Days 8-10

If you've just joined us and would like to start from the beginning, then scroll down to the 'archives' and click on 'lets get cleansed'. There are Ayurvedic, TCM and other links which may provide some insight not only into the way you eat, but also the way you live.

I've been having different comments from people all around the world either by sms, email or on the phone, and I welcome them all.

My German friend in Chile says "great diet, but I can't stop the coffee".
My Irish friend in New York says, "Finding it hard to give up booze", and
my Aussie friend in Mansfield says, "that green drink of yours tastes like *%$@! pond slime".
Another Aussie friend in Germany has a lot to say about commercial muesli, and I'll talk about that later.

I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. Contact me

For our Northern Neighbours enjoying the autumnal month(Sheila O'Shea in particular whose request this was), a spring cleanse obviously isn't for you right now. What's good this time of year is a gallbladder cleanse. The Chinese consider the gallbladder and liver to be the organs of spring, and they are related in function too, so when you cleanse one, the other is usually involved. The reason why I'd recommend cleansing the gallbladder in Autumn however, is for the simple reason that apples play a major part in the cleanse by softening the stones (sometimes into liquid if you drink enough apple juice), and as we know, the season for apples is autumn.
It's actually very easy, lasts for 5 days only and you don't have to change much in your diet other than to consume a lot more apples than you normally would.
There are many variations of this diet, but they generally involve the same ingredients.

5 day Gallbladder Cleansing Diet
I followed Dr. Lai Chiu-Nan's programme last May.
1. For the first five days, take four glasses of apple juice every day. Or eat four or five apples, whichever you prefer. Apple juice softens the gallstones. During the five days, eat normally, but for a better effect, avoid sugars, wheat and alcohol.
2. On the sixth day, take no dinner.
3. At 6 PM, take a teaspoon of Epsom salt (magnesium sulphate) with a glass of warm water.
4. At 8 PM, repeat the same. Magnesium sulphate opens the gallbladder ducts.
5. At 10 PM, take half cup olive oil (or sesame oil) with half cup fresh lemon juice. Mix it well and drink it. The oil lubricates the stones to ease their passage.
PS. 1cup=250ml, ½ cup lemon juice=3 lemons (approx.)

The next morning, you will find green stones in your stools. 'Usually they float,' Chiu Nan notes. "You might want to count them. I have had people who pass 40, 50 or up to 100 stones. Very many."
Even if you don't have any symptoms of gallstones, you still might have some. It's always good to give your gall bladder a clean-up now and then.

If you do shoot more than 40 stones, then I'd recommend having another go in a couple of weeks time.

But back to Spring...

DAY 8
Woke up with a citron pressé and went for a walk along the back track to the beach. You can either surf the Southern Ocean snorkel it for abalone, and today was particularly calm. The tide was also out which not only added to its beauty, but also exposed the leafy sea lettuce attached to the rocky sea bed. I harvested a handful and took it back home to experiment with.

So. Here comes the bit about sea vegetables, or seaweeds as they are more commonly known. I am by know means an expert, but what I do know is this... All terrestrial plant life began their journey as blue green algae. When the algae began to emigrate from the sea onto land, it lost its major food source of nitrogen and began competing for the next one, sunlight. That caused the algae to grow up toward the sun to feed, creating first small plants, then trees.
Because all plant life originated from the ocean, "...sea plants contain ten to twenty times the minerals of land plants and an abundance of vitamins and other elements required for man's metabolism, making them an excellent source for food and medicine." Paul Pitchford "Healing with Whole Foods"

I read the back of a couple of different packets of sea vegetables and found that some are simmered lightly for up to 7 hrs before being dried. As the leafy sea lettuce was considerably lighter in texture than its leathery kelp cousin, I simmered it for only 90 mins. It took only 4 hours to completely dry outside. The result was a very palatable flavour. It unfortunately lost some of its vibrant colour but the cooking definitely broke down the structure to make it more digestible. When it dried, it was quite beautiful in shape. A good first effort I think and I'm now inspired to play with it some more. Maybe cooking it in a sugar syrup would enhance its colour and give it a 'snap' when dried to garnish a desert....

