Playing vegan with miso glazed acorn squash and soba noodles

In December after a week of steak eating, cookie baking and face stuffing, unfortunately much prior to Christmas, I decided to become a vegan.  Now I only could do it for a week, as my love for dairy, eggs and meat should be obvious.  But, I can assuredly say that I felt much better.  I had a lot more energy and was less hungry.

This blog is definitely in need of more vegetables.  I love eating vegetarian fare, but somehow steamed broccoli with lemon juice just never seems sexy enough.  Of course my husband never even touched this dish, but that’s ok because sometimes I need things for myself.

White miso paste has a very rich, salty and sweet taste to it. I cut the squash in half and then cut very thin slices with a sharp knife.  Then I painted the glaze of miso, maple, soy and sesame on and roasted the squash in a hot oven until it was bubbling. 

To make this a complete meal, I made a miso sauce to toss buckwheat soba noodles.  This is delicious hot or cold.   Now I know the pictures aren't pretty, but this is good. Playing vegan is fun sometimes!

Maple miso roasted acorn squash with soba noodles

For the squash

½ acorn squash

2 tbsp white miso paste

1 tbsp maple syrup

1 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp soy sauce

drizzle sesame oil

For the noodles

2 tbsp miso paste

¼ cup hot water

2 tbsp grated ginger

1/2 garlic clove, grated

2 scallions finely chopped

drizzle sesame oil

1 package soba noodles

Preheat the oven to 400.  Cut the squash in half, then cut thin strips of squash, cutting those in half as well.  Mix the glaze and paint on with a pastry brush.  Bake the squash until it is golden brown and bubbling about 20 minutes. 

For the noodles.  Make the noodles according to the directions.  Combine the rest of the ingredients and toss with the hot noodles and squash.  

Meatballs

Just feeling like sharing a recipe--I think I'm going to try and do this more often.  This is a middle eastern twist on meatballs.  Easy and delicious.  The trick is finding bulgar wheat as a binder which adds whole grain and a nice nutty crunch.  I love lamb and I used ground lamb in this instead of beef or pork.  I served them with baba ganoush and sauteed veggies.  They would also taste great in pitas or in pasta.

 

Lamb Meatballs

 

1lb ground lamb

1 cup cooked bulgar wheat*

2 tbsp chopped parsley

1 tbsp chopped dill

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

2 tbsp pine nuts chopped

salt to taste

 

Preheat oven to 400.  Mix all ingredients together with hands until combined.  Take about 1-2 tablespoons filling, roll into balls and place on foiled baking sheets.  Bake until golden brown and cooked all the way through, about 15 minutes. 

 

*To cook bulgar wheat bring 1/2 cup wheat and 1 cup salted water to boil, reduce to low and cook for approximately 20 minutes

Mi Favoreet Foood Ees Mango

My life has been laced with mangoes.  My most endearing mango-related memory took place the year I took off between college and medical school.  Before I left for Chile, I worked odd jobs including a daily volunteer job teaching adult Mexican immigrants English. 

The class was designed to teach these vibrant adults survival English.  We taught them their addresses, the different coins and money, body parts and the doctor’s office, how to take the bus, and how to navigate the grocery store.  One of the sentences we taught the students to say was “my favorite food is” and had them fill in the blank.   Invariably, every person would say “mi favoreet foodd ees…mango” regardless of how many other food words we taught them.

Well, can you blame them?  Mango is one of the most addictive foods I have ever encountered.  When my family lived in Asia when I was in junior high, my dad used to bring the most amazing mangoes back from the Philippines by the dozens, and we would heartily devour them.  Those Philippine mangoes are the best ones and they come dried and pre-packaged by the kilo at Costco.  I can only keep the bag around for about one day, and for the sake of my tummy and my blood sugar, I only buy them about once a year.

Since I’m done with medical school and on vacation until I start residency, I’ve decided to screw science for this post and just give you a recipe for yummy mango fried rice.   I’m sure mangoes have amazing scientific, nutritional and genetic properties, but I just think they taste really good.  So there!

The trick to mango fried rice is to use slightly under-ripe mangoes.  They are tart and cook up to be tender, with the slightest bit of sweetness.  This recipe balances tartness, sweetness, spiciness and saltiness and has lots of veggies.

