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.



---
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 :)

Stuck in the bed part 1

About a week ago I got an excruciating back pain.

I was unable to get up from the bed to go to toilet. Not to mention going to doctor. We called in the ambulance because either way I had to see a doctor. Why? Well, it stops being a secret and makes a very important input into the story, I am pregnant with my second child (18 weeks tomorrow).
Clearly, the pain medication for the back pain was restricted by the drugs allowed for pregnant women - which for most of the time is Paracetamol.They have found one more, but even if it helped me to get my back about 10 cm of the bed, it didn't really help with sitting.

(When I mean pain... let me tell you that I gave birth to my daughter on just laughing gas. I would compare that pain to the contractions just before giving birth - the ones that make you vomit and see everything white and scratch people and throwing things at them as if making other hurt would make you not hurt.
Brr... I think this time I go with epidural much earlier :D)

Since I couldn't actually make it home, I stayed in the hospital for 3 days. It's a small hospital about 30 minutes drive from my home with only one or two wards. They put me together with grannies recovering from hip surgeries and life went on. The drug made me sleep all right (I literally fell asleep in the middle of my dinner), but pain didn't go away and still before Easter holidays I was unable to sit, even if I was able to stand up with the use of my hands on the crouches (or the more advanced Segwey type thing that looked like baby walker XXXXL size :) ). They were amazed by my recovery, since grannies apparently don't recover so well, but that didn't change the fact that the doctor was taking Easter holidays and there would be only nurses on the ward and I should either go home or change hospital. At that point I chose other hospital, as I was unable to sit in the car yet.
I have spent there about a whole day with no food on the emergency, and about midnight, before they were closing, the doctor finally came to tell me that basically it is a back pain but:
- we cannot make X-Ray pictures
- we cannot make MRI
- even if we did, we cannot make operation, so there is no point there
- they cannot give me any drugs, as those were the only two allowed for pregnant woman
- this is a result of some old injury (I had a knee operation last year) and that the baby growing inside presses on the injury and this means it can continue like that until the delivery
- if I can sit I should go home.

I said I can not sit.
There came a nurse and gave me the most painful of all injections that hurt for 3 days afterwards. Apparently he consulted with gynaecologist and they figured out some other drug that works differently, is weaker but could help.
Strangely, one hour afterwards I was able to sit up for a minute.
He ordered me a taxi, said to use the drug only when needed (not daily) and discharged me. The most painful drive of my life.

Everybody asks me how is the baby.

In those 4 days, no one checked the heartbeat on that poor baby of mine. I cannot feel it move, I have lost two kilograms so ... who the heck knows? I hope for the best.

I have went through a very depressed stage over Friday and Saturday, but I think I am over with it... at least partially. Shit keeps raining on me all my life, so frankly, it seems like two days of crying is enough to shake bad news off and move on.


Ok, back on track with my culinary journey.
On Monday, before it all happened I was called for a visit to a food specialist because the midwife was concerned about the fact that I am vegan and weather or not I am eating enough nutrients for the baby. Granted that I never have been to such person, and I love learning new things so I agreed. I knew my grounds, I wrote a huge letter to that person. Basically they believed that it is because of my religious upbringing that I am vegan. When they heard that I do it for health, the specialist started her crusade of "how milk is great and healthy" and how I should reconsider my veganism. Needless to say I created a huge letter with all the research literature (including presentations and movies - for if she did not want to read books), but of course she didn't read any of it in the end. However, she was positively surprised by my food dairies and the nutrients I consume. In the end she said it would be and I quote "a great diet to loose weight after pregnancy". And again I had to explain how this is not for weight loss but for health... and she still did not get it.

She had no idea about the nutrient contents in products. She did not know about many of the things I ate what they are, such as chia for example or asparagus (that one I found funny). The thing about pregnancy is apparently that one is forbidden to eat flax seeds, which is a staple omega-3 source. They contain cyanides and thus are harmful for the foetus. So I explained her that I eat walnuts and I eat a spoonful of chia every day, which is an even better source of omega-3 (but of course chia is more expensive than flax seeds) and I eat blueberries everyday.

