The beet goes on

People who are into sports could take a winning tip from Sonny and Cher’s top-100 hit of 1967. You heard it here first, guys… The beat goes on was code, man. Yeah. They’re saying like eat your beets, and you’ll run harder, longer, faster!

It’s true. Lots of science backs this up, but the latest news came out this spring…  45 years after Sonny and Cher gave us the word.

A new study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that eating 7-ounces of baked beets 75 minutes before exercise helped racers run three percent faster during a 5K. Better yet, in the last 1.8 kilometer, they ran five percent faster. Being able to up your performance  like that means you torch both your opponents and major calories.

The secret is all those nitrates in beets. Nitrates  help deliver more oxygen to your muscles, so you don’t get tired as fast  during a race.

Juice them, soup them, or put them in cake! And don’t throw out the leaves. They’re  totally delicious, especially when you use them to make my favorite dish, beetniks.  No, the name of this dish is not referring to Sonny and Cher in the 60s. Beetniks turn up at parties in western Canada, especially weddings and Christmas gatherings, when people expect to have a great time and good food. They’re not hard to make, especially if you start with frozen dough.

Click to try out these beet recipes
Then lace up, go out and  run your personal best!

Beet Juice

Beet soup or borscht

Beet cake (see my next post)

Baked beets  or roasted beets with tahini sauce

And my personal favorite…
Beetniks!!!

2 or 3 dozen larger beet leaves, washed
(In a pinch,  you can use red chard leaves)
Bread dough, a pound or so
(I use whole-wheat frozen bread dough)
1 tablespoon coconut oil (or 2 tablespoons butter)
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 cup milk thickened with 1 tablespoon flour (or 1 cup cream)
Handful of fresh dill

Get ready…

• Defrost frozen bread dough in the fridge overnight
• Wash the beet leaves and leave them to wilt and dry overnight in a tea towel. If using chard, cut the ribs out
• Chop the onion and garlic
• Lightly grease 2 cookie sheets

Get set…

Beetniks

• Heat the oven to 350°F.
• Pinch off a piece of dough the size of a golf ball and roll it in your hands into a sausage. Wrap a beet leaf  loosely around the middle of the dough, leaving the ends unwrapped.
• Place the rolls on a cookie sheet, an inch apart.
• Cover the pan of rolls with a damp, clean kitchen towel and let the bread rise for an hour or so. While one tray of rolls is rising, prepare more for a second tray and so on.
• Once the rolls have risen, bake them 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
• You can freeze beetniks at this point and save them for a special occasion. If eating right away, continue to the next step.

Cream sauce

• Sauté the onion and garlic in coconut oil in a large pan until soft.
• Remove from heat and stir in the flour, then add the milk slowly, stirring until well mixed. Return to the heat and continue stirring until the sauce thickens. Keep warm and when ready to serve, add salt and pepper to taste, then  stir in the dill.
• If you are using cream (very rich, but if for a special occasion, oh well?), stir it into the sautéed onions and garlic (no flour needed)  and allow it to simmer until it thickens. Add dill last.

Go!

• To serve, put three beetniks per person into the warm cream sauce and let them simmer away until they’re hot. This takes more time if the beetniks are frozen than if they are fresh out of the oven. That’s it!
• Serve beetniks with meat and veg or with other treats that come to us from Canada’s west via eastern Europe…  like cabbage rolls or barbecued marinated lamb.

Of course, beetniks use the leaves of beets, not the roots. That makes it a different animal from what scientists tested in the study up front. But you won’t go wrong with beet greens. They’re loaded with minerals to keep your blood and bones strong…  making you a better athlete!

Just so you know, a 1-cup serving of beet leaves provides you with 15 percent of the daily recommended value of iron, a mineral vital to your red blood cells, which carry the oxygen to your muscles. Iron also regulates cell growth. Besides iron, the same serving of beet greens also contains 15 percent of the calcium you need every day to keep your bones healthy.

So… Go beets! Go kids! Run, run, run! It’s just like Cher was trying to say. Beets help you go on, and on, and on, and on…

Photo from Ravenous Penguin

Yackity’s Yaks

Let me tell you the strange tale of how a Sherpa lass called Yackity ended up on a ranch far from home and got to the meat of the matter.

