How to Make We Qi Fermented Pickles

A fun thing to do in the summer is to make your own fermented pickles.  These are the directions we attach whenever we give away a jar.

To give credit where credit is due, We Qi is very much like the Korean national pickle known as kimchi.  But We Qi (pronounced “Wee Chee”) is a process, not a product!  Most importantly, you shouldn’t make it all by yourself.  Make it with your partner, with family, with friends, and your Qi (“breath” or “energy”) will alchemically merge with the Qi of the ingredients, and create a remarkable living food: We Qi. 

Make some, eat some, give some away!  Join the We Qi Revolution!

Ingredients:

            2 medium to large heads nappa cabbage

            2 daikon, peeled and cubed

            ½ cup sea salt

            5 - 10 cloves garlic

            10 green onions

            powdered red pepper or chopped fresh red peppers (adjust to your desired level of heat)

            juice from previous batch of We Qi (optional)

            2 large buckets

            plate

            big rock

Procedure:

1. Set aside several large outer leaves of cabbage
2. Chop up rest of cabbage, coarsely, and divide into two buckets for easy mixing
3. Add half the salt to each bucket, mix well by hand
4. If you have juice from your previous batch of We Qi, add it to the mix to hasten fermentation
5. Combine into one bucket
6. Cover with large whole cabbage leaves
7. Place upside-down plate over the top
8. Place large clean rock on top of plate
9. Cover bucket with moist cloth, bungee-cord it closed so critters can’t get in
10. Set aside in a cool place for three days, mixing occasionally
11. Add crushed fresh garlic, coarsely chopped green onions, red pepper, daikon cubes
12. Cover with moist cloth and set aside another three days – let it get good and bubbly
13. Transfer to clean jars and keep in refrigerator until ready to enjoy
14. Adjust for over-saltiness (if necessary) by adding more daikon; adjust for under-saltiness by adding salt
15. Give away some jars along with these directions so that others can experience the Way of We Qi!

Variations:

Add other vegetables, like carrots, kale, turnips, radish, etc., or other interesting things like kombu seaweed slices or watercress

Add fresh herbs like ashitaba leaves or gotu kola and let them ferment along with the cabbage.

If you are the adventurous type, add anchovy paste, fish stomachs, or other funky matter.

Instead of starting anew each time, just keep adding fresh vegetables, sea salt, garlic to your bucket of We Qi.

Om We Qi Yum!

On Mushrooms

One morning not too long ago, I woke up early and, unable to go back to sleep, decided to head out for a hike in the pre-dawn chill. As I walked uphill towards one of my favorite dells, I savored the crisp morning air and basked in the light of the recently-full moon setting in the west. I felt myself slipping into that state of mind which only a rhythmic entrainment with nature induces in me: energized yet calm, introspective but wide open, happy and fully alive.

Call it a hunch, call it the effect of a few stray spores floating in the moist air and alerting the olfactory centers of my brain, call it what you will - but for whatever reason I veered off the path and followed a deer trail into a damp area of tan oak, bay, and poison oak. There, as the first rays of the sun hit the leaves on the forest floor, I found my first chanterelles of the season. With the combination of the recent rains and dropping nighttime temperatures, the forest had produced a beautiful little crop of golden-orange manna for me to gather. After picking enough for breakfast (I left the babies for another day, or perhaps for another mushroom-lover), I headed home and made a delicious buttery mushroom omelet for me and my family. What a way to start the day!

Here in Santa Cruz, many people share my passion for mushrooms. But in much of this country, indeed in much of the Western world, mushrooms are looked upon with great suspicion if not revulsion. The great mycologist G. Gordon Wasson divides the peoples of the world into two classes: the “mycophiles” and the “mycophobes.” Fortunately for me, my parents both come from strongly mycophilic cultures. Growing up in Japan, I grew to love the plentiful shiitake, the long and skinny enokidake, the rare and fragrant matsutake which evoked for us the joys within the sad beauty of autumn. My father, who is Swiss, is an avid mushroom-hunter who goes foraging in the hills of Binningen, where he lives outside the city of Basel. His father, a civil servant in the town of Thalwil on the shores of Lake Zurich, served as the mushroom inspector for the community. If people were unsure about the edibility of the mushrooms they had collected, they would bring their harvest to my grandfather to have it checked out.

