Recent Photos from the Bento Cooking Class

photos by Paul Herchig

My Trip to Waikiki Worm Company

I've dabbled in composting before, but I was told that I wasn't doing it quite right. I had a spinning composter, but worms don't like to get tossed around. When I changed living arrangements, I sold my spinning composter and took a hiatus from the whole endeavor.

Throwing vegetable scraps away just didn't feel right, and after attending the recent agriculture conference, I committed to seriously getting back into composting. I made my visit to the Waikiki Worm Company this afternoon and purchased all my new composting items. Here is the store owner getting my worms ready for me.

Mindy explained to me how to set up my system. First, I have to shred paper and place it into my composting bin.
Then, I take the pile of worms and separate it from the vermicast, sprinkling the vermicast onto the paper to make a nice bed for the earthworms. It's important to water it so that it stays moist.
From there I take the ball of earthworms and place them onto the bed and let them wriggle their way into their bed of paper and vermicast.

Now I can begin to feed them, so I grabbed some alfalfa sprouts that I had leftover from a cooking class and sprinkled them in.

Finally, it's important to cover the food with more paper, and then wet everything down, and place on the lid.

My system is now operational! I'm heading back to her shop on Saturday to pick up some compost tea to spray on the foilage of my plants.

I'm really seriously working on getting a big container garden going. Here is my kale, basil, thyme, chives, parsley, and Maui onions.... (hard to see but they are all in there!).

Cilantro and arugula are sprouting in some other containers...

Hawaii State Agriculture Conference

On September 23rd and 24th, I attended the Hawaii State Agriculture Conference at the beautiful Ko'Olina Resort. For two days, I thoroughly enjoyed and took in as much of the information as possible, and here is my interpretation and summary of the issues for you:

• We as a nation and world are in completely uncharted territory in terms of CO2 emissions and are in dire need of innovation and new ideas.
  
• The most critical issues facing the islands seem to be the price and/or availability of energy, land, water, and the number of farmers. In addition, financing and transportation are important issues. 'Energy' and 'Agriculture' may see some big fights to come. The main recommendation is for everyone (conventional and organic farmers and ranchers) to try to "get along" and to communicate well regarding our shared issues.
• UH's College of Tropical Ag is working on aquaponics to meet some of the new sustainability standards set for 2050. Aquaponics helps solve problems of access to land. Some of the components of farming this way are expensive, so they are looking at ways to source items locally (e.g., fish food and fertilizers).
  
• We currently have 90% of our energy shipped to the islands in the form of oil. There is a big push to move to biofuels (and I was sitting between someone from the Department of Energy and another person from the Navy who were both asking lots of questions and taking many notes), but farmers and ranchers are losing their land so that biofuels can be grown and produced. Although it was left unsaid, it was implied that the biofuels are GMO crops.
• It's critical that we all move to organic and sustainable methods of production. For health reasons in particular, organics were strongly recommended. We heard from ex-conventional farmers who have completely changed their methods and yielded some incredible crop results.
  
• Consumers need to educate themselves that food doesn't come from a store, it comes from the farmers. We all really need to stop shopping at places that offer "cheap" food and start prioritizing local producers. Buying "cheap" creates more long term systemic problems.
  
• Ranchers and farmers are people on whom we all currently rely every day (so we really need to value and respect them).
  
• Ranchers are moving toward grass fed beef. The cow is becoming a key part of the biofuel industry. It's predicted that perhaps the ranchers will start building some bio-refineries and when this happens, they will be selling energy back to HECO. (Seems like we really ought to be nice to our farmers!)
• Cows and worms are some pretty valuable creatures.
  
• Korean Natural Farming Methods and biochar are a couple of things to seriously learn about and incorporate into current farming.

Although the mood was hopeful and optimistic, I came home concerned about our food and energy security.

Photos from the Lunch: Wraps & Spreads cooking class

Thanks again to Ruth for sharing her photos from the afternoon cooking class! I had some help rolling everything up for everyone so that we could move on to the next recipe. Looking forward to next week's class, Lunch: Gourmet Bento Box Items

Recovering Your Health

From The Book of Macrobiotics by Michio Kushi

In order to recover and develop our physical, mental, and spiritual health, we need to reorient our way of life in the following ways:

• we should reflect upon our own daily life, whether we are pursuing only sensory pleasures and emotional comfort, and thus forgetting our native potential for greater happiness and higher freedom

• we should reflect further upon our daily food and drink and consider whether our meals are really balanced to produce the best quality of blood and cells as well as to secure the best mental and spiritual conditions.

