Healthy Summer Fruit Tart
Pie You Don’t Have to Feel Guilty Eating. Healthy Summer Fruit Tart are deserts full of ingredients with high nutritive value–fiber, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, protein, etc, , with high amounts of life force from fresh well farmed ingredients, and with out what’s bad for you–white sugar, artificial stuff, preservatives, things with no life force, like frozen fruit and pie crusts off the shelf of Cost Co. Traveling in Europe one of the things you might notice is that the pastries are sweet, but not sickeningly so. In particular the fruit tarts are slightly...
Read MoreSpringtime Tea from Somalia with Cardamom and Mint
Food and drink like language and music spreads between cultures without rules. But within any given tradition, within any given culture, its as if there are unspoken rules that govern change; creativity is allowed, but to a point. In the world of food or music, for example, once you change a thing enough it is no longer what it started out to be. This can lead to certain kinds of conformity. For example, in my grandmother’s Russian Jewish culture there were two kinds of gefilte fish–sweet without garlic, but with sugar, and spicy, without sugar, but with black pepper and...
Read MoreDaikon Radish: Detoxify and Promote Digestion
Daikon Radish is a great soup or salad vegetable. It is spicy, and acts as a digestive by stimulating digestive fire, just as the small radishes that Mexicanos eat with corn and meat do, but it is more aromatic, especially when boiled, than the small radishes and not as hot. Daikon is used in Chinese Medicine Nutritional therapy to balance heavier foods that are high in harder to digest animal protein and fat, like beef or pork. Beef and pork, which are are also neutral and cool in natural temperature, easily produce toxic dampness when eaten in excess, because the combination of heavy...
Read MoreWakame Sea Vegetable with Turnip, Pear, and American Ginseng
Wakame is a delicate, mild tasting, low calorie sea vegetable with a succulent texture. A favorite food in Japanese and Korean cuisine, it is traditionally cooked in miso soup, served on its own as a cold side dish (sunomono), or cooked with foods like kabocha squash. It can be adapted into American cooking in salads, soups, stews, as a side dish, and even added into raw sauerkraut. It compliments grains from barley and quinoa to rice and millet. Wakame looks black in the package, but turns a delicate green color when cooked, brighter if blanched briefly in boiling...
Read MoreJuiced Watermelon with Lime, Ginger, and Salt
Alternative to Iced Drinks in Hot Weather Protect the Agni/ Yang in Summer: Juiced Watermelon with Lime, Ginger, and Salt The other day was quite hot (for SD!), and I swam at the beach after walking down from the top of Torrey Pines, and got home overheated and thirsty. I could still feel the sun hot on my head, even though I had worn a hat. I needed a lot of fluid and to cool down healthfully. An excellent alternative to iced beverages in hot conditions like that is juiced melon, especially watermelon. I juiced mine with fresh ginger root so as to protect my digestive fire/yang/agni from...
Read MoreAnchor the Yang: Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture and Moxabustion Therapies for Summer Solstice
The Chinese and Indian View: Life is a Passage Through Cycles In Chinese Medicine (as also Ayurveda) a fundamental concept is to prepare for what is ahead. This is not just generalized prevention as in eating a healthy diet or sleeping well, but is specific to how we relate to the passage of time. Chinese Medicine sees life as cyclical: a series of transitions, changes, phases, and cycles; as a continuous movement between the forces of yang and yin, rather than as a linear progression of fixed events. The hard thing about living is dealing with change. Cycles Involve...
Read MorePeppermint and Gotu Kola Ayurvedic Cooling Summer Tea
Cooling Teas of Summer: Peppermint and Centella Asiatica (Brahmi, Gotu Kola, Pennywort) There are lots of ways to hydrate and cool off in summer, without damaging the Agni/digestive fire/Spleen Qi which is actually weaker in the hot weather than in the cold weather. In cold weather the Agni fires up in the core to keep us warm, but in the hot weather it is dispersed to the surface as we sweat. That is why we can eat heavier food in the winter than in the summer. So it is important to be careful about too much cooling food in summer, especially late summer as we begin the descent into the...
Read MoreBaked Butternut Squash and Black Bean Stew
Cooking Methods in Chinese Food Medicine: From Warm to Hot to Very Hot One of the aspects of Food Medicine we pay attention to in Chinese Medicine is the cooking method itself. Each method of cooking adds relative values of heat to the dish being prepared. Steaming and boiling are the mildest. Then, in degree of heat imparting come croc-pot slow cooking/stewing, stir frying, baking, and finally, the hottest–deep frying. That may explain in part why baked and deep fried goods are so satisfying–life is a process of warm biochemical or energetic transformations–qi and blood...
Read MoreDandelion and Chicory Greens: Vegan Fast Food
My idea of fast food: real food, made easily. Too many of my vegetarian and vegan friends are what I call “grilled cheese vegetarians.” Though they avoid meat, they also seem to avoid green vegetables and eat lots of bread and soy cheese or vegan sausages. I was on a meditation retreat a few years ago in Quebec, and it was surprising: lots of beans and grains and dairy, too, even ice cream, but zero green vegetables. Chinese medicine says: Protein for strength, Grains for energy, Green Vegetables to keep it all clean. Luckily, walking around the extensive uncut fields...
Read MoreWinter in the "Nei Jing", the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Chinese Medicine
To stop for a moment and meditate on the passage of time, to feel time moving inside you, is to practice the value of the winter season, when movements appear underground, when earth’s energy has gone downward and inward. The sun too is on holiday low in the horizon, and cool Venus appears triumphant in a dazzling triangle alongside Jupiter and the waxing and waning Moon in mid-winter. To stop for a moment and meditate on the passage of time, to feel time moving inside you, is to practice the value of the winter season, when nature’s In the Yellow Emperor’s Classic or Nei Jing Su...
Read MoreKorean Summer Rice with Job’s Tears, Shitake, and Hijiki
In Korea, Job’s tears “barley” (Coix lacryma-jobi in Latin, YiYiRen in Mandarin Chinese, Hato Mugi in JapaneseUiin in Korean)– is cooked in with rice during the hot, humid summer months to help alleviate the effects of the hot weather and to remedy the excessive things we sometimes do to cool off from the heat. In Summer our digestion is actually weaker than in winter. This seemed counter-intuitive to me, until I studied Ayurveda. Ayuveda explains that in winter, our digestive fire increases, in order to protect us from the cold. This would explain why the best...
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