Good for you Dessert

Yes, you read that right.  There are desserts you can enjoy with a clear conscience.

Dr. Tae Yun Kim encourages everyone to eat healthy, organic diets for a long and healthy life.  That does include an occasional dessert, especial one that is known to promote good health!

Dr. Tae Yun Kim, when she grew up, never knew what we now call desserts, nor did she know modern medicine.  People were grateful that they had food to eat, any food, and when people got sick, they used traditional medicines, supplied by nature, and Elderberry was one of those medicines, used for the flu, colds, coughs and other minor illnesses, just like is was and is in America and Europe.  Nowadays we know it may also be able to balance your blood glucose, and is a mild diuretic and mild laxative.

But did you know that the Elderberry flowers are just as good for you?  You can use them in many different ways, such as making syrup or ferment them into a drink, or simply dry the flowers and make them into tea; but here is my most favorite way, as my mom made for us in Austria:

Pick any light batter, a nice pancake or waffle batter, and dunk the flowers in – let drip just slightly and put into hot oil, fry on both sides lightly, quickly pat off oil, and enjoy!

Can you taste the light, fruity flavor?  Feel free to either use powered sugar, powdered stevia, or even a little maple syrup.  

Go ahead and give it a try.  However, use care and be 100% sure you have the right plant!

And as an additional bonus, here is a quote from Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s new book, “Seven Steps to Inner Power – how to break through to awesome!”:

While people and events can shape you, for better or for worse, you do have power over those influences, more power than you realize.  It doesn’t matter how bad your current circumstances may seem.  what I have discovered throughout my life is that how I dealt with circumstances was much more important than the circumstances themselves or the environment in which I was raised. 

(page 7)

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It’s a Delicious Life!

It’s spring again, and according to the temperatures, almost summer!  Dr. Tae Yun Kim is very much in tune with the seasons and loves to create different dishes for different seasons.  In this first picture, is a new version of traditional Korean cold noodles; it is new because it has very untraditional, yet incredibly healthy new ingredients.  New recipe coming up!

When she is not busy on her new book tour, Dr. Tae Yun Kim loves to work in her garden, growing many of the ingredients for her special dishes.

Here you see a bed of sook, or mugwort as it is called in the USA.  It is a very healthy herb, helps to cleanse the blood and is a great spring food; but you can dry it and make it into powder and tea.

And here is Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s version of sook fried in batter – incredibly delicious and healthy!  What a win!  And it’s so simple!  Just whip up a simple savory batter, dip the cleaned sook into it and fry briefly, until the batter is cooked through.

And if you have missed the big news, Dr. Tae Yun Kim just published her new book, an all new version of “Seven Steps to Inner Power – how to break through to awesome!”  You’ll definitely want to read this one, and if you live in Southern California, you can still catch her on her book tour.

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Pizza magic

It’s been a very busy week in Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s kitchen and that is exactly why I haven’t had a chance to write much yet – there was a lot happening!  See?

Here you can see her latest creation – pizza pockets!  But not just any pizza pockets – these are 100% gluten free.  They are also a health food.  The dough was a dream to work with – it took a long time to figure out a good and healthy way to make gluten free yeast dough and  Dr. Kim came up with the secret magical ingredient – yucca root!

But that is only one of the healthy ingredients, there are also hemp seeds, almond flour, yucca flour, ground chia seeds, ground flax seeds in there.  See what a nutritional powerhouse this is?  Dr. Kim is really starting to share her vast knowledge of Eastern healing foods and medicine and I would have never expected so much nutrition in pizza pockets of all things!  🙂

For the filling, things were a little simpler.  Just make your favorite spaghetti sauce and keep it on the dry side.  Spice it up with whatever strikes your fancy; we like jalapeno peppers, or red pepper, and lots of herbs, sometimes olives and add some meat, I had small meatballs and cut up gluten free hot dogs in there too.

The dough is fairly easy to roll out, just make sure you put a lot of (gluten-free) flour on a wooden board and start rolling, flipping dough over frequently to prevent sticking.

To put it all together, roll out a piece of dough and cut a round, I used an upside down soup bowl as “cookie cutter” and it worked great.  Put some grated cheese, then add a big spoon of thick, chunky tomato sauce and top with a little more grated cheese.  The cheese acts to bind the sauce and will keep it all together nicely.  Gather the edges and form a roll/bun/turnover type thing, pinching edges together the best you can.  It’s ok if the dough breaks here and there, the outcome will be just as delicious.

Bake this at 350 (375 works too) for about half an hour.  Don’t blame me if everyone in the household gathers to wait for these goodies to come out of the oven – they smell absolutely divine!

