Russian pickled cabbage

Pickled cabbage is my childhood favorite. When my mom comes to visit me as she does annually, pickled cabbage is at the top of the most-requested list. This time, I asked her to make me enough to last me through the winter. It's a wonderful side dish for any meal, lightening the palate between bites - or a guilt-free snack for any diet. The primary difference between pickled cabbage and sauerkraut is in the length of the fermenting process, days instead of weeks. As a result, it has a fresh salad-like taste instead of the overpowering "sauer" in sauerkraut.  The best part - it keeps forever (well, nearly) and it's quite simple.

Ingredients:

• Cabbage
• Iodine-free fine salt
• Carrots
• A big pot

When buying cabbage, make sure it looks crisp, and does not feel soft.  It is best to use an enamel pot so the fermenting process does not ferment the seasoning off your cookware.

Preparation:

Shred the cabbage. Shake the salt three times while chanting "Abracadabra!".  (Though optional, the step really puts you in the right mood.)

Place about two inches of cabbage in the pot. Grate 1/4 cup or so carrots loosely on top. Sprinkle a tablespoon of salt.  Repeat layer by layer. When finished, squash the cabbage as much as possible, using fists works well, until it gives juice.

Fermenting

Place a plate or lid on top of the final layer. It should fit inside the pot, leaving an inch or less around the edges.  Put something heavy: a brick, a rock, a jar of water on top, to keep the pressure on the cabbage.

Keep the pot at room temperature during the fermenting process.

Each day, open the plate and poke deep holes in the cabbage to allow gas to escape. Press the plate and the weight back on.

Fermenting usually takes 4-5 days. Don't hesitate to taste it. Longer fermenting process will result in more sour cabbage.

Place in jars, squeezing out most of the juice and refrigerate. Fill the jars to the top, squashing the cabbage - they'll keep longer. Certainly for 3-4 months.

Serving

I like pouring a little oil over the cabbage and will occasionally chop up some onion to give it an extra kick. Use it in recipes in place of sauerkraut for a less overpowering flavor, but otherwise similar results. Cabbage is a wonderful replacement of potatoes and grains in beef and vegetable soups in general. Pickled cabbage makes it slightly sour for a classic russian soup щи (shi). (Here is a random recipe I found to give you the general idea.)

Enjoy!

Reference

I have found a youtube video describing the making of pickled cabbage. It looks very similar to what my mom does. One exception is, my family does not hesitate making a large pot while the lady recommends a small amount.  Just don't forget to press down on the cabbage each day, allowing it to give off more juice, and make holes!

Also, the Choose-Healthy-Food blog article, which includes this video has a variety of tips on making/troubleshooting the process.  I hope it helps!

Simplifying: an almost Paleo diet

Mark Sisson's newsletter this week says:

It's nice to have goals, but you have to have a plan of attack to succeed. Full health is achievable, certainly within a year. But break it down, start with a few specifics. Make this "the year I stop drinking soda!" or "the year I go camping once a month!" Let total health blossom as a result of achievable goals.  

For me, this was the encouragement I needed to proceed with a plan that I had made for myself. A while ago, I blogged about the advice I gave my dad to start paleo gently. Recently, I have taken a page out of my own book and relaxed the requirements I had set for myself initially, focusing on the following principles:

1. Paleo is a high-fat high-protein diet. I tell my kids, "meat is what gives you energy to do the things you want." For me, what I want is to be a successful parent who is not too exhausted for the patience, creativity and physical activity the job requires. I can also use the extra kick a good Paleo meal gives me for my after-hours personal and professional activities.
2. Grain is not acceptable as a food group. However, I will use it as an herb, if you will: boy, does flour-based gravy taste good! And while Trader Joe's sweet potato fries are far better than anything I can create, they contain gluten to give them the shape and crispiness.
3. High sugar fruits should be avoided. But fruits, particularly the healthy variety, can be part of many quick and wonderful snacks. Better than bagels, eh?
4. A little healthier is better. I just don't sweat it so much any more. When we go to have sushi, I get some sashimi, but the sushi rolls are my favorites. I've quit torturing myself and eat the whole thing.
5. There is such a thing as healthy desert: dark chocolate, fruits/berries with whipped cream, cheesecake, even meringues. I want just plain unabashed decadence to be part of my lifestyle.

