Of Weeds and Weans

Medicinal foods for a healthy New Year

Joseph Nolan

It’s Health Kick January, and immunity and optimising health are on our minds— for a change. It has also been a long, rocky December: anxious, sugar-coated, and weighed down with boxes of Quality Street. Time now for healthy foods and the hope of new habits, and for preparing our kids for whatever 2022 is going to throw at them, and at us.

The turn of the year changes the mood. By the end of the month, spring’s harbingers— Galanthus nivalis (Snowdrops) —will begin to appear. Imbolc draws near. And, because January is December’s hangover, all is gastronomical piety and good intentions. Naturally, this extends to our children. The festive period allows a degree of laxity with regard to sugar, junk food, processed and convenience foods, adherence to special diets, and other limits— but now, it’s time to rein it all back in. We reach instead for deeply nourishing, immune supporting, liver toning, detoxifying, and blood sugar regulating foods to put into our kids’ wee stomachs. It’s not just healthy food time, but medicinal food time.

However, getting medicinal foods into them might seem a bit of a challenge, with children’s notorious aversion to vegetables being a particular stumbling block. I have no answers here; only that eating vegetables and healthy foods yourself is a good start, at least in front of the children. Acting like eating vegetables and other healthy foods is normal and enjoyable goes a long way towards winning the argument, at least in early childhood. But, as far as I’m concerned, this does not extend to pretending to like those ghastly little hell cabbages that appear on holiday tables all over the UK; a person must have limits.

Even if, despite your best efforts, consuming fresh vegetables is a struggle in your house, there are a few simple things you can do to make the food on your table as healthy as possible.

Buy organic as much as possible. Aside from the much lower levels of pesticide residue than in conventionally grown food, organics are typically higher in nutrients, and often taste a lot better. Compare a tin of conventional tomatoes with a tin of organic ones, and I think you will be surprised by the difference. I certainly was.

Offer a wide variety of whole foods to include the broadest possible spectrum of nutrients, vitamins and minerals for growing bodies.

Offer, and ideally consume, fermented foods every day. In addition to cultivating a healthy and diverse microbiome, fermented foods are a great source of Vitamin K, which aids in healthy bone growth, and B vitamins for a healthy nervous system. Additionally, microbial activity renders the food both more digestible and more nutritious, as the friendly wee critters liberate nutrients and make them far easier to absorb. So even if you cook some of your fermented foods— like sour cucumber soup, sourdough bread, miso gravy, Weinkraut with apples —there will still be great benefit in eating them.

Add medicinal foods wherever you can, to improve immunity and resilience, and to provide the best possible materials for your child’s growth.

So what do I mean by medicinal foods? Well, for the most part food is fuel, both in the carbohydrate sense of providing energy to the body just as petrol does to your car, and in the nutrient sense of providing the raw materials for body processes, like calcium for bone production. Medicinal foods go a step or two further: they may be extraordinarily antioxidant, like Curcuma longa (Turmeric) or Vaccinium myrtillus (Blueberries); they may be supportive of the immune system, like medicinal mushrooms; they may vastly improve the function of a particular system or process, like Cinnamomum verum (Cinnamon) regulating blood glucose levels, and fermented foods improving digestion. As Hippocrates is thought to have said some 2500 years ago, ‘let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.’ These things are both.

Soups and broths

It is soup season. Clear aqueous extractions of herbs, vegetables, fungi, and (for the omnivorous) bones, are the essence of this; one might also simply call it a good stock. In Ashkenazi Jewish cooking, a rich chicken broth with Carrot, Onion, Parsnip, Leek and Celery is served for holiday meals, for wholesome lunches with matzah balls or noodles, and any time someone is sick or in need of a boost. This is wise. Long, slow cooking releases all the nutrients into the water in an easily absorbable and delicious form. You can use broth or stock as the base for other soups and sauces, and as the cooking liquid to produce flavoursome Rice, Potatoes, and Beans. With Long Covid all around us, it is also worth noting that these clear soups make excellent convalescent foods, and they store and freeze well— so, after the initial effort, they are very quick and easy to prepare.

Being vegetarian or vegan, though, can present a challenge where stock is concerned. Bones and scraps— whether of red meat, poultry or fish —are usually the main ingredient. So what is a plant-powered person to do? Well, we have mushrooms, and we have seaweeds, and the two combined make an admirable alternative to animal-derived versions. Gone are the days when a constant kitchen fire made this sort of cooking a doddle, but slow cookers are here to save the day— and making broth is quite a nice activity to do with children. They can throw in a handful of this and that, help cut Carrots or Onions, and crush Garlic. When I make my stocks, I start with a selection of dried mushrooms, inexpensively purchased from my local Chinese supermarket, including Shitake, Black Fungus, Maitake if I can find it, Cordyceps, and Agrocybe, plus some Porcini if I have them. Foraged mushrooms will end up in there too, including Trametes versicolor (Turkey Tail), Auricularia auricula-judae (Wood Ear, whose former antisemitic moniker unfortunately persists in the Latin), and Ganoderma applanatum (Artist’s Bracket). Seaweeds like kelps or kombu, Chondrus crispus (Irish Moss), Wakame (Undaria pinnatifida), and the lichen Cetraria islandica (Icelandic Moss), all add important nutrients to the brew. Dried fruits, like Lycium barbarum (Goji berries), Crataegus ssp. (Hawthorn berries), and Sambucus nigra (Elderberries) will also end up in the pot. Vegetables add flavour and nutrients; I tend to stick to my Grandmother’s aforementioned basics, although I sometimes add Allium sativum (Garlic) and whatever else I have lying about. You can add dried Urtica dioica (Nettles) for nutrients, and herbs that improve digestion like Piper nigrum (Black Pepper), Salvia officinalis (Sage), Thymus vulgaris (Thyme), and Rosmarinus officinalis (Rosemary). I find it best to under-add rather than over-add, because you can always add flavour later, but trying to dilute a murky, black, mud-tasting broth is a fool’s errand. Cook it for a long time— eight hours or more —to get everything out of your material. Then strain and use as you wish. I find it keeps at least five days in the fridge.

