Macrobiotic cooking

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - 10:00 pm     English  |  日本語

How much have you gained over the holiday break?

Woo… I hear many gasps and fainting sounds everywhere. I know many people trying to get back to where they were before the Christmas season. Oh, me? Dude, I’ve given up long time ago, yo. I’ve reached the point where I simply accept the fact my stomach’s been fatter and fatter without no sign of thinning.

Yup, I like any meat, oily deep-fried stuff, with chocolaty dessert afterwards. But I equally like my greens, grains and beans too. Because I like anything that tastes good. So I had no problem trying out a new eating philosophy / method called Macrobiotic diet that’s been quietly increasing its popularity all over the world.

So what’s macrobiotic diet? You should go ask professor Wiki for its definition and explanation in details. But to me, it seems alot like a traditional Japanese regimen or I could roughly paraphrase as “stuff my grand parents used to eat.” Alot of veggies in seasons along with grains and beans cooked in Konbu dashi.

Along with two other friends, I attended a macrobiotic cooking class run by Keiko the macrobiotic instructor at Soramame. Something I found particularly interesting and rather easier for all of us to take on daily healthy eating is that the macrobiotic diet doesn’t have much strict dietary restriction like vegetarian and vegan diet. Ingredients and condiments are categorised into yin, yang, and neutral. Then these are to be combined and cooked so the finished dish would be balanced out to be neutral.

The recipes for this class were focused on after-holiday detox. Yup, exactly what I needed. Desperately.

• Detox cleansing drink (soup) – facilitates getting rid of accumulated body fat.
• Macrobiotic style Nanakusa Gayu (Japanese Seven-herb rice porridge)
• Oatmeal & Tofu meat balls with sweet & sour sauce
• Pressed salad
• Orange crushed jelly

One of the variations of Japanese pickles is called Asazuke, which literally translates to “quickly marinated/pickled.” And this salad was just like that. Sort of like a coleslaw without mayo. Thinly sliced carrot, cabbage and cucumber combined and rubbed to marinate with sea salt and lemon zest. Then press it down with weights or simply water filled bowl on the dish until water gets out.

Now, this reminded me of the Oroshi Tofu Steak that I’ve recently posted. In this macrobiotic version, we combined firm tofu, oatmeal, grated carrots, sauteed onions and mushroom, soy sauce, sesame oil and sea salt. Unlike my version, there’s no egg nor Hanpen used, but adding oatmeal holds the mixture quite well. How come I never thought of using oatmeal as a substitute of flour/egg before! *slapping forehead*

Nanakusa gayu (porridge/Congee) macrobiotic style. Instead of white rice, we had brown rice and millets. It’s more watery than ordinary rice porridge/congee, but with alot of other ingredients like white radish, turnip, bok choy, red beans, italian parsley – it’s quite filling I must say.

We all initially expected this to be served chilled, but it was rather a soup. Grated carrots and white radish (Daikon), water, Nori (seaweed paper), Umeboshi (Japanese pickled sour plum) and soy sauce. This drink helps getting rid of fat accumulated in body, lowering cholesterol level, prevention of kidney stone, solving problems in bones, joints and lung.

I <3 jellies in summer. In macrobiotic diet, use of gelatine, corn/potato starch is substituted with Agar (Agar agar/Kanten/Japanese isinglass), Kudzu or arrowroot. For this jelly, powdered agar was used. I actually prefer fruits jelly to be made with agar for its firmer texture and ‘crunchiness’. Oh, also I was super surprised how quickly the jelly sets with agar. It wasn’t even in the fridge!

Now the tasting time!

Tofu & Oatmeal ball (with thicken sweet & sour soy sauce)
“Hmmm yum!” naturally came out of my mouth. Well, I love tofu to begin with, but adding Oatmeal to the mixture actually holds the combined ingredients well together and added another layer of flavour. My favourite of all.

Nanakusa Gayu
To be honest, I’m not really a big fan of congee. However, I really didn’t mind having this as “once every week” sort of food.

Detox Drink
Here’s the detox cleansing drink that I was very much intrigued. Lots of grated daikon radish and carrots with nori (seaweed paper) means lots of fibre to eat! And it tasted quite good as a soup, so that’s definitely a good thing when I have to emphasize on “detox” part.

Pressed salad
Wasn’t really nothing new to me on this one because I already do this sometimes. But surely a refreshing dish on the day of the class!

Crushed Orange Jelly
I LOVED IT! I wouldn’t usually choose agar to make jelly simply because it’s rather hard to find at supermarkets. Next time I see agars, I’ll definitely get one for sure!

OK, overall after trying out macrobiotics dishes, I was pretty impressed how filling and flavoursome these simple ingredients had turned out. Plus, as I mentioned at the beginning, I do like healthy options to begin with. I wouldn’t say every meal everyday, but I can easily see myself adopting more of macrobiotic methods into my daily diet. To me it was a rather realisation of what’s lacking from my daily intake.

My favourite carrot salad – the first attempt to adapt marcrobiotic diet.

Salt & black sesame tofu.

Now the great part of the macrobiotic diet I most certainly appreciate is, unlike other strict diets out there, it doesn’t force you to follow a philosophy you don’t necessarily believe or to eat things you’re not happy with. It’s more of an idea/suggestion to step forward and be “better” from just “fine”. Eating is one of the essential human instincts. Starving yourself or living on something you hate couldn’t be any better for yourself. Although it does have more strict ways to follow, such as for the purpose of diabetic treatment, macrobiotic diet for ordinary people living in this stressful world is supposed to be a little help to live better by eating well. And this class was definitely well-worth attending for me to have another opportunity to lead myself to the better living. And of course more eating.

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Then the day after. Btw.
I’ve been known as ‘constipation-less’, whatever I take in comes out no problem.
But even for me, all the fibres and grains I had from the food at the class worked super magically to my stomach.
How magical?

It only took 3 seconds.

Soramame
(currently their group classes are held in Japanese.)
For more information, contact Keiko directly.