Perfect Juice for a Liver Cleanse

Well, it's been a while...mmmm....awkward silence.  Sorry about that.  Life has been busy, I've actually been on some interesting adventures, but just didn't get around to blogging about it!  I'll remedy that in the next few weeks but for now, I thought I'd share a recipe.

This week heralds the beginning of a liver cleanse for me. I've noticed some classic 'over-burdened liver' signs in recent months - tiredness, joint pain, unusual sensitivity to chemicals (perfumes, alcohol etc) and nausea at various times throughout the month (and no, I'm not pregnant!) - so am giving my poor liver some attention. 

The liver does a huge amount of work, not only in filtering blood, but also in converting thyroid hormones to their active form, producing bile, storing Vitamin D...the list goes on! So, I reckon my liver needs some help and this week I am beginning by cutting out sugar, coffee, dairy, alcohol and all grains. I won't feel deprived tho (well, I might, but I'll have to get over it!) I'll be feasting on fresh veggies, veg juices, seasonal berries, eggs & oily fish.

Either with breakfast or lunch I'm having a vegetable juice, which I then blend with avocado to add some fibre and fats, helping to balance out all the sugar from the veg.  You might not think of veg as being a big source of sugar, but when you juice things like carrots and apples, most of the fibre is removed and you can end up with a recipe for a blood sugar spike.  I'm also using organic veg as much as possible, the less chemicals the better, especially when I'm working on reducing the chemical load on my liver!

Yesterday I juiced the following:

1 medium sized raw organic beetroot

2 sticks organic celery

3 medium sized organic carrots

2 organic apples (I used golden delicious, but would prefer something a bit sharper if I could get it)

A fairly large piece of organic ginger - I used about 5cm, which is quite fiery, but I'm used to it.  If you want to ease into it, maybe just try 1 or 2 cm.  If you can't get organic, remove the skin.

3cm organic cucumber - I would have used more, but it was all I had left in the fridge!

Then I put the juice in my blender, with half an avocado and a dessert spoon of barley grass powder.  Blitzed till smooth, it looked bright pink and creamy.  Yum Yum 

A few things worth noting:

Beetroot is the most wonderful vegetable for liver & blood support.  Eaten whole it contains pectin (among other things) which is particularly helpful in 'scrubbing' the liver, so I would suggest eating whole beetroot too, roasted or grated into a salad.  Raw juice protects the betaine, a substance that supports the liver in eliminating toxins.  Beetroot is also rich in antioxidants, folate, iron, choline and betacyanin, all wonderful for the liver, blood and other organs in the body.

I could talk for hours about Barley grass (but I'll spare you!)  It's an incredibly powerful grass (not the grain) rich in antioxidants & phytonutrients that protect all cells from free radical damage, but particularly the liver.  I absolutely adore it, it's rich in chlorophyll and is powerfully alkalising - much needed in a western diet which is predominantly acid forming.  Apart from Vitamin D, barley grass contains every vitamin, most minerals (especially calcium) and all the amino acids we need.  Get some and keep it in your cupboard, add a teaspoon to any kind of smoothie.  It tastes quite pleasant, a little bit earthy, but the sweetness from the carrots & apples helps to balance that out.  If you've ever tasted spirulina and thought you might die, barley grass is much easier to swallow.

I use a masticating juicer, which works slowly and with very little heat.  This protects many of the nutrients - vitamins and enzymes particularly - so is a better option than a centrifugal juicer.

When making this juice, or any that you add a powder like barley grass to, add the powder into the blender before the juice.  I find it helps to prevent the powder flying around everywhere once you hit the blend button.

Whenyouhaveacold Soup

I was in Ireland recently for a wedding.  It was a glorious occasion - the sun shone, the bride and groom were beautiful and the food was divine.  I didn't take any photos though, so I won't tease you with stories of the dinner in Dromoland Castle, nothing about all five courses, the sorbet, the petit fours...oooh no, it would be too much...

Instead I thought I'd share a soup recipe I got from my father in law.  He made and served it to Mountain Man and I on the day we left Ireland after the wedding, to come back home to Malmö.  It's the kind of soup you can make with whatever you have in the fridge, is terribly forgiving and will stretch to feed whoever happens to turn up (as we did).  We gulped it down half an hour before we had to be at the airport, after a manic weekend of wedding glamour and intense visiting.  It was so good I could have had 3 bowls and curled up in a corner, happy.

This week I have been suffering from a nasty head cold and so I dug out the recipe he had emailed me and made the soup, albeit with one or two ingredients missing or replaced with something else.  I figured it would cheer me up, boost my immune system and be a fairly easy lunch for the week.  It was.  My father in law calls it 'whatsleftoverveg soup', for me it's 'whenyouhaveacold soup'.

In a nutshell, you take a couple of cloves of garlic and an onion  and dice small.  Cube 3 carrots and a couple of sticks of celery (size matters, small is good, but whatever you decide, keep it consistent) and put them with the onion & garlic into a saucepan with a dash of good quality sunflower oil and a smidge of real butter.  Saute for 10 minutes or so, then add 1 litre of stock, half a tin of tomatoes and a teaspoon of each of the following spices - smoked paprika, cummin, ground black pepper - and 8-10 whole green cardamon pods.  If you like a bit of heat, now is the time to add in some chilli powder or harissa paste.  I added half a teaspoon as it needed to suit Mountain Man too.  Simmer for about 15 minutes, then add in half a tin of beans,  half a leek and a bunch of chopped parsley & coriander.  Continue simmering until the veg is al dente and serve up with some crusty bread and butter, or as I did some Swedish 'hard bread' or crackers (more on those in the next blog). 

