January 5, 2016 Breakfast- Oatmeal, Lunch – Beef Noodle Soup, Dinner – Stir Fried Pork, Bok Chou, Bamboo Shoots, and Shitake Mushroom
Yuck, I have a cold. Probably from sharing a bed with Suzette who has been sick with a cold for several days. Mike and Kathryn are still staying with us but they left early today to visit her father and I slept late until after 8:00 to catch up on my rest after working on a pleading until 6:00 a.m.
Suzette worked with Mario to hang the new bookshelf and several other racks in the kitchen this morning. At around 10:00 while Mario was gone to Home aDepot to fetch some brackets to hang the book shelves, I made a small pot of oatmeal with raisins, brown sugar, and crushed walnuts.
We watched Michael Pollan’s PBS Special named “In Defense of Food”, which was revelatory. Food is that which rots. All the other stabilized, processed ersatz foods are “food like edible substances” in Pollan’s world. His mantra is to eat a vegetable and fruit rich diet and to use red meat as a flavoring. I knew that, but had departed from that path lately and made a New Year’s resolution to more closely thread that path, which Pollan proved resulted in a healthier, longer life.
So for breakfast instead of cheese and preserves on buttered French bread made with white flour, I chose to make oatmeal, which is a more whole grain, with raisins, brown sugar, and four or five crushed walnuts cooked in water and whole milk. In the same time or less that it would have taken to make toast, I had produced a relatively healthy, lower cholesterol hot breakfast.
When Mario left around 12:20, I decided to stay at home in my pajamas and fix a hot noodle soup for lunch. We had pieces of PPI heavy beef, so I decided to make Pho with sliced onion, fresh spinach, beef, tofu, seaweed, red miso, and sliced mushrooms. I used three types of noodles, rice, egg, and mung bean threads. I garnished the soup with green onions and flavored it with fresh cilantro, fresh lime juice, and Shiracha for a very tasty lunch.
Suzette cleaned out the garage storage area at the Center today, after helping Mario hang the book case in our kitchen, so she was completely spent when she arrived home and collapsed into a chair. I was more than happy to make dinner because I had a menu picked out that I wanted to cook a la Michael Pollan, and because I had rested for an hour or two in the afternoon and felt refreshed.
Stir Fried Bok Choy with Pork, Bamboo Shoots, Onion, and Shitake Mushrooms
I made 1 ½ cups of basmati rice, so we would have some PPI rice, with dehydrated Knorr’s chicken stock, three cups of water, and a Tbsp. of dehydrated lilly pods.
I the sliced and diced 1/3 onion and three stalks of a new Bok Choy to me, which was tall and thinner than the usual type. I separated the heavy white bottom pieces from the thinner green top pieces, all of which I had sliced and diced into bite sized pieces and rinsed them in cool water. I opened a small 5 ½ oz. can of sliced bamboo shoots and rinsed them in a colander also and finely minced two cloves of garlic and a quarter sized round piece of fresh ginger and sliced 1 pork chop and was ready to stir fry.
I heated my wok with 1 Tbsp. of peanut oil and 1 tsp. of sesame oil on the special wok holder attachment on our new stove and added the garlic, ginger, and sliced pork chop. After stir frying the pork until it began to change color from red to white, I added the diced onion and white portions off Bok Choy and stir fried that about ten minutes, until it began to soften.
I then added two sliced Shitake mushrooms and the bamboo shoots and about 1 Tbsp. each of mushroom soy and Chinese cooking wine. I stirred the mixture to integrate the ingredients and covered the mixture with my wok cover to steam the ingredients. I then made a thickening sauce with about 1 Tbsp. each of cornstarch, mushroom soy, and Chinese cooking wine with about ¼ cup of water and a dash of sesame oil in a separate bowl and put it aside.
After about another four or five minutes I added the green tops of Bok Choy and occasionally stir fried them into the mixture for three of four minutes to allow all the ingredients to cook together and mix their flavors. I then added the thickening sauce and stirred it in to integrate it and to coat all the ingredients for a couple of minutes and the dish was ready.
The dish is ready when the sauce glistens and reflects light and all the ingredients are cooked, coated with sauce, and integrated, which requires some stirring and flipping of ingredients throughout the entire surface off the wok.
Suzette fetched large pasta bowl and chop sticks and I ladled a pile of rice into each bowl and then covered the rice with the stir fried dish.
I drank green tea with my dinner and Suzette drank water.
Later we ate Java chocolate chip ice cream for dessert. As Michael Pollan said in his show, “everything in moderation”.
Actually one of the interesting things I learned in Pollan’s show that he actually addressed in his last book, “Cooked”, is to eat a diet that aids the bacterial health of your gut. His example was the research being done to analyze mother’s milk, which is thought to be the most complete food for humans. The research found that there is a component of mother’s milk that is not digestible by the baby’s body. Further research revealed that that component was absorbed by and aided an increase in a special bacteria in the baby’s gut that fought of harmful bacteria, so it was a major source of protection against harmful bacteria. Pollan’s point is that the wide range of natural fruits and vegetables he recommends that we eat contain nutrients that help protect us in ways that are not obvious, so we should choose real food rather than processed foods that have been denuded of many of their natural elements such as the wheat germ and hull in the production of white flour and then enriched with chemical nutrients that do not include all the elements of the natural nutrients found in the original,, such as the fiber found in the hull around a natural wheat seed which is beneficial to our bodies and bacterial health in our gut, for the sake of creating a product with a longer shelf life, like Enriched Wonder Bread.
Eat well and prosper.
Bon Appetit
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