LADY (and I will imitate the ... how the old chinease medicine practitioners sounded to me when I was little, of course this is comically enhanced for the purpose of the explaining how I felt at that moment): NO COMPUTES. Drink flax seed oil. Bad taste, good for you.

Then we had the calcium discussion. OMG. When people (doctors, nurses, midwives and apparently food specialists) get to their head that calcium comes from milk........ there is no way you can convince them that calcium is anywhere else.
I had sent her an exempt from my daily routine where it showed that from my food I am getting above 700 mg of Calcium.
LADY: No computes. Impossible. Vegetables and fruits haz no calcium.

So I educated her, that a kg of oranges, which is what I would have for lunch, has 430 mg, for starters. I also told her that she must understand that when it writes there "oranges" and 1200 g... I seriously freaking mean it. This is what I ate that day. And I started joking, that I already know when I need calcium or have eaten less than I should on that day, because I crave orange juice like crazy then.
LADY: Do you know that (brand name of main food/milk producer in Finland) is supplementing their orange juice with calcium? You should drink that.
ME: I meant like the squeezed orange juice. I make it myself from fruits or then I buy the (brand of the widely popular, yet helluva expensive juice), because it is the only product on the cold shelf, that actually is needed to be stored in cold - because it is not from the juice concentrate. Besides it has proteins and pulp as well, other juices don't [before she was on my case of where do you get your protein from and how I should maybe consider protein supplementation].
LADY: WHAT PROTEIN? HOW MUCH DO YOU DRINK IT? Drink milk for protein!
ME: I am not entirely sure why I need to defend drinking the actual juice from the actual fruits. I drink juice when I feel like juice. I don't drink it for protein. It's a side effect.

The protein thing of course spiked from how do I feel now. And I said normal, just like not pregnant, but in the last two weeks I actually started feeling more hungry and have to eat a bit more. It's normal. You are pregnant - you consume more kcal, you need more macronutrients, you get hungry. Also as the alien inside grows, you cannot fit as much food at a time, so there naturally come snacks in between the meals.
LADY: Eat less fruits, eat more protein. You will not be hungry.
Me in my head... did I say that being hungry in pregnancy is a problem? It's a natural freaking thing.

I went prepared, read my literature, remember?

"Recommendations for protein intake during pregnancy
The additional protein intake needed during pregnancy was derived from the
newly deposited protein and the maintenance costs associated with increased
body weight (Table 14). Mean protein deposition has been estimated from
total body potassium (TBK) accretion in normal healthy pregnant women,
gaining 13.8 kg. The efficiency of protein utilization was taken to be 42%.
The maintenance costs were based upon the mid-trimester increase in ma-
ternal body weight and the adult maintenance value of 0.66 g/kg per day. The
safe level was derived from the average requirement, assuming a coefficient
of variation of 12%.
• Based on an efficiency of protein utilization of 42%, an additional 1, 9 and
   31 g/day protein in the first, second and third trimesters, respectively, are
  required to support 13.8 kg gestational weight gain.
• In view of the literature indicating a controversial increase in neonatal
   death with supplements that are very high in protein (34% protein:energy;
  see below), it is recommended that the higher intake during pregnancy
 should consist of normal food, rather than commercially prepared high-
protein supplements"


(...)
These benefits of supplementation are consistent with dietary assessments in unsupplemented mothers, showing that those who had the highest protein intakes (around 100 g protein/day) had the
best pregnancy outcome (96). However, as reviewed recently, untoward
effects on pregnancy outcome were reported with high-protein supplements
(providing >34% of energy) in studies conducted in New York and India. The high-protein supplement (470 kcal and 40 g protein/day) in the New
York trial was associated with a small, non-significantly higher weight gain,
and a higher, non-significant increase in neonatal death, and no difference in
fetal growth.

