I started this blog in my frustration of there being no tempeh in stores here in St. John's, and since that time, my eating habits have vastly changed. Eating my wife's vegan cooking was a big change, as I've mentioned throughout this blog, then I went through a massive raw fruitarian phase which all but destroyed me. Finally, inevitably, my horrible experience with eating too much raw, tropical fruit from Costco led to my discovery of vegan macrobiotics via Terry Walters and Alicia Silverstone. And this change was quite the whammy on my food-borne curiosity. So much so that I now eat dinner for breakfast, aka leftovers from the night before, something I never thought I'd ever do in my lifetime.
Eating leftovers for breakfast, am I nuts? Yes, it sounded crazy to me, too, but now that I think about it, eating dinner for breakfast isn't that strange at all. We do it all the time, eating bacon, eggs, omelettes, sausage, breakfast burritos, Egg McMuffins (the last time I had a an Egg McMuffin I was in the shitter for an hour--back in 1996.) But if you're a vegan, you have to scratch all that. You're limited to the non-healthy items on the breakfast menu: pancakes, waffles, toast, muffins, cereal, pastry, bagels with fake cream cheese or even worse, processed soy sausage links or bacon strips with scrambled egg replacer (never had it, never will.) You're going down a bad road if you keep that up. Which is exactly what I was doing, I was eating from the unhealthy side of the vegan breakfast palette. But I needed to do the opposite: my breakfast needed to be as healthy as my other meals, not just comprised of a bunch of baked goods made from refined white and whole wheat flour that'll give me diabetes when I'm fifty. No thanks, I'll pass.
All of the these vegan-friendly breakfast items, pancakes, waffles, toast, muffins, conventional cereals, pastries, bagels--these should all be considered sometimes foods. More importantly, processed, refined white flour should also be considered a sometimes food, as everyone clearly can tell from the headlines is becoming increasingly bad news on the body. If you do use white flour in your baking, try to at least balance it out by halving the white flour amount and using whole wheat pastry flour for the rest in your recipes. So, yes, flour is pretty much a bad guy. No, it won't kill you, but it won't do you any favors either, and is more than likely to trip you up if you're eating lots of white flour and white sugar together in the perfect harmony known as the baked good. Don't want to give up bread? Then eat sprouted bread, it's much better for you.
What, now I can't eat baked goods? Then what the hell can vegans and vegetarians eat for breakfast? Ay, there's the rub. Fortunately, macrobiotics has the answer: you eat leftovers from the night before. Or you can go one better: just look at your pantry and throw a macrobiotic-friendly meal together. It doesn't matter if it looks like a typical breakfast or not. If you're going for hot cereal, it will. Anything else would probably look foreign--ironically stated because macrobiotics is all about eating in harmony with the climate and region you live in. Here's how the process works: you simply begin to think macrobiotically when you plan your meals, morning, noon, and night. Actually, when you start to eat macrobiotically, you begin to see how much sense it makes, and this is where the magic really happens: you feel it deep down, in the marrow of your bones, that you know what you're doing is the best thing you can possibly do. It feels just so damn good. Then you become a happy macrobiotic convert like us and the rest of the macrobiotic community.
No, it's not a religion, it's a philosophy/lifestyle, which just so happens to be based on Taoism--yin and yang. Our food is loaded with both, which is why it's so important to eat meals that balance both of the two energies. Eat too much yang food and you're yanged out. Eat too much yin food and you're...yinned-out. And with the mass populace eating loads of factory farmed meat (extreme yang) and coupling it with factory-made sweets (extreme yin), it's no wonder we're all bipolar, mood-swinging, disease-ridden, pill-popping, processed-food-a-holics. Chow down on some bacon, eggs, home-fries and pancakes with maple syrup and a cup o' joe or a glass of milk and you've yinned and yanged the hell out of your body right there. That's a hell of way to start a morning, and yet millions probably do this daily. But their day has just begun. Once you top it off with an animal-based lunch and dinner with a nice sweet dessert, and let's not forget all the snacks in between, and you're really out of whack, yinning and yanging all over the place, with no balanced center in sight, all of which is to be repeated the very next day, for years. Yikes! Doctor, I feel like shit, help me!
I made this the other night and so had it for breakfast this morning. I carmelized some leeks, carrots, and parsnips in olive oil, threw some fresh corn in there, and sauteed the whole thing in brown rice (soaked in water for at least three hours). I dabbed it with my wife's home-made cranberry relish from Thanksgiving, and voila, a perfectly-balanced macrobiotic breakfast. Everything in this meal is grown here locally, save for the brown rice and olive oil. It is the eating-vegetables-for-breakfast-thing that I am just getting used to, and loving it.
Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy
To learn more, I highly recommend The Everything Guide to Macrobiotics and/or The Macrobiotic Way.
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