Happy Breakfast Guests, Housemade Grand Marnier Vanilla Extract and the MeDi….

Sometimes we find ourselves with a dietary mixed table ~ a couple who are trying the Vegan lifestyle for a month and a couple who aren’t. Donn and I get into the kitchen at 8 a.m. for 10 o’clock breakfast service hoping to make everybody happy at breakfast. 

Donn has discovered his inner chef and has progressed from being a prep chef to dressing the oven roasted potatoes, seasoning them perfectly, himself. He has brought the majority of the new gadgets lately and loves his de Buyer mandolin that creates the thinly sliced onions to top this morning’s paleo pizza – recipe to follow for both vegan and regular variations.

His prep-chef routine doesn’t work for part of the week when he leaves for our Olympia Optometry office- Martin Way Vision Center, but for most of his local eye doctor week at Medical Vision Center (www.medicalvisioncenter.com) in Morton, he starts the day in the kitchen with me and ends it at the clinic. While guests often sleep on, we’re creating fantastic memories playing in the kitchen together…

We all wear lots of hats these days! I was appointed Associate Editor of the National Health Federation’s (www.thenhf.com) magazine, Health Freedom News, so I will often be writing for NHF or lining up authors while the pizza crust is on its first bake. Check out my article on Dry Eye in the Spring issue of HFN and learn to solve it naturally, once and for all. Magazines are free with your membership of $36 for the year and some of you will also wish to publish in this international, sophisticated magazine.  Call me if you have an article to share…

This morning, we make one gluten free Vegan paleo pizza crust using ground flax seeds mixed with water as the egg substitute and one crust with eggs. Each will receive the topping suited best for the desires of the guests, and we end up making everyone happy. We start with the Sweet Breakfast Quinoa that I shared with you before- only now, since we went to the Hawaiian Vanilla Company on the big island bringing home beans with us and I learned to make our own Vanilla Extract- this time we finish the quinoa with a healthy splash – okay, splashes…of Grand Marnier Vanilla. Yes! This is the ‘elevator’ that takes it to the next level. Everyone loves it!

 We have a large bottle ‘brewing’ of Vanilla Rum and Vanilla Vodka and also the Queen of all Vanillas: Grand Marnier. They each add their own special signature to the dishes we prepare. Do you know the Vanilla Orchid only blooms once a year? It is hand pollinated on that singular day and is one of the most expensive spices in the World…Fascinating!

You can keep a bottle of vanilla extract going for years. Just keep adding the same liquor. Back in the Prohibition Era, because people started drinking Vanilla Extract as liquor, they diluted it with water by 40%

The Owner’s Son Teaching Us The Art of Vanilla Bean Production…Another Plan for Adytum

. So if you want the real thing…get some beans, open and scape the seeds down into the liquor of your choosing and drop the beans in- three to a large bottle. Six months later you have The Real Deal! And seriously, what a difference. You can buy directly if you’re ready to try your own and you will not regret it: http://www.hawaiianvanilla.com/

Today, with half Vegan guests, the traditional ‘Egg on the Half-shell’ is transformed into a base of roasted Portobello mushroom with slivers of garlic, garlic powder, sea salt, olive oil and Italian Seasoning. Each option is topped with the same sauté of mushrooms, red bell pepper and garlic highly seasoned. We only use sea salt at Adytum…one is topped with Vegan Cheese and the other with Asiago. Again, all guests are happy. You can sauté all this off with Pesto too, but it has a bit of Parmesan in it.

I’ve done all the diets…raw, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian 

which includes fish in a vegetarian diet, traditional SAD (Standard American Diet)….In my perfect, idealistic World no one has to pass up a dish at the table because, “I can’t eat that…” and in my ultimate perfect World, we can actually eat out at restaurants and have amazing meals anywhere, anytime because GF and vegetarian are mainstream. My chef son, Phillip advised me that to order vegetarian at the average restaurant was to get options that have, shall we say, been around in the freezer for awhile? 

