More on food

Not something I'm about to suffer, but this article about orthorexia, when people's lives become taken over by food dogma, is very interesting.

I am still reading as much as I can easily get my hands or eyes on about immune system building foods. It all seems to come back to the health of the gut. I'm watching Nikki's blog with great interest as her family embark on a diet to heal their guts, specifially in support of Nikki's young son who has had big health challenges of late.

Today I found some more broth ingredients. We had to go to Hokitika to get the car fixed, so got to shop at the fishmongers and at the local craft and produce market. The fishmonger gave me bones for stock for free and checked that I knew how to make the fish stock without it going bitter. So tonight I am putting beef bones to cook overnight and tomorrow I will make fish stock. I am looking around and thinking of recipes to use my broths in to expand from my standard risotto and soup usages.

I found the Hari Hari butcher's caravan and had a chat with the butcher. He doesn't use West Coast animals for his meat either, though he would very much like to. He has a homekill service as part of his business but is not allowed to sell that commercially. The costs of setting up a commercial abbatoir are prohibitive (I've heard this from another butcher on the coast recently too) and so his meat comes from Canterbury. Drives me insane. The logic of these regulations is very unclear. I was relaying this to the goat cheese people on the way home when I stopped to buy feta and they agreed. They had huge hoops to jump through to get their cheese production okayed and are still not allowed to export.

But the cheese people had another story for me. They used to farm beef cattle. Two of their three year old beasts tested positive for TB and so they were given $100 for each animal. They were not allowed to buy them back themselves. So they researched and found out where the animals went. They go into the supermarket meat chain. They calculated that each beast would have produced, for the people who paid only $100, six thousand dollars' worth of meat. Errrm, where are the ethics in all of this?

Last night I got out in the garden. I weeded the old chook run and pulled out spent plants and thinned where things were growing too thickly. Some of the lettuce has bolted or become bitter already so much of the lettuce went to the compost or the chook run. I removed zillions of caterpillars and eggs and still found some fat caterpillars feasting on the same plants this morning. I am part way through mulching the old chook run with pea straw.

Returning to term time, with school runs, tired children and me working part time, has turned me into a weekend gardener for the moment. It has also had an impact on my projects inside - I've nearly forgotten the kefir. But slowly I am getting some rhythm back and I've got my kefir tasting nice again. I bought a huge bunch of basil today (and somehow spent $23 on less than 400gms of pine nuts later on - ouch) and so have pesto to make tonight. I also want to get some sourdough going again. There isn't much point me paying good money for freshly milled organic flour if I leave it in the container untouched for months...

Then there are the tomatoes I bought this afternoon for making pasta sauce...

I fall off the good food wagon on a fairly regular basis, almost always when I am short of time. Today's pie for breakfast is an extreme example, but it isn't a once a year phenomenon. The hot chips we shared after swimming this afternoon now scream 'naughty' at me given all the reading I've been doing on carbohydrates, but they did taste very yummy. As I wasn't dressed this morning when our kind panelbeating friend rang to say it was time to get going and meet him, a chilly bin full of healthy goodies to sustain us on our day out was a romantic and pleasant idea, not something that was going to become reality. Once we were home again and the children had two parents in the house at once, I cooked proper food for dinner. I made raita to go with the fish, potatoes and salad and reflected that raita is probably a good condiment for probiotic purposes.

I've been seeing something called 24-hour yoghurt crop up in my gut healing reading. I presume this is any old yoghurt (including easiyo?) which has been fermented for 24 hours before going in the fridge? Because if it is, then I've been making that for a while now, 100% because I so often forget about the yoghurt's existence until 24 hours after I've put it down to culture. Although the packet says 8 hours, I generally do a minimum of 12, even on days when my memory is functioning well.