Category: Food recipes, food & love

I used to treat myself to something nice to eat as a reward. And when I am anxious I restrict myself if it comes to food. I think for a lot of us to eat nice food is a present we give ourselves. And life on a daily bases is just not about receiving presents. The food we take in often is more about convenience, price, habit or because we have to feed ourselves ‘anyway’. 

‘But what about love?’ she asked. 

‘Love is not enough’ he replied.

My Indian yoga teacher years ago opened my eyes with a wise exclamation:’ It’s time to start eating not because it tastes good but because you need building material’. You would say that ended my quest for healthy yet nice food. It didn’t. It marked a beginning. It set me on a journey of exploring with food items and diets, purely to see what they do to my body. How do I feel when I skip this from my diet? What does my body wants me to do when I eat this? Does it want to stretch itself or surf on a couch? Is it wanting to proof it’s strength to me or does it want to sleep?

It got me into a raw and vegan life style for years. Thank the heavens for this adventurous exploration in my own kitchen, not having to travel a mile, yet discovering brand new worlds. Today I am vegan and half raw, till and not including, dinner.  If you ask me why, I say: ‘because I like how it makes me feel’. 

Do I not enjoy the taste of what I eat? That’s where it gets interesting. I’ve put how it makes me feel first and the taste second. I’ve discovered that taste can be acquired and I’ve discovered that a lot of what we think tastes nice actually is conditioned by ourselves. I used to have a sweet tooth. Nowadays when I eat sweetened produce, I am not even talking about refined sugar which I don’t really consume but responsible sweeteners like maple syrup or coconut nectar, the concentrated fructose or glucose content often tastes like it’s too much for me.

When I was pregnant and not vegan yet (‘just only’ vegetarian 😉) I quit eating salt. After a while I didn’t like the taste of it anymore. I enjoyed a soft boiled egg without a sprinkle of salt! That was many years ago. Today I enjoy the taste of salt. But I know and I’ve learned that what tastes nice is much more complex then just the taste of it.

It’s like love. Falling in love is savoring the most delicious thing on earth. Staying in love is a journey. An amazing journey of desire, trial and error.  An exploration of what is possible, necessary, required and unbearable. Discovering these things with one and other is like building our taste buds to crave healthy food. I like my love to be sweet and sometimes I like it raw. I like it complex and deep. And sometimes I like to grab a snack. Slow cooking is beautiful but sometimes I need fast food. And all my cravings for love and food alike are conditioned by my surroundings: the color of the earth I walk, the sound of the rain I hear, the feeling of sun rays on my skin and the smell of a rose petal covered with dew. 

My breakfast delight started with a desire for seeds and reading about how kiwi induces good sleep. While traveling the path of devoting myself to a free of almost anything diet (sugar free, gluten free, lactose free, dairy free, meat free, colorants & additives free and lately nut free) I seek to restructure from Ground Zero. Today I calculate the nutritional content of my default breakfast per it’s daily percentage of our dietary requirements. Selecting ingredients goes carefully and slow like picking blackberries from bushes along hiking trails. Trying not to pinch my fingers, only gathering the ripe ones, searching for the ones that fall into the palm of my hand upon pulling the little soft dark red thing ever so lightly, not forcing it, basically just gesturing it to let go of it’s branch. And then I taste, every late morning savoring my breakfast delight and I slowly adjust every late afternoon while preparing it again for the next day. 

The above conjunction is where we are now.

