MON DIEU OH LA LA, C'EST RATATOULLIE!

The CSA had an insane number of zucchini and squash, so what was there to do but pop in Disney's Ratatouille and make the dish itself! Typically it has more cheese than a Whole Foods dairy aisle, but May and I were having none of that, so we cut butter and cheese where we could, and replaced the rest of it with soy and rice cheese.

To date, this is my favorite snackrobiotic dish we've ever made. It was probably one of the best things I've ever eaten. It's labor-intensive, but if you really want to rock the minds of your vegan friends, I have to say that this is a truly stunning dish.


* 1/4 cup olive oil
* 6 cloves garlic, minced
* 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon dried parsley
* 2 eggplant, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
* salt to taste
* 2 cups grated soy cheese (try either rice cheese parmesan or soy cheese mozarella)
* 4 zucchini, sliced
* 2 large red onion, sliced into rings
* 4 cups sliced fresh mushrooms
* 4 large tomatoes, chopped

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Coat bottom and sides of a 1 1/2 quart casserole dish with 1 tablespoon olive oil.
2. 
   
3. Heat remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Saute garlic until lightly browned. Mix in parsley and eggplant. Saute until eggplant is soft, about 10 minutes. Season with salt to taste. Follow these same steps for the mushrooms, cooking about 10 minutes until most of the liquid is released and evaporated. Add to the mushrooms one sprig of fresh thyme.
   

See the steps below for pictures of what happens next!


It took a long time to slice these by hand. I'd recommend using a mandolin where it's available, and doubling or tripling the recipe to make at least two pans of it. If you're going to do the work, might as well have a tray of leftovers, because this thing will be consumed to the last drop.
It's key to saute the mushrooms, eggplant, and then (separately) the onion slices. The former two because they'll make the dish too liquidy when it cooks, and the latter because onions lose their flavor when they are raw and touch acidic tomatoes in the oven. You have to saute them a little while first, so that their flavor comes out and is sealed in.
Coat the bottom of the pan in mushrooms and eggplant like the bottom of a pie crust.
Begin layering all of your ingredient discs, alternating materials (squash, zuc, tomato, onion) all the way up and down the pan. Once a level is complete, cover it in soy/rice cheese, and start building the next level.

Pop it in the oven and cook for 45-60 minutes! I hit it with one last layer of soy cheese and let it really brown...

It was such a perfect night. We sat in the sun room, which is this great turn-of-the century construction off the side of the house that is all windows, popped in the movie "Ratatouille," and enjoyed this incredible dish together. What an amazing experience!

Macrobiotic Theory: Planting on Good Soil

So we talked in our last post about how nobody really wants to stop eating meat and cheese, but they do it anyways.

Now we're going to talk about getting your mind right. We take things for granted. "I have really bad skin." "I'm just never going to be skinny."

For every person who makes their life better through macrobiotics, there is a shift, like seeing a Magic Eye picture right for the first time. There are two kinds of people reading this blog: devout Christians and dedicated atheists, and I have a feeling that if we had a Snackrobiotic potluck, it would probably end with a surobachi being upturned on somebody's head. But here's my point:

You have to believe that something spooky is going on. You have to believe that something amazing is about to happen to you, and you have to know that it's because of events and changes that are bigger than you can control. It's about grace. I'm not necessarily talking specifically about Biblical grace, but to eat with the seasons, sleep at night and wake up with dawn is to feel a power from which we have previously been divorced.

To experience the gentle healing that accompanies this realignment with nature is to experience something that touches your soul. It's to understand that healing and vitality is right and natural. It's frustration when you see the vegetable you want to eat has been covered with pesticides and genetically modified, but it's from that frustration that you begin to see the desperate need that we have to heal our nation.

It starts small. It starts micro. I decide I want to heal my health, so it's winter and I go to the store to buy winter squash. I'm feeling good, eating my good food, and I'm upset to see that the only squashes they have are covered in pesticides and grown across the world. I want to find food that is local and healing. My need to heal becomes a community issue. It goes macro.

The Gospel of Luke tells us, "And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear."

