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.

Read Full Post »

Unexpected and delicious surprises

Time for something other than soup or stew, am I right?  Or at least something to go with that stew or soup?  With Valentine’s so close (and a very healthy and breathtakingly good recipe coming soon) our thoughts turn to the sweeter things in life.

Talking about Valentine, I just love this quote from Dr. Tae Yun Kim, and it continues to inspire me.  It’s not only beautiful and poetic, but also very fundamental and true.

“You are who I dreamed of….

And so you came to be.

And you shall be with me beyond time.

I will never leave you,

and 

my love will follow you

as you follow my light,

just as the tail of the bird follows the wing.”

(The First Element, page 121)

So I got to thinking, with all the soups and stews I have been making – so popular in our family with this crazy rainy and snowy weather – what can I make that boosts our regular dinners into something special.  Should still be healthy, yet a real treat.

I already know that cornbread is very popular here, and cornbread muffins as well.  This recipe that Shirley came up with years ago is a well-tested and well-enjoyed taste experience.  You can get the recipe for that here.  I also know that often I get the ‘complaint’ or should we say, suggestion that the muffins are “empty” and couldn’t I put something in them.  Hmmmmm……Dr. Tae Yun Kim also is my ultimate not only Martial Arts teacher but also gives incredible encouragement to try different and new things.

How about some berry filling?

I happened to have some blueberry cheesecake filling stashed – good thing nobody found it – and I used that.  It’s a very simple filling – just get blueberries, fresh or frozen ( and any other berries work great here as well, and I imagine pretty much any fruit filling) boil them with a little rose wine, or water if you don’t like wine, add as much sugar as you need but don’t make it too sweet – and thicken with a little corn or sweet rice starch that you have dissolved first in some water – this will prevent hard little pebbles in the sauce.  Let the fruit sauce cool.

When you are ready, fill muffin cups, or bread pan, or both as I did 🙂 with a thin layer of cornbread mixture, then add a generous layer of fruit filling, and top with another thin layer of cornbread batter.  Bake as directed in Shirley’s recipe and enjoy, and bask in the compliments you are sure to receive!

Read Full Post »

Pizza construction

Dr. Tae Yun Kim not only emphasizes healthy foods, but also the importance of being creative when we cook.

Can you imagine eating the same food every day?  Sure, when you don’t have options and are starving, we’ll do anything for a crust of bread.  But in today’s world, creativity helps to encourage making the right food choices.

After enjoying many versions of hot soup lately, it was time for some “sink in your teeth” food, and pizza is an almost universally liked food for all ages.

Here is the secret: you don’t really need a recipe, just some ideas.

Dr. Tae Yun Kim has made some astonishing creations, and here is a picture of my try to re-create – it was very good, but not anywhere near what Dr. Kim did!

Tip # 1: you can take pretty much any yeast dough as pizza dough.  This goes for gluten-free as well as gluten full.  If it’s too sticky and wet, just use a little flour on your hands and pat directly onto a well-greased pizza pan or baking sheet.  Pre-baking also helps when the dough is sticky.

Tip # 2: use either any tomato sauce you have on hand, or any pesto, as a layer between dough and toppings.

Tip # 3: anything goes as topping!  I mean, you know you shouldn’t pour soup on it, but seriously, any meat, any veggies, in any combination will work well, depending on your taste buds.

Tip #4: if you are adding cheese, bake without the cheese first and add it only about 5 minutes before it’s done, so you won’t scorch the cheese.

Tip #5: I bake pizza around 400 degrees and not at the higher ones you might find in recipes – basically, know your oven and bake at higher heat than you would bread, but not so hot it burns before it’s done.  In my oven, that’s about 400 degrees.

Most important tip: Dig in and enjoy!  🙂

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

 

 

Read Full Post »

In case of emergency…

We have had a few power outages recently, and before we got a backup generator, there were times life was a bit unusual and required thinking out of the box, something that Dr.  Tae Yun Kim has been encouraging her students to be and do all along.  “If you expect life to be without difficulties, without challenges, you are on the wrong planet” Dr. Tae Yun Kim bluntly says.

So, when you are just not able to go and pick up take out food, because it’s too late and too far, other than peanut butter jelly sandwich, what are you gonna do?

This is what I did:

I put three candles into a cup, and set that into the kitchen sink.  I put the oven grate on top, put a pan on and made a most delicious vegetable omelette.

“You have the ability to do, the capacity to act, and the capability to perform and produce,” Dr. Tae Yun Kim says, “don’t let anything get in your way.  Where there is a will, there is a way!”

Read Full Post »

Bread baking creativity

Lately, Dr. Tae Yun Kim has not only been emphasizing health and healthy foods, but also to use creativity in cooking and creating new dishes with healthy ingredients.

