Stuck in bed, part 2. - the story of under cooked starches.

One thing the specialist pointed out to me is that I may be missing iodine. And indeed we are using the non iodine enriched salt. And I thank her for pointing it out to me. This is maybe why I craved sushi so much. I have bought the supplemented salt and used it since and I have to say I have seen an immediate improvement in my anger levels. I should probably buy a supplement at least for a while.

Ok, once I got that sarcasm out of my stream, I guess I owe a bit of understanding to the position of the hospital. They have a budget per person and definitely it is cheaper for them to purchase 1 kg of oats for 0,69 euro and make approximately 20 portions, than to buy 1 kg of oranges even for 0,69 euro and make one portion.
I also understand that trying to be a raw vegan who relies on the minimum 0,5 kg of green leaf vegetables sounds hell of an expensive even to me - with the price of lettuce/spinach during the winter at 1.89 euro per 70 g... well, do the math. Especially if you want to feed a family of three like that. Like, seriously, I am a student still.
This is basically why I am not likely to go fully raw (at least not during winter), but I also know that the more raw is in my diet the better I feel.
But basically the research says that just vegan lifestyle (whole food, plant based), even if based on cooked starches, will provide good health results, provided you keep you ratio of carbs to protein to fats on the desired level of 80:10:10. Currently, the recommendations by WHO are around 70:10:20 (the de-guru-fied version), whereas the standard western diet is somewhere around 44:12:44, so you choose what you want to do.

I am not mad at that woman in the office. I am mad at myself I guess, for believing for a long time in the TV god and whatever adverts or sponsored shows told me. Open your mind, think for yourself, remember that the money rules the world - and food and especially health supplements are a big part of the world. (If you ever heard the adverts on the radio in Poland, you would know... I counted 20 adverts in a row of food supplements). If a protein bar producer tells you to eat more protein... or margarine producer encourages you to change your eating habit to eat more "healthy" fats... or when a milk producer tells yo "eat well, you feel well, have a protein enhanced cheese" (p.s. it's just fitting twice as much milk in the same container and selling to you for twice the price - well, did you think about it?)... or when a new product of milk-juice appears on the market - do you ask yourself why isn't a mixture of orange and milk curdling - what is wrong with the both of them and how badly they have been chemically altered to be able to be sold to me?
No we don't. We believe them. 
Do you believe that you need 1000 mg of calcium for healthy bones? Well, from what I was reading, no one knows what is the best amount. And actually people who eat 600 mg are sometimes having healthier bones than those with 1000 mg, so results are inconclusive in those large human population studies. And supplementing men above 500 mg of Calcium apparently was found to be correlated with increase occurrence of colorectal cancer.  I agree that pregnant women need more calcium, for we will have to produce about 500 g of tiny bones in 9 months :) so, yeah, 1 g per day sounds about right.
(I should get the references, right? :P I feel like at work. It's my free time, if you are interested, google it. That's what I did.)


How I got inspired to become a vegan was by observing my young daughter, who somewhat naturally chose to feed herself on: pistacchio nuts, blueberries, green pea, raisins, corn and cherry tomatoes. And she drunk milk and water with it of course, but I was so scared, since she did not want meat or egg or bread or oatmeals or whetever else everybody was telling me to feed her. I read about those foods and realised - that pretty muchly they contained everything she needed to grow. And she did, she was on the slim kid percentile, but on the very tall percentile, so together 50%  - meaning average.

Then I went back to work and went for some abroad trips due to my work, and she stayed home with her daddy, whose idea of something fast is driving 20 minutes to a nearby fast food place and buying burgers. The first time I came back from the trip, my daughter changed her habit of having just milk for supper to eating a sausage for supper.
Needless to say, my daughter is now a processed food junkie. And I am so sad about it and probably have so much hidden anger towards my partner, I cannot even express. Zipping it in. He knows, he just doesn't care.

So it's about me and the person I want to be. No longer about a mission to change my family, because that only brings me down and depresses me when I try to please everybody and all they do is bitch about how they hate this or that veggie. They still eat on average more veggies than a standard person, so maybe all is good.
I hope my daughter will understand in just a few years.

To the recipes.

Because of the fact that I had limited standing capabilities and the last shopping before Easter was done a week ago and all the stores were closed when I came from hospital, I had to do with what I had.
Couple of weeks before, on that Swedish trip I bought myself instant thai noodles with lemon grass sauce. Basically it was noodles with lots of spices, 3 peas and five fingernail pieces of dried leak. But the taste was so great sweet, sour and spicy but in a refreshing way, I thought I will attempt to recreate it.

Lemon sauce noodles.
I took :
125 g of mushrooms, chopped
150 g of leaks, chopped
1 clove of garlic, chopped
pinch of iodized salt
table spoon of oil
1 cup of frozen pea
100 g of wok eggless wheat noodles
1 lemon
1/2 chili dried pepper

I put the mushrooms with leaks on the oiled pan with the clove of garlic and salted it slightly, and poured hot water over the frozen noodles and frozen pea. And went to lie down (my bed is now downstairs next to the kitchen, how convenient). When I heard sizzling I came back to the kitchen, stirred it switched off the heat, and put the noodles and pea on the pan. I squeezed the juice of the one lemon and crushed the pepper over it, and kept it for a while in warm.

How I screwed it? The noodles. They were not done. I guess one would need to boil them for a moment, since they were not really wok-ed... or just use the rice noodles.

But it looked and tasted great, except for the crunchiness of the noodles, very similar to the original, just slightly more nutrients.



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And then the visual fail.
I really love spinach. I love it recently in the smoothie, because it is the only green which stays green for long, so the smoothie doesn't turn into some brown liquid by the time I get to work with it. But I always loved spinach. Before as a vegetarian - eggs and spinach was my favourite.
Now I discovered a new combo that works awesome for me - tomatoes and spinach :) The spinach turns very nasty black color after just a moment, but still I really like it. I would usually add a spoon of peanut butter, as a thickener - it really adds that creamy flavour to the sauce, like it would have cheese in it. But I was reading on that day about omega-3 and where to get it from, and how peanuts are bad for it because they are legumes not nuts. And oh well, I decided to go with sesame seeds for calcium purposes.


Spinach sauce for rice (or pasta).
300 g of frozen spinach
500 g of canned tomatoes (I use the cartoon tomatoe pulp)
1 carrot, shredded
1 onion
1 spoon of oil
2 spoons of dried sesame seeds
pepper to taste
1 cup brown rice + 2 cup water.
(optional, a tea spoon of balsamic vinegar)

Fry onion on the oil, add spinach and carrot. Simmer until soft. Pour the canned tomatoes over and bring to boil. You can add balsamic vinegar and wait for a minute for it to evaporate the vinegar part.
Switch off the heat. Crush the sesame seeds in the mortar. Add the sesame seeds and pepper to taste. Serve with cooked rice.

Simplex, not complex.

This meal will give you about:

998 kcal
it will be in the energy ratio 64.2:9.7:26.1

34 g of protein! (for me 53% RDA)
30 g of fat (iik, gotta cut down on the oil, but still 59% RDA)
885 mg of Calcium!!!!!!  (88,5% RDA)
17 mg of Iron (65% RDA)
2,2 g omega-3 (whooping 156% RDA)
12.6 g omega-6  (97% RDA, could be lower)
bunch of vitamins, and 119% fiber

The only down side is how it looks :P And the rice was undercooked :) The package lied - it needs to be more than 15 minutes!!! :P

 Enjoy :)