This is enabling me to cooperate with my non-paleo family in creating meals. As a result of making this change, I am working with my live-in mother-in-law and depending on her to create meals that are pretty good, instead of facing the lonely task of planning, shopping and cooking strict paleo.

One of the tricky parts she is actually helping me is: introducing more fat into the already-cooked meals. My husband is trying to lose weight in the mainstream way, by avoiding fat and counting calories. So how do we sit down at a single table?

Here are some ideas I have worked out:

1. Adding butter into sauces at the table.
2. Rendered (which I figured out means fried) salt pork fat, resulting in delicious bacon bits (only much better than bacon) sprinkled in with the food.
3. When we bake chicken, we use a mix of low-fat white meat and high-fat dark.
4. I sprinkle almond slices & shredded coconut on top of meat sauces
5. Avocado is frequently a good side.
6. My dad is going to buy me some Russian salt pork, called "salo". I remember it from my childhood. It is intended to be eaten raw, on top of a sandwich, or fried up like bacon bits. The difference is, whether raw or rendered, it melts in your mouth, losing the stringiness of bacon due to a different salting process. I have to write about it once i have some!
7. If all else fails, I round out the meal with a high-fat desert (see dessert listings above).

I feel good again. My kids are not aggravating me. Even my mother-in-law is pretty good company. Yesterday I was completely sleep-deprived, having stayed up half the night for no good reason.  I was falling off my feet - but I never lost my temper, went shopping, cooked dinner and passed out cuddling with the babies. I will put this get-back-to-paleo operation as an unqualified success thus far.

Fruit indulgences

The hardest thing for me to give up on Paleo is fruit. As far as I am concerned, world peace has got nothing compared to a steady supply of grapes.  I am currently on a mission to make Paleo easier and more comfortable for me.  Here is how I have integrated fruit.

1. Grape fruit - the red kind - turns out to be absolutely delicious!
2. On apples, I stick to Granny Smith as a low-sugar option. They've always been my favorite anyway.
3. Berries berries berries. Pricey, but well worth it.
4. The most important discovery: fruit is always better with a good doze of fat & protein:
• Apples & nut butter. I make a sandwich of two thin slices of apples with nut butter inside. Yum!
• Whipped cream. Not enough sugar to count and it turns a sin into a win.  :-)
• How about both? Yesterday, it was pear + peanut butter (I didn't have any other kind, *sniff*) + whipped cream. What a delight!
• Yogurt. Everyone knows, it works well with berries, but oh my god peaches!!! Then sprinkle roast coconut on top.  You could almost call that a meal. Or, if dinner fails - a backup option.
• Heavy cream. When I was a little girl, I used to love eating berries in a bowl of milk, as a cereal. It's even better - and way more filling with cream.

So, I've relaxed and I am enjoying it. If I had a good meal, I won't turn my sweet fruit tooth down. A few days ago, a friend sent over a fruit basket filled with all my favorites, including a pineapple! Have you ever had pineapple with whipped cream? "... you should. For this is fun and fun is good!" just as the doctor [Seuss] ordered.

How I have failed at paleo

I have been off paleo for the last two or three weeks as a result of an explicit decision to give up in order to simplify my life.  It did not come as a great surprise that instead of simplifying it, I found myself in a worse slump than I had been in before and at this stage, I am gathering personal strength to get back to what I now believe even stronger, is a better way of eating, functioning and living.

By way of preparing for it, I want to explain what happened as much for myself as for those who may be reading this.

So, what's so hard about Paleo?  For me, it had nothing to do with deprivation.  Really, that's one thing I never experienced.  It was pretty easy to give up sugar, grains & potatoes.  In this sense, Paleo is the best diet in the world: your body adjusts and begins to guide you toward the better choices as long as you are focused on the right way to live and eat.

However, the right way to eat involves, as any Paleo enthusiast will tell you, creating meals out of ingredients as close as possible to their natural form. This means, no bagels, no TV dinners, no canned soups - none of the grocery store conveniences that make meal preparation a ten-minute breeze.  Instead, you have to plan ahead, show in quantity, design meals and never find yourself with an empty refrigerator at meal time. True, with practice, it is possible to develop a rhythm such that actual preparation time is not onerous. Still, no one will argue that cooking paleo is a small commitment.