One evening, while Yackity fed her animals their usual treat of puffed maize, a cruel wind picked her up and blew her far away from her haven in the Tibetan mountains.

When Yackity came down to earth again, she found herself all alone in a land that reminded her of home.  Pine trees, grassy fields,  worn rocky outcrops, and many bright flowers felt familiar.

But other things looked strange. Tall whispery trees bent their branches down to a small stream that flowed past their roots. Prickly bushes along the fences drooped from the weight of red berries. Black birds with a blood-red patch on their wings flitted among the reeds.

“Where am I,” Yackity wondered aloud. As she looked around, she was surprised to see an old man walking toward her. What surprised her was his age. Where Yackity had come from, people retained their youth right up to their time of passing. Yet this old fellow seemed fit and spry… running through the fields, shouting “Clara!  Micheline! Jasper!”

“Hello there!” Yackity waved, finding she could magically speak to the old man in his own language. “Who are you calling? And where am I?” she asked.

“You’re on one of the few Yak ranches in Canada,” the man replied. He spread his arms. “I was calling the animals so you could meet them. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it?” He smiled. “My yaks roam across 750 acres of  lush vegetation here. They  nibble on willow when they are ill and feast on raspberries when they are pregnant. They need only half the food a cow eats and find most of it for themselves. I give them some hay in winter, though. Winters are cold here, but their shaggy hair and extraordinary body chemistry equip yaks to thrive without much shelter, regardless of the weather.”

“What’s so special about their body chemistry?” Yackity asked. “I kept yaks myself in my homeland and never heard of  any super powers…”

Jasper, the hardy yak

“I could yack about that forever!” exclaimed the old man. “The main thing is their humungous red blood cells. When it’s cold, yaks breathe slowly, storing oxygen in them. When it’s hot they just breathe faster. Their body fat differs completely from other animals as a result.”

“That’s odd,” Yackity went. “The only meat I’ve ever eaten is yak. It doesn’t have much fat at all.”

“That’s right” said the ranch owner. “Yak meat IS lean. It has just half the calories of beef, the meat people eat most often here abouts. Yak meat has one-third less saturated fats, the nasty ones, and one-third more of the omega 3s and linoleic fatty acids, the ones that are good for us.”

“Oh,” said Yackity, speechless for once. “What I like,” said Yackity, licking her lips at the thought, ” is the delicate juicy flavor. We say yak meat is what keeps us Tibetans limber enough to climb the mountains until we’re well and truly old. If you have some around, I’ll make you my favorite dish for you!”

The old man had a large supply of it in his freezer.  Tune in next week to learn how Yackity made her Tibetan pie.

To this day you can still find Yackity on the ranch in Canada,  thriving on yak meat and other treats from the land, while helping the old guy care for his animals.

Tibetan pie half undressed, so you can see what’s inside

Many thanks to Rosemary Kralik, for allowing me to post photos of her animals. Rosemary runs Tiraislin, a yak farm just west of Ottawa. She sells her meat from her farm and at the Ottawa Farmers Market. Her yak products are delicious and so good for you, too!

Related Link

Yackity’s Life-everlasting Tibetan Pie – A great recipe for Sherpa pie and some simple science facts about meat. Yak meat comes out on top in every way… a super meat!

Auntie Oxidant Rides to the Rescue

Auntie Oxidant is hitch-hiking in your veggies. Give her a ride with this delicious creamed soup!

Auntie Oxidant is a kid’s best friend. Who wouldn’t want to have a powerful protector like her on their side? She’s a real fighter who guards our cells and disarms invaders that cause disease… good to have around.

Auntie O lounges about in fruits and veggies. You probably know some of her family already. Meet:

• Vitamin A – hiding in ORANGE fruits and veggies, like carrots and sweet potatoes
• Lycopene – swimming in cooked tomato dishes, like catchup
• Vitamin E  – holding hands with vegetable oils, nuts, and seeds
• Anthocyanin – showing off  in RED or BLUE foods, like beets and red carrots

Known in the science world as antioxidants, these nutrients protect cells from free radicals.

”The amount of antioxidants in your body is directly proportional to how long you will live.”
- Dr. Richard Cutler, former Director of the National Institute of Aging, Washington

Free radicals are trouble-makers – formed when oxygen molecules are ripped apart.