Mango Fried Rice

1 lb pork loin finely chopped (optional) you could also use chicken, shrimp, tofu...or nothing
3 tbsp vegetable or peanut oil
1 under-ripe mango cubed
3 scallions sliced into ½ inch pieces
4 cloves garlic smashed
1 large shallot diced
¾ cup green beans cut into ½ inch pieces
1 carrot diced
1 inch of gingerroot peeled and finely chopped
2 tbsp cilantro chopped
1-2 red finger peppers sliced with seeds (depending on spice level desired)
1 egg
4 cups cooked jasmine rice
Juice of one large lime
¼ cup soy sauce
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp oyster sauce
¼ cup cashews toasted and ground

In separate glass, combine lime juice, soy sauce, sugar and oyster sauce.  With wok or large cast iron skillet, preheat 1 tbsp oil over high heat.  When oil is smoking, add pork and cook until pink is gone.  Remove pork and juices onto plate.  Add another 2 tbsp oil and allow to reach smoking heat again.  Add mango, scallions, garlic, shallot, green beans, ginger, carrot, red pepper and cilantro and cook, stirring frequently until green beans are slightly tender, about 7 minutes.  Add about ¼ of the soy mixture and stir.  Add egg and scramble.  Add pork and allow to reheat throughout.  Add rice and incorporate.  Add rest of soy mixture.  Stir until rice is hot and has started to brown on sides.  Put in bowl or on plate, and add cashews to the top.  Enjoy!

The grapefruit--one way to battle winter

As the snow keeps drifting down, the wind keeps a blowing, and the gray skies ever make me desire a personal psychiatric consult, the citrus aisle of the grocery store is a welcomed reminder that there are palm trees and sanity in blessed parts of the United States of America.  As you can tell from repeated posts and reminders, I’m not really a fan of winter.  I particularly disdain the bleak species where the snow turns black and there’s no topographic variation to permit skiing or mountainous exploration.***

I have employed a variety coping mechanisms for the seasonal blahs.  Tactics have included the evasive, fleeing the northern hemisphere in December for summery South America for six months; the illuminating, having my fiancé design and build me a “happy lamp” as a sun substitute; and the caloric, particularly baking.

A less proud moment of winters past may have involved an entire chocolate layer cake topped with toasted walnuts and about a pound of homemade buttery caramel that I ate—alone.  (At least I completed an Olympic distance triathlon that summer.)  Now I moderate a bit better, but I still love to bake during the winter.  Benefits of winter baking include, admittedly, the cold weather allowing the oven to steam the windows Titanic style, and of course, the citrus.  Not only are the lemons and oranges beautiful, but the grapefruits are brilliant in baked goods.

The grapefruit, the beloved seemingly benign diet food of America also has a more mischievous side.  Grapefruit juice can be a bad player when taken with a variety of medications.  This discovery, like many scientific discoveries was hobbled upon coincidentally.

 In the 1980s in attempts to study the interaction between ethanol and a popular blood pressure medication, scientists decided on a Saturday night to make a felodipine Cosmopolitan with grapefruit juice to help the booze go down a bit better [1].  When they ran the experiment, they found that patients who took the drug with the cocktail had significantly lower blood pressures than those who had no alcohol.  Somebody astutely suggested it was the juice, not the liquor that caused such drastic changes in the drug metabolism.

Since this time, the grapefruit juice/medication interaction has been further explored.  [2,3].  Many medications are metabolized through an enzymatic pathway.  It appears that grapefruit juice reduces the prevalence of the enzyme CYP3A4 part of the cytochrome P450 in both the gut and the liver.  This allows for more medicine to be absorbed in the intestine and allows for medicines to linger in greater concentrations.  This can exacerbate toxic effects of  multiple drugs. 

A list of common medications that interact with grapefruit are listed here.  If you are concerned, please talk to your doctor.  If you are not taking any of these medications, feel free to participate in the construction and destruction of a luscious grapefruit lemon bar.  The benefit of the grapefruit is a complex sweetness with a less harsh tartness that I find many lemon bars have.  The crust is a modified shortbread recipe, so it is crisp, crumbly and light, with a bit of sour cream to echo the acidity in the filling.  The filling is more of a curd than a sturdy baked custard, so these treats are best eaten with a fork after refrigerated overnight.  The curd would also work great on toast or as a filling for cakes or cookies so feel free to separate the elements and work with what pleases you.

Grapefruit lemon bars

Shortbread Crust
Adopted from Joy of Cooking
¾ cup unsalted butter (1 ½ sticks) softened
2 tbsp sour cream
¼ cup confectioner’s sugar (powdered sugar)
2 tbsp granulated sugar
¼ tsp salt
1 ½ cups all purpose flour

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.  In large bowl beat all ingredients minus flour.  Stir in flour.  Light knead until blended.  In 8x8 baking pan with fingers press dough into bottom and up around the edges about ¾”.  Bake for about 35 minutes or until lightly browned and darker at the edges.  While baking, make the curd filling.  Allow to cool slightly for about 5 minutes and add the curd.  Refrigerate for 4-5 hours or until cool and set.  Sprinkle with powdered sugar and enjoy!