Aside from a genetic propensity to dwell on mushrooms, to long for them when they aren’t around and to cook and eat them with great gusto when they are, I have maintained a longtime professional interest in fungi. As an herbalist, I prescribe them daily in my practice, usually in the form of the mildly tonifying fuling, sometimes as the more strongly diuretic zhuling, often as part of a formula containing the immune-strengthening, spirit-calming polypore known as reishi or lingzhi. From the Chinese point of view, mushrooms are a yin phenomenon, growing as they do in dark, moist places. The biggest part of the mushroom’s body is the mycelium, a fine network of thready matter that grows through the soil of the forest floor. But the above-ground sexual organ bursts out into the yang of daylight to spread its spores into the greater world. Thus the mushroom when eaten nurtures the dark wet places within us, but also animates our creative and libidinous energies – what Chinese medicine calls “tonifying yin and yang.”

Mushrooms are the great alchemists of the forest, transforming tons of dead and decaying matter into beautiful, edible, perhaps even spiritual morsels. From the delectable morel to the medicinal lingzhi to the psychedelic ‘shrooms that have spread like spores on the wind from the huts of obscure Mazatec medicine women to living rooms and raves around the world, mushrooms have shared with humans a symbiotic intimacy since the dawn of time. When we forage for fungi in the wild, cook them with a few simple ingredients and eat them, we get a taste of Eden. Something in us remembers a time before supermarkets, a time before we left the safety and abundance of the forest for the open plains, a time when a field was just a field and not a place where we planted stuff. When we eat mushrooms, we embrace the long lineage of hunter-gatherers from which we are descended. And, embracing what we truly are, we feel good, and we are healthy.


Note to mushroom lovers: PSYCH!  No, I did not find my first chanterelles this early!  I wrote this piece one October many years ago for my ACUPUNK column in the Good Times.  May the rains begin soon.

Mangos and Pork

Mangos and pork

Who needs a fork?

Dive right in!

Life is for living

Eating and Being Eaten

The winter season always makes me appreciate the joys of feasting. The Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas ham urge me to take it easy, get comfortable, sleep a lot. “Time to hibernate,” they purr from deep inside my gut. There’s something about the cold weather that triggers this ancient mammalian drive. Most of the time we ignore it. But during the holidays the kids don’t have school, my wife has two weeks off from work, the clinic slows down, and for a few glorious lazy days I eat more and do less than I normally do.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The post-feast sloth is a joy in its own right, but the eating is definitely the main event. To prepare a large meal with family and friends, to sit down and eat together when you are hungry is a joy that’s hard to beat. In fact, whether or not it’s the holidays, eating for me epitomizes the joy of being alive.

Clearly, just as evolution has wired us to enjoy sex, we are programmed to enjoy eating. DNA “wants” us to keep on living so that we increase our chances of making babies and hence more DNA. Ergo, we like to eat, and we like to make love.

Speaking of food and sex, Chinese medicine describes our vitality, our qi, as coming from two main sources. The first source is our parents, and by extension our ancestors. This type of qi, called “pre-natal qi,” is passed on genetically and is said to be stored in the kidneys. Pre-natal qi is the qi of sexuality and reproduction, and we only get a finite amount of it. We can’t really build it up, but we can squander it through too much sex and drugs and rock n’ roll. The second type of qi, called “post-natal qi” because we start to absorb it after we are born, comes from the air we breathe and the food we eat. The lungs and digestive system are the domain of this kind of qi.

How can these theories contribute to our health? Well, number one is: don’t over-spend your pre-natal qi through fast living and reckless habits. Younger readers will scoff at this advice, but older readers will nod knowingly. Number two is: keep breathing (if you feel you need help with this, find a good qigong instructor or a yoga class). Number three is (you guessed it): keep on eating.