An easy lunch, if your little one likes it, is miso soup made with this kind of turbocharged stock. I serve it in a small cup as an accompaniment to a plate of other things; it makes a great medicinal boost to a winter diet.

Fermented foods

British diets are woefully deficient in these wonderfully healthy, delicious, piquant foods, and the strong flavours and pungent aromas can put some parents off. While Olives are usually a hard sell to children, pickled Cucumbers, sauerkraut, yogurt, kefir and kombucha generally go down well if presented in small portions and without a fuss.

Fermentation is a traditional method of preserving, and is essential for producing many of our favourite things— including bread (although modern food chemistry has largely rendered yeast irrelevant in massmarket bread production), cheese, alcohol, and soy sauce. Live fermented foods, like yogurt and kombucha, contain a wide range of beneficial micro-organisms, known by the catchy title ‘probiotics’. Nutrients that encourage probiotic growth in the gut are called prebiotics, and are as important to help the microbes stick around. Fermented foods, even after cooking, are pre-biotic, and fibrerich foods also help keep the bitty bacteria happy.

There is a staggering number of conditions for which probiotics have been found helpful in laboratory studies (e.g. IBS and IBD, allergies, low immunity, UTIs, hypertension, high cholesterol, anxiety, depression, kidney stones, some cancers), and conventional wisdom the world over credits them with granting a long and healthy life. Especially in winter, when fresh foods are a little harder to come by and most things are cooked, I make it a point to serve fermented foods every day— whether as homemade sauerkraut, miso in dressing and spreads, a little kombucha, yogurt, or a zesty condiment.

Superfoods

Then there are the so-called ‘superfoods’ . Essentially, a superfood is anything containing high levels of nutrients: minerals, vitamins, healthy fats, and antioxidants. Ferments and broths might fall into this category, but generally the rather nebulous marketing term is applied to things like Cacao (raw chocolate from Theobroma cacao), Spirulina (Arthrospira spp.), bee pollen, raw Honey, Green Tea (Camellia sinensis), Turmeric, Ginger (Zingiber officinale), Beetroot (Beta vulgaris) and so on. Most can be rather quietly slipped into a child’s diet, and we all know that Tomato sauces and pestos hide a multitude of nutrients. These kinds of super-nutritious foods are worth incorporating into your child’s food on a daily basis. Their wealth of essential vitamins and minerals makes them a really valuable boost to health and vitality at this time of the year.

Because many superfoods have powerful pigments— Turmeric, Spirulina, Beetroot, Blueberry —using them to colour more workaday dishes can be fun. For Hallowe’en, a little black tahini stirred into hummus turns it a really unappealing grey, but makes for an entertaining ‘wet cement’ dip. I have also been known to tart up jarred pesto with some Spirulina, making it bright green and really inviting, with the dish’s big flavours conveniently masking Spirulina’s somewhat fishy taste. However, one of the better ways I have found to introduce these types of foods is in snacks and treats like this one:

Superfood Bites

Based on a recipe by Tipper Lewis for Neal’s Yard Remedies

Ingredients

2 tbs. fruity superfood powder

1 tbs. Spirulina or green powder

4 tsps. Raw Cacao powder (regular unsweetened cocoa powder works fine too)

4 tbs. dried berries (Blueberries, Raspberries, Strawberries, Currants, Goji berries, etc.)

2 tbs. Maca powder (Lepidium meyenii), or Slippery Elm (Ulmus rubra), Baobab (Adansonia), or other nutritious pre-biotic powder

4 tbs. Chia seeds (Salvia hispanica)

15 Dates (Phoenix dactylifera)

200g ground Almonds (Prunus amygdalus)

4 tbs. unsweetened desiccated Coconut (Cocos nucifera)

1 tsp. Vanilla (V. sp.) essence

1 tsp. Rose (Rosa sp.) water (optional but highly recommended)

Method

1. Roughly chop the dates.

2. Put all ingredients into a food processor and blend until smooth and sticky. Adjust texture with additional ground Almonds, Slippery Elm, or liquid.

3. Roll into balls of desired size and eat with relish.

Happy herbing!