"Protein and amino acid requirements in human nutrition", WHO technical report series, Report of a joint WHO/FAO/UNU EXpert Consultation

Do you read what it says? 1 GRAM! 1 FREAKING GRAM MORE PROTEIN in the first trimester.  
And don't eat those protein supplemented products that say they have 30 g of proteins in a small jar of milk product! That can actually be lethal for your baby!
I am soooooo against all the new wave of those milk products that are protein enriched ... especially after I read that.

According to my calculations in the beginning I should eat about 59 g of proteins per day and move onto 90 g in the third trimester.

The diet I was prescribed now as a potential diabetic (previous pregnancy problem which puts you automatically on the list) assumes that at best I consume minimum 118 g of proteins during the day. It actually suggested chicken breast twice a day as an option, so this would be higher. I think this is a slight overkill.

Needless to say, there is no sign of diabetes, even if I eat 3-4 times more carbohydrates than is allowed in such situation.

Her final words were more in the range of, if I feel hungry I should reduce the fruits and eat more fats.
This one I totally did not get. If I feel hungry, that means my body needs something. If I eat anything I will provide proteins, carbs and fats. I am not going to go into the whole thermogenesis thing (check wikipedia) - but that is the answer how my body gets rid of the excess of anything if I eat a whole food not an extract of that food. When we eat oils and refined sugars and protein supplements - this is not happening and we gain weight. They should teach about it at school.
Bottom line - it is always better to eat a whole food than to drink oil. Oil taste bad = BAD FOR YOU.
I already pointed out to her that in pregnancy I feel optimal at level of maybe 17%energy by fat in my diet, while 20%E is suggested. I achieve that by seeds, nuts, avokado, which contain incidentally all the other things plus minerals. Not by means of adding "a knuckle of butter" as Mr. J. Oliver would say.  Worse of all, she told me to eat this fat in form of margarine, which for me is the most unnatural way a fat can exist.

I think I left that place sad. I was hoping that finally there will be an open mind on the other side of the conversational table, and it wasn't.

Her final words were "The low fat milk, is a very healthy product. Drink it."
I didn't have more energy to explain to her how unhealthy a milk is. But it just depressed me. 


And then I have found myself on the next day in the hospital in the same building where her office was.

Their version of a breakfast for a vegan was an oatmeal with a knuckle of butter in it, a toast bread with more butter and cucumber (already special request from me), juice from concentrate and a tea:

For dinner I have received this:

Oh my oh my. Cooked barley, the same sandwich, glass of rice milk and berry corn pudding (Kisiel), which I know is artificially sweatened by sweatener.

For lunch came the same sandwich, glass of rice milk and a soup from cauliflower and potatoes. For snacks I was offered 1) cofee, 2) tea with sugar and cake.

This incidentally fitted very well with that diet I said is somewhat suggested for me now.
When I said I normally eat fruits in the morning, they found one pear for breakfast and one banana for lunch. They said I don't need to eat it if I feel overwhelmed.

Laugh. Out. Loud.
I ask: where is the calcium, where is the protein, (I can clearly see where the fat is...) where are the nutrients? Vitamins? What with the five a day veggie portions?

If your mouth watered at that above that would just mean we are meant to eat this way... did it?
I didn't think so.

When my man arrived finally with my beloved oranges I attacked them like a crazy orangutan. The lunch lady came into the room to take my dishes, first so down by her life... and then she started smelling the room "Wow, it smells so good in here, so fresh, so ... orangy! " And she was smiling.
Fruits do that to you.
Oatmeal doesn't.

To be continued....

The cabbage people

Hi,

It was quite a long time since I wrote last time, but in between spending two weeks in Sweden and then trying to catch up with everything at work and throwing up two birthday parties for my daughter, attending some of her friends birthdays (why oh why all the kids are born in the spring?)... then some troubles at work with my co-workers... I am exhausted. Today I felt like someone pulled off my legs and arms at the same time and left me there to bleed out.
I haven't really had a cake for my birthday for I was abroad then. My girlfriends made me the best present ever - they send me a book with vegan chocolate recipes :D That worked as a cake as well :*

Tomorrow still a wave of guests and... yes, then it's Easter.... brrr.

