Uncategorized - My Wholefood Romance

My Wholefood Romance Fermentation Series Part 1: FERMENTING VEGETABLES

June 2, 2014 By Meg With 12 comments

fermentedVeg1 Welcome to the wonderful world of FERMENTATION! I’ll be your host, Meg. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time, as it is a topic close to my heart – and I have a book coming out soon on fermented beverages!! Fermenting is also a very big topic, so I have decided to break it down into a few episodes. This first foray into fermentation is all about culturing vegetables. It is one of the least intimidating ways to ferment, as you don’t need any special starters or equipment. Just a little patience {insert Guns n’ Roses style whistle….any late 80′s early 90′s music fans out there? Anyone??}.

Fermented foods and drinks are magical! Most noted for their positive effects on the digestive system, they work to promote an optimal balance of bacteria in the gut. Healthy gut bacteria is essential to the health of the whole body, and unfortunately many of our dietary and lifestyle habits such as sugar, caffeine, processed foods, toxins and stress are harmful to these precious bacteria. Fermented foods and drinks work to maintain, protect and nourish our intestinal cells, and can also alleviate some common digestive conditions such as IBS, bloating, and reflux to name a few. In addition to their wonderful digestive talents, fermented foods and drinks can improve the function of our immune system, help to regulate our allergic response and reduce susceptibility to allergies, improve detoxification, and can contribute to healthy skin and hair. More on that to come.

The greatest thing about making fermented anything is that they are simple, cheap, delicious and easy to make at home, and they are a lot of fun! Making your own ferments is essentially making your own probiotics.

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I say that fermented foods and drinks are magical, because the process …

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Gorgeous, Glowing Skin and an AMAZING Giveaway from Tata Harper!

May 19, 2014 By Meg With 8 comments

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Dear Beautiful Readers,

I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for being the wonderful people that you are. I love sharing information with you all – even if sometimes I wonder if anyone is reading, and the I will receive an email, a comment on Instagram or Facebook, or sometimes people will tell me directly how much they love and are inspired by the blog, or how their family use the recipes, or how much better their health is, and it just makes my heart explode.

I have been wanting to do a giveaway for a while, and when the opportunity came up to team up with Tata Harper, I jumped at the chance. Our skin is our largest organ, and I think it is sometimes easy to forget that what we put on our skin is absorbed into our bloodstream, just like anything we put into our mouth. So although this is not a food related post per se, I think it is perfectly relevant. I am ecstatic to be able to give away two prizes of Tata Harper products worth over $200 each. As my readership is mainly split between Australia and USA, I wanted to allow residents of both countries to be eligible – hence the two prizes. But more on that below.

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Just in case you are not familiar, Tata Harper is a 100% chemical free skin care company, that make the most divine lotions, creams, oils and tonics. Tata founded the company after being unable to find the products that she wished existed. That is her in the first image, on her beautiful organic farm in Vermont, USA, where a lot of the ingredients are grown – gorgeous! The products are hand-made on site. I have been lucky enough to use them …

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Golden Turmeric Milk – to cure what ails ya.

May 13, 2014 By Meg With 13 comments

turmeric milk 0 Turmeric is a magical spice. From the same family as ginger, this root herb is warming and bitter in nature, but has a lovely mild, woody flavour. The healing properties of turmeric have been greatly researched, and it is used widely by natural therapists, both in liquid, capsule and powder (dietary) form. It has a long tradition in India, where it is used generously and daily in the diet.

Turmeric is a beautiful antioxidant, scavenging free radicals and protecting our DNA. It is also massively anti-inflammatory (great for arthritis, menstrual pain), is protective of our liver, improves liver detoxification, and can decrease blood lipids – improving cholesterol levels. Not only that, but turmeric can promote wound healing, is antimicrobial, and its active component curcumin can be used in cancer treatment.

turmeric milk hand The great thing about turmeric is that it is fairly easy to get through your diet. You need around one teaspoon daily to have a therapeutic effect, or less for general wellbeing. Apart from adding it to your curries, stews, soups, and rice or grain dishes, turmeric is also great friends with cauliflower, and egg, so feel free to sneak some into your omelettes.

One potential downer of this superhero called turmeric, is that it can be quite poorly absorbed by the body. Lucky I have a couple of fancy tricks for you. First of all, turmeric is fat soluble, so be sure to consume it together with some fat – usually the meals that you would be adding it too do have fat of some kind, so this is great. Secondly, black pepper increases the bioavailability of turmeric by over 1000% – wowsers, so add some black pepper into the same meal.

Another idea is this golden milk, an ancient, traditional drink. This is my version. It is a …

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Double Chocolate Pancakes vs Blackberry Buckwheat

May 5, 2014 By Meg With 3 comments

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Pancakes are great! I’m fairly sure I’m not on my own there. The reason I love them so much is that they are so versatile – savoury, sweet, traditional, thin crepe-like, thick pikelet style, and they lend themselves beautifully to catering for any food intolerances. A few weeks ago, The Urban List asked if I would create a healthy pancake recipe for them, which I was super chuffed about, but it got me thinking. I don’t really like to use the word ‘healthy’, as I don’t think it means a whole lot. People have vastly different ideas on what healthy is, and compounded with a complete overload of information available these days, it makes for a confusing world! So, in putting these recipes together, rather than holding them up as the perfect healthy pancakes, I thought about giving some great, sustaining nutrition in the morning, I thought about making them as allergy friendly as possible, and of course I wanted to make them simple and delicious!

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I was very fortunate to have the lovely Jacqui Wilkins in my kitchen to take these beautiful snaps for Urban List – thank you Jacqui. This has inspired me further to take that big grown up step of organising an actual real camera to take my photos with, rather than relying on the ol’ iPhone – which I think has done a pretty good job so far… It also inspired me to clean up my kitchen, ha ha!

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I ended up with two pancake recipes – Blackberry Buckwheat, and Double Chocolate and Coconut. As promised they are easy and quick to make, contain no gluten, dairy or sugar, and are deee-lish! The double chocolate numbers are grain-free, so take extra care when flipping.

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