Posts Tagged ‘antioxidants’

19 Dec

Orange Peel in the Thrifty Kitchen

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, home food production, Ketogenic diet, Nose-to-tail vegetables, recipe, sustainable, Uncategorized, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

I’m  an almost-diabetic who uses low-carb food intake to maintain my excellent blood sugar, so citrus juice, which is a pretty concentrated belt of sugar, is mostly out of my diet.  I also love oranges and orange flavored things, and don’t like artificial flavors. So for a while I have been following with interest the analyses showing very high antioxidant activity in citrus peel and wondering how to incorporate it into my diet, and recently I got a chance to test this when I came across a bonanza of 20 large organic navel oranges that could not be sold because they had soft spots. I could have made orange-cello liqueur, but wanted something I could drink with lunch.  So I washed the oranges carefully, cut out the soft spots, cut them into chunks, and puréed  them in batches in my blender with only enough water to keep the purée  moving.  Each batch was blended at the highest speed for over a minute, to make sure it was completely liquefied.  I have a Vitamix, and I don’t really know how well this would work with other blenders, but probably well enough.

Please note that the oranges I was using were seedless. If you try this with seeded oranges, the seeds have to be carefully removed because they are intensely bitter, and this technique will not work at all with lemons because their inner white pith is so bitter.  I haven’t experimented with other citrus. I would say that tasting a little slice of the white pith might be a good test. If it’s very bitter, it might not work to use it this way. I think that blood oranges would work well, and I plan to try as soon as they come into season. Also, organic really matters when you are using the peel.

You end up with a thick smooth purée  that is only very slightly sweet, has a hint of bitterness, and is loaded with orange flavor and all the nutritional value than oranges have to offer. I use two or three tablespoons in a water glass, fill it with sparkling water, and sweeten with stevia sweetener. When you get near the bottom of the glass, be sure to swirl it around and drink up all the particles that settle to the bottom. Overall I’m probably taking in about a tablespoon of pure orange juice per glass, so the carb content is not high enough to worry me. I have also added it to a low-carb coffee cake with good results. Because of the intense flavor that the peel adds, you don’t need much.

Orange trees are strikingly beautiful, and if you live in the citrus zone they are great edible landscaping material.

If you do a web search on citrus peel you will find articles suggesting that there are few diseases it won’t prevent or cure. Let’s not get carried away. The antioxidants that it contains, including  naringinen, hesperadin, and rutin, have some interesting anti-inflammatory activities, and there is no documented evidence that ingesting some amount of citrus peel and pith is harmful. It’s also a superb natural source of vitamin C, which can be a bit short in a ketogenic diet. It makes thrifty use of something ordinarily discarded, and it tastes good, adding strong flavor and a touch of bitterness that makes an adult drink out of a fruit that can otherwise be too sweet to enjoy very much of. You can read about its various possible benefits at the links below, including the interesting demographic information from the REGARDS study that higher levels of citrus consumption correlated with lower levels of ischemic stroke. Make of that what you will.

 

REGARDS study analysis indicating possible inverse relationship between citrus consumption and ischemic stroke:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5086785/

A survey of antioxidants and anti inflammatory activities in citrus peel:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27719891

An animal study showing inhibitory effects on human prostate cancer tissue grafted into mice:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23673480

An animal study showing effects in reducing neuroinflammation:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26423872

There are other possibilities for eating citrus peel. I came across the following recipe while searching, and haven’t tried it yet, but it does look lovely, doesn’t it? Personally I would roast the fruit-veggie mixture first to soften them more, then the salmon by itself, since I despise overcooked salmon.

http://www.cookinglight.com/recipes/roasted-salmon-oranges-beets-and-carrots

 

11 Nov

Superfruit Sauce

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, front yard gardening, fruit, home food production, Ketogenic diet, Uncategorized, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , .

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A couple of years ago I started my low-carb fruit project, aimed at growing maximum antioxidants with minimum carbohydrates.  This summer my plantings started to bear. Here are a few observations:

1. A good Italian plum tree is abundant beyond rational imagination. In season the branches are weighed down with thick ropes of plums and its overblown beauty warms your heart at sight. Make sure you have plans for the fruit. Prune plums are not low-carb at all but have plenty of soluble fiber in a delicious form, so I eat some.

2. Goji berries are my worst garden invader so far. They seem to behave better in other parts of the country, but they love my alkaline desert soil and go wild. Everywhere I look, yards from the parent plant, eager offspring are poking up among the broccoli and muscling aside the beans. The plants are rather thin, though, and don’t block any appreciable amount of sunlight, so I am happy to have them. But if your nature and aesthetic are more meticulous than mine, better plan to use a root barrier. The shoots, gathered when they still snap cleanly, were one of my favorite perennial vegetables this year. The flavor of the fruit is nothing to write home about, but I enjoy them in savory dishes or mixed with other berries.

3. Clove currants, when left on the bush for a couple of weeks after they turn black, are delicious. Eat them before that and you’ll wonder why you wasted space on them.

4. Goumi berries are very well suited to alkaline soil and tolerate heat well. They smell heavenly when they bloom in May, with a far-reaching honeyed sweetness that is free of the grape Koolaid note that can be overbearing in their close relative the Russian olive.  Again, once they turn red, start tasting every few days, and don’t harvest until they taste good. It’s very worthwhile to buy the expensive named varieties. I didn’t, and my wild-type berries are so tiny that harvesting is very slow and tedious. I’ll be planting some selected varieties next spring.