But what to eat? Since I believe that all food is good, I don’t like to give lists of “good” and “bad” foods. So here are a few health-oriented suggestions instead: Cook your own food. Eat regularly. Don’t overeat (except at infrequent feasts). Eat seasonal, local foods. Incorporate in your own diet what your ancestors ate many generations ago. Eat a varied diet. Set time aside to enjoy your meals.

Ultimately, all diets from macrobiotics to vegan are based more on ideology than on anything else. Often, in the New Age circles in which alternative medicine thrives, there is an unspoken assumption that cleanliness is next to Godliness, that if you could only cleanse all those toxins from your liver or manage to avoid certain karmically incorrect foods, you will ascend to the “next level,” a realm that by definition you are not in now. I’m not arguing that these diets are necessarily unhealthy, but I do think that they can create guilt and neurosis, neither of which contributes to good health.

My own food ideology has to do with honoring our biology, and embracing enjoyment. By honoring our biology, I mean that the human digestive system evolved into its present form over the course of at least two million years of hunting and gathering. What this means is that we are optimally fueled by an omnivorous diet consisting of a large variety of fruits, vegetables, roots, tubers, grains, seeds, and meats. Archeological evidence shows quite plainly that the shift to agriculture, with its reliance on a few key foods, had a disastrous effect on human health (it also triggered the population explosion that we are reeling from today).

As for embracing enjoyment, I believe that pleasure is inherently healthy. Those French studies showing that red wine is good for you probably have as much to do with the attitude towards food of the people studied as they do with the chemical properties of red wine. We will all be eaten one day. But until life eats us, let us eat life! Bon appetit!

The Art of the Herbal Liqueur

The first time I ever distilled my own liquor, I experienced something of the excitement that must have been felt by Jabir-ibn-Hayyan, the eighth-century Mesopotamian alchemist who is said to have discovered the distillation of alcohol. It was the year that our apricot tree fruited like never before, an embarrassment of riches that yielded apricot pies, apricot sauce, and finally, due to sheer neglect (some over-ripe apricots left in a bowl, then accidentally submerged in water), apricot "wine". The wine got me all excited, but my excitement waned when I tried it, then reached a new height as I was hit by the inspiration to extract the alcohol from the wine. I rigged a crude still out of a pot, a ceramic vegetable steamer, and a bag of ice, and produced a few milliliters of clear, strong, and deliciously fruity-flowery-aromatic moonshine. Tasting it, I was transformed by the spirit, the essence of apricot as it melted into my tongue then shone out of my every pore. This, I thought to myself, is definitely something I could do full-time.

As it turned out, I never did become a big-time producer of whiskey or rum or apricot liquor. Fortunately, there are other ways of extracting plant essences with alcohol. When I was a child, I used to help my parents make umeshu, the traditional “plum wine” of Japan. My sister and I would carefully wash and dry the unripe fruit (actually a variety of apricot), then poked them full of holes with a fork. My mother put the fruit into large glass jars, together with rock sugar, and poured shochu (grain spirits) over them. A couple of years later, we enjoyed the resulting liqueur, neat or mixed with soda water and ice as a refreshing summer drink.

This, essentially, is the art of the herbal liqueur: you take a plant, soak it in strong alcohol to bring out its flavors and other qualities, then (after a wait of at least two weeks) drink this extract in small amounts over time to appreciate its effects on your mind and body. You can do this with all sorts of things: ginseng, astragalus, angelica, walnuts and Chinese wolfberries all yield decent tonic liqueurs. And you can experiment with a variety of solvents – rum is one of my favorites, although you can use vodka, tequila, or any strong liquor.