CS

7% daily fat

20% daily dietary fiber

5% daily protein

9.5 % daily calcium

6.4 % iron

12.6 Magnesium

SunS

Fat 11.8 %

Dietary fiber 5.5

Protein 6.3

Iron 4.39

Vit B6 , 9.8%

Magn 12.27%

SesS

Fat 11.5%

Protein 5.45

Fiber 7.27

Calcium 14.7

Iron 12.27

Vit B6 ,6%

Mag 13.18

LinS

Fat 9.69

Dietary 16.36

Protein 5.45

Calc 3.77

Iron 4.69

Vit B6 , 3.78

Magn 14.84

HempS

Fat 9.5

Dietary F 2.1%

Protein 9.6

Iron 6.6 %

B6, 6.96%

Mag 26.5%

HempH

Fat 10.3%

Dietary 4.39

Protein 10%

Iron 8%

Magn 24%

Dates

Fiber  4%

B6, 2.87%

I just had a fabulous massage. At the end her two hands rested on my back, silent, nothing happened. It seemed. A wave of relaxation stirred my body. As if she uncorked my body and gently poured the content into a nice wine glass. That was Reiki she explained later. Her name is Geri. She’s a massage therapist at the Amchara Health Resort in Gozo, Malta. I am blaming myself. While lying in the fuchsia pink room, candle lit with the sound of relaxing music and rain pouring down outside the sheltered cocoon; I blame myself for not loving myself. Did I ever really love myself? You should take better care of yourself, I say to myself. Life won’t treat you well if you don’t set the example. 

We make love over the phone. Often emotions and hormones get caught up in laughter, arousal, arguments or even silence: ‘I want to listen to your sounds’. And then that’s what we do. Listening to each other’s sounds. But Geri’s massage reminds me of the power of touch. Tears rising up behind my eyeballs. I wish to be able to release them. Together with the worries that tighten the muscles between my shoulder blades and those securely fastened in my neck. Someone touching my skin feels divine. A short break in the endless and relentless repetition of what seems to be a soothing mantra of three words ‘I miss you’ fighting for priority over the other hallucinating three I-Love-You words.  I miss his physical presence. We’ve almost got it all. It’s a hazardous place to be. That what follows beyond the ‘almost’ and presumably completes the picture, grows bigger and bigger until the absence of it overtakes everything else. 

I need to distract myself. I dedicate my attention to the preparations for a raw Thai salad, attaching lost feelings of love to it. Quickly pickling pungent tastes of cabbage and onion, softening them to digest more smoothly his absence and my longing alike. Is it possible to justify the present? The salad is bright. The colors are as distinctly separate as it’s different tastes.  It is tossed as lightly as it is seasoned. The ingredients are as raw as my emotions. 

1/2 small red/white/brown or shallot onion – finely sliced – drown in apple cider vinegar – macerate 1 hour
1/8 red/green/ Savoy or white Cabbage – finely sliced – drown in apple cider vinegar – macerate 1 hour
1/4 Fennel bulb – finely sliced – juice of 1/2 lemon adding water until the fennel is covered
6 Mushrooms – finely sliced – juice of 1/2 lemon adding water until the fennel is covered

Other vegetables: 
6 Cherry tomatoes – quartered (yes quartered)
1 Carrot – with a peeler, peel off carrot ribbon
1/2 Bell pepper – nicely sliced 
1 Spring onion – chopped diagonally
Handful of each mint, coriander and basil – leaves only – chopped finely
5 cm of Courgette – sliced finely

Fruit:
1/2 Peach or nectarine – pit the fruit and slice finely – add juice of 1/2 a lemon to a bowl, put the fragile fruit carefully, make sure all the flesh has been in touch with the lemon juice by tossing very gently
10 Red currents
1/2 Grapefruit, lime or clementine – cut of the skin thickly, cut out individual citrus particles without hull

Dressing:

Juice of 1 lemon
3 tbsp water
Salt
1 tbsp sweetener (agave, rice sirup, maple sirup, coconut nectar, honey)
A thumb of ginger pressed through garlic press

Right before serving the different ingredients are assembled in a bowl, tossed lightly; just with 1 or 2 swirls with your bare hands while adding the dressing

Poor a shot of coconut oil over it and decorate with dulce and grated grapefruit/lime or clementine zest

‘Is that all?’the woman who came down for her lunch asked and I said: ‘Yes, that’s all’ feeling my tears rising again.

Soupe à la Reine is white and velvety and very soothing. It’s classic French cooking at it’s best. The original Dutch Soupe à la Reine is a thin roux based bechamel, enriched with cream and garnished with a handful of garden peas, little cubes of carrot and celeriac. It’s minimalistic, rich and simple. And it’s all in the broth. 

It’s cold in the plane and I am tired. Jasmin green tea with milk melts down my throat into my stomach, soothing me. Matcha latte comes to my mind, thinking:’they started it, the Japanese. It isn’t my own weird idea, adding milk to green tea’. Matcha is an exclusive finely ground almost fluorescent green powder of the tips of excellent quality green tea leaves. It’s use has evolved into a discipline which is called the Way of Tea, performed as the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. Matcha powder has also become a favorite ingredient for more experimental chefs in Japan, used in pastries and ice cream. Starbucks sells Matcha latte, matcha powder mixed with milk and sweetener. Sweetened because original matcha is slightly bitter, a bit more even then the green tea leaves it’s derived of.

