NUTRIENT DENSE COOKING ... and a GIVEAWAY!

Nutrient-dense homemade dressing for all occasions

I feel like I spent a long time searching high and low for answers to my food and health questions, in my observations and queries that have come out of my own health and eating struggles and that of those around me. It isn't until hearing about the Weston A. Price Foundation a few years ago and their approach to whole foods with a traditional bent, when my daughter was in preschool that some of the information about food I was hearing from the outside world was starting to jive with what I had going on in my own body through observations and long pondering, not to mention that felt like it resonated with what I had heard from my own parents and my Grand-Maman Lena too.  It was like a beacon of light that shone the way in the right direction, at least for me. 

Fast-forward a few years, and I am now knee-deep in the study and observation of where food and health intersect and do this diligent research in the hopes of finding answers to these questions I continue to have. As a Holistic Nutritionist and food (and foodie!) lover, why is one thing good for one person, but not necessarily a good idea for their neighbour? Why would someone who has been eating well for the last two decades appear to still have such health troubles? In the spirit of keeping it brief, I will save you from my long list of questions.

In my travels brought on by all of my queries, there are some bits that fit and others that don't. For me. And different ones for different people, clients, friends and family members. The one truth that really resonates with me in the middle of all this, is that EVERYONE CAN BE BETTER SERVED BY EATING NUTRIENT-DENSE FOODS and by slowly changing their food rules away from consuming food-like substances to stocking their fridge and pantry with food that your grandmother would recognize. One item at a time. I like Michael Pollan's take on this: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.  Oh and yes, one of those rules he speaks of in the fabulous book Food Rules is to not eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Solid advice. This information is behind one of my favourite tags, #JERF. Just Eat Real Food. No gimmicks. No counting. Just eating. And real fooding.

What does it mean to eat Nutrient Dense Food? Choose those foods that are packed with micro- and macro-nutrients (meaning vitamins and minerals, plus carbs or fats or proteins) that would be deemed from good sources. Sometimes it's hard to figure out if a food comes from a good source. As your nutritionist, I can certainly help you navigate these waters, figuring out what your personalized Foods and Key Ingredients may be, and where to source these ingredients and foodstuffs like locally pastured beef or sprouted grains, or figuring whether or not to buy organic or conventional.  

Olive oil and balsamic vinegar samples from Blue Door

For today's blog post, I want to highlight a fantastic local-to-Calgary supplier of quality olive oils and vinegars. If you haven't heard of Blue Door Oil & Vinegar yet, you are in for a treat. Their slogan hits the nail on the head: Your New Secret Ingredient. Their olive oil is top shelf, excellent and fresh quality. Part of their work is to educate consumers on the health benefits of olive oil, and the questions you need to ask in order to find out if the olive oil you are purchasing is of fresh and good quality. (Tom Mueller, a columnist with the New Yorker exposed the fraud that some olive oils are not what they appear to be back in 2011.) I assure you that the olive oil you purchase from The Blue Door are indeed true and pure, fresh and absolutely packed with micronutrients (antioxidants!) and macronutrients (healthy anti-inflammatory fats!). We're talking nutrient dense foods here folks, to fuel your very best selves!

Nutrient dense lunch fixings

I am so pleased to be a part of Blue Door Oil & Vinegar's Brand Ambassador Program. They are a family-owned local business that has at their heart providing YOU with the ingredients you need for nutritious and delicious home-made food. They sent me some tasty samples to try out and come up with some recipes. They have very graciously also offered a giveaway to lucky readers of good food + you!  Read to the end of the post for the how-to on how to get your name in the hat for the giveaway.

Today's recipe is for a nutrient-dense salad dressing that serves as a great base for all kinds of salads. I whipped a batch of this Easy Homemade Mayo and added some curry powder, chopped celery and apples and served it on a bed of the greens that were still left in my garden as of last week, along with a few flower stragglers that hadn't yet succumbed to the frost. (That'd be borage and nasturtiums. Eat beauty! Eat flowers!) I added a tin of smashed sardines (the original tuna salad!) to increase the anti-inflammatory fats and offer a solid protein. I like to use sardines instead of tuna as they are lower on the food chain, and as a result have a lower level of heavy metal toxins. Plus, the brand I use is packed in tins that do not contain BPA. Hooray for nixing the endocrine disruptors!

This is NUTRIENT DENSITY.

EASY HOMEMADE NUTRIENT DENSE DRESSING
Based on a recipe found in Sally Fallon's book "Nourishing Traditions", the bible of all things WAPF
1 cup creme fraiche (recipe here)
2 egg yolks (from pastured eggs only! not conventionally raised chickens, to eliminate possible contamination from E.coli)
1/4 cup good quality olive oil (I chose the EVOO from Blue Door)
1/4 cup Sicilian Lemon White Balsamic Vinegar
1/2 tbsp honey
1 tbsp dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon of good quality sea salt
1/4 teaspoon of pepper

THE HOW-TO: Put all ingredients in a glass jar. Shake the jar until all is well combined. Tuck in the fridge until ready to eat. Will last in the fridge for 3-5 days.

