sugar freedom

This past couple of weeks, I've been joining in a virtual event hosted by Kimi of The Nourishing Gourmet called the Sugar-Free Challenge. If you know me, now is probably the time that you should say, "What? Sugar free?" I know; it's shocking. I'm the one who would rather smuggle candy than popcorn into the movies, the one who bakes cookies to share with coworkers for no reason at all. My hope is that, from this challenge, I'll still be the same sweet-loving person, but in a more natural and nourishing sense. And anyway, there are three levels of the challenge, and I started with the most basic. You can get more details about what the challenge is and the different levels here. While Kimi's challenge ended last week, I'm still going on my own personal challenge.

I don't know what it was that made me think I could successfully complete this challenge. Perhaps it's just that, similar to Adriana, I'm drunk with love over fall and everything the markets have to offer right about now. But usually my favorite fall things include a particular sandwich cookie with neon orange cream filling. And the small dishes of bite-sized candies that start popping up in every office and shop in mid-October. This year, though, things have been different.
 
When Kimi posted the challenge, I realized that I wanted to, and could, join in. So here I am. It's almost two weeks later, and extracting processed sugars and white flour from my routine hasn't been the tug-of-war of will versus desire that I had expected. Instead, sugar-free has felt simply like freedom. Please note that I've been debating with myself about whether or not to blog about this, afraid that committing this experience to keyboard would somehow break this sugar-free spell and that I would suddenly find myself incapable of resisting all highly refined products and slipping into a mire of darkness and ill-health with which I associate them. However, I'm taking that chance, as I think there are several elements of this sugar-free week from which others (and I) can benefit. Here are some of them.

1. Eat lots of fermented foods. This may not be true for everybody, but for me, eating fermented foods has really helped to reduce cravings for sweets and other refined carbohydrates. If you know why this is, please chime in. My best guess is that fermented foods are more easily digestible and increase healthy intestinal flora, allowing us to extract more nutrients from our food and decreasing cravings for nutrients we aren't getting. These days, if I'm hungry between getting home from work and making dinner, I snack on a half cup or so of Bubbies sauerkraut or my homemade 'kraut. I'm a little bit in love with it.

2. Eat more vegetables. This challenge has been a great excuse for me to fall back in love with my favorite vegetables. Last week, instead of packing my usual afternoon snack of almonds and an apple, I sauteed a red bell pepper and an onion. It was delicious. Funny that I didn't think of sauteed vegetables as a snack before, and that I so blatantly overlooked their natural sweetness.

3. Get enough protein. I know this can be a hard one, especially for the vegetarians and vegans out there.  Plus, who wants to go around calculating the amount of protein you need with each meal? My tactic is to make sure I have some form of animal protein at each meal, be it unsweetened whole milk yogurt, scrambled eggs, chicken or grass-fed beef.

4. Include high-quality fats. Some of my favorites of late have been my homemade cultured butter, coconut milk and coconut oil, almonds, olive oil and whole milk from grass-fed cows.

5. Experiment with natural sweeteners. Try out some sweet leaf Stevia in your coffee or tea, or add raw honey to your oatmeal instead of eating sugary packaged cereals. One of my favorite fruit-sweetened recipes is stewed prunes, which are simply luscious and decadent with yogurt. Oh, and this whole natural sweeteners thing is what brings me to my next point: poached pears. I know that even if you're going sugar free, you might still want to share a beautiful dessert with your friends when they come over for dinner. These poached pears are perfect for just such an occasion. Mine are sweetened only with apple cider, and I found them plenty sweet. However, if you want to add a teaspoon of raw honey to the cider as it reduces, I'm sure that would be lovely, as well. I love these pears because they fill the house with autumnal aromas without the sugar and white flour that are in so many fall treats.

Cider-Poached Pears for Fall
Serves 4


2 cups fresh apple cider
2 Tbs. mulling spices
4 pears, peeled, halved and cored
Optional: 1 tsp. raw honey

Add the cider and spices to a medium-sized saucepan and bring to a low boil. Stir in the honey if you are using it. Reduce the heat, and allow mixture to simmer, uncovered, for ten minutes.

Meanwhile, peel, halve and core your pears and place them gently in the liquid. Continue to simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, until the pears yield easily to the tines of a fork but are not falling apart. By now, your liquid should have reduced to half its original volume. If it has not, remove the pears when they are tender and continue to reduce poaching liquid.

Remove the pears from the pan and place in shallow bowls. Strain the liquid into a bowl to remove the spices, and generously spoon the liquid on top of the pears. Serve warm as a dessert, or cooled as an accompaniment to breakfast yogurt.

*Note: You'll notice that the pears I photographed were not halved and cored. I did this because they are pretty to serve that way. However, on second thought, it's much easier for people to eat these if you do the coring before you poach, which is why I included that step in the recipe.