I am still working on making this a “repeatable” and fool proof recipe, with the proper measurements and everything that a recipe requires.  I am a newbie at developing recipes that are repeatable, and will share in another post how I happened to figure out how to go about that entirely scientific process.

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You need a little sweetness in your life

Isn’t this a beauty?  Even with New Years resolutions and goals to finally lose those 15 lbs you do need a little sweet now and then, right?  Especially when you got something healthy and gluten-free going.

Dr. Tae Yun Kim is not into having people deprive themselves, or never touch anything sweet ever again.  She knows that is not realistic for 99.999% of the population.  So Dr. Tae Yun Kim set out to create a cake that’s so delicious, yet at the same time very healthy for you.

We talked about the health benefits of Seabuckthorn in my last post.  Once again, 1/4 cup of the flour was included into the batter.  The basic batter comes from my dear friend Shirley and you can see the recipe right here.

Usually, I double the recipe because, well, because there are plenty of eaters around that if I only made one batch it would disintegrate the minute it comes out of the oven, and I do need time to set up and take pictures.  So…..

Dr. Tae Yun Kim also likes to use the bounty of the land, and especially the healthy gifts mother nature provided.  So not only did blueberries get to jump into the batter, (a good 2 cups of fresh ones) but also about a cup of Madrone berries that had been soaked in Vodka for a couple of months.  Madrone berries have been used by Native Americans for centuries, to make use against stomach cramps and pains and to help with skin irritations of all sorts.  They provide vitamins and minerals in the winter when not much else in the cold, snowy woods is available.

To make this cake, double the recipe mentioned above, but instead of all gluten-free basic flour, use half almond flour and half the basic gluten free flour.  For the sugar we always use the raw organic turbinado sugar, and that is why the cake comes out a little darker.  Dr. Tae Yun Kim raises her own chickens, so no worries about the quality of the eggs.

The berries were folded in at the very end, very carefully to not smash them.  If you don’t have any Madrone berries you can add some dried cranberries that you can soak in brandy or vodka or a couple of hours.

The result?  Deeeeee-licious!  Give it a try and see if you agree!

 

 

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Korean style yummy spicy ribs

Dr. Tae Yun Kim is, among all the countless other things she does, a most amazing cook.  Of course we know that by now.

But tonight was a different level of yummy.  Wouldn’t you agree by looking at the picture? First, Dr. Tae Yun Kim started out by, as usual, boiling out the long, meaty beef ribs. Naturally they were from locally raised pastured cattle, all organically fed.

The sauce!  Did I mention that heavenly sauce?  It has all sorts of goodies in it, and starts with a mixture of Korean hot pepper sauce, Gochu Jang (available in gluten-free nowadays), garlic, a little water, raw sugar, crushed garlic, apple cider vinegar, and – tada!  Tonight a new special ingredient made an appearance – cinnamon!  As far as proportions go – it’s meant to be spicy with just a hint of cinnamon, and fairly sweet.  How good was it?  See for yourself!  🙂

Yes, that’s right there is sauce all over my face and hands….so so good!

Dr. Tae Yun Kim always encourages people to be bold and go ahead and try new things – so give it a try and enjoy the results!

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Food that’s good for you any day

 

A dinner that starts out with ingredients like the ones above – how can it be anything but healthy and delicious? Especially when it is prepared by Dr. Tae Yun Kim?

She is not only one of the highest ranked Martial Artists in the World, motivational speaker, best-selling author, CEO of a high-tech company, TV show host, founder of the TYK fashion clothing line and so so much more, she is “in tune with the food.”  As Ki energy Master she knows what’s good and what isn’t.

Here you can see what those raw veggies turned into – lovingly combined with Korean sweet potato noodles, baby squid, brown rice cakes, and Korean red hot sauce.

To switch it up a bit, Dr. Tae Yun Kim also introduced this tummy pleaser:

This one started out with potatoes and kosher hot dogs.  Did I mention before that Dr. Tae Yun Kim uses a lot of Kosher food because it has to be handled in a very clean environment, with prayer?

After they were sautéed briefly, just enough to be barely tender, green onions joined in the fun, as well as tofu, sweet potatoes, yellow onions, and another version of Korean hot sauce. There are as many versions of Korean hot sauce as there are kinds of kimchi, as there are kinds of bread.  Each cook pretty much has her own tweak.  Many of them have gluten in it, and MSG. Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s version doesn’t have either, and tastes clean and pure.  For an exact recipe – sorry folks but that’s gonna be in her cookbook!  As a hint, it has gluten-free “gochu jang” (hot red pepper sauce), apple cider vinegar, sugar, crushed garlic, sesame oil in it.