There’s a lot of discussion among students of herbal medicine as to the proper percentage of alcohol in the solvent, in relation to the type of plant being extracted. For our alchemical purposes, I suggest any strong liquor of about 100 proof. That way, you’ll end up with a balance of water-soluble and alcohol-soluble herb constituents. Also, to create a pleasant-tasting brew it’s good to start with more liquor and less herb, significantly less than the one to five ratio (one ounce dried herb to five fluid ounces of solvent) that is considered standard strength for herbal tinctures. Better yet, begin with something that tastes good to start with, like peaches or cherries or any kind of berry! There’s a lot to be said, in terms of antioxidants, bioflavonoids, and other phytonutrients, for the health benefits of fruit. One of my fantasies, yet to be fulfilled, is to travel the length of the West Coast one summer with a huge jar of Kirsch or Calvados or some other fruity spirits, throwing in large handfuls of wild berries as I come across them in my travels. Olallieberries, raspberries, strawberries, huckleberries, currants, even the somewhat medicinal-tasting berries of the California Spikenard and Devil’s Club would all be welcome to the mix. By the end of the summer I’d have a quantity of berry elixir to last me through the rest of the year, to share with friends and loved ones, to stretch a little bit of the summer’s sweet goodness into the cooler days of fall and winter.

The satisfaction that comes from making stuff, especially stuff that tastes good and makes you feel good, is a feeling that many people do without. In this day of instant gratification and 40-hour workweeks, few of us take (or make) the extra time and effort necessary to cook our own meals, much less concoct our own medicines and dessert wines. Why bother, when our natural food stores and supermarkets offer us everything we need, pre-made and ready to go? I bother because I find this type of activity to be deeply satisfying in a way that’s difficult to describe. To be in touch with the flux of the seasons, to pick an herb when its qi has sunk into its roots in the fall or risen into its flowers in the summer, to harvest by the time of day and phases of the moon, to extract the essence of a plant and then to ingest it – these are activities that are so ancient that their re-enactment awakens in us an almost shamanic appreciation of the natural world that we are a part of. Why not take the time to appreciate, in some small way, the great cosmic cycles that shape and influence all life on our planet? Watching the sunset or the moonrise, or the Milky Way on a clear night, can do the trick. But to drink the light that was captured by a plant – that is the unique pleasure, and the rare medicine, of the herbal liqueur.

On Tea

It is said that when Bodhidharma, the first patriarch of Zen Buddhism, arrived in China from India in the fifth century, he sat down facing a wall and meditated for nine years. During that time, he fell asleep once. When he woke up he was so angry with himself for this lapse in concentration that he tore out his eyelids and threw them to the ground. Where they landed, so the legend goes, the first tea plants grew. Ever since that time, monks have been using tea to keep their minds clear during meditation.

This story is interesting in its depiction of tea as a stimulant herb, but it is known that the origins of tea use go much farther back than the time of Bodhidharma. In fact, tea is one of those drug plants that humans have probably been foraging in the wild, then cultivating on their own, for many thousands of years. And why not? Tea tastes good, refreshes the mind, and is an important medicine in its own right.

Scientists now know that tea contains potent antioxidant chemicals known as polyphenols. A University of Kansas study shows that EGCG, one of the strongest known polyphenols, is about a hundred times more effective than vitamin C in its power to protect against the ravages of the body’s cell-damaging free radicals. The presence of EGCG and other compounds makes tea (especially green tea) an important weapon in the fight against cancer. In fact, Japanese research shows that people who drink four to six cups of green tea every day have a much lower incidence of liver, lung, breast, esophageal, pancreatic, and skin cancers, compared to people who don’t drink tea at all, or drink less. Other research shows that tea lowers the risk of stroke and heart attacks, lowers blood sugar levels, fights viral infections, and helps control allergies.

Because tea has received much publicity for its health benefits, you can buy it in the form of concentrated and caffeine-free pills and capsules. These products are fine for people who truly dislike the taste of tea or wish to avoid caffeine. But, I would ask those who place themselves in either of these categories, have you ever tried a cup of really good tea? Tea is made from the leaves of a flowering plant, Camellia sinensis. Since the best leaves are picked in the springtime before the budding of flowers, the floral essence of the bloom-to-be is captured in the leaves and stems, giving some teas a delightfully sweet, floral scent. Other teas, especially those green teas that have been steamed before drying to prevent the oxidation that would otherwise produce an oolong or a black tea, have a fresh vegetal quality to them that reminds one of an ocean breeze or cut grass in the summertime. My point is that tea drinking is as complex and enjoyable a sensory experience as is wine tasting, and if you think you don’t like tea, it just may be that you’ve never had a decent cup. So give tea a chance and treat yourself to the good stuff! Get high-quality leaf tea (avoid the finely chopped and oxidized tea that comes in tea bags) at specialty stores, or buy online at http://greentealovers.com/ or http://www.imperialtea.com/.