Anyway, since I am supposed to check my students work... and it's Saturday night, I feel it is better not to pretend I work but to do something useful... like,  write a blog for example. :)

When I was in Sweden, I spend the time in Nynäshamn, which is a small town with limited range of restaurants and shops. I had to rely on the hotel food and whatever the cafeteria cook (industry on the town outskirts) prepared for me on that day. It was extremely awesome that every day when I cam he looked at me, asked "vegan?" and vanished in the kitchen preparing me something - BIG HUGS FOR THE GUY. However, even tough the cook had a pretty good idea what vegan food is  and it was always twice as much on the plate as my non-vegan friends, but then... he decided to drown everything in olive oil. Like literally - I once lifted the food and there was a small soup of oil underneath. Not to mention that spices were apparently not on the menu.
Still, this was better than anything else there, when I went to pasta place, which advertised veg-pasta, and had all the nice ingredients in it like mushrooms, artichoke, avokado, tomatoes, basil. I took it. It turned out to be food suffocated in cream sauce. Ehhh. Thai place made me vomit for a day... so rest of the time I lived on bread and canned peas and fruits.
The hotel's vision of fruits for breakfast was also a bit funny. I told them I am vegan and eat fruits for breakfast. They always prepared me a plate with one apple, quarter of ananas, 1/8 of honey melon and handful of extremely sour grapes. It was set out on the table for everyone, so I guess I was not even expected to eat it all. I guess I should work on my communication skills, for I was sitting in front of it every day for two weeks thinking veeeery loud in my head - SERIOUSLY? LAXATIVE AND SOUR STUFF FOR BREAKFAST!!!???? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!!!! But on the outside I kept smiling.
That's me in short. Nice girl. 

Anywho, when I came home I needed... FLAVOR!
I bought myself 2 kg of sour cabbage, 2 kg of mushrooms and kept cooking :).

Here comes the Proust-like interlude... forgive me for that.
We, the Polish people, are nuts about Pierogi. There is zillion versions of them, and everybody has their own secret to share.
My mother always made the ones with sour cabbage and mushrooms, and the ones with meat. For me Pierogi mean Saturday evening, when both of my parents got off work earlier and we engaged in family hobby of making the little bastards. Dad was making the dough, mum made the fillings, we all clipped them together and then boiled... and then fried on the pan with butter and ate until we could not take anymore. It is the ultimate comfort food.

Then the prosperity times came, my parents divorced and Pierogi were available in every fridge in supermarket. Never quite tasting the same.

My aunt was making Pierogi few times a year still and always invited us over. During summer, she would buy the blueberries and strawberries and fill the dough with sweetened fruits (covered in potato flower, so that the water would not splash at you when you ate). Then she would decadently use sour cream of 18% mixed with 3 spoons of sugar and pour it all over your sweet Pierogi. It's a skill in itself to take something as healthy as fruits, and kill it :) No wonder my family has probably an average BMI of 40 :P

Well, the other time she would make Pierogi was for Christmas. They would be "mushroom and cabbage" filled, but when you looked inside it looked like filled with shit :P Pardon me, but my uncle believed that the mushrooms should be the dominant part in the Pierogi and since he always had a lot of dried bolete mushrooms, he never spared them. They tasted delicious, mind me. I have never found cabbage piece in them, tough :D

My grandma in her fantastic understanding of my vegetarianism "fashion", always prepared me "Russian Pierogi". Those are filled with potatoes, onion, white cheese, pepper... aaaaaaaaaand bacon. I appreciated that at least she did not serve me the ones made out of pig lungs. Those were also pretty common when I was a kid.