Go ahead, be bold and try it out and see what version you can come up with!

 

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Lunar New Year!

Happy Year of the Monkey to you all!

We just celebrated Lunar New Year on February 8th.  Did you know that this is Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s Birthday?  Traditionally, her birthday is on a different calendar day each year, as the Lunar New Year date changes.

Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s story has a very sad start – back in those days, in a small rural village in Korea, girls were considered lower than cattle – at least cattle were useful, you could milk them and eat them and trade them for other goods. Girls, on the other hand, required a dowry to marry them off as quickly as possible.

Not only did she never get any birthday cake, but she also was never allowed to taste the traditional New Year rice cakes.  Only once was she able to catch a little crumb of a rice cake that contained sorghum flour instead of rice flour, and now she reminisces how much she loved it, and would love to have again.

What a challenge!  I browsed through some Korean cook books an blogs and tried to get an idea how to even start on such a thing.  The above picture is the result of that experiment, and it sure brought a big smile into Great Grandmaster Tae Yun Kim‘s face!  It was close to the traditional “rice” cake and very delicious!

Here is what I did:

Boil (or pressure cook) small red beans until soft and mushy, mash them up with enough honey to make it slightly sweet, and a dash of cinnamon, walnuts and/or boiled chestnuts.

This is the filling.

For the outside dough, I did something entirely non-traditional.  I did not want to use sweet and sticky rice flour – not good if you have to watch your carb intake and have diabetes.  So I ground up some yucca root total of perhaps 3/4-1 cup and boiled that until it was all gluey.  I added enough sorghum flour to form a soft but pliable dough.  Then formed small pieces of dough into balls the size of a walnut and flattened them out.  I boiled these for about 5 minutes and then fished them out – let them barely cool off and then flattened these pre-cooked disk until they formed a very thin dough.  Be careful though, the dough is very fragile.

I then put a good heaping teaspoon of filling onto these disks and closed them like you see in the picture, and steamed them for about 1/2 hour.

The result is certainly delicious and worth every moment that you spend making them.  They may not be traditional, but you will love the chewiness and sweetness and knowing it’s all good for you!

HE CAN DO, SHE CAN DO, WHY NOT ME!

 

 

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Korean Red Bean Ice Cream – non-dairy version

When Dr. Tae Yun Kim was just a little girl, they didn’t have any ice cream in Korea.  They didn’t have electricity, or ice cream makers, or even the concept of any food that wasn’t meant to simply nourish.  Sweets?  Ice cream?  No way.  Just things to keep you alive and reasonably well, especially during and after the Korean War.

With the American Soldiers – to whom Dr. Tae Yun Kim is forever grateful for saving her and her family’s lives, came some things she had never heard of before, such as chocolate, coffee, candy, ice cream, among many other things.

And while she could never even dream of having any of those goodies – she was barely allowed to survive on whatever little food she could scrape and scratch together – she always wondered what they would taste like.  For example, once in a while an ice cream vendor would come through her village, in the summer, peddling his wares, yelling out, “Ice cakes, ice cakes….”

It was only much later in her life that she finally could taste these simple treasures, and enjoy them.  Here is how I have learned to make this ice cream, healthy dairy free, gluten-free version.

First, soak your red Azuki beans.  Soak them in a LOT of water.  They are big guzzlers, so go overboard with the water, and soak them for at least a day.

Boil the soaked beans and you will need to make enough to have 2 cups of boiled beans.

This is what the red beans look like after boiling

It’s ok if you end up overcooking the beans, because most of them will end up in your blender.  Let the beans cool off.

Now, put a can of full fat coconut milk (or use any other milk you like) in your blender.

add 2 cups of cooked beans and keep the leftover beans handy.

Add anywhere between 3/4 cups – 1 1/2 cups of honey.  Traditionally, this isn’t very sweet, so I normally use less than a cup.  But if you prefer it sweeter, use the full amount.  Here is my current favorite honey:

I love how it says “made by American bees!”

This is the inside of my blender, with all the ingredients in place

Set your blender on either Ice cream, or smoothie setting, and process until it’s all nice and smooth.

Put it all into your prepared ice cream maker, and let it go!

Doesn’t it look cool how the ice cream maker swirls around the future ice cream?
When the ice cream is almost done, add the rest of the cooked, cooled, whole beans, up to 1 cup, but you can add as few as you want.

Then, either put the ice cream into popsicle molds (which is the traditional way to serve this) or put it into a container and store in freezer.  My popsicle didn’t look good enough to take pictures of, although they tasted awesome!

