Month: January 2020

Fermented Vegetables

I am sure you have heard the recent trend of fermenting foods. It has become an entirely new business. We can get these goods in almost all the stores nowadays.

Where I come from, our tradition is to eat fermented cabbage, known as sauerkraut, and fermented cucumbers, known as pickles. My mum used to make amazing sauerkraut salad with freshly grated apple and olive oil. Delicious! 

However, fermenting has existed in most of the cultures for generations as it is one of the oldest methods of preserving food.

People thought of it in the times when there was no fridges and they used fermentation to let their foods last longer.

This process not only prolongs the use by date and enhances the taste of the food, but also has a lot of health benefits for our body.

By consuming produce containing live cultures, we absorb bacteria that helps us digest food. The same bacteria, while going through our system, produces a lot of protecting compounds, enriching our inner ecosystem, guarding us from the harmful pathogens and improving our digestion.  It can help with conditions like constipation, diarrhea, reflux, intestinal inflammation, IBS and even vaginal infections.

Live cultures are also awesome to help build back our gut flora that gets destroyed by antibiotics or even by consumption of highly processed foods.

There is a direct link between the health of our digestive system, it’s functioning, and overall immunity of our body.  By strengthening our gut we totally enhance our immunity. We get much stronger and are ready to fight different viruses and bacterias. 

This is also a great way to have nutritious foods, fruits and veggies, on hand during the cold season when not much fresh produce is available.

Especially during that time of the year, remember to keep your body strong and immune to fight flus and other viruses.

Fermented vegetables like sauerkraut, pickles, kimchi and others are a great way of getting vitamins and nutrients into our body and at the same time improving the functioning of our guts.

But fermented foods are not only veggies.

We can enrich our diet also with fermented grains, sourdough bread, yoghurts (made out of dairy but also for example coconut), tempe (fermented tofu), fermented drinks like kombucha and much much more.

Almost every culture has their staple fermented food.

I encourage you to experiment with a wide range of it.

Here is a super easy recipe for fermented Jerusalem artichoke. also known as topinambur, but you can use this method to ferment almost any vegetable: carrots, beets, onions, pumpkin, cucumbers, cauliflower, etc

FERMENTED JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE

around 1/2 kg of Jerusalem artichokes, washed well and sliced 

(try to use eco products)

4 pieces of turmeric, chopped roughly

1 l of lukewarm water

3 tbsp of coarse sea salt 

1l clean jar

  1. Pack Jerusalem artichokes and turmeric, firmly, into the jar
  2. Prepare brine by dissolving 3 tbsp of salt in 1l of lwater (if using fine salt use less) 
  3. Pour brine over the vegetables. Let the water cover the veggies completely.
  4. Leave 2 cm between the top level of the brine and the top of the jar. You can use a weight to push the veggies down, if necessary (for example you can use baking weights or a smaller jar, filled with water)
  5. Close the lid and stand on your counter for 3-7 days, burp everyday (open to let the air out and close again)
  6. From day 3 onwards try the veggies daily and if you decide it is fermented enough to your taste transfer the jar to the fridge, it will slow down the fermentation
  7. Enjoy on salads, in bowls, on sandwiches etc

The Power of Gratitude

 As I was setting my intentions for the New Year, 2020, I started with a reflexion on 2019. What was supporting me last year??

It was a very beautiful but also challenging year for me, filled with difficult moments and a lot of adjustments had to be made. I realised that what really kept me going, helped me see just the blessings, and made me go only forward was GRATITUDE.

I know a lot has been said lately on that and we hear it everywhere. I also have been practicing it for a long time now, but last year was special. I literally lived by it everyday. When I didn’t know what to do in certain situations that seemed hard to resolve, I used gratitude over and over again. There is so much to be grateful for. We ALL have so much to be grateful for. Starting with simple things like running water or clean water to drink, food on our plate, clothes to wear, washing machine to wash it, roof over our head, people around us: friends, partners, children, then of course health, love, peace, kindness, nature around us…..the list is endless.

This brings me back to the times when I lived in Lagos, Nigeria. I have really learned a lot there in respect to gratitude from local people. I have seen so many situations where people had next to nothing and lived in poverty however, they were still grateful for being alive, for food, and for their health. They danced, sang and made jokes on a daily basis. This was so inspiring to watch. In my culture I was not used to it. In Africa I have seen people living without running water, without electricity, without enough food to last them till the end of the month, yet they still were cheerful, grateful, kind and helpful. And somehow they would always make it work. What kept them going was gratitude paired with profound trust in higher power. (I will write on the latter in a separate blog).

And that is how it works.

By just acknowledging a couple of positive things that stood out for us on a particular day, we put ourselves into a spiral of positive energy that we can ride on wherever we want. 

Acknowledging and appreciating what we have, being thankful for it, makes other things just flow into our life. Suddenly everything starts falling into place.

If you still have doubts try it yourself.

PRACTICE:

Everyday (best first thing in the morning or last thing at night) tell yourself 3-5 things you were grateful for on that particular day or the previous day.  You can also write it down in a ‘Gratitude Journal’.

Do it for at least 1 month and see how you feel. At the same time try to restrain yourself from complaining too much. Anytime you feel like it, just start reminding yourself your blessings over and over again.

Try it out, it works like magic!