I am a stay-at-home mom and the hardest part of the job turned out not to be sleepless nights, potty training or tantrums.  It's keeping the house, putting meals on the table and cleaning up after!  Each time the complexity of my life increased, I my eating suffered.  Worse yet, in the absence of good food, I did not have the energy to get organized, shop, cook and get back on top of things...

Going off paleo was thrilling the first few days as bagels & cream cheese were suddenly an available option when I was hungry. A week into it, though, my general well-being began a downward spiral.  I was tired, short of breath, bad-tempered and a general sense of exhaustion of life overcame me. Now, at the end of week two, as I am looking at what I have done, the choice seems clear: get off my ass and make a god-damn meal!  Today, tomorrow, for the rest of the week...

Still, I am aware of the enormity of the task.  Three meals a day every day.  Sure, some will be left-overs, but the discipline required is above anything I have taken on before.

That said, I am coming out of hiding and would like to tell the story of my attempt to organize my life and doing better (or worse), and telling primarily this story over the coming year.

Paleo: a gentle start

My father is turning eighty this year. He has the gammit of the normal maladies that affect old age: heart desease, high blood pressure, weakness in his legs, general tiredness.  Yet, he has an unbeatable sense of life that makes you cherish his presence and want to fight to preserve that life as a value to yourself and all those around.

I watched him deteriorate over the last six months.  Always talking about being tired, giving up major values to avoid extra driving, even his sense of life began to dim. Now, I am a huge fan of Paleo.  Yet, I do not have sufficient knowledge to stand up to all the medical advice he is receiving and ask him to listen to my new theories in the face of serious problems and disease.  One day, though, I had had enough. Hearing my dad simply decline and disintegrate, I remembered a scene in Atlas Shrugged, when Dagny shoots the guard not for resisting her, but for failing to make a decision or pick a side.

"Dad, I said, I have something I'd like to share with you..." And so it began.

The difference in his demeanor was startling after two weeks.  Actually, it was quite funny: "Dad, how are you feeling? Can you tell a difference in your energy?"  "Me? Well, you know me.  I've been full of energy my whole life! I mean, certainly, I might take a nap on occasion, but I am not one to complain."  I laughed with relief... Paleo was working.  He sounded like he was himself again!

Today I would like to share some of the specific advice I gave my dad to help him ease into Paleo without going through some of the difficulties that I first faced. Perhaps, this will be useful to those who would like to win family members over to this side or are contemplating moving forward themselves but can't quite make the leap.  I also found this advice extremely useful during my pregnancy (12 weeks now and feeling like a million bucks!) when things got a bit tougher.


"Dad, Paleo is different. It isn't about what you don't eat as much as it is focused on what you should eat. And what we eat is the whole animal.  Make that the focus. Don't give up your carbs too fast. Your body needs to learn to extract the good long-lasting energy out of fat and protein and it'll take a few weeks. So don't go low-carb. Go high-animal.

"Be sure that each meal is centered about the animal.  Eat that part first - following up with vegetables and other carbs if you do not feel full. Your body might resist this change and will want some short-term energy from carbs to feel like things are going ok.  I still love finishing my meals with yogurt and berries, though it is no longer absolutely necessary.

"Avoid grains. Giving up grains cold turkey is hard. They are known to actually be addictive. So stick to small portions of your favorite bread - with a nice hunk of meat on top, of course! Immediately give up bowls of pasta, rice and other big grainy side dishes with little nutritional value.

"Drop the potatoes.  They are not substantially nutritionally different from candy due to their high glycemic index. I know you love squash and its relatives. Try out sweet potatoes - I grew to love them.  I know my step mom makes yummy califlower that's a nutritional wonder compared to its pale competitors. Continue exploring different vegetables each week. Forage far and wide. Your taste palates will change as you continue Paleo and you will crave nutritious options while things that are bad for you will strike you as yucky.

"Finally, give up sweets to the extent possible. Your body won't miss them. No side-effects there! And enjoy yourself. Paleo is about good yummy food, not sacrifice.  If you sin, no need for a confessional.  Just find a yummy animal to decorate your next meal - and let bygones be bygones."

I love you, dad, and I hope that you decorate this world we live in, putting a smile on the faces of those who meet you for a good long time!