Either way, it is a most delicious and healthy way to enjoy a cool treat on a hot summer’s day!

If the ice cream isn’t sweet enough for you, drizzle with honey….

“You have the power to fulfill your dreams!”

Note: Shirley over at GFE gets the credit for me attempting to convert the original recipe – so surprise my teacher with this new concoction.  Thanks for your ice cream recipes!

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Spice in your life – stuffed Korean Jalapeno peppers

Cooking is definitely a creative process.  Whether you follow a recipe exactly as is, or whether you develop your own recipes, or whether you are somewhere in between, creativity is needed!

And what does Dr.  Tae Yun Kim say about creativity?  Here is a little gem:

“You can have whatever you can think.  Because we have such great freedom to create, we must take responsibility to use our power constructively!” (Seven Steps to Inner Power, page 32)

Korean food is highly creative and its hard to get exact recipes.  I have had these stuffed peppers in several restaurants, and usually they are dipped in egg and fried.  I try to minimize my fried food intake, and I thought I would do some experimentation in re-creating this delicious and gluten-free dish.

First, I cut a few Jalapeno peppers in half, lengthwise, and baked them in the oven just enough to make them a little soft, at 350.  This will probably take about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, I cleaned some leaks and cut them fine

I sautéed some hamburger meat (from grass-fed beef) with a liberal amount of garlic and chopped onions, and then added the leeks.

At this point you can add spinach if you like, or any other veggies, although, if you decide to add carrots and other “hard” vegetables, pre-cook them to make sure they are cooked.

Salt and pepper to your taste, and if you want to make sure you get the Asian flavor, put in some gluten-free soy sauce and/or gluten-free hot bean paste called “Goju-jang.”  Go easy at first, until it’s hot enough to your liking.

Then, stuff the pre-cooked peppers, and heat them up in the oven.

Enjoy one of Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s favorite dishes!

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Korean Summer delight

It’s been very busy here, and temperatures have been climbing.  I am more of a cool weather person, so coming up with nourishing and healthy, satisfying food that doesn’t make me melt away into a puddle, has been a challenge.

Dr. Tae Yun Kim shared a very old, traditional Korean recipe with me.  It’s one of her very favorite summer foods and I love it.  This is also very light, and won’t weigh your stomach down, so it’s ideal both before and after a heavy-duty workout in the heat.

Once you have the ingredients, the rest is very very easy to make.  I start making the acorn “jelly” in the morning, when cooking is still ok, and then it’s all set and cool come lunch and dinner.  I also boil the eggs, at that time, and have them ready.

So, here is how you make Korean mook, or acorn jelly, according to Dr. Tae Yun Kim.  The description is long, but it is really a very simple and quick process.  Trust me, if you can make pudding, you can do this!  He can do, she can do, why not me!

This is what you start out with:

This acorn starch.  If you are gluten-free, make sure there are no glutenous additions in the flour – acorns themselves do not contain gluten.

You will need:

5 cups water

1 cup acorn starch

a few drops of sesame oil

a sprinkle of salt
Bring 4 cups of water to a gentle boil.  Meanwhile mix the acorn starch with the remaining cup of water,

and slowly add, while constantly stirring, to the boiling water.

Stir vigorously the entire time it’s cooking.  Boil until the bubbles look like this:

quickly add a sprinkle of salt and a couple drops of sesame oil and make sure it’s all mixed in well.

Then pour into a pan, and smooth out top:

Time to let it cool off – this might take several hours in the refrigerator, until it is solid, and chilled through.

Then cut into strips, like this:

Then, cut a pickling cucumber, or any cucumber, into thin strips, and put onto the jelly:

You can get creative now and add things, like thin strips of beef, cut up, hard-boiled egg, cut up tomatoes, even strawberries or thin melon slices, small young lettuce leaves, watercress, cut up kim chi – it’ll all taste fantastic!

Now, take some raw seaweed, a sheet that hasn’t been toasted yet, and toast, like this (if you don’t have any, it’s fine to serve without, just adds more authenticity)

Crumble the seaweed and put over the acorn jelly.

Serve with some of this sauce:

And some chilled kim chi juice, and a bowl of ice water.

To eat, mix with the sauce ice, and kim chi juice, to your taste.

Dr. Tae Yun Kim told me that after the war, in her teen years, she would get this as a very special treat, once in a very long while, and she still enjoys this simple, healthy treat now.

I love this a lot, especially on a hot summer day, and if you are lucky enough to live near a Korean store or restaurant, you might be able to find ready made acorn jelly, and all you have to do is to add the sauce!

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