• we should also reflect upon our thought and behavior toward our family, friends, and other people and consider whether our respect and love are really dedicated from the heart and whether our behavior toward them is really serving for their health and happiness

The beginning of self recovery from all personal unhappiness, including physical and mental disorders, is our understanding of the perceptual order of yin and yang. In order to release ourselves from all physical and mental disorders changing our degenerative tendencies towards health and happiness, we must first apply our understanding of yin and yang to our daily dietary practice, how to choose, prepare, and take our food and drink. Through proper eating, our blood and body will become sound and whole. Mental and spiritual well being will naturally follow. food is creating us. If the nourishment we receive is proper, we are naturally more energetic physically, more comfortable emotionally, and more elevated spiritually than when our way of eating is imbalanced and disorderly. If our daily food is improper, our health declines, our emotions are disturbed, and our spirit becomes chaotic. Personal feelings, social relations, and our approach to any problems are influenced by what we eat. When we feel any frustration and disturbance, we should first reflect upon what we have been eating. Our physical and mental habits, as well as tendencies in our thinking and capacities of our consciousness all depend upon what we have been eating for a long period, from the embryonic stage through childhood up to the present. To change our food is to wholly change ourselves. Through food, consciously or unconsciously, we shape our destiny.

Kanu Hawaii Eat Local Cooking Class

Date: October 1, 2010
Time: 5:30 pm	to	8:30 pm

As part of the Kanu Hawaii Eat Local Campaign, I will be teaching a class emphasizing local produce and how we can use it in quick, easy, nourishing, and delicious meals. This class is great for anyone who wants to use more local produce and even for those who use local produce often, but may want new recipe ideas.

Location: Pan American MOA, 3510 Nuuanu Pali Road, Honolulu, HI

Prices and more details can be found on my website:
Kanu Hawaii Eat Local Cooking Class

Dinner in a pinch

My mom and I were on our way to yoga class, and then discovered that we had the wrong day and time. We decided to go shopping instead, and by the time we were done, most of the day had slipped away. We had to come up with a meal for dinner, QUICK! My Dad was coming home, and my sister and brother in law were on their way over too. So I took the leftover black beans and turned them into a delicious and hearty soup with garlic, onion, carrot, sweet potato, cilantro, and celery and it only took about 15 to 20 minutes to cook the veggies. My family likes a little extra flavor, so I took about 2 tablespoons of salsa and stirred this in with cumin and sea salt. There was some leftover brown & wild rice so that was a great side dish, and I took the kale my cousin sent us home with and threw together a raw kale salad filled with grated carrots, sliced snap peas, tomatoes, sunflower seeds, and roasted soybeans for a little bit of crunch. It was dressed with some tamari, lemon juice, brown rice vinegar, and olive oil. They had the meal with some chicken, while I skipped that part. My niece and nephew especially liked the brown rice. (The dessert is described in the next post.) All of this took from 30 to 45 minutes to whip up. It's really possible to have tasty healthy food that doesn't take forever to prepare leaving us time to play outside in the late summer sun.

Apple Peach Crisp

When I was with my cousin the other day, I picked several peaches off her tree, and when my sister called asking for her favorite apple crisp, we decided to make it apple peach crisp. After stopping at the health food store to buy some fresh Washington apples, I headed home to make the crisp for her. The crust is made with oats and nuts and this smells so scrumptious baking in the oven. My family enjoyed it with some vanilla ice cream, and it's delicious by itself with tea. I meant to take a photo of the final product, but it got eaten too quickly.

Farm-to-Table living

I have been in Washington enjoying the end of summer, and loving the farm-to-table living that is part of the lifestyle here. One highlight has been spending time with my family, and also up at my cousin Sarah's home in Skagit Valley where she lives off the grid with her family. We had two incredible meals straight from her garden including zuchinni, cucumber, tomatoes, beans, lettuce, kale, radish, celery, blackberries, blueberries, peaches, plums, nasturtiums, and borage.

the grape arbor

my niece's new friendone of the amazing greenhouses

zuchinni

pears not quite ripe yet

corn

I will add new photos in the next post!

More farm-to-table living

my cousin harvesting zuchinni and cucumbers

hops

currants
sweet peas
blackberries - we stuffed ourselves

garden art

Brown Rice Sushi

Today in the Healthy Back to School Lunch Box cooking class another one of the items on the menu was brown rice sushi. I brought home the leftover ingredients made up some extra pieces for my lunch on Monday - brown rice, natural ginger pickles, ume, carrots, tofu, and cucumber. I used to think that making sushi was difficult, but it's much easier than I ever realized, once I rolled a few. You don't need to be an expert to do this. Excited to enjoy them!

(I will be teaching how to make brown rice sushi on Sept 3rd! We'll have a great variety of delicious sushi. More info here....)

Surprising Combinations

Frequently, people will taste a dish that I have made and say something like, "I really didn't know what this would be like when I saw that it included x and y ingredients, but it's actually REALLY GOOD!"

This happened today at the Healthy Lunchbox cooking class. For one of our dishes, we had a pasta salad that included tofu, cucumbers, ume, onions, and basil. You'd never realize how well ume and basil go together!

Can you challenge yourself to try some new things? How about peanut butter and sauerkraut on a rice cake. You'd be surprised :-) (Seriously, I was!)

Late Afternoon Party

Having fun in the garden waiting for friends to come over for an afternoon party....


