[a medicinal cooking blog: using food as medicine to treat whatever may ail you]
Showing posts with label healthy cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label healthy cooking. Show all posts

Thursday, September 16, 2010

A Duck's Egg


I wanted to share the good news on duck eggs (which I already loved). While a free range farm fresh chicken egg is a wonderful source of protein and nutrition, duck eggs are even higher in concentrated amounts of vitamin A and D, manganese, zinc, copper, potassium, sodium, phosphorous, calcium, and iron. This also means they are higher in cholesterol, though it is considered the "good" cholesterol i.e. monounsaturated fats. Duck eggs are an alkaline food while chicken eggs are more on the acidic side. If you are allergic to chicken eggs, you usually will not be to duck eggs. And, eggs are the perfect protein, full of high quality essential amino acids. Does it get any better? That is, if you love eggs to begin with.

In Chinese Medicine, eggs are considered yin in nature, nourishing all that is liquid in the body, such as blood and essential fluids. Eggs are thermally neutral which means they are neither warming nor cooling and can be ingested by people who are at one extreme of the spectrum or the other. Eggs are an excellent food for fertility purposes, both before (pre-conception) and post partum. According to P. Pitchford (Healing With Whole Foods), eggs should be avoided in an overly damp condition (i.e. someone who is very overweight or if you have a mucus overload).

I like to poach or make soft boiled duck eggs and serve them over a salad or a tender meaty dish like I did before the summer started in this pork chop braise. Once it got warmer, out came a salad of radicchio, chick peas, carrots, and onions with a lovely soft boiled sweet duck egg on top. Apparently you can also bake with duck eggs, though I can't share any recipes on baking as it's not my forte. I drizzled a tangy vinaigrette over the salad which consisted of : olive oil, honey, sea salt, fresh crushed black pepper, dijon mustard, and rice vinegar. Delicious.


Friday, June 12, 2009

What's in Your Local Store



Just went on a quick jaunt to the grocery store, specifically Trader Joe's, to stock up on food supplies for the weekend as well as some basics. I like to shop in a variety of places, I hit up a butcher for my meat, the Chinese grocery for my ground pork, the Lebanese store for my lamb and olive oil, and on and on but as of late Trader Joe's has been quite a nice place to get some great quality basics all in one place for a very decent price when I can't go to all my stores all over the place. They've also been doing some great stuff in the medicinal foods arena. I found Aloe vera cubes in syrup which I've been wanting to make from scratch and post about here as Aloe has so many wonderful medicinal qualities. Besides being high in vitamin E, Aloe has powerful soothing digestive qualities, and is beneficial in treating diabetes (much like nopales which I posted about last month). I'm excited to try the Trader Joe's product and then make it from scratch next time using the gorgeous Aloe tails I bought at Cermak Produce recently. I also got some lovely aged balsamic vinegar for less than $4, which is a steal, I'll have to taste it and see how it turns out. I've been on a big vinegar kick, probably because my liver is calling for it as winter is finally over in Chicago and I'm transitioning from all the stews and hearty foods into a lighter diet. Vinegar is a great detox condiment when you are trying to clean your system out as well as helping in treating conditions of obesity and phlegm.


The mini aged balsamic vinegar, can't wait to try it.


The Aloe vera dessert cubes.