Learn to feed yourself.

It is incredibly empowering to realize that we - little old ourselves - have the ability to control our own wellbeing, and all it takes is paying a little more attention, and remembering to take care. This is idea simple, perhaps obvious, though all too often overlooked.

While I’d like to avoid giving Michael Pollan any more airtime, I have to admit that his concise rules for eating “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” is pretty spot on. I would add one more line to these rules, “Learn how to feed yourself.”
Food is our fuel. That’s all we’ve got, so we better know what to do with it.

I went through a long period of being pretty unhealthy and unhappy. I’ll expand on this later, but it was a great realization to have when I figured out that a poor, or rather unexamined diet was a huge contributing factor to feeling just plain awful all the time. I began to keep track of how I felt after eating what foods and when, and I quickly made some solid cause and effect observations. By many standards I had a great diet; vegetarian and mostly vegan with lots of fruits and veggies, usually bread or rice for grains, and beans, tofu or seitan for protein. The way I was balancing these foods and this overall diet just wasn’t working for me though, and as soon as I began to watch their effects I understood why.

I know that my body just doesn’t like beans very much, they make me fell sluggish and don't seem to leave my system for days. Too much dairy makes me want to hurl. Greasy food gives me a headache. If I eat anything with a high wheat gluten content, seitan especially, it feels like an iron ball in my stomach, same goes for white bread. Yoghurt is the greatest thing on the planet, and everything fermented rules (yes, I include good beer and wine). Spicy stuff is amazing. Tea, herbals, blacks and green, rules. There are many, many delicious grains out there, and I like to use them all. I eat plants in all colors. For now, a 100% non-meat diet just isn’t for me. I drink a lot of water.
I totally still drink way too much coffee, and I like really, really like good beer.
That’s cool. Vices are very important.

Edging away from my eating habits was hard, especially since one of the biggest culprits seemed to be wheat, which is very difficult to escape in the western diet. Celiac disease, which is essentially an auto-immune deficiency triggered by an intolerance to gluten, is terribly under diagnosed and it is estimated that 1 out of every 150 Americans has this potentially life-threatening condition. According to the Mayo Clinic wheat is one of the eight most allergy-causing foods, and symptoms can range from indegestion to asthma and skin reactions (www.foodallergyinitiative.org). The inclusion of wheat in so much of our food makes it an element we rarely think twice about. It is so common that the thought of a wheat allergy doesn't even seem possible.
Well, it is. Take that into consideration if that delicious bagel you had for breakfast has thrown off your system for the rest of the day, and probably the next day too.

As a vegetarian I quickly adopted preparing most of my own meals, but I didn't become very creative with my cooking until these other dietary factors became apparent. I loved baking, and had always been intrigued by vegan baking especially. Vegan baking is a total puzzle, you must avoid butter, eggs and dairy milk, all so key to such a big world of delicious baked good things. Tweaking a recipe to veganize it takes serious critical thought; the work of figuring out what substitutions will work with others and predicting how a taste or texture will be affected is actually pretty fun, really! I have always been incapable of following a recipe anyway, so any excuse to veer off course and experiment a bit is alright with me. Once I figured out that wheat should no longer take center stage, my whole thinking really had to change.

Any grain can be ground and made into flour. The gluten in wheat flour is what produces that great thick melt in your mouth chewiness, and unfortunately you just can't get that texture with anything else. But who says that's got to be the goal? White bread gets boring. Every grain offers different tastes and textures, so why not take the leap and try em all. I like to use a few different flours in combination, and I do usually include a wheat flour as a small portion of that. I use eggs freely now, although that is certainly not my default. If I think a flax seed egg substitute (1 TBS ground flax seed + 3 TBS water) would be more yummy I'll go ahead and use that without question.

I like to bake on a whim, which often leaves me limited to whatever is in the house at the time. I'll take an existing recipe for it's basic proportions of wet to dry to rising agent and go from there. Most of the time I have pretty good results, sometimes it's inedible. It happens. I learn, and try to do it a little better next time.

I'll be posting these little oven fresh inventions as I concoct them. Try em for yourself, or better yet take these for inspiration and create something on your own!