Well I stay true to my mother's recipe and I love the sour cabbage and mushroom ones. I am a connoisseur. I go to restaurants and order this alwasy... and never quite find what I have at home.
To find the proper sour cabbage in Finland was and still is a hard job.
How would I describe the perfect cabbage? It is sour, it is salty. It doesn't contain "maitohappobakteria", which is the Finnish way of spoiling the food by adding milk bacteria to cabbage. When you boil it it doesn't go into puree. As you boil it, the taste concentrates, not vanishes (some of the store ones have flavour enhancers which actually evaporate!!!).
It's a simple thing and I don't understand what is so complicated about it - take cabbage, spend an evening cutting it into pieces, add salt, leave it in the corner and wait for it to spoil. It is hard work tough and you end up with a bucket, so I usually rely on the store ones. But situation is definitely not the same as in Poland. I wish we could do something like from the book "Chlopi", all the Polish ladies in the neighbourhood, do the cabbage, and then we share it between ourselves. Well, too little people around....
Don't get me even started on salty cucumbers.... OK I started... Finnish ones have actually sugar in them!!!! OMG. There! no more words.

The thing about this filling is that you can actually eat it in many ways:
- in pierogi
- with boiled noodles ("lazanki")
- as vegan "bigos" (just as is) with bread
- in "krokiety".

Krokiety is another thing that as many cooks in Poland, as many recipes. I don't usually eat them in other people's homes, because they (sorry for that all) taste awful when they are covered in cake, then with egg, bread, and deep fried and still into the oven. Seriously? There are simpler ways to spoil your food.

What I usually did was to prepare a cake for crepes (250 g flower, 250 ml water, 250 ml milk, pinch of salt - use teflon pan, no oil) and fill them with my stuffing, roll them and ... yes, this will shock you all the other Polish people... EAT :P

When I became a vegan I missed crepes the most. So a quest began. Of course all the vegan crepes recipes assume you want them sweet as pancakes. But you don't, because you want a savour dish.

So here is a cabbage and mushroom filling:
1 litr of cabbage (1 kg)
250 g of mushrooms
(if you have small amount of dried wild mushrooms, crumble them in your hands and use as spices, if you have a lot, use them instead of the store mushrooms.)
1 onion
1 table spoon of oil
2 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon of pepper.

Fry the onions on oil, until glossy (you can use the cover on the pan to sweat them out a bit). Add garlic and fry some more. Throw in the mushrooms (I usually shred them on the shredder for smooth texture, if you like your food crunchy, chop them into little pieces). Add cabbage and pepper.
Usually if your cabbage is good, you don't need to add any salt (obvious, isn't it?), but on some occasions I had to work with "Finnish wonders" where a two tablespoons of soysauce were needed to get some flavor.
My mother would add still 1 bayleave and 3 seeds of allspice. When I make it as a "bigos" or with noodles, I add that too - but it's hard to pick this stuff out from Pierogi or krokiety.

And then, if your cabbage is proper, you need to boil it for a while (around 20 minutes) to soften it. Again, few times, after 5 minutes I ended up having a puree. Such things only Finland.

And then Pierogi dough. 

750 ml of flour
1 tea spoon of salt
1 glass of water

NO, I do not use any egg or potatoes.
I put it all into my used Ken Wood, and ask him nicely "please, please roll me the dough". He does it, for he is a great chef. Then I wrap the dough in the plastic foil and put it into the fridge, so that the gluten starts working.
Then I pull out my Jamie (pasta machine) and roll it first on size 1, and then on size 4, and finally on size 6. Size does matter. Then I cut out the nice round circles out of this, and use my pierogi machine. I place the circle in it, put the filling on and call my child to squeeze them.
This was the version for motorised.
If you do it any other way - you will hate yourself for the next two days.

I know, it requires 3 machines and a child... but that is a small price of deliciousness.

You should bring a water with a pinch of salt to boil, and place ready pierogi in the water. They will drop into the bottom. When they are done, they float on the surface. Take them out and... eat.
Or alternatively if you care not about your waste and you are a fan of crunch - take a pan, place some oil on it, and fry such boiled Pierogi.

