The Ever-Changing Diet

LIVING ALONE and being self-employed, I'm relatively able to do things in my own way and on my own schedule -- which is, mostly, NO schedule. Still, my life tends to slip into various kinds of ruts. For example: for probably more than a year now, I've been eating mainly Italian parsley as my green, leafy vegetable. The only veggies and fruits I buy are from the Farmers' Market -- where there are 2 sisters who sell really good, organically grown, Italian parsley. There are very few organically grown things at the Market, and their Italian parsley has been (and continues to be) especially appealing to me. It has a strong taste, and such a dark green color, and such character and strength and vitality -- I've just not been drawn to the other greens for a long time! And usually I've been eating the parsley uncooked.

My food selection and my cooking have both been getting simpler for a long time. Whole, cooked grains are still my staple: for months, my routine has been to cook 2 parts of short-grain brown rice with 1 part of sweet rice, 1 part of whole (not "pearled") barley, and 1 part of millet. I've been cooking these, almost always, with sliced, fresh ginger root (and sea salt). I soak the grains -- except the millet -- for about 24 hours before cooking ... until fermentation bubbles have started to appear ... then add the millet and cook them all together, in the soaking-water. The soaking is VERY important, for getting rid of acidity and making the grains easier to digest.

I was on the mainland for 3 months last summer. When I came back to Hilo, I was really in a getting-out-of-ruts mode! I couldn't stand even the thought of going back to my previous routine of nightly radio-listening; I put the radio in the drawer and began listening only to the coqui frogs at night. They were much louder than before I had left, and I really heard them as a direct message from Mother Nature: "Put away that stupid radio and listen to ME!" And I've been very glad I did. I feel remarkably more at peace, listening just to the nightly serenade of the frogs; and I get a lot more work done this way!

At the same time, I decided to make my diet a little more fun than it had been. I added CHOCOLATE! -- or, to be really accurate, I should say I added cocoa. It seems to me, the word chocolate -- the late part, specifically -- denotes the inclusion of milk (hence, that the term "milk chocolate" is actually redundant!).

Did you know that cocoa contains theobromine (literally, "food of the gods"), which is regarded as an entheogen (a "substance, such as a plant or drug, taken to bring on a spiritual experience" -- literally, "generating the divine within")? It's the theobromine in chocolate that causes poisoning in some animals, if they eat it. Sorry, Fido: no "food of the gods" for you! : ^ )

photo courtesy www.hawaiianchocolate.com

Oh, I confess to having eaten my share of "milk chocolate" in the past, as a personal indulgence here and there ("junk food", purely and simply!). But this was different; this was choco without the late, cocoa without the milk. I started buying organically grown cocoa, both in powdered and bar form. The bars were usually 88% cocoa, sweetened just a little, with unrefined beet or cane sugar. The powder was 100% cocoa, which I liquefied, and sweetened a bit with agave nectar. Now, for almost 5 months, I've been having some of this cocoa almost every day, as a deliberate part of my diet. And I LIKE it! : ^ )

I haven't reached any full-blown conclusion about the effects of the cocoa in my diet; but my feeling, when eating or drinking it, is that it has both strongly contractive (yin) and strongly expansive (yang) characteristics, simultaneously! [NOTE: You might like to read my Yin and Yang article, because my take on yin and yang is very different than what Macrobiotics teaches as yin and yang!]

The cocoa definitely tends to focus my thinking in a linear direction. And I noticed, right away, that eating just a small amount of this cocoa would keep me from getting hungry for hours! (The very opposite of eating sugary "milk chocolate," which always demands more and more eating.)

ANOTHER fun food, which was literally raining down on me when I returned from the mainland, was lilikoi -- "passion fruit". These come in 2 colors, purple and yellow, and they look very much like Easter eggs! Where I live, we just happen to have a lilikoi vine of the yellow variety, which sprang up from the compost pile and quickly headed for the treetops.

It's been raining down a steady and bountiful supply of yellow "Easter eggs" for many months; therefore, I felt rather obligated to incorporate lilikoi into my diet almost every day (especially since no one else in the house really likes it!). And the lilikoi seems a perfect item to go with the frog-songs -- because the inside of the lilikoi (the edible part) looks very much like a mass of frog eggs!

So, in addition to my grains and the Italian parsley, I've been eating brown cocoa, yellow lilikoi, also yellow bananas, an occasional coconut, red azuki beans, and -- just lately, now that the weather has been colder and wetter -- red flakes of dulse! I must say, I've been really enthusiastic about the dulse; obviously needing something it has to offer! (I know it's not exactly "local" to me -- it comes from the Atlantic Ocean -- but, hey, the oceans are all connected! : ^ )

Here's how I've been cooking the beans: covering them with an inch or so of water, bringing it to a vigorous boil, then shutting off the heat and covering the pot. In about an hour, I get the water boiling again, shut off the heat and cover the pot for an hour again. Then I add salt, bring the water to a boil one more time, cover the pot ... and, in 30 minutes or so, the beans are ready to be eaten -- tender, and beautifully whole and firm.

Along with grains, another staple for me is sweet potatoes. We have 3 varieties here: purple, yellow, and white. Lately I've been alternating between the purple and yellow, mostly. And, in the late summer and fall, another staple is avocado. There's a tree less than 10 feet from my back door, and another one in the next-door neighbor's yard ... and, like the lilikoi, they rain down their bounty on us! More avocados than in your wildest dreams -- and I would swear, on a stack of cocoa bars, these are the most beautiful, most delicious, most perfectly textured avocados I have ever had the pleasure of knowing!! Big, firm, bee-yuu-tee-full -- I don't have enough superlatives to do them justice! And, this very day (23 January 2007, in case you don't have your End-Of-Time decoder-calendar handy), after thinking we'd seen the last of the season's avocados, I got 3 more of them!

Another fun food I've been enjoying since the end of summer ... is ... POPCORN! I've lived in Hawai'i since the autumn of 2002, and had not even thought of popping corn -- but, this fall, the idea took hold of me, and I've been pop-pop-popping it ever since! At first, I was eating it every day, my body was so delighted to have rediscovered it! Now, maybe 3 times a week. It seems a little "junky", I know -- but it's especially nice for a drying effect, on wet winter days in Hilo. Even just the sound of corn popping in a pot, on a rainy winter day, resurrects a feeling of sunshine-and-happiness in me!