Macrobiotic Life

I am not posting my daily eating recipes with photos as I planned. It’s mainly because I feel like my meals are very similar to each other and I have nothing new to show and share, except of the little bit different grain and vegetable combinations. But I am still making pictures very often, because I really like the look of the macrobiotic foods on the plate. It encourages me to care for a plate design a little bit more than if I wouldn’t be making pictures for this web. In privacy, when eating alone and preparing my quick dish from the leftover grains, I am very often mixing all foods into one pot – starting with a little of oil or water, frying some vegetables and then adding the grain + ginger or shoyu or miso. And then very often eat right from the pot.. yeah, I am just a simple man, pardon me But in the last month, I really do care about the aesthetic aspect of my meals too.

Back to my typical morning breakfasts. I am usually cooking new batch of grains every morning. I get up at 6-7 am. I have usually prepared soaked grains already in the pot with the right amount of water. So I just bring them to the boil, pick the foam, add kombu or sea salt and pressure cook them for 50 minutes. Then wait until they are little colder and I am starting with the breakfast time around 9-10 am. It’s ok for me, because at the morning it’s the only time I am really satisfied with being hungry and I have no taste cravings. So I enjoy the empty stomach at morning, sometimes as long as I can, and it is no rarity to start eating at 11-12 for me – it very depends on the richness of my last evening meal.

When the grains are prepared, I am used to add only water prepared vegetables on my breakfast plate. In the last Spring days I really like veggies like broccoli, leek and carrot. I water-boil them very fast, with no salt, like 3-6 minutes, so they are nicely crispy, have perfect enticing color and are very sweet (broccoli not so much, but the leek and carrots very much). I switch between boiling in too much water (3/4 of the pot) and simmering in 2 cm water in the pot – to have always different cooking styles. I am changing the cutting styles also. Remember to always change something in your daily cooking. It enhances creativity also.
Every other day, I am roasting pumpkin, sunflower or sesame seeds for my breakfast too.
And that’s it.

I have to add, that my breakfasts are not entirely ideal macrobiotic ones. The suggested morning meal should consists of a grain gruel, it means more watery version of your usual grains. You will achieve this by cooking grain left-overs for 5-10 minutes in a 1-2 cups of water. The consistency will change to gruel and it’s more recommended for the daily healthy breakfast. You should go more yang (less water) as the day progress. The miso soup is also recommended for the ideal macrobiotic breakfast (again the water effect). So in the end, you can see, that my breakfasts are not ideal at all

You can see the final results on the following – macrobiotic breakfast – pictures:

Barley + adzuki + kombu, kale

Short rice + oat + kombu, leek

Short brown rice + emmer grain, leek + broccoli

Short brown rice, leek

Breakfast

I have whole grains leftover from the previous day. It was 70% rice + 30% millet cooked with piece of kombu and 2x of natural spring water in the pressure cooker for 50 minutes.
I simply modeled balls from the grains by hand (wet your hands), just for the decorative reason.
And the vegetable is very simply boiled too. I have choose to quick boil it in the big amount of water (can’t remember the cooking style of this). It’s just different than steaming the vegetable in a pot with little water in the bottom. Because you need to pick narrow smaller pot and fill it 1/2 or 3/4 with water, let the water boil and bubble and put one type of vegetable in it. Cook the vegetable types separately. The cooking time is short, to let the veggies be crunchy and nicely coloured with strong flavour. For the green veggies, 1-3 minutes is enough. For the root vegetables let them boil a little longer. You will learn by practice, just experiment. Pick the veggies out with a strainer. I usually put my grain balls at the end to the hot water too, to get them warm, because I usually use leftovers from fridge for breakfast.

Lunch

For the lunch I have spent a little longer time today. It was about 40 minutes for preparation.

Whole grains
I prepared these whole grains today: 70% rice and %30 emmer grain (it’s one of the oldest grains used for cooking on this planet – Paleolithic Age 17,000 BC), kombu, 2 times of water, cooked in pressure cooker for 50 minutes.

Vegetables
I have used the water from the morning breakfast and for the veggies choose mostly full pot of kale and 1 piece of onion. I am repeating again, these are not hardstone written recipes. I am thinking them up daily, according to my tastes, but very often my tastes are out of range of my stores, so I cook whatever is eatable at my house at that moment Let your intuition guide you and mix any sorts of vegetables together as long as they are macrobiotic sorts of veggies (you know the prohibited ones are night shades – capsicum, tomato, potatoes, eggplant etc. and use only the ones from your climatic zone). I have sidetracked a little…
I also add to the kale+onion+water these other things: red lentils (like 3-4 tsp), wakame (3-4 cm), pumpkin+sunflower seeds (1-2 tsp).
Let it boil for 12 minutes and put 1 tesp of barley miso and squeezed 1 tesp of ginger. Rest for 2 minutes and ready to serve. But I had to postpone my lunch a little because I wanted delicious, crunchy, fatty tempura with a lot of protein.

