Fermentation as Meditation

I've been experimenting with fermentation recently as a way of adding more plants to my diet. My goal, eventually, is to have enough fermented veggies around so that I can have some with every meal. Fermentation, as most of you are aware, increases the bioavailability of the nutrients from raw foods while also giving the foods a more dynamic flavor profile. I personally like strong tastes in my food, so the added punches of spicy heat, sourness, and saltiness are welcome, beyond reasons of health.

After working full time, then training BJJ almost every night, I have limited time to make dinner. Sometimes, I don't get home until nine or ten at night and need to prepare my own foods. Having some fermented plants on hand, ready to eat, saves me a great deal of time. I can fire up my skillet, cook some meat, and shower, with the meal pretty much ready after I've toweled off.

I've been brining in pink sea salt and nothing else -- I prefer to take the simplest approach. I use the traditional German model of sauerkraut preparation. I've also started a no added salt, seaweed ferment -- it's bubbling up as vigorously as the salted preps but I haven't tried the results yet. I made it alongside a pink salt batch, to compare.

At some point, I would like to use ceramic pots with weights for my ferments, but I don't have the resources at this time, so I've been using mason jars and using a dowel rod to press down into the mix. I've created various mixes with ingredients including ginger, burdock root, turnips, garlic, green onions, cabbage, jicama, radishes, and lemongrass (hint: add a few stalks of bruised lemongrass to your cabbage sauerkraut).

What strikes me most about the whole process is how simple it is. I store the jars on baking sheets in my closet, which seems to keep a fairly consistent temp of between 69 and 71. It's also dark in there and away from other food that might carry molds or unsavory elements.

The other day I was walking up to my apartment with arms filled with mason jars and strainers and tubes and got a few curious looks from the neighbors. Too many episodes of Breaking Bad, perhaps?

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For the past few weeks, I'd been practicing a form of Zen meditation I learned at the White Lotus temple in Brooklyn. Because of added stress and my tight schedule, I realized that having another self-improvement task on my schedule was only making my feel more over-taxed than I already am. So I took a break from the meditation and decided to focus on the making of the ferments as a meditative act as well. Sitting on my floor, with my cutting board, slowly transforming three foot long burdock roots into tiny discs is relaxing, and leads to a sense of wholeness and peace that I would like to think is the goal of meditation as well. I've heard before that the spirit in which you make food changes the flavor itself. Of course, this is very unscientific, but on some level, I suppose, many of us believe that food "made with love" somehow tastes better than food produced to make money or to diminish the appetites. It seems as though my ferments have started bubbling and frothing and producing tasty brines quickly, and I'd like to think, against all rationality, that the spirit in which they were prepared -- with deliberation, attention, and care -- has somehow made for a better environment for the wee beasties that drive fermentation to thrive. Silly yes, but perhaps there's something to it?

How to Cook Liver for Finicky Adults

I don't personally love the taste of liver.

I just recognize it as one of the most nutrient dense foods available. It seems to contain abundant nutrients that are hard to find from other food sources, and seems to even be good for our skin. Additionally, it's extremely inexpensive.

So I've been experimenting with different ways of cooking it. This one absolutely blew me away.

I'm lucky enough to live in Lowell, MA. Yeah, I mean that. One of the great aspects of living in Lowell is that I have easy access to Laotian and Cambodian cuisine. A lot of the dishes from these cultures are paleo friendly without much tweaking. So I drew inspiration from what I'd sampled in area restaurants to come up with this dish. I didn't aim for it to be some sort of fusion dish -- I only wanted to use elements I'd found in Southeast Asian food to make the liver taste as good as possible.

I call this liver for adults because it's spicy. I'm sure you could modify it by making it less spicy, but anyone who would do such a thing would not be reading this job. Such a person would not dare.