I had relatively small amounts of all the berry types this spring, so I decided to mix them together and add plums to make a sauce base for producing my own hot sauces and chutneys. Other than stoning the plums, I didn’t do any other prep. I threw roughly equal quantities of the four types of fruit in a stockpot, added good red wine to just cover the fruit, and simmered slowly until the fruits were soft. I think it was about 90 minutes. Then I put the mixture through a food mill to remove any woody seeds that the goumis had contributed and to smoothe and thicken the mixture.

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Add salt to taste. Now you have an antioxidant-rich purée that can go in a number of directions. Cooked down a little further until it thickens up, and sweetened to taste with sugar or your favorite artificial sweetener, it makes a tart local substitute for cranberry sauce. Cooked a bit with sweetener and chopped garlic and ginger, it makes a delicious Asian sauce for garnishing pork, dipping dumplings, or just as a table sauce. Make hot sauce by pureeing a can of chipotles en adobo in the blender and adding to the superfruit base by spoonfuls until you get the heat level that you want. Sweeten or not; I like some sweet with my heat. My favorite use is superfruit chutney: to a cup of base add a couple of teaspoons of mustard seed lightly toasted in a dry skillet, a teaspoon of garam  masala, a small onion and a clove of garlic finely chopped, and a small piece of ginger grated. Crumble in a dried chile or two if you like heat.  Salt a little less than you think is optimal. Simmer together, adding a little water if necessary, until the alliums are cooked and soft. Taste, adjust seasoning and salt, and cool. Serve with nearly anything Indian.

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I froze some superfruit base in cartons to use this winter. It could also be canned, although I would suggest pressure canning for safety.

 

3 May

Garlic Leaves

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, farmers market, front yard gardening, greens, Nose-to-tail vegetables, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , .

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My patient readers might be wondering by now why I have so damn many posts this year on the uses of green or immature garlic. The reason is simple: last summer I ordered my garlic sets as usual, forgot about it, and a few weeks later placed the same order again. When a LOT of garlic sets arrived in fall I decided to treat this as serendipity and planted them all, and the result is that I have hundreds to thousands of stalks of green garlic right at the moment. Since I have become interested in the health benefits of alliums, especially the green parts, I am thoroughly enjoying experimenting with ways to use them. Right now they are just beginning to send up scapes, and the stalk of the plant is hard and difficult to use well. But when I pull a few plants for the newly bulging bulbs, I find that the leaves are still green, and I decided to try using them as a leafy green vegetable. I washed a bunch of them, cut them in 1 inch sections crosswise, and blanched them in boiling water for two minutes.  This initial blanching seemed to tenderize them a lot, but if you insist, try cooking them without pre-blanching and see how it goes.  Then I slowly roasted in butter with a little salt and rich chicken broth for about 20 minutes, taking care that they did not dry out. I roasted them only because I was also roasting some chicken, and it would be easier to slowly sauté them on the stovetop. Make sure that there is enough broth that no part of the leaves dries out. Kept a little moist, they develop a lovely plush texture. This turned out to be a delicious vegetable, full of flavor but not excessively garlicky. The only thing I’m going to do differently in the future is cut them in shorter sections, about half an inch, since there is a suggestion of fiber in the mouth when cut to the longer length. I did not identify any actual fibers of the nasty kind that stick between the teeth, but I just think the mouthfeel would be better if cut shorter.
I am increasingly delighted to find that every part of the garlic plant is edible, versatile, and delicious, a true nose to tail vegetable with a boatload of health benefits besides. Right now garlic, shallots, onions, and multiplier onions occupy about a third of my total available garden space, and I think this is how it should be and will do the same again next year.
Incidentally, once the emerging scape begins to show at the top of the plant, the stalk is not worth trying to use except as a flavoring for broth, in my opinion. It is just too fibrous and tough. But soon the scapes will be elongating and they are eminently edible when young, so a couple of weeks of patience will provide you with a whole new vegetable.

30 Mar

The Joys of Spring: Goumis

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, front yard gardening, fruit, Ketogenic diet. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

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A few years ago I began a project to grow fruits that offered maximum antioxidants with minimum carbohydrates, in other words fruits very different from the swollen sugar-pops that fill the American grocery store. I had been reading with great interest about Goumi berries because genus Eleagnus thrives in my area with relatively little water. I planted three of them, and over the next two years they got a bit bigger but nothing much happened. Last year, their third year, they grew over 5 feet tall and one produced three tiny berries. Hardly an exciting outcome. But this year they have already earned their place; all three are covered with scads of small discreet blossoms and when the sun hits them, the scent that they throw all over my front yard is indescribable. It has the honeyed spicy sweetness that characterizes Russian olives in bloom, but without the grape Koolaid note. Utterly delicious. They are humming with bees, and I do wonder what Goumi honey would taste like.

The bush seldom tops six feet, and unlike their relatives the Russian olives and autumn olives, they are thornless.  They are nitrogen fixers and tolerate my poor alkaline soil, and are not demanding about water. I soak mine every two or three weeks and ignore them the rest of the time. They are not dangerously invasive like their cousins. I hope that later in the year I’ll be reporting on fruit production and quality. The berries have a high lycopene content and the seeds inside contain a quantity of omega-3 fatty acids.  But even if I had no interest in the fruit, they would be the stars of my early spring yard. Sometimes my message is a simple one: grow this plant, you’ll like it.

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