I love sprinkling my hot Pierogi with dried basil for smell.
And they look like that (when boiled):

And Krokiety, vel. vegand Crepes, which is how I failed. 
I found this recipe on-line
http://dairyfreecooking.about.com/od/pancakeswaffles/r/vegancrepes.htm
But as I mentioned, I did not want to use coconut milk or sugar, to have more savour tasting crepes. Plus I had no soy milk home, just rice milk.

It started like that:
2 dl of white flour
1 dl of full grain flour (together it is around 250 g)
300 ml of water
200 ml of rice milk  (Alpro)
1 table spoon of oil.

And then I whisked it and hoped for the best.
Let me tell you that I had to remove that first pancake from the pan with my nails. Second one also fell apart into million pieces as I tried to flip it.
Fail, real fail. Water in my eyes.
And illumination.... I WONDER WHAT THAT BAKING SODA WAS FOR?

So I added a table spoon of baking soda, and they started growing on the pan, and looking like crepes and being crunchy and hard and staying together :D OMG, OMG, I got excited.

They tasted good :)
Then you just need your filling and roll them as this lady shows.
Mine looked like that, recipe makes about 10 pcs. I like to add too much filling inside so I fitted the whole portion in 10 pcs. I'm decadent.

Enjoy.

Greetings from us Polish people in Finland a.k.a. cabbage loving super people.

Go check for yourself how much goodies is in a cabbage in terms of nutritional package:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage

Don't be afraid of it, feed it to your children and have some yourself.

When the young cabbages arrive in stores I will probably make a 100th attempt at "kapusta zasmazana" which I hated when I was young, and never wanted to eat it, but now I miss it so much. I always screw it up... so let's look forward to it this year.

Cabbage to the people!

101 ways to ruin a recipe... The Why, The banana cake and The donuts

Hi,
The purpose of this blog is very simple. It is meant to help us learn from (laugh at) our mistakes in kitchen. I seem to be making a hell of a lot of them. We've talked with a friend that this kind of blog would be a breath of fresh air... and when yesterday I bumped into this lovely site of people who tried and ruined the recipe and I laughed so hard I couldn't breath I decided to share some of my own FAILS. It is not fair that only I get to laugh at my stupidity in the kitchen.

Don't get me wrong, I consider myself a good cooker, since everything I make is eatable in the end.  (Except for that one time when I burnt the kale stew and still attempted to eat it. Brrrr...)

I have lived with a woman who was perfectly capable of burning down a pot of boiling pasta. I have a good man, raised by that aforementioned woman, who is munching on anything that is remotely eatable and doesn't contain broccoli, cabbage, sour cabbage or mushrooms. Too bad that the majority of my favourite food contain one of the last 3 ingredients :/

I believe that to Err is human, and I hope everybody is with me on that. I, for example, have a thing for Jamie Oliver and his programs. I come home totally wasted after a day of work and sit on the sofa watching them.

He goes: "This is so simple, fantastic recipe which you just must try!"

I think "I must try it!", and keep sitting. He goes on:

"It is so cheap, just 1 pound per portion, so easy to prepare yourself! Look, you just throw in some eggs, milk, flower and sugar together... ", while on the screen it looks like spoons and measuring cups have all went extinct and he continues, " and then you just wrap that cake around the fruits like that, like you don't care about it at ALL".

He goes : "You must try it!"

I go: "I must try it"

He goes "I swear it is so simple, you won't regret it"

I go : "It looks simple, indeed, there is no way I will regret it!"

He goes : "Ohhh, so delicious"

And I keep drooling...

I think "OK, I can do it, I can not care about folding something". Afterwards I percolate and come to the conclusion that everything that was in the recipe is available at my home, I start and pour in similar way as he did on TV and his "lazy simple version" looks like piece of art, whereas mine looks like someone vomited on the plate...

