The Goods Are Odd

With so many posts on dinners I figured a few words could be said on the food that starts our day.

I actually don’t do too much variety in breakfast because it is the time of day where route muscle memory serves well, and I don’t like to have to think too much about what I am doing. For most of my life I really relied on packaged cereal for breakfast and snacks, okay and dinners. I was a very picky eater and would get stressed out when I couldn’t manage to figure out something to eat so cold cereal was always, so to speak, on the table. Despite being expensive with too much packaging the process for making cereal just isn’t ideal. The high heat treatment of grains is akin to burning your cooking oil- rancidity and the creation of free radicals. Read about the concerns here. So in effort to get more goodness out of our morning meal we turned to porridge.

When I was eleven my parents and took a bike trip to Scotland, touring around the Outer Hebrides and staying at family owned B&B’s. At these rural cottages, if you wanted oatmeal for breakfast you would need to tell your gracious host the night before. At the time I thought that they cooked the oats all night, but now I realize they must have been soaking them. This is a great example of how traditional food preparation techniques are great resources for age-old knowledge on how to eat and cook.

All grains and legumes contain phytic acid. Traditional diets have historically processed grains and legumes to reduce this kind of anti-nutrient. Here is an explanation (for even more follow the link and learn away!)

The amount of minerals your digestive system can extract from a food depends in part on the food’s phytic acid content. Phytic acid is a molecule that traps certain minerals (iron, zinc, magnesium, calcium), preventing their absorption. Raw grains and legumes contain a lot of it, meaning you can only absorb a fraction of the minerals present in them.

Soaking and, even more so, sprouting and fermentation are processing techniques that make our food much better for us and the thing is people already have known this for much longer than we have forgotten it and many traditional diets still use these techniques even if they don’t know why)

So with all that as a foundation, we have started to start our day with oats soaked at least 12 hours in yogurt or whey.

(Mix the yogurt or whey into the oats and add 1c water for each cup oats

cover with lid and keep at room temp)

After some soaking has been allowed the oats are then boiled 1 to 1 with water for a very brief time. In addition to making the oats better for you soaking also makes cooking very quick! The result is a creamy rich slightly soured porridge that is very filling and satisfying. I only end up needing about a half cup, mixing in honey, and some whole raw milk (okay I even sprinkle a little brown sugar still even though it’s bad, I just find such delight in that combination, hopefully my power oats can trump the sugar’s depletion tendencies)

When no oats have been soaked my mainstay breakfast is an egg with toast. We are all over the danger of eggs now right? I don’t need to go into this? If you are having any reservations, or you still have some lingering doubt when you enjoy this super food read this Wellness Letter from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health (see, it isn’t even a Weston A Price source, believe me it is no longer controversial that eggs are very good for you)

The toast is from the Alvarado St. Bakery which makes all sorts of bread products from sprouted grains and are generally a great company. This slice even happens to come from the sprouted sourdough loaf (double whammy) The butter is cultured (bought that way from Organic Valley, Clover also uses cultured cream) and the jam is homemade strawberry.

This was clearly a day-off morning as I don’t usually have time for pots. But this is actually a pretty quick side dish. Cut up the potatoes (I prefer for most things the little waxy or thin skinned ones, red or yellow) into pretty small pieces like two-hole Lego piece sized. Then just saute with olive oil, salt and pepper and throw in some herbs towards the end so they (the herbs) stay fresh. I used parsely. Many would also do garlic, but I have an aversion to garlic in the AM.