Super Natural Cooking. With its gorgeous visuals and original approach to healthy eating, her blog really inspired me to create my own. It helped me realize that there is an audience out there of people eager to forgo fast foods and trendy diets in favor of sophisticated cooking with whole foods. Heidi’s got a great aesthetic, an earthy NoCal sensibility and a soulful approach to living. She’s vegetarian but not in a preachy way, and many of her recipes are easily adapted to include meat (or chicken or fish). She likes bright flavors, seasonal produce and ethnic cuisines. In short, a girl after my own heart. So it was with great pleasure that I received a review copy of her new cookbook, Super Natural Every Day: Well-Loved Recipes from My Natural Foods Kitchen, already highly acclaimed in the blogosphere and climbing the ranks at Amazon and on The New York Times' bestseller list. It's a beautifully photographed compendium of her favorite everyday preparations, most of them pretty quick and easy. 
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In my quest for wild edibles, I dredged up a distant memory of my friend Julia telling me about a morel she had once found at her weekend place nearby. So I headed over there, still dreaming of a big score. Her house has been closed up all winter long and as I drove up a big, fat groundhog scurried across the lawn. She has a beautiful piece of land that slopes down to a brook, now swollen from all the rains. Plenty of skunk cabbage along the bank, a favorite snack for bears. No sign of morels, sadly, though I did find a nice patch of stinging nettles. They must be picked and handled with care—heavy gloves do the trick—as the stems and undersides of the lovely, heart-shaped leaves are covered with fine spines that release irritating formic acid upon contact (like the sting you get from fire ants and bees). Nettles are surprisingly high in protein and deliver lots of calcium, magnesium, iron and potassium, among other vitamins and minerals. For millennia, they have been prized for their anti-inflammatory properties. Their delightful green color and spinach-y flavor makes a wonderful spring soup. And the skull pictured above? Stay tuned for an episode of CSI: Sullivan County.
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Certain foods just have a universal appeal. Consider the dumpling, for instance. It's found in so many cultures, this rose by any other name: knedlíky (Czech), kreplach (Jewish), pantrucas (Chile), manti (Armenia), ravioli (Italy), buuz (Mongolia), pangsit (Indonesia), dim sum (China), gyoza (Japan), mandu (Korea)...the list goes on and on. Yogurt—and soured milk of all kinds—may not be quite as common, especially given that many African and Asian countries don't do dairy, but among those that do it's a deeply-held tradition. From straight-up yogurt to crème fraîche to quark to ricotta to paneer to Mexico's indigenous Nahuatl jocoque árabe, people have long been introducing bacteria or acid to milk with delectable results. Greek yogurt has become hugely popular in this country over the last few years, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous Fage (pronounced "fa-yeh") brand and now Chobani, too. It's simply yogurt which has been strained to remove the whey, giving it a much denser, creamier texture. Sometimes this style of yogurt is even enriched with extra butterfat or powdered milk.
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One of the more beloved tales in my family's rich lore is of how my father, very early in his marriage to my mother, came up behind her as she was leaning into the oven and goosed her—except it turned out to be my grandmother!! I can just see the shock on both of their faces, and imagine the explosion of laughter that followed. They both had a wicked sense of humor, especially my dad. He and my maternal grandparents loved each other dearly, once the deeply Christian Chávez family got over the idea that their beloved eldest daughter was going to marry a Jew.

But this is about another sort of goose altogether. A goose egg, actually, no doubt laid by a female relative of the lovely fellow from River Brook Farm who was the centerpiece of our Christmas dinner.
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Seeds. Water. Light. Life! That's all it takes. Just shy of 5 days, and hardy little shoots are springing out, so vibrant and crisp. A reminder of how eager cells are to divide, and how little they require to thrive. The pea shoots are tender and crunchy, full of vivid pea flavor. The broccoli sprouts are smaller and more tender, with a delicate but recognizable taste. They are ready to eat now: stirred into soups, tossed in salads, layered in sandwiches, simply dressed with a little lemon juice and sesame oil, blended in juice.
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My hemp sprouting bags arrived this week, so I wanted to give you a little update on the whole sprouting project. I ordered two bags, plus dried green peas, broccoli seeds and sunflower seeds, from the good people at Raw Guru. They say hemp breathes and dries even better than cotton or linen, and is naturally antibiotic, so it's the perfect environment for sprouting. That website is a real rabbit hole for me, I can get lost for way too long poring over dehydrators and sprouters and raw agave and virgin coconut oil...yet another resource from which I can obsessively stock the larder. Anyhoo, I "sterilized" the bags per the instructions by dousing them with boiling water and then, after soaking a cup of peas and a couple of tablespoons of broccoli seeds in two clean jars filled with water for about 6 hours, I poured them into the bags. And there they hang.
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