Tempura
I have decided to deep-fry small pieces of seitan, tempeh and nori. I use white flour for deep-frying, something that I have learned at Kushi Institute in Holland. They teach us, that white flour absorbs very little of fat in comparison to whole grain flour. And it’s really true from my experience. We have very good electrical grain-mill at home. It was bought at Vienna, but I don’t know where exactly, it was a gift. But it’s really superb grinder, all the others I have seen here are very small and very costly. This one is big and precisely made and according to the man who bought it, it was cheap, but I am not sure about the exact price. Just let me know in comments if you want to get more info or to see a picture, I will gladly help. So if you have your own grinder it’s very good, because you can always prepare the very fresh flour, that’s not in the rancid process. I made white flour by milling the white rice. Then I just mix with a little of water and make thin paste. In the small narrow pot pour enough oil so your tempuras can be deep-fried easily and be covered by oil from all sides. I am using sunflower oil, but I am not sure if it’s the best one for frying. I have read about big advantages of rice bran oil for the deep-frying. The Ilanit Tof article about oils – Reflections on oil consumption – is very good reading in general. Back to the tempura making. Simply cover the seitan, tempeh, nori pieces in the white flour paste and let it deep-fry for 2-4 minutes in the hot oil from both sides. Place on a plate with spongy napkins to absorb the excess of oil. And you can see my Wednesday result at the pictures.

I have found few pictures in my digital camera storage card, so I am posting them here. They are not so hot, just my usual ordinary daily meal shots.

Macrobiotic food 01 – This is a white rice mixed with whole grain pastas (spagheti), cooked with flax seeds, and the vegetable is simply steamed cabbage.

Macrobiotic food 02 – White rice with spagheti and flax seeds again (I am not eating white rice too often, but these pictures were taken in the time of 2 days, so I was eating the same white rice over and over), vegetable is mixed leek, cabbage and parsley – simply chopped, fried on sunflower or sesame oil and then you add little water (0.5 – 1 cm in the pot) and let it simmer for 15 minutes, at the end add shoyu sauce or miso and it’s done.

Macrobiotic food 03 – Here I have spagheti pastas (whole grains) – cooked alone. And vegetable is carrot + onion + seitan. Fry onion on a little of quality oil for few minutes, add little water and carrot and seitan and steam for 10-15 minutes, add shoyu sauce and ginger (you can add ginger to any meal, just make it always different, there are not strict rules, play with it and make it fun). And the green vegies is watercress (you can simply grow it on the damped cotton wool at home).

1 onion, 1/2 leek, 1 parsley, 1 turnip cabbage (kohlrabi) – I am not sure, what’s the proper English word, 1 tbsp sunflower oil, 1 tbsp corn flower, 1 tbsp flax seeds, 1 tsp ginger juice, 5 cm wakame, 1-2 tsp barley or rice miso, 0.5 l water, green fresh vegetables for decoration – scallion, like watercress, green haulm of parsley, chives, dandelion, daisy, etc.

Total time: 38 minutes
Working time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 18 minutes

Chop all vegetables to various pieces, change the chopping style everyday. Onion should be small pieces. Heat the pan for 30 seconds, pour oil on the hot pan and fry onion on moderate flame until it gets shiny colour (2-3 minutes), give Fire (element) energy into the food by active stiring of the onion. Put corn flower and stir for 1 more minute. Pour water and turn the flame on max until it boils. Lower the flame and put all vegetables, flax seeds wakame into the pot and let it simmer for 15 minutes. Mix miso into this the nearly done soup and let it simmer for 1 minute together. Turn off the flame and add ginger. Let it rest for 2 minutes and you can start serving fresh with something green on the top.

I would like to start posting and logging and blogging about my daily eating habits. I will try to make descriptions of the ingredients and make a nice pictures of my daily foods. Sometimes I will post only my lunch recipe, sometimes breakfast or dinner too. It will depend on my time, mood and if the meals would be interesting to blog about. It’s all one big experiment what I am going to do. I always wanted to log what I eat daily and it seems that if I will blog about it here, I will even give other people new ideas and maybe encourage them to start cooking macrobiotic too. It’s not hard at all. I am single man, living alone, cooking for myself only and I am preparing 3 meals a day. I won’t lie to you, it’s taking quite much time, because I am trying to cook as best as I can just now. But any time invested in your health, is not lost time. You will gain a massive amount of energy, happiness, well-being from your orderly cooked macrobiotic foods and if you eat them in relaxed manner and chewing them well. Don’t exchange your time for money, by working hard in a lousy job and neglecting your health. Stop and try to think a little. Anything in this world is more important than your health. If you are healthy, you can build on top of that. But no model can work opposite. You can’t do anything well if you are not healthy. Be patient and start cooking macrobioticly, because it’s the only food system, that is in harmony with nature and leads to natural well-being and happiness. Ok, from now, you will see more pictures and recipes at this blog. Enjoy and post comments if you want