When I decided to heal my stomach, I began making decisions rooted in good soil. As those changes grew, they began to manifest a hundredfold in my life, as my skin cleared, my weight dropped, my cramps got better, I didn't get sick, and my friends and family began to make changes and see good health in their lives too.

So if you're looking to change your health today by changing your diet, know that you're planting seeds in good soil that will begin multiplying and expanding in ways you never expected or intended.

Detox.

So last year when I was detoxing all the prednisone, pain medication, anti-emetics, and all the other fun drugs they gave me over the last two years, a small bump on my hand developed.

Small turned big over the course of a year, so I went to the dermatologist, who assured me it was definitely a build-up of scar tissue, hit it with a locally injected drug to treat it, and went on her merry way. Apparently, it wasn't, because it got considerably bigger over the year, so I went back last week.

They took a biopsy, which they said would be nothing, and it has hurt considerably all week (not as bad as my last surgery, but it kept me up last night), and now not only has my body been unable to form a clot over it in three days, but it's an open wound. I work in food service. Awwwesome.

This has not been a good week. In fact, it's been spectacularly bad. I would like to go to a small Scandinavian fishing village where we can spend all day drilling holes in the ice and taking pictures of seals and NOT having creepy side-effects of narcotics I had to take last year.

I am really upset right now, and have eaten accordingly, which I'm sure I'll suffer for tomorrow, but right now I'm pretty much in an extremely agitated place and probably have to have a bigger surgery later this week. Will it ever end?

I could really use some prayer right now. I know that God has a greater purpose in this, but I feel so small and powerless when I have these health problems. It's a scary and vulnerable place. I am so freaked out at the prospect of more surgery, more medical bills, and figuring out what this thing actually is.

Step Away From That Pot Roast: Macrobiotic Theory

My last meal was a prosciutto and gouda grilled sandwich on artisan sourdough dipped into creamy tomato basil soup.

I threw it all up about six hours later, but I wasn't sorry. Yet. I threw up all night, and again the next morning, and sat on the couch holding my stomach and crying until my mom loaded me into the car and drove me out into the country to Ginny's house. To this day, I still get a little green when I smell fresh sprigs of thyme.

When I refuse food at dinner, many people tell me that they could "never give up meat or cheese." There seems to be this illusion that I, as one who eats neither meat, nor dairy, am some kind of "healthy person" who doesn't LIKE meat or cheese. This is incorrect. I love meat and cheese. Probably more than they do. Given my way, I'm a pot roast-slamming, fondue-dipping, powdered sugaring maniac who only eats a vegetable if it's been sauteed in day-old bacon fat.

The difference is that at dinner, I made a choice.

Here is a list of things I took for granted:

• I am a person who gets horrible period cramps every month.
• I am a person with volatile skin.
• I get sick all the time, and have to take steroids for my sinuses.
• I am tired and irritated all the time.
• I am just not a thin person.

As it turned out, I was choosing these things. Imagine if you knew that if you ate cheese on the first day of your period, you would get horrible, agonizing cramps. You could eat cheese the day before or the day after and it would be no problem, but for that one day, eating cheese would mean cramps.

You'd be crazy to do it, right?

We make that choice every day. Every day that I eat (as I ate this morning) a honey-corn muffin, I am telling myself that in three weeks, life is going to be painful for a day. I earned that. I paid for it. So last month when, after a few days of loose, non-macro eating, I found myself with pretty uncomfortable cramps, I made the choice not to take pain killers.

For one thing, my body is much stronger than it used to be. Now, because I eat so clean, a few days of bad eating will only give me minor cramps for a few hours, as opposed to my pre-macro days of a whole week of agony punctuated by brief periods of advil-induced relief.

The most important reason I mention not taking pain killers is accountability. Not only are pain medications horrible for your liver and kidneys, but I needed to feel the consequences of my eating. This is my body communicating with me, saying "I don't need the food that did this to me."

When we take pain medicine to cover up what our body is telling us, we feel better. For now. But we're delaying a later, much stronger, much angrier response. It's like plugging our ears. You may not get the memo next week, next month, even next year. But eventually, all that symptom-covering will come back, and all the drugs we took to cover it will make this backlash even worse.