I am drinking herbal tea with milk, green tea with milk and fruit tea with milk. ‘Could I have a peppermint tea please? With coconut milk on the side’. The combination is bizarre, I realize. But it tastes really good. Lemon-ginger with oatmilk, green tea with almond milk and in case plant based milks are not on offer, I add regular dairy milk to the tea brews as it tastes good too. It’s only that I prefer to keep to a vegan diet that is keeping me from indulging in tea served with cow milk. 

Last winter I started making what I call Tea Lattes. Hot milk poured on regular or decaffeinated black tea. The plant based milks could be mixtures of rice and soy milk or oat and almond milk, they top up a tall glass for at least two thirds, filled one third with strong simple black tea. I liked it so much that I got tired of carrying the cartons of different plant based milks from the shops to my house and started to get into different tea flavors served with less milk. It got me down to herbal tea, green tea or fruit tea served with a generous cloud of rice, almond, soy or oat milk and when I can lay my hands on walnut or hazelnut milk, I feast. 

Soon we’ll land in Vienna. Wiener mélange comes to mind. Coffee latte topped up with whipped cream basically. I finish the Jasmine green tea with four sachets of airplane milk telling myself I won’t go into the Vienna version of my Tea Lattes. Which would be topping them up with whipped cream. Although whipped aqua fava would be an excellent vegan topping. But already my Tea Lattes are at least as good as the commercialized Matcha latte, a Turmeric latte or a good old traditionally spiced Chai.

Christel asks me to join her Sunday late afternoon presentation about fermentation. She demonstrates kombucha making and she likes me to do another ferment or pickle. There’s a small Savoy cabbage in the large fridge of the industrial kitchen of the health resort where both she and I work, Christel as a naturopath, me as a chef. I resolve to prepare for a quick pickle of the more distinguished and tasty sister of the original white sauerkraut cabbage: Savoy Cabbage. This quick pickling asks for vinegar and lemon juice instead of only salt and pressing down.

My stomach hurts. Deep inside. It’s not about the food I eat. But maybe the pickled cabbage will help me digest my pickled emotions. How do I pickle butterflies that nest in my stomach? I am not talking about bacteria. Tears in my eyes roll down my cheek. They taste salty like pickled emotions, the liquid drains, the flavor intensifies. It isn’t about conservation. It’s about transforming the chemistry. I love him so much. My stomach hurts.

1/2 of a small Savoy Cabbage, the leaves pulled, stem and harder parts cut off

1 tbsp course mineral salt

1 tbsp natural sweetener like coconut nectar, agave, maple sirup or honey

1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar

2 cups filtered water

Sterilized glass jar

Something sterilized to press down the leaves (a tall glass)

Optional:

1 tsp pepper corns or 1 tsp red chilly flakes or a piece of kombu (algae)

Neatly arrange the cabbage leaves in the glass jar, pressing down tightly. Heat the liquid ingredients with salt, sweetener and if you are using them either of the additional flavors. When the salt is dissolved, poor liquid over the cabbage topping the jar up all the way. Close the lid. Let cool until you can touch it without burning your hands. Shake it and leave it stand for 24 hours. It’s ready to consume. After you first open the jar, please keep it in the fridge until it’s empty.

It reminds me of places I have never been. Rich scents my nose encaptures but they don’t have a name. A whirl of sounds engulfing my ears but they can’t be distinguished. Overwhelming and bigger then me, this unknown place feels like it embraces me, making my ego and all of me dissolve like salt in luke warm water. It frees me. Because of it’s anonimity. There’s no known structure. There’s no familiar patterns and habits. Everything is hussling and bussling without me taking part. Without me doing anything. I can just be. Be still. Be me. Until I slowly evaporate, merging with the sounds and the scents and faraway freedom.