As for caffeine, tea is an altogether different beast than coffee. Or, perhaps more accurately, if coffee is a beast then tea is more like a wise friend. It is the great fallacy of modern pharmacy that the effects of a natural substance can be reduced to a single active ingredient. Unfortunately, this type of thinking has led some to believe that tea, because of its caffeine content, is an unhealthy stimulant. The reality is quite different. Coffee contains about five times more caffeine, cup for cup, than green tea, and its many volatile oils, acids, and other components make for a much rougher ride through our metabolism. Green tea does contain some caffeine, but it exists in an organic matrix of healthy substances, including chlorophyll, vitamin C, and the antioxidant polyphenols. In any case, the overall mental effect of tea is quite different from that of coffee, more the heightened awareness of a samurai warrior than the mile-a-minute mental chatter of the coffee addict.

But all this talk about health benefits, antioxidants and caffeine is almost beside the point. The true value of tea, in my opinion, is that its proper preparation and ingestion require us to pause for a few moments in our mad scramble through life. This is how you do it: you let the dry leaves fall into a favorite ceramic teapot, cover them with hot but not boiling water, put the lid on, and wait. After a couple of minutes you pour the tea, and let its sweet fragrance waft up and enter into you. The fertile earth, the monsoon rains, the blazing sun have conspired to place in your hands a bowl of jade-colored dew. You drink it with gratitude, then go about your day.

Celebrate the Green!

Set aside a whole day. Pack a sandwich, some drinking water, a large paper bag, a pair of garden shears or scissors, and gloves. Head for the nearest woods. Find a stream. Follow the water until you come across a stand of nettles. They're usually a couple feet tall, with square spiky stems and beautiful dark green leaves with serrated edges and hairy silvery-colored undersides. If you're unsure about identification, rub your hand across some leaves. If they sting, you've found the right plant!

Take your shoes and socks off and play in the stream. Eat your sandwich. Take a nap, if you feel like it. Approach the nettles and ask if you can harvest some leaves. They usually say "Yes." (It helps if you don't automatically take the stinging to mean "No.") Put on your gloves, get out your shears, and start clipping healthy leaves into your paper bag. Gather a lot, but just a few from each individual plant. Stop just as you're starting to feel greedy.

When you get home, wash the leaves in a colander. Dry them in a salad spinner or by swinging them hard in a cotton bag. Cut individual leaves off of stems. Make a batter by mixing a cup of flour with an egg and a cup of iced water. Don't mix too hard - lumpy is good. If you're feeling adventurous you can substitute chilled carbonated water for the water. Heat a pan with at least an inch of cooking oil, or use a deep-fryer if you have one. Coat one side of each nettle leaf with a thin layer of batter, and throw these into the hot oil. Fry until the batter is crispy but not burnt. The uncoated side of the leaves should turn a brilliant translucent emerald green. Dip the leaves in tempura sauce or any sauce that you like. A bowl of rice, some kimchi or sauerkraut, and a cup of miso soup rounds the meal out nicely.

If you don't care for tempura (or next time you do this), make a delicious cream of nettle soup: in a pot, saute a chopped onion in melted butter until it is golden brown. Set aside a couple of baby nettle leaf-pairs. In a blender, blend up the rest of your fresh nettle leaves with some water, a boiled potato, and the sauted onions. Pour back into the pot, and add chicken broth until you have the amount of soup you want. Heat until it's boiling, then reduce to a simmer. Let it simmer for half an hour, stirring occasionally and flavoring with salt and pepper, to your liking. Add a dollop of sour cream or whipping cream, garnish with the baby leaves, and serve with crusty fresh bread and a glass of wine. Enjoy!