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In a mixing bowl, prepare the spices:

1 tbsp cocoa power
2 tbsp fresh ground coriander seed
1 tsp fresh ground cumin seed
salt/pepper

Now, add the following to the bowl, all chopped finely:


4 stalks, parsley
4 green onions
1 stalk, lemongrass
2-3 sprigs of mint
Fistful of bitter greens, such as dandelion

And then:

A inch or so of peeled, fresh galanga root -- use ginger if you can't find any
Two serrano peppers, sliced medium and
Two thai bird peppers, red and yellow if possible just for looks, sliced thin thin thin.

This should create a mountain of greens in the bowl.

Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

Now add 1 pint of chicken livers to the bowl. It will looks like a very small amount of meat compared to the veggie mountain, but breath easy. This is how it should be.

Now, take your clean hands and dig in, mixing the mixture. This is not for the faint of heart. Liver doesn't look like ground beef. It looks, well, real. If you are squeemish about such things, get someone better looking than you are to mix it for you.

Make sure you wash your hands carefully immediately afterwards.

Place the entire contents of the mixing bowl into a cast iron or oven safe skillet, preheated, and then treated with a cooking oil of your choice.

Brown the mix for about four minutes and then place the entire contents into the skillet and brown for about four minutes. Don't stir it. Don't touch it. Don't even look at it. Just let it cook.

Now place the skillet into the oven, wait about ten minutes, and reduce the heat to 200. Let it go low and slow. Go read a book or do some kettlebells. Play with the dog. Come back in about an hour, erring on the side of cooking longer.

You can do a neat little reduction with a 1/4 cup of coconut water and the fresh juice of half a lime, or you can simply add the fresh lime juice straight to the meal while it's cooling.

If you want to serve it up as a kind of superchili, add some nice salsa, pickled hot peppers, parmesan cheese if you use dairy, and a few more sprinkles of the parsley.

If you want to go towards a Southeast Asian style, cut an iceberg lettuce head in half and use the leaves to scoop up the mix.

If you want to really impress your date, hard boil an ostrich egg and serve it inside that. Just make sure you really, really like them first. Otherwise, they might not leave you alone.

Before, After, and How This Came About

My before pic isn't great. I'm a photographer and used to be the guy in the crowd with a camera -- that means I got to delete or crop any images that weren't flattering, which was most of them.

Before pic details: Age: 38. 6'1". 250 lbs. Size 38 pants, size XXL shirt (normally XXl that is -- the shirt I'm wearing in the pic was, as you can see, too small for me, although it fits perfectly now).

After pic details: Age: 40. 182 lbs. Size 32 pants, size medium shirt.

Because I hurt my back almost two months ago, I have barely been able to work out. I do light walking, some push ups, and pull ups. That's it. Once my back heals up, I'll train anywhere from five to seven days a week at BJJ.

Last night, for dinner, I had two ten ounce steaks cooked in tallow. 1.5 Larabars. 1 Raw Revolution coconut bar. A handful of fresh, local carrots. A gingerade kombucha. A pint of fresh blueberries.

What I did for a workout yesterday: nothing. I lay on my ass all day, playing Gears of War 3 and resting my back so that I can get back to training.

Just talking a minute to note my progress. Put on a size medium shirt I found lying around the house today and that seemed like a milestone worth marking.

Spicy Pickled Kelp Yum Yum

Spicy Pickled Kelp

In Diane Sanfilippo’s excellent new book, Practical Paleo, she lists sea vegetables such as kelp as “super foods.” I know, I know. The term gets used laughably often and for all sorts of foodstuffs of questionable nutritive value. However, I wanted to add some seaweed into my diet for a number of reasons.

The first is for nutrition, of course. I’ve read about the much touted traditional Inuit diet, healthy but high in fats and almost completely devoid of vegetable matter, still contains seaweed.

The second reason is economy. A package of kelp at HMart, the Asian Supermarket, cost me two dollars. The single package revealed massive rolls of seaweed once re-hydrated. I am still eating my first batch kelp pickles, and I eat them every day.

