Search Results for: rice - Page 2

Cambridge Fried Rice

CarbSane has asked for a recipe for Yang Zhou Fried Rice; Yang Zhou is a city in southern China in a leading rice-farming region.

As far as we know there is no special ingredient, though Wikipedia says that barbecued pork is a characteristic ingredient. The great thing about fried rice is that you can adjust the ingredients to your taste; use as many or as few as you like. So, here is our recipe — let’s call it Cambridge Fried Rice.

The key steps are to “fry” (really, warm and coat in oil) the ingredients separately, to get a good diffusion of oil throughout the rice and food.

Here’s how it’s done. As always, click on images to enlarge.

First, gather ingredients. You’ll need oils, eggs, long-grain rice (short-grain rice sticks together and doesn’t work as well), plus other ingredients of your choice.  Here are peas, carrots, scallions, and shrimp — we’ll also use mushrooms:

Friedrice1b

Next, scramble some eggs. Use whatever oil you like, we think eggs go well with butter:

Set the scrambled eggs aside, add new oil to the pan (now we’ll use olive oil), and add any of the miscellaneous ingredients that need cooking:

Again, set these ingredients aside:

The long-grain rice should have been cooked, but long enough ago that it has had time to cool and dry. Traditionally, fried rice uses leftover rice — cooked earlier in the day or the previous day.

Add oil (now we’ll use coconut oil) and rice to the pan, stir until rice has soaked up the oil and is uniformly coated:

Now return all the ingredients to the pan, mix, and add spices to taste:

In this case we added salt and pepper, divided the fried rice in two, and added turmeric to one half. (Soy sauce can be added to hot oil when frying vegetables and meat, but it’s not necessary.)

Serve:

We haven’t measured weights or counted calories, but it’s fairly obvious that this is a fat-rich (oils, egg yolks), carb-moderate (rice), protein-light (shrimp, egg whites) recipe with vegetables for good measure — essentially, the Perfect Health Diet macronutrient ratios.

This is the basic recipe, add spices or ingredients to your taste!

If you would like another view of Yang Zhou Fried Rice, from a professional chef, here’s a video:

Melissa’s Recap of the Weston A Price Conference

Melissa McEwen, host of the Hunt.Gather.Love blog and a commenter here, has a recap of the Weston A. Price Foundation’s recent Wise Traditions conference.

A few of her observations with my comments:

Stephan Guyenet and Chris Masterjohn are gentlemen as well as scholars. None of us will be surprised to hear this.

The Inuit eat a lot of plants. This was a finding by researcher Anore Jones, who has a book out called Plants that We Eat. (Thanks, Gary.) If you would like a flavor of Anore’s writing, check out an earlier report Anore did for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2006 called Fish that We Eat, available here. It has interesting information, like the fact that freezing fish for 2 weeks kills the parasites that infect humans. Maybe we should eat frozen fish instead of fresh fish!

A lot of healthy cultures used steaming and boiling. This is one of our recommendations in the book:  cook at low temperatures. Very high temperatures generate toxins. It’s never a surprise that traditional cultures developed health-maximizing practices. It is a surprise how quickly we lost their knowledge.

Check out Melissa’s blog for the rest!

Cooking with Rice, I: Chicken Soup

Since many Americans and Europeans are not familiar with how to use rice, we thought it would be nice to offer some ideas, mainly drawn from Asian cooking.

(The zero-carb dangers series is continuing, but as it’s science heavy I thought mixing in a food post would be fun.)

We make a soup every weekend and have a bowl to start dinner most days of the week. Chicken soup is a classic winter dish. We have a brief recipe in the book, but here is a variant. In the book recipe, the chicken is pulled out before it disintegrates, the meat and skin pulled from the bones and returned to the soup. Here, the chicken is left in the soup and cooked much longer to create a thicker and more nutritious broth. The downside is that many small chicken bones are left in the soup.

The Recipe

We like a garlic-salt-and-pepper flavor. Garlic is very important for the flavor of the soup; use at least 12 cloves, I prefer 20. Slice each clove in half so that the flavor seeps into the broth more easily.

Use enough water for the chicken to float but not swim:

For the most nourishing broth, simmer 2-3 hours. Skim off scum that rises to the top, but don’t skim off fat. If you wish a soup with less protein, remove the chicken breast meat after one hour, returning the rest of the chicken to the soup; the breast meat can be used for other dishes, like chicken salad.