Breakfast was the green juice, followed by the leftover millet porridge with rhubarb, honey, nuts and cinnamon.

Early Dinner was something more substantial. Rice pilau with roasted vegetables. I felt like something hardy.

• 1 cup of brown rice (I had brown basmati)
  
• 2 1/4 cups stock of your choice (meat stocks are a great source of calcium without needing to eat the meat)
  
• various whole spices such as cardamon, star anise, cloves, cinnamon quill
  
• onion diced, garlic, ginger, chilli chopped to taste.
  
  Set oven to 180˚C or 400˚F.
  Slowly saute the last 4 ingredients in a frypan until soft. Add rice. Add spices. Add stock and bring to boil. Season to taste. Pour everything into an oven-proof dish or a silver mixing bowl and cover tightly with lid or aluminium. Bake in oven. Walk away and forget about for 70 mins. Check, stir and add more liquid if req or fork it through and let rest with lid on for a bit.
  
  For the last half hour of cooking time, I added the usual suspects of segmented cauliflower, then asparagus and mushrooms for the last 10 mins, all drizzled with olive oil, tamari, honey, and seasoned with white pepper and salt.
  Enjoy.
  

DAY 9
Breakfast: citron pressé, no green juice this morning...sometimes it's good to have a break the repetition.
Back to the muesli. I love it and it's a great way to get seeds and nuts into you. My mother was inspired by my home-made variety, so she now adds her own assortment of bits to a commercial product, but here's what Mike offered from Berlin.

"...the humble muesli has been processed of course.. the grains have to be manhandled so that they have a shelf life and are also ready to eat!
It’s quite appalling how they strip out the ‘germ’ (because it goes bitter), and the fibre (too rough to chew), and after the processing they mix back in powdered vitamins, salts and sugars. I think in the UK at least, they’re still allowed to call stuff ‘natural’ if they put back (artificially) what they took out in the first place."

I had never heard this before, but explains why my batch turns rancid if I don't munch through it in time. I always thought it was the nuts, and it can be, but the oats I hadn't thought about. When I looked into it some more, I found that oats have 3-5 times more fats (lipids) than other grains, and are heat treated to 90˚C to stabilise them for a longer shelf life.

You can buy organic, unstabilised rolled oats at your local health food store, but store them preferably in an air-tight jar in the dark and try and use them within 4-5 weeks.


Lunch: Leftover rice pilau with roquette (arugula) from the garden, chia and sesame.

Dinner: Out came the parsley salad. The recipe for this is in the previous week's menu. It's kind of like a chunky salsa verde or gremolata and goes with almost anything.

Marieke also made a version of what she used calls " get carrots into kids anyway you can".

grated carrots, soft boiled eggs, blanched asparagus, sliced, snow peas, broad beans, whatever you need to use up from the fridge, basically. The dressing was the basic olive oil (or flax), red wine vinegar, mustard, honey AND the leftovers from an eggplant pickle which i swear took it to new heights. Believe me, this tastes a whole lot better than it probably sounds. Make sure the eggs are still warm, and don't be too precise about any of the ingredients.

We ate it with a puffed rice cracker, and some more green salad.

DAY 10
citron pressé, proceded 30 mins later by a green juice . The juice changes its flavour everyday. One day I agree with Charlotte, it tasted on the pond slime side, and the next day was delicious....so play around with the ratios. Half a grapefruit per cup will take the green-ness away if that's your desire.

Breakfast: Muesli with rice milk, sheep's yoghurt, honey, cinnamon, oatmeal and psyllium. Again, if you're not fond of the lanolin smell and flavour sheep's anything can give off, add honey.

