Traditional Foods

"Traditional" in the context of these projects means pre-contact foods. No beef, mutton, goat, chicken, pork, milk, butter, cream, wheat flour (no fry bread), rye, barley, okra, black-eyed peas, or any other "Old World" food that many of us have lovingly incorporated into our diets and tribal cultures. No processed foods (Doritoes, Lays Chips, etc), even if the base is corn or potatoes. No chocolate unless it is unsweetened cacao or sweetened with honey from the Melipona bee, fruit, stevia, camas or agave. Be adventurous and try unfamiliar foods! There are many foods to choose from. My American Indian Health and Diet Project site lists and defines many of them.



Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Day 1 Part 1

Good Morning and Welcome to Day One of the Indigenous Eating Challenge.

I woke up with a sore throat. This does not surprise me since many of my KU students have been sneezing and gagging in class and, this weekend was the state cross country meet. I have to brag and say the Baldwin High School girls team won state for the fifth year in a row. My son Tosh medaled, a week after finishing second at the 4A Regionals: http://signal.baldwincity.com/news/2011/oct/27/bulldogs-run-well-class-4a-regional/

Anyway, the cross country celebrations included a late night party and bonfire on Saturday, then the boys' team spent the night at our house. I ran ten miles after the guys left and probably went too far on too little sleep. Am a bit pooped and my throat feels it.

Breakfast today was two glasses of water. Normally I'd have half-caff coffee and some tea. My throat wanted water. Then I had a banana smeared with "all natural" peanut butter. I don't like the unprocessed kind, however. As you may have noticed, the cost of peanut butter has risen dramatically because of the poor peanut harvest, so we are exploring the other nut butters.
This looks like a child's 3-D cell model. Tuesdays and Thursdays are long days for me. I have early office hours, then teach, then meetings. I'll swim at lunch and won't eat a real meal until I get home. This is a mix of pine nuts, dried strawberries, dried coconut, chia seeds and cranberries. I am out of dried bananas. Drat. I take a spoon along since the chia seeds will spill otherwise. I also have to drink a lot of water with this mix.

This is a quick salsa mix. A cross country mom made this for the party and gave it to me: corn, chilies, tomatoes, onions, black beans. How convenient for me! I will put this on polenta later today.

This looks like the rising oval sun. I made turkey chili/stew in the crock pot yesterday. Ingredients are basic: ground turkey, tomatoes, green chilies, onions, and ground red chilies (a powder I made). I left out garlic. This will probably be late lunch when I get home.

5 comments:

  1. For day 2 of my week, I had a mix of wild rice, blueberries, maple sugar, and wildrice milk for breakfast. We had leftover moosemeat caserole for lunch (the folks at the office liked it too), and then we had turkey spiced with sweet fern, wildrice with cranberries, roasted pumpkin wedges in maple syrup, and crabapple sauce for desert. It was a very good dinner. Day 3 breakfast was the same as days 1 & and we had leftovers from last night for lunch. I am thinking about whitefish with morrel mushrooms, leeks, wildrice, and june berries for dinner.

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  2. I want to eat at your house.

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  3. I am enjoying sharing my indigenous foods with my family and co-workers. It is really a value added to our interactions. One of the students here at work even took some wild rice and rice milk to her grandmother in the hospital.

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  4. So I ended up making chicken with noodles for my wife and daughters, it was hard not to lick my fingers or test the noodles (el dente). For myself, I made whitefish (spiced with sweet fern), wild rice, a compote (made of squash, leeks, and maple syrup), and surrounded it with red raspberries. I also tried to make some high energy bars, like the Tanka Bars, but it didn't turn out so well. Instead I decided to make them into meatballs. I used bison, leeks, cranberries, wild rice meal, wild rice flour, maple sugar, and one duck egg. I scrambled two of the meatballs, some wild mushrooms, and two duck eggs this morning for breakfast. I am having a leftover moose meat burger and wild rice for lunch today, and am thinking about a bison steak for dinner this evening.

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  5. these food ideas are fabulous. The comments are helping me change my ways of thinking about food. Roasted pumpkin wedges in maple syrup and wildrice with cranberries sounds very good. I like the lunch idea pinenuts, dried strawberries...
    Congratulations Tosh!

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