The third reason is efficiency. Most nights, when I’m not injured (as I am now, stupid back), I get home late from training. After working an eight plus hour shift, then commuting 30 minutes to an hour to Mass BJJ, then commuting another 30 minutes or so back to Lowell, I sometimes get home as late as ten o’ clock at night. And I have to cook. I’m on a tight budget and I’m pretty strict with my paleo diet so it’s only on rare occasions now when I’ll eat out. If I could get my veggies ready for dinner with almost no prep time, then that would give me plenty of time to throw some beef kidneys into the oven at low temp, crack open a Graham Greene novel, and relax. This makes my dog happy as well.

Here’s the problem. I don’t particularly like the taste of seaweed. I’ve tried cooking it before and find it difficult to get an even bake throughout. It tends to be overcooked at the edges or undercooked in the middle. Even when I’ve gotten it right, I haven’t been pleased with the results. Yes, I love nori in miso soup or wrapped around sushi. And the precooked sheets, like those at Trader Joe’s, are delicious but contain some non-paleo ingredients.

So I decided to try pickling my kelp. I did it in two ways, one which you’ll find impossible to reproduce, but might enjoy reading about, and one which you’ll find effortless to make and enjoy.

This summer, I bought some ume plums at HMart on the recommendation of my friend Cole. I tried some. They were extremely bitter. At work the next day, I read about them and found out that they can are both seasonal and highly toxic if not prepared properly. So I stopped eating them, put them in a container with a brick on top, and set about pickling them according to a modified traditional method. Well, the pickled turned out way too salty, but they did produce, as I was told they would, an excellent vinegar with a nice, bright, citrus note. I put this vinegar in a mason jar and forgot about it.

Later in the summer, I was mentioning them to my friend Charlie, a professor at Fitchburg State and the baker of the only bread in the world for which I will break my diet.

I told him the taste profile and he came up with the inspired idea of pickling hot peppers in the vinegar. There was already enough salt, too much, so I diluted the vinegar, added some strips of fresh cut turmeric root, a few peppercorns, and some sliced serrano peppers. I still have some. They were so delicious that I limited myself to one or two a day. Plus, with the reputed health effects of ume plums, I wanted to savor and enjoy these pickles for as long as possible. Combined with the turmeric and peppercorns, I was hoping that the food would be somewhat anti-inflammatory, a big issue for me when I’m training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on a regular basis and dealing with orthopedic injuries.

So, when I got home with my kelp from HMart, I still had a giant quart mason jar of my leftover vinegar with some of the serranos still inside.

I decided I would try putting the kelp in the brine with some of the remaining hot peppers.

I soaked the sheets for twenty minutes, draining once at the ten minute mark -- perhaps overkill but I’ve made the mistake of using overly salty seaweed before -- then cut them into 2”x2” squares. I simply put the squares in the quart mason jar with the other ingredients, along with a few thai bird peppers I had lying around, and waited three days. They are very easy to cut. The process is only somewhat time consuming because of there are so many sheets to work with.

The results were fantastic. I eat them every night and haven’t tired of them yet. Sometimes I pull out big clumps of the seaweed because it has a refreshing quality after training. They are crisp and light tasting -- the spice comes mostly from being soaked along with the hot peppers and the burn is mild and pleasant.

But there was a problem.

There was so much seaweed from my little two dollar package that I couldn’t fit it all into the jar. In fact, I couldn’t even fit half of them in. So I drove off to Market Basket, picked up the best looking jars of different hot peppers I could find, and returned. I redistributed them into small mason jars and topped the seaweed with commercially made hot pickled peppers. The results were all different, but all good. I put some added chillis and turmeric root in some. As the jars got low, I combined them to come up with new flavor notes.

So that’s it -- if you wanted to try a simplified version of the same recipe, start with some kelp, soak and strain it, cut it into squares, and top it off with hot pickled peppers of your own choice in a mason jar. Perhaps the simplest pickling experiment you can think of even if it does mean using a commercial brine. In the future, I’ll experiment with adding fresh herbs like dill, as well as using different types of peppers.

Additionally, if you want to add a foraging element to the mixture, go out and find some wild grape leaves -- very easy to find in my beloved home state of Massachusetts.