-Kylie

spinning into butter

I grew up in a world awash with margarine. I remember dipping my knife into a beige tub of it straight from the refrigerator. With little resistance, I would scoop out a lump and slather it easily onto a whole wheat roll. It melted easily and soaked the bread with its oily yellowness. I didn't think a whole lot about it. It was the nineties, and my parents were into being healthy and exercising. Back then, margarine was part of that.

I can't quite pinpoint the moment my world shifted from margarine as health food to margarine as toxin. It could have been junior year of college when I read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and tried to understand trans fats for the first time. Maybe it really sunk in when New York City's Board of Health became the first in the nation to ban the use of artificial trans fats (the kinds in margarine and other hydrogenated oils) at restaurants. I guess it doesn't really matter when it was, but sometime between Y2K and now, my world changed from one where my friends and family cooked and baked with margarine for "health" to one where they use butter without fail.

Still, the mistaken association between butter and health problems pervades television commercials and women's magazines. Multinational corporations continue to produce butter substitutes made with rancid oils, selling products which are actually far more damaging to our health than the lowest-nutrient butters on the market. Soy, corn and cotton can all be used to make the ingredients that comprise a butter substitute, and food-producing corporations have a glut of all three due to monocropping practices.

The thing is, people will only be swayed by marketing for so long. High quality pastured butters become available at more grocery stores every day, and many boutique food stores now regularly carry cultured butter like that of Vermont Butter and Cheese Company. Once you taste a good cultured butter slathered on fresh bread, you're transported to a world where butter has taste and where it needs some good sea salt, a world where have to ask yourself, "How was I passing this up?".

This post is in the spirit of putting a stop to the passing up of butter. That is my mission, and I hope you'll accept it. I wanted to make butter because I came across this article while internet browsing during lunch at work, and butter making sounded to me both daunting and delicious. Subsequent Googling yielded the unanimous bloggers' consensus that homemade butter is far superior to even that of Vermont Butter and Cheese. I had to know.

And so Mary and I made butter. We bought our cream and yogurt fresh from the farmers' market, we fermented overnight, we cooled the cream in the fridge. We shook a jar for half an hour until the butter separated from the buttermilk, and (Eureka!) we were victorious.

Everyone else on the interweb was right: It's easy to make butter. It tastes good. Oh, does it taste good. And it's good for you. Really, really good. As I understand it, butter made from the milk of cows that have been eating grass (or "pastured") in the fall and spring is high in both Vitamins A and D. It is high in both selenium and cholesterol, protecting against cancer and heart disease. If you have questions about  more of the specific health benefits of butter, check out this Weston A. Price Foundation article, "Why Butter Is Better". It will also answer some questions if you scratched your head when I said that cholesterol helps to protect against heart disease. Culturing the butter increases its enzyme content and makes it easier to digest. It also makes it taste even more incredible.



Cultured Butter
Adapted from The Atlantic


1 pint of heavy cream (not ultra-pasteurized; that won't become butter)
3 Tbs. plain yogurt with live cultures
A pinch or two of good sea salt to taste

*Note: Do not make butter on a hot day, as the butter will not separate from the buttermilk properly. I made it on a day that was about 70 degrees, and everything went fine, as I chilled the cream before shaking it.

Pour heavy cream into a mixing bowl and add the yogurt. Stir to mix, cover with a towel, and leave at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours, until the cream has thickened slightly and developed a slightly tangy taste.

Pour cream into a large jar with a lid that closes tightly, and place in the refrigerator for an hour or two. The cream should cool to between 60 and 66 degrees Fahrenheit. Once it has cooled, you can separate the butter from the buttermilk in one of three ways. You can pour it into a food processor and process it for 5 to 6 minutes until the butter separates from the buttermilk. The butter will look clumpy and yellow, and the buttermilk will be a translucent white. You can also mix it with a stand mixer. Just be sure to cover it well so the cream doesn't splash you and your entire kitchen. You can also do it the fun way and work up a sweat like I did. Shake it vigorously in a jar until it separates, about 30 minutes. I recommend finding yourself a shaking buddy and alternating every five minutes.

One the butter has separated from the buttermilk, strain the clump of butter in a colander and reserve the buttermilk for use in another recipe. Place the butter in a large bowl of ice water, and work to buttermilk out of it with your hands. The buttermilk will make the water cloudy. Strain the butter out of that and put it in a new bowl of ice water, repeating this squeezing process until the water stays clear, to to three times. Remove the butter and pat it gently with a towel to remove water droplets on its exterior. Work a couple of pinches of good salt into it with your hands (if you want salted butter). Transfer the butter to a ramekin or small bowl and cover tightly. It will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator, or several months in the freezer.

-Kylie