Oxygen comes into our bodies in the air we breath. It arrives in pairs of oxygen atoms, with each pair bound tightly into a molecule. We can’t do without the oxygen twins for more than a few seconds. They are essential to life.

But the twins have some powerful enemies. Smoking, alcohol, air pollution, infection, sunlight, radiation… all these things tear at the oxygen molecules, breaking the twins apart.

The separated oxygen atoms are freed at a price – they each lose one electron. The deprived oxygen atoms go on a rampage… stealing electrons from other molecules and damaging cells. Cancer, stroke, sunburn and even aging itself are triggered this way.

Antioxidants ride to the rescue. They use their own electrons to rope those crazy radicals in and tie them up before they can do harm. Without Auntie O, we sort of rust away, from the inside out… or in the case of sunburn, from the outside in!

The Bottom Line

Scientists agree that eating lots of fruits and vegetables lowers your risk of heart disease and certain cancers. A diet rich in veggies and fruit keeps you healthy, through and through.

If your kids won’t eat their veggies in chunks, try them on a delicious pureed soup. Why not start with Auntie O’s favorite, adapted from Cooking up a storm, dish by dish.

Get shopping, preferably at a farmers’ market

Auntie O’s Soup of the Day

CREAM OF ORANGE AND RED VEGGIES

Makes 14 cups

You need

2 tablespoons canola oil
2 red (or orange) carrots,* cut into cubes (about 1 pound or 450 grams)
1 butternut squash, peeled and de-seeded, and cut into cubes (about 1 1/2 pounds or 680 grams)
1 red onion, cut and diced (about 10 ounces or 300 grams)
2 cloves of garlic
2 tomatoes, diced (about 1 pound or 450 grams)
1 litre chicken stock
a little salt and paprika to taste
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar or to taste, depending on acid in tomatoes
pumpkin seeds and basil to garnish

Get ready

1. Wash, peel, chop and measure the veggies. Tip: Slice the squash into one-inch rounds, then slice off the hard skin and take out the seeds. Now cut it into cubes.

Get set

 

1. In a soup pot on medium heat, stir fry the carrots for 10-15 minutes in the oil. My red carrots turned the soup a beautiful burgundy!
2. Add the butternut squash, together with the onions and the garlic, and stir fry for 10 minutes longer
3. Add the tomatoes, and cook 2 minutes more
4. Add the chicken stock – bring to a boil
5. Cover and simmer over low heat for 20-25 minutes or until the veggies are squishy
6. Switch off the stove – let the mixture cool for 5-10 minutes

Go!

1. Puree the soup in a blender or food processor, or use a hand blender right in the pot on the stove top (the easiest)
2. Serve warm, topped with basil and pumpkin seeds, if you like

Sources

• The free radical theory of aging matures. Physiol Rev. 1998 Apr;78(2):547-81.
• Protective effect against sunburn of combined systemic ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and d-alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E). J Am Acad Dermatol. 1998 Jan;38(1):45-8.
• Plasma and lung macrophage responsiveness to carotenoid supplementation and ozone exposure in humans. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2004 Dec;58(12):1571-9.

* Red carrots have been grown in Turkey for centuries. Their color remains stable and adds a lovely burgundy glow to your soup. You can find them at farmers markets or veggies stores, sold as heritage carrots. They are even healthier than orange carrots because of the special antioxidant they contain,  anthocyanin. If you can’t find any red carrots, orange ones work too.

Magnesium Battles the Evil Stroke

A plateful of Magnesium

Are your grandparents looking a little worn around the edges? Maybe you see them filling up on junk food or puffing away on cigarettes too often?

If so, they could be setting themselves up for a medical catastrophe known as Stroke. Holy smokes! That could be serious. Is there anything you can do to help?

If you’ve struck out asking them to quit smoking (a very hard thing to do… but oh so healthy), maybe you can get them to stock up on foods that are high in the superhero Magnesium (Mg).

Magnesium, a mineral found in some foods, has just been proven to fight off the scary Stroke.

The most common kind of stroke happens when the blood thickens enough to form a clot, which blocks a blood vessel in the brain. Researchers at the Swedish Karolinska Institute found that the risk of older folks suffering this kind of problem was reduced by 9% for each 100 milligrams of magnesium they eat each day.

Researchers think it may be because Magnesium helps lower blood pressure.

Get ready to be healthy. Chop, measure, mash, and mix before you start cooking.

