Patty's Kitchen #1 / Macrobiotic Recipes

The kitchen is the center, the bottom line, of your macrobiotic practice and everything begins and ends there. Take pride in its use and arrangement, treat it with tenderness, give it love and attention and you will get it back.

This month (June) signals the phasing out of wood season and the beginning of fire season. Our cooking has been changing slowly to reflect this as far back as 120 days ago. Fire means the heart and small intestine are the organs we will support as they discharge and strengthen. We leave some trailing wood and add some future soil, doing this all year around with each season in relative amounts to how close it is to the present one. This is possible through the application of the macrobiotic principles of yin and yang. For example, changing bitter to sweet pushes (modifies), the taste from fire to soil. Changing the taste doesn’t change the nature of the chi. The idea is to get the most out of our macrobiotic lifestyle.

A great recipe for this season is my version of a polenta/vegetable dish and is very easy to make. Of course, your own version may be slightly different based upon when, where, who, and what is going on outside and inside. It’s fun to experiment. The ingredients (@four servings) are:

You don’t wash the polenta, but look for rocks, bugs, and other stuff, however.

Warm an enameled or plain cast iron cooking pot and toss in the polenta, stirring until it becomes hot to the touch and gives off a sweet aroma. Be careful because it easily burns if left unattended.

Cover, bring to a boil, then turn down the heat to just a simmer and cook for 20 minutes.

Serve on a dark-green plate with yellow place mats and steamed leafy greens in the evening of a warm early summer day after the miso soup...enjoy.

Looking at the qualities of what went into Plenty Polenta, we can see why we are eating this at this time of year. First thing is that these all grow locally around us and are freshly available now.

Corn is the grain (along with red millet in the East) of the fire season. There is a difference between the various forms of corn. Originally only one species, today’s corn is a hybrid and lacks the vitality, energy, and strengthening power of the original Indian corn. Commercially mass produced corn is grown with fertilizers and chemicals.

Corn on the cob is considered a vegetable. If it has been dried whole (yangized by the sun) it is considered a grain.

Ground up, the corn meal and flour can be used in breads, soups,vegetable dishes, and for making polenta.

The character of corn is yin cooling and yang drying. As a vegetable it’s great on hot summer days. Its cooling affect is also felt as a grain and its yang quality influences blood formation and high levels of energy.

It grows upward (yin) and inward (yang). This is the movement and the direction it goes in the body. Upward to the chest and the throat. Inward to the heart and small intestine; how it affects it.

The energy level is manifested as fast (yang) and irregular (yin). If eaten dry, then it has a dry and warming affect on the body. This would be done during cooler seasons where it was the only grain available.

Corn throughout history gave rise to the many great civilizations of North and South America. From these places it made its way back to the more established civilizations of the old world. Today in many countries it’s main use in not for human consumption, but as animal feed. There are many different organic products available naturally, from tortillas through oil to chips and corn silk tea, which is good for kidney problems having to do with hardening.

Carrots are a downward (yang) growing root vegetable that energetically nourish and strengthen the small intestine and indirectly, the heart.

The healthy small intestine is the primary place where, according to macrobiotic theory (dismissed by the scientific community), food is transformed into blood.

Carrots create a warm (yang) and damp (yin) environment with a slow (yin), regular (yang) body rhythm. As with all root vegetables, it is very important to use organic, as being in the ground they absorb more of what’s in the soil, such as pesticides if they were being used.

Onions are also considered a root vegetable but are really tubers that grow underground. They support the intestines, especially the large intestine, along with the lungs. The sweet cooked taste supports the spleen and to a lesser extent, the pancreas and stomach. Their properties are the same as carrots except instead of going down and inward, they go down and out (yin). This is why there is more affect on the large intestine and its eliminative functions.

Two things to make note of here. One, is that in macrobiotics all these ingredients are always cooked. If eaten raw, they have a cooling effect which over long periods of time can cause degeneration of the body. We need inner warmth to be healthy. Two, anything has both positive and negative influences. This depends on your condition and the extent to which they are employed. Anything in extremes can have a negative effect no matter how healthy it is. Your understanding of yin and yang and the five transformations will help you avoid this dilemma.

(Published in Macrobiotic Times June, 1998)