Meanwhile, you can pre-soak some uncooked rice in water. This helps the rice open in the soup:

After 30 minutes or more of soaking, pour off this water to remove starch and surface contaminants, then add the rice to the soup. Cook another 1 hour. With shorter cooking, the rice remains intact; with longer cooking the rice releases starch into the broth for a thicker broth.

By this time the chicken should be falling apart. Use a spoon to break it to small pieces. Add salt and pepper and other spices to taste. In the last half hour, you can add any vegetables you wish to cook in the soup.

You can also add vegetables after the soup is finished, for a crunchier texture. In this case we added cilantro, carrots, and scallions:

Finally, after cooking is done and just before eating, you can add fat sources to hot soup for a richer taste. We use egg yolks or heavy cream. I rather like cream with turmeric. Here is how it looks with three egg yolks:

Christmas Gift Ideas

Still thinking about Christmas gift ideas, for yourself or others? Here are a few ideas.

Perfect Health Retreat

We’ve improved the retreat every time we’ve staged one, and it’s now a very special event. Perfect Health Retreats offer:

  • a relaxing and enjoyable vacation on a magnificent and almost-private beach;
  • a training in how to modify one’s food, lifestyle, and environment in simple ways to achieve a lifetime of great health;
  • one-on-one health coaching with me that has resulted in significant health improvements for many guests.

The food is outstanding, and you’ll learn from Shou-Ching herself how to cook great PHD food in 30 minutes a day or less – plus get online access to our cookbook (still in preparation). You’ll get one-on-one posture and movement coaching from our Head of Movement Jae Chung – his sessions have generated rave reviews from nearly everyone – plus 3 movement classes per day including a nightly course in relaxation and stress relief. My science lectures provide depth of understanding and motivation. Plus, it’s fun.

You don’t have to take my word for the value of retreats. In recent retreats, nearly all the guests have reported that it exceeded their expectations, and half the guests have been sufficiently delighted to provide video testimonials at the end of the retreat. Soon I’ll start sharing videos from the May 2015 guests.

In an ideal world, we would offer the retreats more frequently. The 2015 retreats both sold out two months early, so demand is there. Alas, Shou-Ching and I have taken on another project – curing cancer (more on that later) – which is consuming all our time. Therefore, we’ll only do one retreat in 2016.

The 2016 retreat will be held April 30 to May 7, and we’re taking reservations now. The price is going to increase on January 1, but reservations made by December 31 will receive 2015 prices. Also, room selection is in order of reservation – so if you want to come to a retreat, at lower prices than will be available henceforth, and in the best possible room, please consider making your reservation this month.

To learn more about the retreat, visit the various web pages under the Perfect Health Retreat tab, starting here. To reserve a room or for more information, please contact Paul Jaminet at paul@perfecthealthretreat.com or Whitney Ross Gray at whitney@perfecthealthretreat.com.

PHRetreat_img3_600x400px

Mother Dirt Skin Probiotics

One of the benefits retreat guests have enjoyed is free samples of AOBiome’s Mother Dirt AO+Mist skin probiotic. I’ve been using it myself since May and have noticed that consistent use leads to a clearer, younger-looking complexion and the virtual elimination of body odor. There is reason to believe that restoring ammonia-oxidizing bacteria to the skin will increase nitric oxide production; nitric oxide is an important vascular regulator that may lower blood pressure and reduce cardiovascular disease risk. Readers have reported significant improvements in odor, general wellness, and the appearance of skin conditions.

Based on this experience, I can heartily recommend AO+Mist skin probiotics. To order, click on the image:

MotherDirtCropped

Ubiome microbiome sequencing

Another benefit retreat guests have enjoyed is UBiome gut microbiome sequencing. UBiome is currently offering a 10% discount on their sequencing kits: visit here for details.

Thrive Market

Thrive Market is a 2015 startup offering natural, organic (ancestral) foods and products at wholesale prices, delivered to your door. Their description: “Think Costco meets Whole Foods, online.”

They are specifically targeting the Paleo community and several Paleo leaders (not us) were early investors. PHD readers are likely to find worthwhile items. Click the image to check them out:

Our Recommendations Pages

We recommend a number of products we’ve found helpful, and many of the products on the following pages could make great gifts:

Or, just shop Amazon from this search box:


New Books

A number of our favorite ancestral community members came out with books this year. These came to our attention in a positive way:

I’m sure there were many other great books this year by ancestral authors. If you found something to recommend, please let us know in a comment.

Merry Christmas to all of our readers!