Grapefruit Curd
Adopted from James Peterson’s Baking

Juice and zest from one ruby red grapefruit (about 1 cup juice)
Juice and zest from one lemon
4 eggs
¾ cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp unsalted butter cut into tablespoon pieces

Set a saucepan of water over medium heat and bring to a simmer.  In a heatproof bowl that will fit over pan, whisk together eggs and sugar for about 2 minutes until pale.  Then whisk zests and juice.  Set the bowl over the saucepan.  Stir constantly with a whisk for about 8 minutes or until the mixture starts to thicken.  Add the sliced butter, one piece at a time and stir constantly.  Cook for about 2 minutes longed.  Remove from heat.

***On a side note completely unrelated to the core of this essay, I have just undergone the most unbelievable ritual to prove that winter is evil.  Coincidentally, my car and my fiancé’s car break simultaneously.  Our lovely repair shop lends us a loaner.  After spending an hour driving through blustery conditions to drop him off and then drive to the hospital, I roll down the window to take a parking ticket. The window falls into the door with impressive speed and doesn’t come out.  I then proceed to drive through downtown with no window while it snows into the car.

1. Bailey D et al.  Ethanol enhances the hemodynamic effects of felodipine.  Clin Invest Med 1989: 12: 357-362.
2. Dahan A et al.  Food Drug interaction: grapefruit juice augments drug bioavailability—mechanism, extent and relevance.  2004.  European journal of Clinical Nutrition.  58, 1-9.
3.  Bailey D et al.  Grapefruit Juice-Drug Interactions.  1998.  British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.  46: 101-110.

A shout out to kraut

For all you science geeks out there, remember when we used to sit in the lab looking at things under the microscope?  My junior year of college in my microbiology class, my lab group of three decided that we would isolate a virus from a bacterial strain that grew from sauerkraut.  Thinking back on this, attempting to isolate a virus FROM an isolated bacterium in a basic science lab was probably not a smart idea, and the experiment most definitely failed.  So did the sauerkraut.  What started out as about 5 lbs of raw shredded cabbage in an industrial bucket with salt dumped on it turned into a smelly, moldy, microbiologic disaster.

While most people find gross memories scarring and unappetizing, for me they ignite my hunger.  (This does not include any foods that have actually made me sick.  I will never eat Hot Sauce Williams again…or drink lemon-lime Gatorade.)  I always came out starving from gross anatomy class the first year of medical school, and the operating room reminds me of BBQ—in a good way.  Probably, I’m just hungry all of the time and it can be challenging to carve out lunch time in the hospital. Grossness becomes a regular part of life, and I just eat around it. 

The sauerkraut incident should have turned me off from fermented salty, acidic cabbage, but alas, it only made me want more.  Of course, we all know that I love bitter vegetables.  Sauerkraut has its health benefits too.  The brining of cabbage brings out cancer fighting compounds that are vitamin C derivatives.  A recent study shows that cabbages grown in winter have the highest concentration of ascorbigen, one of these cancer fighting compounds 1.  Who knew that winter could actually provide health benefits?   

On a slightly more disturbing note, I also found this study titled “Use of human urine fertilizer in cultivation of cabbage—impacts on chemical, microbial and flavor quality.”2  Supposedly, peeing on your plants is an excellent and delicious way to fertilize them.  This might just be the motivation to go organic (although urine is probably organic anyway).  Maybe I’ll just start eating pesticides.

Nothing about this post should convince you to eat sauerkraut.  If you have read this far, you are probably gagging, nauseated, or revolted.  Eat it anyway!  In this recipe I make a whole chicken cut up and cooked in sauerkraut, beer and veggies.  It’s a hearty winter dinner just for you, and your friends, and your drunken downstairs neighbors.


Chicken with sauerkraut and beer

One onion diced
One carrot diced
One pound sauerkraut drained (I rinsed mine but I wish I hadn’t…I like the acidic kick)
2 slices bacon chopped (if you don’t eat pork just use butter or olive oil instead)
¼ tsp red pepper flakes
¼ tsp fennel seeds
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp ground allspice
¼ tsp ground cloves
1 ½ tbsp brown sugar
Pepper to taste
One whole chicken cut into thighs, wings, and breasts (to cut up a chicken look here, or just buy whichever pieces of chicken you like…this recipe is better for chicken with bones)
One 12 oz bottle of stout beer
Sour cream to top

Cook bacon over medium high heat in dutch oven or other large cooking vessel.  Put bacon on paper towels and drain excess fat.  Leave about 2 tablespoons.  Over medium high heat, sauté onions and carrots until translucent and soft, about 8 minutes.  Add red pepper, fennel, allspice and cloves.

Add sauerkraut and saute for another 1-2 minutes.