soft swirly avocado & aqua fava merenguada

With stick mixer blend an avocado, juice of half a lemon, a banana, turmeric and 50 ml almond milk. With handheld mixer mix liquid of one can of chick peas (keep the chick peas itself for another purpose) during 5 minutes. When stiffened like merengue, add maple or agave sirup until it’s comfortably sweet. Top avocado mixture with aqua fava merenguada and give it one swirl. Sprinkle with a hint of cinnamon. Serve with a long spoon

”I love you as the leaves of trees embrace the wind, as the grass soaks up the rain and as the sun peaks up over the land to cast its warmth”

You catch

fish

and my kiss

You breath

in my bed

Deep water

you caught her

with flies

Blue skies

burning sun

We com’

closer

closest

U and I

unite

re-unite

Burning fire

soft desire

crystal clear

You are

Almost here

Blend 1 banana, 3 pitted dates, 1 heaped table spoon peanut butter, 2 tablespoons broken linseed, teaspoon turmeric, teaspoon cinnamom, 100 ml almond milk (or rice milk, oat milk, orange juice whichever you’ve got)

Since years I drink tea, no coffee. In the same addictive amounts as I used to drink coffee, ate sugary treats and smoke cigarettes. The love for my body and my shame for not feeling healthy got me turnaround pretty much 360 degrees. Reminds me of the expensive make up industry with a well chosen name for a daily Clinique product: turnaround cream. Don’t we all want to make that total 360 degrees turn? Sometimes…

And then there’s the revival of Blondie and a movie I went to see with the greatest love of my life, thinking it was about Blondie. Atomic Blonde appeared to be a mysterious mixture of James Bond ingredients, David Bowie music, East Berlin when the wall comes down and passionate lesbian sex. No Blondie, not even a single song. I linger while admiring the Italian designed, made in Australia, fantastic espresso maker. We know about the high pressure percolators, nostalgic, reminiscent of Italian romance for unknown reasons, no logic, just feelings. 

The high pressure espresso maker takes a while to heat up on top of the woodfire stove. We are off the grid and lovin’ it. Not a lot atomic about the nostalgic coffee. Like there was not a lot of Blondie about Atomic Blonde. The scent of freshly brewed coffee is irresistable notwithstanding many coffee-sober-tea-drinking-years, I will always love the scent of coffee. Like I will always love Blondie’s music. Be it atomic or not.

Lift her face gently with both your hands, moving your head close to hers, touching her lips with your lips, light as a feather, very careful as with the first little sip of your espresso. Let the sensation of the black liquid engulf your tastebuds; like the warm sensation of her soft lips runs through your veins. The shivering magic opens a door to another world, our atomic world within. Another sip, greedy this time. Another kiss, full and complete.

We had not been there for 2,5 months. The sun is bright. The apartment empty. As empty as we found it a long time ago. Before we started making memories there. Many memories. I said downstairs in the lobby while checking the mailbox: ‘it isn’t as bad as I feared it would be. The revisiting I mean’. Little did I know. We ascend to the first floor, entering a bare but trodden apartment. I am surprised to find some of my stuff left behind. I loose focus and I take his hand, leading him up the stairs, to our bedroom. We undress. Like we did a hundred times, a thousand times. Half close the blinds. Duvet on the floor. A rush of hormones is running through my veins. Before I know it I am all over him. And then, suddenly, I burst out in tears. Rolling from the deep, warm, unconsolable, uncontrolable. After quite some sobbing, the tide slowly alters. We make love like never before. We leave the apartment behind us, empty as is. I am fulfilled with the remnants of past hope, glory and boundless expectations that could only be countered by the chemistry of our bodies. Talking an universal language without words. Singing a song without a melody. Rocking it without rolling waves. Desperate longing without an horizon. Kept and preserved as if in hot desert sand. Not since long, just lightly pickled.

1 continental cucumber with skin, cut in half lengthwise and de-seeded, sliced in 1 cm thin half circles, preferably a bit diagonally cut, Japanese style

2 cups apple cider vinegar

1 tblspoon salt

1 tblspoon sugar

A piece of 3x3cm Kombu (thick seaweed) optional

Find a glass jar that fits the cucumber slices 

Disolve sugar and salt in the vinegar, add cucumber slices, fill up with cold water all the way to the top

Put lid on it

Shake the jar slowly, turning it upside down

Place in fridge

Ready to eat after 24 hours