So that's the first part. Getting rid of stuff you don't want.

But the best part is when the good stuff gets even better. And that's for tomorrow's post!

Macrobiotic Beginnings: Intro

This week I've spent a lot of time in hospitals. Unlike past hospital experiences, I've been blessed with healing and am not the patient, but this time, the visitor. Truthfully, I can't say which experience is worse, that of the patient... frightened, expected to trust unfamiliar faces every day, alone, and in pain, or that of the loved one, who must sit at their side helpless, as they are expected to make impossible choices that they have no idea how to make.

It is impossible to sit in a hospital chair watching the ones we love suffer connected to wires in a cold, sterile room and not ask ourselves if there isn't a better way. This week, I visited several terminally ill loved ones in the hospital, and I came to several conclusions. The first is that there is nothing I can do to help them. This is a hard realization to come to. I don't know about you guys, but I know that after seeing the amazing power the macrobiotic diet had to heal my body, I felt like I had an "in," a special knowledge that there is healing possible, even from the most grim prognoses.

While I still believe this is true and have shaken the hand of people who should have died 20 years ago, this week, the lesson for me was that for all of us, there is a time to heal and a time to die. Sometimes the best we can hope for as those who understand the healing properties of food, is to bring some comfort and alleviation of pain to those who are terminally ill.

I'm writing a series on beginning the macrobiotic diet that I hope you, my regular readers, can forward it to friends who are curious about beginning the diet. I hope it will answer some questions and will lead them to seek out a macrobiotic counselor who can help them begin this lifestyle.

For every one of us, there comes a moment when our life could truly, radically change. My life changed last winter, and I've never looked back. I hope that these posts can help someone else get curious about changing their own life.

Update and Happy 100 Posts!

Happy 100 posts, everybody!

Sorry it's been so dead over here. Things have been really chaotic and I've neglected both cooking and posting about it. I made a truly incredible ratatouille the other week with local organic vegetables that was probably the best thing I've ever eaten. I'm going home next week and making it for my grandmother, so I'm really excited about that.

There's a great chapter in Ginny's book where she writes about her grandmother cooking a meal for her when she was healing. She was worried that because her grandmother wasn't familiar with the macrobiotic diet, that the food might alter her fragile health. The macrobiotic practitioner she spoke to smiled and told her that if it was made with good, fresh, whole ingredients and with a loving, healing intention, the food would be nutritious and healing.

Right now my grandmother is recovering from major surgery, so I look forward to cooking a meal for her with all my best intention! My grandparents are both quite ill right now, so I'll be going home for a week to be with them and support my family. If you guys could pray for our family right now, that would be great. God sometimes speaks in incredibly literal ways, and I know that He reached into my life and spoke to me last week.

I have a particular affinity for the book of Jonah, because it was the first scripture that we studied when I joined my church, and the book and verses from it always seem to pop up in my life when God wants to make sure I get the message. I also really identify with Jonah as a fellow stubborn person who literally has to be forcibly digested before I concede defeat.

To me the most poignant part of Jonah is the break in the text where the entire rhythm of the document shifts, and he sings from below the water.

From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help,

and you listened to my cry.

You hurled me into the depths,

into the very heart of the seas,

and the currents swirled about me;

all your waves and breakers

swept over me.

What an incredible moment. It's so quiet. The silence and the stillness, represented by the break in text are so profound. I can just remember in my life last year being so sick and fighting like crazy to be back up North and fighting against my body and everything that happened in my past as hard as I could, and finally, after one particularly painful hospitalization, I just stopped. When it's time for a change in direction, when you're ready to come up for air and to go some place new, if you humbly submit yourself to change and are willing to accept and trust the unconditional love waiting for you on the other side, it's going from drowning to safety.

I know that this is particularly relevant in my life. I tend to fight and kick and scream my way through everything, and as my friend Allison so aptly put it, "do things the most difficult way a human being can ever contrive to do them." I often confuse defending things that are important to me with being defensive. But it's important to remember that God knows the things I love and the things that are important to me. It's a pretty awesome concept. So I am going to try to put down my fists and accept what God has planned for this unexpected turn in my life.