Braised gobo and sauteed tatsoi were on the menu, along with a summery arame salad and a soba salad with oven roasted vegetables and an Asian-dressing. The other items not pictured were hummus, roasted nuts, Kalamata olives, fresh corn on the cob, sauteed broccoli, chocolate cake and fruit salad.

The late afternoon was filled with really wonderful friends, gorgeous late summer weather, and lots of laughter!

Brown Rice Onigiri

In this photo, you see some items ready for my lunch on Friday. I pressure cooked some brown rice with azuki beans and a little bit of barley, and when it was done, mixed it with some shiso kombu furikake and sesame seeds. Here are the onigiri waiting to be wrapped up into some nori.

When you make your rice balls by hand, your right and left hands are joined in prayer formation over your heart, so your rice is blessed! I wonder if this is why many Japanese people feel so loved by having their mothers' brown rice balls packed into their school lunches?

Sweet Treats

This coming Sunday is the back-to-school Healthy Lunch Box Cooking Class and today I have been working on the various recipes for it. One quick and tasty treat is the Brown Rice Crispy Treats that I'll be demonstrating how to make. Mmmm..... crunchy, nutty, sweet.... What more could you ask for?

Pressed Salad

I was in need of a quick meal tonight because I wanted to go running and then head out to see Kanu Hawaii's screening of The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil , so I chopped up all my veggies, including hakurei* (baby turnips), wonbok* (Chinese cabbage), carrots, and cucumber*, sprinkled it with sea salt, and then pressed it with a plate and something heavy (jug of mirin pictured for this purpose) to make a nice summery and refreshing "pressed salad."


You can eat this dish by itself as a side dish, or use it to fill wraps and sandwiches. It has a nice crunch and light flavor. For this particular meal, I had it as a side dish with my sandwich that consisted of a little bit of vegenaise, tempeh bacon, and alfalfa sprouts. I'll try to turn it into something else for dinner again the following night.

*locally grown ingredient

Playing with new ingredients

The other day when I was shopping at Whole Foods, I stumbled on two new variations of ingredients that I haven't seen before, barley and lentils.

I have been searching for this special and very elusive black barley for about 8 years! My friend Reni told me she found it at Rainbow Market in the Bay area, but my own search always came up short.

I found out that this beautiful grain is originally from Ethiopia, but is rare in the US because it has a low yield. The site that I looked at says, "A farmer in Montana decided to take a risk. This is actually the only grain that can go from field to table without being processed because the gloom or bran layer stays attached to the kernel and is edible." They recommend combining it with another grain because it's chewy, and I agree. The next time around maybe I'll do 25% black barley with 75% regular barley. It gets much plumper after it's cooked.

I used it as the main ingredient of my grain salad for dinner. In this dish, several things are grown locally, such as the cucumbers, green onions, and my own home grown parsley and dill.


The other ingredient that I haven't used yet, but plan to sometime soon, is Black Beluga Lentils. It looks like caviar! This should be fun to experiment with. Look for that blog to appear at some point in the near future.

7 Levels of Judgment

Have you ever noticed how macrobiotic theory likes to classify things? Here are the 7 levels of judgment according to one's approach to eating.

At what level(s) do you tend to be? (They say that most of us never reach the 7th level!)

1. Physical = "I eat to stay alive"
2. Sensorial = "Mmmmm. It tastes good"
3. Sentimental = "This food reminds me of something good/bad from my childhood"
4. Intellectual = "This food is nutritious"
5. Social/Moral = "I don't believe in killing animals", or "This food is grown organically"
6. Ideological = "My religion says to eat/avoid this food"
7. Supreme = "I eat or drink whatever I want because I am free and know how to balance my health according to universal principles (and this includes all the previous levels)"

Where would you classify Homer Simpson, for example? (Comments welcome!)

Spicy? Harmonious? Balanced?

We always have a choice what we eat and when we know how it affects us, then we can decide if that is appropriate for our condition. Nothing is categorically "good" or "bad". It just has an energetic effect. For example, we had several spices like curry powder, cardamom, cumin, coriander, and mustard seeds, in the Indian food class.

The Macrobiotic Path to Total Health says, "In a hot, humid climate, spices serve to cool the body, stimulate the mind and nervous system..." So this cooling and stimulating effect could be beneficial for some people since we live in Hawaii, and it's currently summer so that would be even more appropriate. We also talked about how it could create a lively party atmosphere when people eat spicy appetizers.

However, spices may also contribute to excitability, hyperactivity, cooling and weakening effects. A person might get emotionally upset or experience allergies. It all depends on our own particular health condition at the time. If you are feeling nervous already, and spices theoretically contribute to that, becoming mindful and asking yourself, "Self, even though I like this taste, is it going to benefit my current health condition if I eat this right now?" Of course, this is always a personal choice and it's never up to anyone else to say what is right for you or to judge you. Your body will tell you its answer.

The vegan brown rice sushi class is Sept 3rd!

See my website for all the details:

http://www.macrobiotichawaii.com/2010/07/08/brown-rice-sushi-making-cooking-class/