Add brown sugar, bacon, salt and beer and allow to cook for about 5 minutes.  Meanwhile, preheat cast iron pan with about 2 tbsp canola oil and brown chicken for about 8 minutes.  If you are using a whole chicken, cook the thighs and legs first, add the wings and breasts a few minutes later.  Add chicken to dutch oven, cover, and simmer over medium heat until chicken is cooked through about 12 minutes.  Serve over brown rice, noodles or mashed potatoes and top with a generous dollop of sour cream.

Martinez-Villaluenga, C., et al. 2009. Influence of fermentation conditions on glucosinolates, ascorbigen, and ascorbic acid content in white cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. capitata cv. Taler) cultivated in different seasons. Journal of Food Science 74, no. 1:C62-7.

Pradhan, SK., et al. 2007. Use of human urine fertilizer in cultivation of cabbage (Brassica oleracea)--impacts on chemical, microbial, and flavor quality. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 55, no. 21:8657-63.

And the beet goes on

So I know there aren’t a lot of beet lovers out there. I’m asking a lot to get you to like brussel sprouts AND beets. Let me say, however, that I am a fanatic. A freshly cooked beet tossed up with some lemon is the epitome of richness, sweetness and deliciousness. And not to get too grossly personal, but every time I eat beets, I think I have a urinary tract infection. My pee turns bright red. Does this happen to anyone else?

Studies show that yes, beeturia, as it is so lovingly referred to in the medical world, occurs in approximately 14% of the population. (On a side note, I just love how they named it beeturia. When you pee blood this is called hematuria; hemat- for blood and –uria for urine. I guess the medical term for beet…is beet!)

While having beeturia might seem of minor consequence, and the majority of the time it is, in some cases it can indicate something more serious. Back in the 60s when beets were groovy, British scientists studied the incidence of beeturia in patients that had no known medical problems, those with iron deficiency anemia, those with pernicious anemia (this is anemia from the inability to absorb vitamin B12 in the gut), and those with malabsorption syndromes1. They found that the incidence of beeturia was only about 14% in healthy people but around 40% for anemic or malabsorptive patients.

This phenomenon was further explored. After a group of scientists experimented on 100 impoverished grad students, starving them, feeding them liquid beets and collecting their pee in a jug, it was found that high stomach acidity and long stomach emptying time can greatly impede absorption of beet pigments2. The rest of this data was gathered through rat models. Other things that stop beet pigment absorption include intestinal iron compounds, which explain why anemia can cause beeturia3.

So, if you eat beets and you have beeturia should you freak out? Probably not; most people with beeturia have a genetic predisposition to it. If you are concerned however, you could go to your doctor and say that you read something on the internet written by a medical student that you might have anemia. Doctors love that. (Like the time in my second year of medical school that I was convinced that my fiancé had this horrible autoimmune disease ankylosing spondilitis which causes your back to fuse together and gives you horrible arthritis, just because he had back pain. He went to the doctor all freaked out, and of course he just had some muscular strain. He did two stretches and felt better.)

And if you’re not sure if you have beeturia, there’s only one way to find out. Only through experimentation of consumption can the truth be gained. So, I challenge you to make this colorful, fragrant beet recipe which is citrusy, nutty and creamy, and report back to me. Even if you hate beets, do it for the name of science.

Ingredients
4-5 medium beets
Juice of one lime and one lemon
2 tbs unsweetened almond butter (you can buy this at Trader Joe’s it’s like peanut butter but with almonds; if you can’t find it you could just use a couple of tablespoons of finely chopped up toasted almonds)
1 medium clove of garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt (plus salt to cook the beets)
One ripe medium avocado

Rinse the beets (or scrub that) if they are particularly dirty. Fill a medium to large pot halfway with water. Salt the water. Cut beets in half and boil over medium high heat with covered lid for about 40 minutes or until beets are tender when pierced with a sharp knife. When beets are ready, rinse with cold water and peel with hands. Beets should peel easily and your hands will turn a beautiful crimson color (if they don’t peel easily use a vegetable peeler). Dice beets into medium sized cubes.

Dice avocados into medium sized cubes. To make dressing, mix lemon and lime juice with almond butter, garlic and salt in small bowl or glass. Then add olive oil. Dress salad and toss gently (don’t make too much fuss or the avocados will get mashed up). Enjoy!

1) WATSON, W., LUKE, R., & INALL, J. (1963). BEETURIA: ITS INCIDENCE AND A CLUE TO ITS MECHANISM. British Medical Journal, 2(5363), 971-3.

2) Watts, A., Lennard, M., Mason, S., Tucker, G., & Woods, H. (1993). Beeturia and the biological fate of beetroot pigments. Pharmacogenetics, 3(6), 302-11.

3) Eastwood, M., Nyhlin, H. (1995). Beeturia and colonic oxalic acid. QJM : monthly journal of the Association of Physicians, 88(10), 711-7.