Here are some foods that have mega-loads of Magnesium. Put a few of them on the menu every day.

• Green leafy vegetables, like spinach, kale, collard greens, and broccoli.
• Nuts and seeds. Pumpkin and sesame seeds, peanuts, almonds and cashews are good choices.
• Whole grains, like brown rice, oat bran cereal, and whole grain breads.
• Beans. Black beans are a particularly good source, with 120 mg of Magnesium in one cup.
• Fish. Scallops, halibut, and oysters are all good sources of Magnesium. Choose sustainably raised fish when possible.

Vinny’s readers will already have learned about most of these healthy foods. Click on the links above to find out more.

Try the recipe below for a dinner packed full of tasty Magnesium. You won’t be sorry! It’s awesomely delicious. Isla says: “The outside and the insides of black beans are yummy!” Only a four-year-old would think to dissect a black bean, which she went on to eat daintily, one by one, off the end of her fork.

A magnesium smorgasbord, to battle the bullies that bring on a visit from Stroke
SCALLOPS WITH BLACK BEAN SAUCE

The part of the scallop we eat is the large muscle found inside this beautiful shell fish (royalty-free image)

Ingredients for 2-3 servings

1 pound scallops

1 teaspoon soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon stevia sugar (or ordinary sugar or honey)
Pinch of pepper
1 teaspoon cornstarch
1 teaspoon Balsamic vinegar

1 tablespoon black beans (or black bean paste)
1 clove garlic, smashed
1 fresh green chili, finely chopped (optional, especially if serving kids)
1 teaspoon finely chopped ginger root
2 green onions, cut into 1-inch pieces

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 bell pepper, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

Scallops marinating

Prepare scallops

•    Rinse scallops in cool water. Drain and pat dry. If scallops are large, cut in half (across the middle, to make each piece skinnier).
•    Marinate scallops with soy sauce, stevia, pepper, cornstarch, salt, and balsamic vinegar for 30 minutes.

Prepare black bean paste

•    Rinse black beans
•    Add garlic, chilies,  and ginger root
•    mix well and mash with a spoon.

Put it all together

•    Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a 10-inch skillet.
•    Add three-quarters of the black bean paste, and stir fry for 1 minute.
•    Add onions and bell peppers and stir fry for about 5 minutes.
•    Add marinated scallops and cook until scallops turn white, about 5 minutes.
•    Add the rest of the black bean paste and cook for 1 minute.

Serve

•    Sprinkle with sesame oil
•    Serve with steamed rice mixed with more cooked black beans and a side of  steamed broccoli.

Tasty, chalk full of magnesium,  and oh so good for keeping Stroke at bay:).

Magnesium in a pan

References

• Here’s a tip of the hat to Cooks.com for the above recipe idea.
• More about magnesium in foods…
• High Magnesium foods slide show

And little lambs eat ivy!

A kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?

Maybe before you go popping just any old ivy into your mouth, you should learn a little about what you’re eating. What’s good for lambs  and baby goats, otherwise known as kids, may not be so good for kids of the human variety.

One kind of ivy, though, ground ivy in particular, is a plant people have been eating for nearly ever. Who knew!

Ground ivy – recognize this plant?

Where I live, ground ivy runs all through our lawns… a real pest! Its cousin is mint, a plant you probably know a lot more about than ground ivy. But just because ground ivy has a well-known relative doesn’t mean it’s safe to eat. The problem is: with plants, you can’t just go eating the whole thing willy nilly. Parts of it  may be tasty, as well as good for what ails you. In fact for thousands of years, people used parts of ground ivy as medicine, to treat eye ailments, lung congestion and inflammation diseases. But other parts could be poisonous or even lethal, like the leaves of rhubarb are. You have to know the wild plants you eat. If you know ground ivy, here’s an interesting recipe using the leaves. If you haven’t studied wild plants carefully, don’t take a chance.

Sweaters!

But getting back to sheep and goats… “I love ewe,” say the sheep in my photo, as they knit sweaters for their young ones. I made this counting-sheep-to-get-to-sleep quilt using free-motion machine stitching. It’s for our own young one, expected to be making an appearance in the family in June. Surprisingly, right here on WordPress, I found evidence that sheep do indeed wear sweaters! Isn’t life grand?

Now let’s get cooking!

