“That’s it! I’m not eating
carbohydrates!”
So shouted my husband early one
Saturday morning shortly before Christmas as he was drinking his usual vat of
coffee and I, already bewildered due to my eternal inability to function
properly before, say, 11 a.m., felt even more perplexed since neither of us had
been saying a thing and I don’t think there was a dreaded carbohydrate in
sight.
Then I realized he was listening to
an interview on the radio with science writer Gary Taubes discussing his book,
Good
Calories, Bad Calories,
which “challenges
the conventional wisdom on diet, weight control and disease.” According to Mr.
Taubes, an award-winning correspondent for
Science
magazine, it ain’t the saturated fats or the sedentary
lifestyle that ails us, it’s the carbs, with their impact on insulin secretion,
and the sugars, especially sucrose and that high-octane/high-fructose corn
syrup, that are our weighty undoing.
So no carbs it was for Peter, or at
least very few, quite the sacrifice for a bread and cookie lover amidst a
holiday freezer full of good bread and Christmas baking, and other assorted
jolly-holiday carbs.
Despite earlier misgivings, I have to
admit some half-year later, that I hand it to him. He’s down a pant size or two
and has recently added small amounts of decent whole grain complex-type carbs
back into his diet, which now reminds me of that of my diabetic god-daughter’s.
I’m even off much of my usual
carbo-hydration, cutting that mound of rice to a modest spoonful or three and
grabbing a handful of raw almonds instead of my usual chips.
Given his track record, I’m now
paying attention to Peter’s latest fancy, tempeh — no big surprise given
he’s usually ferreting out something or other off the beaten path.
At first I had no idea what he was
talking about, until I started poking around and learned that it’s a fermented
soy product from Indonesia. So that’s what that was in a veggie stir fry-type
dish I had in Surabaya on the island of Java and couldn’t figure out. And here
I thought it was just the residuals from malaria that had cooked my brain.
Tempeh, according to Harold Gee in
On
Food and Cooking
, was invented in
Indonesia, and is totally suited to that hot, humid tropical climate. It’s made
by cooking whole soybeans (without the hulls), forming them into thin layers
and then fermenting them with a mould, Rhizopus oligosporus or R. oryzae, for
24 hours at a warm, tropical temperature (30-33 Celsius). The mould grows and
makes long thread-like hyphae (a network of fine white filaments that make up
the vegetative part of a fungus), which penetrate the beans and bind them
together. As the mould grows, it also digests “a significant part” of the oil
and protein in the soybeans and transforms them into tasty bits that some
people much prefer to the taste of tofu.
Fresh tempeh has a yeasty, mushroomy
fragrance, and when sliced and fried it develops a nutty, almost meaty flavour
that many a vegetarian or vegan, including many Buddhists, find appealing in
their cuisine.
Traditionally, Southeast Asian
cuisines have used tempeh, including Thai cookery. But now Swedish scientists
have developed something of a doppelgänger that can be made from oats and
barley — crops grown in northern climates — and still deliver the
health benefits of tempeh.
Their study showed that the uptake of
iron doubled after people ate barley fermented and made into tempe, as they
call it (but I think of Tempe as a city in Arizona). As well, people showed low
blood-sugar and insulin responses, which are more typical of whole-grain foods
and part of the goal of the above mentioned low-carb/no-carb diet.
The Swedish-made tempe is also cited
as a good source of the B vitamin, folate, and it delivers the usual health
benefits associated with whole grains and pulses: resistance to cardiovascular
disease, some forms of cancer and age-related diabetes.
Whether it’s your waistline or the
waste of eating meat you’re concerned about, or perhaps it’s just another
unusual food group your curious about, it’s worth giving tempeh a whirl. You
may have to ask to find it; some grocers keep it, or products made from tempeh,
in the freezer department. And given it will be barbecue season, as soon as
this crazy weather breaks, the following recipe will give you some pretty tasty
results on your first tempeh try:
Tempeh kabobs with Moroccan couscous
From allrecipes.com
1 (8 oz) package tempeh, cut into
1/2-inch squares
16 fresh white mushrooms
1 medium eggplant, cut into 1-inch
cubes
1 large red bell pepper, cut into
1-inch pieces
16 cherry tomatoes
8 tbsp olive oil
4 tbsp soy sauce
4 tbsp teriyaki sauce
3 tbsp honey
1 tbsp grated fresh ginger root
1 tbsp chopped fresh garlic
Salt and pepper to taste
COUSCOUS:
2 c vegetable broth
1 tbsp grated fresh ginger root
1 tsp ground cumin
Salt to taste
1 c dry couscous
3/4 c raisins
3/4 c drained, canned chick peas
(garbanzo beans)
1 lemon
Place tempeh, mushrooms, eggplant,
red bell pepper, and cherry tomatoes in a large, re-sealable plastic bag. In a
bowl, whisk together olive oil, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, and honey; add the
ginger, garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour mixture over tempeh and
veggies, seal, and shake to coat. Refrigerate for 2 hours. Preheat grill on
medium-high. Thread tempeh and veggies on skewers. Reserve remaining marinade.
Grill skewers, turning often, for about 15 minutes. (These can also be done in
the broiler.)
While grilling kabobs, combine
vegetable broth, ginger, cumin, and salt. Bring to a light boil. Stir in
couscous, raisins and garbanzo beans; cover, and remove from heat. Let sit for
five minutes, or until fluffy. Just before serving, squeeze lemon over couscous
and stir. Serve kabobs with reserved marinade.
DOWNED SPOONS OVER SPOONBILLS
Trends in all things edible do come
and go.
The Culinary History of Food
notes that Europeans developed a new taste for vegetables round about the
second half of the 16th century. As the number of plant species served at
“better tables” increased, the number of animal species decreased, with animals
such as cormorants, storks, swans, cranes, bitterns, spoonbills, herons,
peacocks, whales, seals and porpoises disappearing from cookbooks and from
markets, thank goodness some naturalists would say. One exception was scoters,
those large black diving ducks with the fancy, bright orange bills you can see
plying the waters of our coast in winter. Despite their obvious bird-like
attributes, such as feathers, these were classified as “fish” by the church and
as such were deemed suitable for Lent for a considerable time.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning
freelance writer who finally saw her first spoonbill in Costa Rica, thankfully
not in a pot.