Patty's Kitchen

A Simple Winter Meal

You’d think that being in the kitchen all the time would become tiring. Well, at times it does and this is the time when you need to get out and eat something different at least once a week. We have the tendency, in some respects, to get caught in our own spiral and after a period of time it becomes too restricting. Some of the clues to this are not wanting to cook, becoming dissatisfied with the food, not having the energy to cook, and so on. If we stay in this spiral we get locked into further restrictions and it may be difficult to get out or to even see it.

 From my experience, the kitchen reflects the stages of your macrobiotic practice. Since it is the primary place that educates you in the workings of yin and yang, seasonal changes, self-reflection, etc., it can be represented as a religious endeavor. This causes the beginning to be slow as you acclimate to the change from much of what you’ve been used to.

 Getting familiar with equipment, procedures, ingredients, and their effects can be done from books, but it is much better to take actual cooking classes.

 Once you’ve mastered some of the basics, then you attempt to experiment with what can be done within the boundaries of your healing stage/condition to compare with what you enjoyed eating before macrobiotics. This takes one on many splendid and interesting trips. This usually lasts three or more years.

 At some point, and this is indicative of the healing process and getting away from the need to emotionally feed yourself, you should become less interested in  what can be done to embellish the food and less interested in anything other than basics and the necessary adjustments to balance via self reflection. In other words, food becomes a less noticeable, less focused on part of your life. This has to do with many things like widening your diet, more emphasis on spiritual development, the body’s ability to take/make what it needs from what it gets, in essence, transmuting all things from everywhere.

 So you may notice yourself going through various stages like desserts, bread making, combinations of foods, seasonal flings, and cravings. Of course, there is also the experimentation with recipes and the feelings surrounding the kitchen. You really need to develop some kind of support system, especially if there are others in your family that have different needs. This is all part of the healing process. Stick with it and you’ll be surprised at the rewards, and surprised that it can be done. Looking back will only take a moment. Looking forward will take a lifetime and more.

 The late summer season is a short one. It, according to the five transformations, is the season of soil and the spleen/pancreas and stomach. That is where the atmospheric chi nourishes the particular organ chi in the discharging and strengthening process. The main grain is millet, the main root vegetables are the round underground ones, and the broad leafy greens are whatever is in the store in your area. Predominately here in California right now are collards, all types of kale, mustard greens, dandelion greens (seems late for both of these), beet greens, turnip greens, bok choy, and some of the lighter ones such as arugula and spinach. This can change with each trip to the store.

The next season is metal involving the lungs and large intestine. This is when we start eating the more yang foods to balance the more yin winter season. Traditionally, this meant storage in the colder climates, as the winters were longer than the growing seasons and the wait until spring.

 Modern living has short circuited this natural process with the ability to provide fresh food from anywhere at anytime on short notice. But this is not good for the natural rhythm of your body and surrounding environment. We need to understand the importance of staying away from these migrating food supplies, especially if you’re in the first three years of healing. The length of time would depend on your condition and all the other factors, but I can pretty well safely say that three years is the minimum for the biggest part of the healing to take place which includes a very small percentage of people.

A generally applied simple healing meal for the metal season in a northern temperate climate would go in the following order:

Miso soup

• Soak 3 dried Shiitake mushrooms in fresh water for 45 minutes or until soft.

• Peel and cut one yellow onion in half and then slice one half only top to bottom in 1/4” sections

• Cut 3” per person of Wakame sea vegetable into small pieces

• Saute onions in 1 tsp of olive oil in soup pot

• Add soup stock and/or good water and bring to a boil, add some udon noodles, first breaking them into halves, and the rest of the ingredients.

• Bring back to boil, then turn down to simmer, cover and cook for 10+ minutes, or until it seems done

• Add 1 tsp of 2 year old barley miso to each bowl, add some stock from the pot, dissolve miso, and add the desired proportions of stock and ingredients.

• Garnish with a small amount of chopped parsley.

Grains

 Use pressure cooked short grain brown rice with 1/8 tsp of sea salt per cup of uncooked grain. If you have leftovers, use a steaming rack in a pot, add some water and reheat. If you’re starting from scratch, then do this step first before you start anything else, even earlier in the day would be best. The procedure is a minimum 2 cups of grain, the salt in the above proportion, water to cover the grain in the pot by at least an inch (this needs to be adjusted per your cooking conditions), bring to pressure, insert flame deflector under pot, adjust hiss to as quiet as possible, then time from this point 45 minutes. At the end of cooking time, turn off heat and let pressure come down naturally, then open and mix the grain so that there is a uniform consistency of yin and yang throughout. Let cool with the top on or a bamboo mat across it.

Root Vegetables

•Use I and 1/2 (leftover from above) yellow onions, peel, cut in half and crosscut once, then make four cuts top to bottom. Do this with each half. Put in a waiting bowl.

•Use a fall/winter squash (Kobocha is nice) and cut-clean-cut (don’t peel) into inch and a half pieces. Also put in a waiting bowl.

•Use a large daikon radish and cut once down the middle, then in approximately 3/8” cross-cut slices from top to bottom, making the pieces equal in surface area.

•Add a tsp of olive oil to a cast iron pot and heat under medium heat.

•Add onions when hot and stir for several minutes, then add a very small pinch of salt, keep stirring (if it wants to burn, add a little water) for 3 more minutes.

•Add daikon radish, stir for a few minutes, add a little water, cover.

•After ten minutes, add squash and keep adding water throughout the cooking process until the squash is soft.

•(When using these heavy type pots you need to learn how much cooking will continue when you turn off the heat. This takes practice.)

•Roast a cup or two of organic raw pumpkin seeds in an iron skillet, stirring occasionally, until they are roasted.

•Pour onto a plate and spray with a small amount of shoyu.

•Use for garnish on vegetables.

Broad Leafy Greens

• Clean and slice, in somewhat larger pieces than the summertime, the appropriate amount of greens (Collards or whatever is available. A more yang green would be better)

• Add three inches of water to a large pot, bring to boil and throw the greens in, making sure that they are all in the water

• Cook until they taste sweet, strain out liquid (save it for soup stock later), put in a ceramic bowl and cover with a plate or something similar until serving.

Gomashio (24-1)

• Heat up a cast iron skillet.

• Add 2 tsp of sea salt, roast for two minutes

• Pour into a suribachi and grind up with a surigochi

• Take 16 tablespoons of brown unhulled sesame seeds and roast in skillet until they break up when you roll them between your thumb and finger on your weakest hand. If they are popping, the heat is too high.

• Add to salt in suribachi and gently grind in a circular motion until seeds are 80% ground up.

• Put uncovered on table before using

• Use 4 tablespoons per day, mainly on grains

Pickle

• Pickled Daikon root. Take out of vacuum packed bag, rinse off rice bran, 3 small slices per person per meal (lunch and dinner), put in clean glass jar with top and put in refrigerator. Will last almost 2 weeks.

Beverage

• Twig tea, roasted brown rice tea, roasted corn tea, roasted barley tea with a slice of lemon and a tsp of brown rice syrup.

Serve soup first, then dinner. Eat from yang to yin; mouthful of grain, then mouthful of most yang vegetable, back to grain, back to vegetable on down the line. Enjoy.

ã1999 Macrobiotic Times