For me, the real prize we get from sheep and goats is cheese made from their milk. SOOOO good! If you see goat or sheep cheese at a farmers market or at the local cheese shop, snap it up. You will be  knocked over by the deliciousness of it.

Here is a recipe for a cheese strata using goat cheese with  only 22% fat. That’s a pretty-low-fat cheese. I took this dish to a party last week and the guests raved over it! I think you will too.

Baaaaa! Goat cheese layered with whole wheat croissants

A layered approach to a goat cheese strata

1 soft-ripened goat cheese brie (made from pasteurized  goat milk, about 165 grams, put  in freezer for 30 minutes)
3 large whole-wheat croissants
6 oz thin asparagus, with tough stems broken off and sliced in half then quartered
2 tablespoons fresh tarragon leaves, chopped
1 teaspoon in total of herbes de Provence (rosemary, thyme, and oregano)
3 0r 4 ounces of smoked ham, chopped
1 1/2 cups skim milk
4 eggs
2 teaspoons mustard
1/4 tsp salt

Plunge asparagus in boiling salted water and cook for 2 minutes. Drain and plunge into cold water. Then drain and pat dry.

Slice each croissant in half. Line a well-oiled 1 1/2-litre oven-proof baking dish with three or four of the slices. Break the remaining slices into bite-sized pieces and reserve.

Slice the heavy rind off the well-chilled brie. Then thinly slice the brie and arrange on the croissant slices.

Sprinkle with half the tarragon and herbs mixture. Spread half the ham and asparagus over the herbs. Top with the croissant pieces and press down hard. Finish with the remaining ham, asparagus, and herbs on top.

Wisk the eggs with the mustard, milk and salt. Gradually pour the liquid evenly over the layered croissants until it’s absorbed. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate over night.

When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350F. Remove the plastic wrap and put the cold strata in the oven. Cover with a piece of tin foil. Bake for 30 minutes. Then uncover and continue baking for 30 minutes more, or until the strata is puffed and golden and the centre seems set when jiggled. Let strata sit for 10 minutes before serving.

This is a wonderful make-ahead dish for a crowd. The fresh flavors make this a taste sensation that can even be enjoyed by kids.

Before you leave me now, why not check out the song I’ve used to introduce both my last post and this one, Mairzy Doats… If you haven’t heard this crazy ditty before and have no idea what the heck I am talking about, be sure to click through to You tube and listen up…  Lala-lala la. It makes for nice background music to your healthy dinner made from oats, goat cheese, or even ground ivy. Enjoy!

Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy….
A kid’ll eat ivy too, wooden shoe?

Can egg whites be blue? Believe it, or NOT!

Lovely murre egg

You just can’t believe everything you read…  But there is always a grain of truth behind every lie. And the Internet is a wonderful tool for digging out the facts.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not (in an edition dated in the 1950s) claims the cooked whites of murre eggs are blue and the yolks are red.  Vinny loves unusual foods, so he wanted to taste these colorful  eggs for himself. But when he searched for scientific evidence, nowhere could he confirm the blue color of cooked murre eggs.

What he did find out is that  murres are cute little birds that look a lot like penguins. They live in large numbers in the north and as far south as California, off the coast in the Pacific Ocean.

During the gold rush, when fresh food was scarce for hordes of visitors out to find their fortune on the west coast of America, hunters prized the beautiful turquoise eggs of murres. Maybe people confused reports about the color of the shells with the color of the whites.  We do know that sulfur in eggs increases with age or when cooked at overly high heat, turning the whites blue. So maybe the  eggs just went bad!

But how could Vinny find out what fresh murre eggs really look and taste like? He couldn’t just go buy some at the local super market.  Thanks to You Tube, Vinny found a video showing some folks hunting murre eggs on steep cliffs in the Pacific where the murres breed. And he just asked them! Ryan’s sister  says, “Murre eggs…  are delicious. The [cooked] egg whites are the same color as a chicken’s, but the yolk is a little darker—almost an orangish-yellowish color.”  Maurice Analook tells Vinny the cooked yolks he tried had rings of red.

In Canada murres are a prized food source for people in Newfoundland. Stay tuned and Vinny will show you a recipe Newfoundlanders use for cooking up murre. He’ll also explain how you can make blue eggs for yourselves and astound your friends with your culinary skills. Eggsciting!