You may notice there are lots of 'half' things here.  That's because I halved the recipe (apart from the tinned tomatoes, which I accidentally put in an entire tin of, hence the very very red soup) but if you want, double the recipe and freeze half the soup.  I also left out a potato, as I didn't have any, but I think it is a worthy addition, so do add it in. 

The onion, leek & garlic are fantastic cold fighters, natural antibiotics and great for your immune system generally.  I am definitely feeling the benefit of a bowl every day this week and it is dead easy to make.  When you do serve it up, adding a dollop of greek yoghurt and a squeeze of lime makes it particularly moreish.  It's all run out now, so I'll have to make more tomorrow, maybe with some ginger added, for extra ooomph.

...flour by any other name does taste as good!

I like to think of myself as being quite organised.  I almost always remember to bring bags with me when I go shopping and generally prepare a shopping list in advance, based on a sort of flexible menu for the week.  A bit OCD, but there you go, this is my 'thing', this endeavour of cooking and eating, so I've been improving my shopping technique for a while now.

Last week I went grocery shopping with mountain man for the first time in Malmö and somehow didn't think about the language barrier.  I imagine I expected the universal language of food to be sufficient.  Mostly it was.  I don't need to know the word for onions in order to select the ones I want (I now know it is 'lök' by the way and garlic is 'vitlök' which I must say I enjoyed learning, as the two are related botanically too).  I did need to know the word when it came to weighing them though, that was fun.  I'm sure other shoppers thought I was a bit mad as I dashed from shelf edge to scales repeating the word over & over under my breath for fear I would forget it before I had pressed the right button.  Most of the food we put in our trolley was fresh fruit or veg, so there was repeated dashing from shelf to scales, with the associated muttering.

Fresh fruit & veg selected, I headed for the baking aisle.  I'm not particularly brilliant at producing baked goods.  This is partly because I enjoy cooking savoury food more, but also because I don't want to turn into a roly-poly pudding with diabetes and heart problems (which has much more to do with sugar and refined flour than fat by the way, but that's another story)

I do like to make wholegrain breads and spelt pizza dough and for that I need certain kinds of flour.  Ahhhhhh, but I have no idea what it's called in Swedish.  The baking aisle had lots and lots of different flour and in the end, I chose purely on 'feel'.  I ended up with a wholegrain ('fullkorn') and plain ('vete') wheat flour (I think) and last night mixed them together to make pizza dough.  It seemed stickier to knead than it would at home and the plain flour looked rather yellow to me, unlike the bright white of flour at home, but maybe plain flour in Ireland is bleached?

The result was hugely successful.  Lovely crunchy & slightly chewy pizza bases and a small loaf of foccacia, drizzled in sunflower oil (higher burning temp than olive oil) rosemary & salt and baked for 20 minutes, then dipped in olive oil and guzzled down. I have no doubt it wouldn't pass the test of a fussy Italian, but we both loved it and managed to eat the entire loaf of foccacia.  The lesson in my grocery shopping adventure?  Don't be scared to make mistakes, sometimes the best discoveries happen that way.

Rocket Fuel

I woke this morning at 5am, struggled to get back to sleep and eventually dragged myself out of bed at 6.30.  I suspect the tension of moving country had something to do with it.  Maybe it was also because this morning was my last chance to visit Mahon Farmers' Market before heading to Sweden?

This is where I buy my food.
This morning, the lovely pink shirt clad 'Rocket Man' in the photo sold me my lunch, which turned out to be dinner when lunch got sidetracked by packing.  Stomach comforting, whole food goodness. Thank you Rocket Man.


Almost every Thursday morning I can be found at this market.  I think it is one of the best in the country.  It is dedicated almost entirely to food, with a couple of flower stalls thrown in, just to cheer us up.  There are 3 or 4 excellent coffee & cake stalls, of course, to keep the punters awake & sugar fuelled, but more importantly for me, there is an organic meat and eggs stall.  Organic, local, grass fed beef, chicken and lamb.  Wow.  I love it and do a little dance inside my head as I give my hard earned euros directly into the hand of the farmer.  Alongside Dan Aherne's meat, there is the local veg grower, so fresh you can tell their produce was picked that morning.  The Real Olive Co. provide the most delicious buffalo mozzarella I've ever had, from their very own buffalo reared in Toonsbridge, West Cork.  I could go on and on about how incredible the food is there.  On a sunny day it's one of my favourite places to be.  On a wet day, the stallholders retreat indoors, so no matter the weather, you can always buy this kind of incredibly good food.

How will Malmo compare?
Will I be able to eat as well as I do here, without blowing the budget?

We leave our little house in Cork tomorrow and depart for France on a ferry from Rosslare on Saturday.  Then comes a 3 day road trip.  Bring it on.