That isn’t appealing…why can’t they realize there isn’t “one size fits dietary ALL” out there?? Get real, this is 2012 not 1960. I remember when basil hit mainstream and I thought, “Where have you been all my life, baby??” We know how to make sure everyone leaves not only full, but nurtured, nourished and pleasantly surprised at how good ‘healthy, (modified to GF) Mediterranean based foods can be!”

 The Hale Project is something I have discussed frequently- Google it if you haven’t heard it yet or check out this link: http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/292/12/1433.full.pdf    . The study took people aged 70-90 years of age with active diseases in progress. After ten years’ adherence on the MeDi, with no smoking and moderate red wine/moderate exercise there was an amazing 50% reduction in ALL causes of death and disease. This isn’t a vegetarian or dairy free diet, but realize that lamb and sheep/goat cheese and fish are different (i.e. healthier…) from our choices in America. The molecular size of the milk from sheep and goats is different from cattle,  and European standards are often so much higher and the food cleaner…You never heard this on this diet promoted as being both healing and preventive for major diseases on the nightly news, did you? If Big Pharma produced a drug that promised these same results, you would have heard about that though. We need to invest in our own health. No one is going to do it for us.

Health begins in the kitchen – really in your bowels with good bacteria…and in the mind and our will- our freedom to choose living, health promoting foods. We’re currently immersing in fermented foods to restore the proper terrain/terroire of the gut and I’ll share in future blogs our smelly kitchen concoctions…or you can share with us as so many of you already know how to make many fermented things we are just exploring. “Wild Fermentation” is now downloaded on our Kindle…Donn is also playing with the dehydrator again- this time making Kale Chips with a Cashew Cream Chili Sauce that is fantastic! Friends popped by this afternoon and finished them off not realizing they were full of active enzymes and full of health.  They are better than any chips we’ve had. Olympia Vegan shared that link on You Tube and this is how we all grow in health…By caring with love for the health of every one of us…iron sharpens iron!

Donn’s Dehydrator Kale Chips With a Cashew Creme and Chili Finish- Excellent!

It’s amazing how many people really love the paleo pizza crust. With Cross-Fit pushing paleo in the form of meat (read the latest studies on red meat…Hmmm. Someone is after looks before health there… the main cause probably being iron overload) it’s nice to find this morning’s table devoted to Paleo with the protein in the crust and in the quinoa- a complete protein there much the same as eggs or meat. We love introducing people to things they haven’t tried yet- or tried in that form. We all help each other and so many of our guests are introducing us to recipes that we turn out loving. Adytum is a magnet for this healthy exchange. 

Despite some early predictions that we would fail unless we offered “a complete English breakfast” (Google that one…) we are holding our own as a vegetarian, gluten free kitchen. Even dedicated meat eaters don’t miss it because the food is savory, prolific and satisfying. We are open to growth and change and would love to hear YOUR favorite recipes. One guest left me with a Pumpkin Paleo Muffin that actually did come from the Cross-Fit people that I’ll try tomorrow with guests here. We appreciate these ‘gifts’ so much, so please do share!! We need you and we appreciate each and every one of you so very, very much…We are a growing community of like-minded individuals here growing in grace and health every day of our lives. Blessings to you all.

Paleo Pizza Crust – From a Telluride Chef – a Friend of a Friend…

2 cups almond meal
2 eggs – or 2 T ground flax seeds mixed with 6 T water and let it sit a few minutes
3 T olive oil
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp garlic powder
1 1/2 T freshly chopped rosemary (optional)

Preheat oven to 350. Using a spoon mix all crust ingredients together until it becomes very thick. Using your hands, form the dough into a ball. Press it onto a lightly greased pizza pan all the way to the edges making it as thin as possible,  and remember to make the hole in the center that Mike taught us was essential to allow the steam to escape. We bake on a pizza stone for 20 minutes, then remove and put the toppings on and put it back in for 20 minutes watching for burning around the crust edges. We brush olive oil on to make the edges more crispy before baking the first time but it is not necessary. Everyone loves this…use oil on your hands if you’re having trouble pressing it out. Without the seasonings it could be used as a tart base for fruits…you may want to add a little sea salt to the dough recipe before baking too.