The CMM.

This is the very intermittent public health blog of Rosemary Eileen Till.

I am going climbing this weekend and, as I am one to scheme about food all the time, I was thinking about what food to bring. I am trying to eat less gluten, mostly as an intentional way to get better at building my diet around other grains, proteins and vegetables, so I was brainstorming ways to go beyond the simple peanut butter and bread sandwich. Also, much as I love Clif bars, I like real food too.

A mainstay of my diet in Park Café days was the Cornmeal Millet Muffin – the “CMM.” Texture-y, tasty and totally granola, the CMM is edible straight from the pan, it makes a supreme compliment to bison-patty-cum-steak, a hearty addition to any backpacker’s Cream of the West breakfast, and is perfectly good smashed to grainy pulp in a bread bag in the bottom of your pack. They’re also gluten-free. What better thing could I do than bake a batch of CMMs? Ignoring the fact that I didn’t really have time, I bought the ingredients and then was obligated with whip them up, primarily because I didn’t want the buttermilk to go bad in the fridge and the only thing worse than buying store applesauce would be letting it go bad too.

However, I didn’t make CMMs and I’m not sharing the Park Café CMM recipe here.  I have this thing with baking cookies: I have one recipe and I play around with it all the time, substituting this for that and adding interesting things like flax and the crumbs from last time’s cookies. David accuses me of baking things that are good, but aren’t cookies. This is not the first time that I’ve made “CMMs,” and since each time they’ve been a little different, the recipe is becoming my go-to platform-for-adventures muffin recipe. There is much potential here. I present to you a variation on the CMM.

Mix in a larger bowl:

·      ½ cup oil

·      ½ cup honey

·      ½ cup applesauce (I used an apricot-apple sauce)

·      3 eggs

·      1 ½ cups almond flour

·      ¼ cup coconut flour

·      A dash of almond extract

Mix in a slightly smaller bowl:

·      1 ½ cups corn flour

·      4 teaspoons baking powder

·      1 teaspoon salt

·      1 teaspoon xanthan gum

·      ½ cup millet

·      ¼ cup sesame seeds

·      2 Tablespoons chia seeds

Mix dry ingredients into wet ingredients, alternating with 1 cup of buttermilk (almond milk or milk, mixed with some yogurt might work here too).

Oil muffin tin well and back for approximately 23 minutes at 350 degrees.

Also, don’t taste them before they’ve cooled to bearable temperature. And don’t inhale them.

They have a bit of a baking powder-y flavor, so maybe substitute in some baking soda. I didn’t have any because I used it to clean the sink about a month ago.

Also, a nugget from my new favorite NPR blog, "Goats and Soda: Stories of Life in a Changing World":

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/07/29/336272173/fist-bumps-pass-along-fewer-germs-than-handshakes.

Project Hummus.

It’s another Friday evening and I’ve just spent entirely too much time at Target and the grocery store. (And not enough time posting here!) However, my meander down the backside of the aisles was fruitful: a bag of Way Better Snacks “Simply So Sweet Chili Tortilla Chips” on clearance for $1.48. Was $2.99. I’ve never had these before, but they looked like something I’d want sometime, and they were on clearance, and that’s how I generally shop. I can tell you now, after having ripped open the bag for a taste-test, that they are perfectly dangerous.

I got up this morning thinking that I’d make hummus. David had a bag of dried garbs in the pantry and I soaked all bazillion of them. I now have a massive pot of garbs.

I must stop eating these chips.

This is my first time making hummus in several years, and so, without further ado, I present to you a freestyle fusion of various hummus recipes I found on Pinterest. I would cite my sources, but really I’ve just looked at a bunch of hummus recipes, mixed that with what I think should go into hummus, mulled around on the hummus theme all day, and am just doing it. Is "hummus" of the commons?

Step One: Close the chip bag.

Step Two: About two cups of garbs, a very large (soup) spoonful of tahini, about 5 cloves garlic, and a splash of olive oil in the food processer. Purée. Add a dollop more olive oil or some more water until the consistency is nice. Now comes the adventurous part.

Step Three: Experiment! Here is what I’m doing: some salt, a squirt of Sriracha, taste, more Sriracha, more salt, taste. Generous shakings of cumin, more Sriracha, more cumin, more salt.

Step Four: Well, it was going to be purple kale. However, upon further inspection, my kale has a lot of little clusters of little white bugs. I know that this is what happens when things are organic and haven’t been sprayed with pesticides. But there are just a lot of these little bugs. I’m holding off on using the kale for now. Parsley instead. A healthy handful, chopped, into the food processor.

Step Five: My hummus is a little too runny at the moment. I’m adding several handfuls of garbs (I have a lot of garbs) and more seasoning.

Step Six: Well, I was going to eat some hummus with some chips, instead I’m going to save the end of the chip bag for a snack later in the w

eek. It just goes to show that you always find good things in the clearance section. Always.

Share with me, please, your creative hummus ideas. I still have a large pot of garbs.

The tab on my teabag reads: “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted.” John Lennon.

Friday afternoon. 

I don’t feel like running. In fact, I think I might be getting a sore throat, which is a good enough excuse to go running tomorrow, when I’m rested and feeling better.

I don’t have any homework to do, because I’m not in school, which is this bizarre feeling of weightlessness and/or disbelief and anxiety that I’m forgetting some big assignment. (I’ve dreamt about this. A sure sign that I need to go back to school.)

I could make soup or organize my miscellaneous papers file, but I don’t really feel like it. 

Or I could follow all of the mind-numbing, soul-flattening links about “Top-Ten Embarrassing Celebrity Selfies” on Facebook, but, eh, I’m not feeling particularly motivated. 

However, I am here – here on the couch with my heating pad, a quilt and the cat – enjoying “wasting” my time on this project I cooked up about a month ago:

I’m going to start a food blog. I’ve just been loving Pinterest so much lately that I need to do something crafty and entrepreneurial myself.

So I had this idea last month when I was winging some gluten-free carrot muffins. I had a recipe, but I don’t like using a ton of oil and I didn’t have this or that and I was just throwing things in as I thought they might work. I even snapped some artsy pictures, dreaming about blog layouts. However, when the muffins were an epic fail, I reconsidered my aspirations as a food blogger and put the project on the back burner.

BUT, I had this other idea as I was mixing up these muffins and brainstorming my food blogging career:

I could have not just a food blog – but – I could have a PUBLIC HEALTH blog.

Yes.

Because I like food a lot, and I like cooking a lot. But, I’m also fascinated by where food comes from and what it means to us. What are our relationships with food and how do our systems of consumption nourish and destroy our health? I’m thinking big-picture here, such as the ways in which the huge popularity of quinoa in the US impacts the Andean communities who grow it. We’re all abuzz about the grain because it is high in protein and is gluten-free – a healthy and versatile option for vegetarians and those avoiding wheat. Is or isn’t that more important than the cultural and physical survival of communities selling their subsistence? “Our” is you and me; “our” is all-of-our, everyone, circular.

Thus, a food blog. A public health blog. A place to share about my culinary adventures, primarily the ones that turn out edible. And, more meaningfully, a forum to broadcast and discuss interesting, public health-related things, which, of course, public health is everything and everything is public health.  A platform, a table, a hearth upon which to serve up tasty challenges, dialogue, community and the occasional shameless pun.

I’m inviting you, my public-health-enthusiast friends.