And then I regret it :D

Yesterday in the new program on how to save with your leftovers, he took leaks and zucchini  and started stewing them. I was all ears for this could be a cheap dish... and then goes like that "and then you take your leftover salmon from yesterday and a filo pastry". Needless to say at this point one would need to do that leftover salmon and a filo pastry. Second of my favourite quotes from that particulate episode was "Oh, when I feel lazy, I don't even peel the garlic cloves"... and I envisioned my significant other vomiting on his plate when that garlic skin stays in his throat. Ehhh...There is the TV truth and the real truth.

Other of my epic fails included trying to make a foccacia bread from Gordon Ramsey's recipe. What he said on his show was that one needs to just sprinkle sea salt on the bottom of a pan and then pour the dough on top of it. The bread tasted good, but we needed a hammer and a chisel to get it out of the mould.

The same feeling I get when in the evening I sit on my facebook and view through my stream, filled with lovely pictures of food posted by many blog owners, which look so delicious and so simple. I divided those blogs by "it looks good and simple, but when I tried to do it it tasted like sh**" and "it looks hell of a complicated but worth my time, which usually in my version will look like someone vomited on the plate".

Recently I tried to make a millet based cake. Everything tasted great, the cake looked good, until I opened the mould and it decided it had better things to do on the floor and it flew.
-.-

Things got even more complicated when I decided to become vegan. If you have ever seen a complicated recipe, multiply it by 2 and it will just about be one of vegan stuffs. Not by means of preparation, but rather by means of ingredients. The problem lays in substituting butter and eggs and milk by all kind of mixes of nuts and seeds and funny sounding oils. The worst sad feeling (-.-) I get is when I read "Add an egg replacer of a brand XXX.". Because, you know, they are all available around the world (sarcasm).

When you attempt at doing some of the raw vegan recipes, hmmm...
Many times I go hearing "and then we add fresh coconut water", or "fresh almond milk", or "fresh dates"... and I go ....o.O....Fantastic, how am I supposed to get those in Finland... IN THE MIDDLE OF A FREAKING WINTER.

For example my attempt at this banana cake (the video recipe is available for it here):

 The recipe for that absolutely fantastic vomit like copy is as follows:

The banana-date cake:
Roughly 800 cal
(I used what I had at home)

Sauce:
100 ml of coconut milk
3 large dates
6 small dried dates
1 ripe banana
1/2  tea spoon of cinnamon
(I suggest also 1/2 tea spoon of cacao powder)

Base
4 ripe bananas cut into slices.


Don't get me wrong, it tasted like a heaven on a spoon, provided you closed your eyes!


My today's failure, namely the donuts from the oven. You may or may not have known this, but the Fat Thursday is coming this week, so of course I have decided to prepare something for it, but since I am a vegan who tries to watch her fat intake I decided to combine two recipes, one from which I got my ingredients, which you can find here (minus the oil and instead of water unsweetened soy milk) and the method of preparing it from a Polish blog Kwestia Smaku. I was hoping for everything to look like here:

But instead I got that:

 First fail was when I discovered, after working the cake, that the warm margarine is still in the microwave. Second fail was when I inserted frozen berries as a filling into the prepared buns - it never occurred to me to defrost them! You can clearly see which ones have frozen inside and which ones have jam... hint, yeasts growth is a function of temperature.Then I realized I cannot really glaze the buns with eggs, so I did it with water...

The third and final fail was when I discovered that there is no ounce of powder sugar in the house and all the kid pomades were used on gingerbread during Christmass....

To top it all I deliberately choose to use cellphone camera, as I believe that it pretty much tells you how it really looks like, without staging the lightning.


Doesn't change the fact that there is maybe 5 pcs left after 1 hour :D

So, since little disappointments build character, let's keep on cooking!

Stay tuned, I already chose a recipe for my birthday cake and I am aware that at least 2 ingredients are unavailable where I live. I envision utmost FAIL.

And if you have any of your own fails, please share with me and the rest of the world... it's not fair that only perfect dishes get to go to nice galleries :)

See the beauty in ugly :)