Lunch: I slowly cooked a finely sliced leek (at the end of their season now) in half butter, half olive oil. Added Garlic, ginger and chopped red chilli. Sliced asparagus, mushrooms and added to the base mixture once cooked well. Turned up the heat. Added sliced zucchini, a Tbs of mustard about half a cup of water. Sliced greens...cavollo nero, silver beet, and tossed them into the concoction. Added in sliced spinach at the end with tamari, umeboshi vinegar (not much) and served with the usual sprinkles.

Sprinkles.
GOMASIO is a Japanese seasoning to use in lieu of salt, as the sodium from the sea vegetable is usually enough. Sesame seeds have a very high calcium content.

1 cup UNHULLED sesame seeds, soaked overnight, drained the next day and roasted in the oven till done. (soaking the seeds, nuts and grains makes them more digestible hence more nutritious)
Wakame, oven dried for about 10 mins on the same temp as the seeds (180˚C)

Either grind both individually in a mortar with pestle, or in the blender to a fine-ish grain or to your liking.

CHIA
I've mentioned Chia previously, but it is such a fabulous seed that it deserves another mention.
15x magnesium content of broccoli, 8x more omega 3 than salmon, 5x more calcium than milk and 3x more iron than spinach!

I also mentioned earlier the dangers of taking calcium as a supplement. "Self prescription of drugs or supplements is inadvisable as we can cause as much damage from having too much as we can from having too little" Anne Marie Colbin".
I'll discuss this more in another article, after the cleanse.

Dinner: It was Friday night, and we'd been invited around to a friend's house for a quick bite before heading to a wine lounge for some clever cabaret. None of these things, as may appear, are conducive to liver cleansing.....so a good test of my resilience after ten days.

Fortunately, our friends had also been cleansing and were not only sympathetic to the cause but are also constantly aware of what they eat. They all have the most magnificent gardens, bursting at the seams with an enormous variety of both fruit and vegetables, chickens and rabbits to boot.
Dinner that night was sushi and sashimi, inari rolls, Japanese spinach and fresh oysters. By the time Swanny had arrived back from the boat with a bucket of fresh scallops, we had no room left!


Japanese Spinach (adapted from a recipe out of the New York Times)
500g spinach, stemmed and washed
3 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
2 teaspoons sugar (I'd use only one and honey of you're cleansing)
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon water (more to taste)
1/2 teaspoon dark sesame oil

1. Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil. Blanch a handful of spinach at a time for 5 seconds in the boiling water using a deep-fry skimmer. Cool, drain and gently squeeze out water. Chop coarsely.
2. Make the dressing. If your sesame seeds have not been toasted, heat a dry skillet over medium heat and add the sesame seeds. Stir and shake the pan constantly, and as soon as the seeds turn golden and smell nutty, transfer to a suribachi mortar and pestle or to a spice mill. Allow to cool. Grind the seeds just until crushed.
3. Combine the soy sauce and sugar in a small bowl and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Add the sake and water, then stir in the ground sesame seeds. Thin out with water. Toss with the spinach and stir together until the dressing infuses the spinach. Be careful not to bruise the spinach leaves. Divide into four small bunches and place in the middle of four small plates or bowls. Drizzle on a few drops of sesame oil. Serve at room temperature.
Yield: Four small servings
Advance preparation: You can blanch the spinach up to a day in advance. The dish can be assembled and refrigerated several hours before serving.

I abstained from the temptations of the wine bar, and to be honest... after 10 days, it wasn't really that difficult. It only takes 2 weeks to lose your palate for sugar, alcohol and anything else you thought you could never 'give up'.

Interestingly, this was the first meal which my stomach reacted to. It's usually a given that I will bloat at the sight of wheat, and I haven't felt bloated at all on this diet...until now. Then I remembered that Monica Henry had discovered a starch/ protein intolerance when pulse testing me a year ago, so I obviously still carry it. I didn't mind though....