VARIATIONS: swap out the Sicilian Lemon White Balsamic for another vinegar to change the flavour; same goes for the olive oil, you may want to choose a flavoured one here in order to make your guests ask you 'what IS that flavour?'; or try adding 2 teaspoons of curry powder and mash it in with a can of sardines as I did for a nutrient-dense lunch option; or chop fresh herbs like parsley and chives to make a yummy dip for veggies or crackers. 

Giveaway to one lucky reader!

In their sample box they sent along for me to go play with my food, there was this packaged duo just waiting for a new home. Which means only one thing...

It's GIVEAWAY time!

Here's how to get your name in the hat: 'like' this post, and leave a comment on what you would do with this oil and vinegar combo if you were to win it. You can also leave word with a simple change you have implemented in your food regime lately that would qualify as increasing the nutrient density of your meals. Contest closes Friday November 6th at midnight, so get your entry in by commenting below before the bell tolls midnight. 

Contest is open to everyone. Now go play with your food! (And thanks to Bruce and Courtney at Blue Door for providing us with good quality foods and flavours to play with!)

A MONTH OF PUTTING UP THE HARVEST - Day 5

Bug ravaged and hail damaged greens. Not all is lost, my friend!

To end this first week's roll call of how I am putting up the harvest 2015, I am going to make plenty from the spoils of Mother Nature. Well, not really spoils, but to some may be seen as spoils. See, here in Calgary this week, we've been hammered by a few big storms as they have swept through our town with deluges and flash floods and huge garden-decimating hail. There was even a tornado spotted just outside of the city this week. I don't know how it is where you live, but our summers here are so very brief that for one to dedicate your time and love to growing a vegetable patch in this so very short season (always turbulent; hey, it's the Prairies!), it's pretty heart-breaking when in one fell swoop of Mother Nature's whim, your hard work and dedication can be wiped out just like that.  

Know that not all is lost. I was visiting a friend when the second hail storm hit, and we sat open-mouthed at the windows watching the downpour, hoping our gardens and cars and roofs would be spared. I remembered a particularly devastating storm from last summer where I had lost most of my greens to big pock marks from hail, and grabbed a plastic grocery bag and ran out the back door. My friend Liz and I went through her garden patch and pulled out all of the dark leafy greens that had been damaged (either by the storm or by little critters) and quickly filled that bag up until it was overflowing. Resolved to add to my downtrodden loot, I headed home to find that my patch had been spared this time around.

Never you mind. This is the pile on my butcher block I saved from Liz' garden. In it, there are two kinds of kale (siberian is THE BEST), nasturtium greens, amaranth leaves, swiss chard and spinach.(Thanks for letting me raid/forage your garden, my friend!)

I took those greens, folded each leaf in two and cut that middle tough stem out of each leaf.  When you're dehydrating greens, I find it is always best to discard the tough stem, as they will end up being super chewy bits in your finished product. Never a delectable thing, I assure you.

So I dutifully chopped all stems, and loaded up the 8 trays of my dehydrator. You can do this with all kinds of garden greens, from tatsoi, broccoli and cauliflower leaves, kale, swiss chard, beet greens, collards, amaranth, lettuces, mizuna, arugula, nasturtiums, parsley, whatever the hail and bugs have tried to claim for their own, claim it back.

Best birthday gift I ever got. Love my dehydrator.

I loaded the trays up, turned the contraption on to 105F (in order to preserve the nutrients and enzymes, anything under 118F is good). It certainly didn't take very long, about 3 or 4 hours later, the leaves were completely dried out.

Crispy dried hail- and bug-damaged greens from Liz' garden.

This is the rocket scientist part. I put all of the greens in my big food processor fitted with the blade, and minced those greens until they were down to teeny flakes. And then I bottled them, a jar for me, and a jar for Liz. Total end volume: 1 cup of dried greens flakes for a full plastic grocery bag. 

Putting up the hail and bug damaged garden greens harvest. Still good food for you. #harvest2015

Tuck these babies in your pantry, and pull them out when you want to add a nutritional punch to your smoothies, or sprinkle on your pizzas, add these to a soup or sauce or stew.  Wouldn't it be good on top of popcorn, along with a dusting of parmesan and lemon juice? Delicious.

Also. Know that once a plant gets damaged by either pests or hail, it starts producing protective compounds in order to ward off predators and as it turns out, these chemical compounds increase the nutritional punch of your produce. So go ahead, eat those damaged greens. 

Incidentally, should you not have a dehydrator at your disposal, you can certainly do this in your oven or toaster oven, with the temperature set to the lowest possible, with the door cracked open to let the moisture out.  There is always someone looking to get rid of their dehydrator on kijiji, or at a garage sale. Keep your eyes peeled!