Dr. Tae Yun Kim has been busy in the kitchen, coming up with some incredible (and incredibly delicious) new dishes that will delight body, mind, and spirit! Here are some pictures, but alas, for the recipes, you’ll have to wait until the cookbook comes out.

Meanwhile, here is something for you to try out, if you like.

For St. Patrick’s day, I wanted to do something other than the usual cabbage and corned beef.  Not that there is anything wrong with it, but there had to be something more exciting than that.

Allow me to digress here a bit.  So often I think of something to cook, bake, saute, broil, etc and then think, nah, that’s just a bit too far out and I let the thought go.

However, Dr. Tae Yun Kim says this in her book, “Seven Steps to Inner Power:”

‘Mistakes are essential to your progress.  How did we humans get the idea that to be perfect we couldn’t make mistakes?  Never making a mistake does not make us perfect.  Never repeating a mistake – after we learn from it – is as perfect as we need to be.”

So, armed with new confidence, I went to do what I had in mind.

See?

I had read a lot about cauliflower pizza dough.  So I thought why not make cauliflower bread?  But I didn’t have any cauliflower, only cabbage.  They are in the same family, right?  Why not cabbage?

Since I had already tried Megan’s awesome bread (recipe here) and knew it is absolutely divine, and I had received comments that it was the best bread they ever had (not even knowing it was gluten-free!) I was going to start with that basic recipe.  By the way, credit where credit is due – originally I was tipped off to this recipe by Shirley of Gluten free easily on one of her awesome roundups here.

I started out with the original recipe, except I only used 1/2 cup of water to proof the yeast (it worked just fine).  I sautéed half a small head of green cabbage, with onions, garlic and salt, and pureed it in the blender with a little bit of water.  I tried to end up with one cup of liquid but it was a little more.

I followed the remainder of the recipe but ended up adding a little more of each flour to make it the consistency in the recipe.  I added a handful of chopped up kalamata olives and a smattering of grated cheese.

And after it was done baking, I received the biggest complement I have received for any bread I ever made.

This is not wet or underbaked – I just am not an expert at taking food picture yet 🙂

Dr. Tae Yun Kim herself said it was THE best bread she ever had.

What more could I have asked for?

PS: After the meal, not a crumb remained, so I can’t tell you how long it would last……

 

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Creativity in the Kitchen

The kitchen is an amazing place.  It can be a warm place for family gatherings, it can be a lab, or simply the best room in the house.  In Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s home it’s all of the above!  Not only does she eat the healthiest of foods, but she also makes incredible new food creations that blow the mind!

Dr. Tae Yun Kim shares that good healthy food shouldn’t just taste good, it should also look good, and it shouldn’t be the same old thing every day, no matter how healthy.

That is why she has been creating some pretty amazing things!  Right now, Dr. Tae Yun Kim is working on a cook book, where she will explain about all aspects of food, even down to the detail of how your attitude while cooking will affect the quality of the food!  She mentions the example of how when you fix dinner as a newly wed or to impress a boy friend – how you will so happily cook and set a delightful dinner table.  On the other hand, if you are unhappy about someone or something and you have to cook for them, you will probably make something that does’n’t taste near as good as it could be or should be!

So challenge yourself – no matter what kind of mood you are in, no matter how your day has been – when you cook, focus on your love for your family (or whomever you are cooking for)!

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

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!

 

 

Read Full Post »

The Birthday cake!

Yesterday I showed you my Birthday Dinner.  You may have wondered, “But what about the cake!”

Well, of course.  There was cake.  Wanna see?

Dr. Tae Yun Kim, when she grew up, never had any birthday cakes.  In fact, her parents were so ashamed to have a girl as their firstborn child, that they never even celebrated her birthday – until she was 50 years old!

To Dr. Tae Yun Kim a birthday cake is not about indulging in sweets for the sake of it, but it is a symbol of all the sweetness in life for the coming year!  So of course we want a good cake!

Now, since we are all focused on healthy foods, we try to make healthy birthday cakes as well.  Especially diabetes friendly ones, since some Jung Suwon warriors have diabetes.  Did you know that there is no such thing as a “Diabetes Diet?”  One doctor pointed out that what diabetics should eat is what everyone should eat – it’s simply a healthy and balanced diet!

Now, how can you have a healthy cake?  Isn’t that a contradiction right there?  Not necessarily.  There are a few requirements of course to make it healthy.  For this blog, it has to be gluten free.  It also needs to be low in carbs and reasonable in fat content.

My go-to cake, ever since I went gluten free 4 years ago, has been “Shirley cake.”  You can find this genious recipe here, right on Shirley’s Blog “Gluten free easily.” It’s pure genious because no matter what I have ever added to this cake recipe, it always, and I mean always, has come out perfect!

It’s of course gluten free, so that’s covered. But what about carbohydrate content?  On first look I was worried.  I mean, after all, it’s a pound cake.  But after I found this nifty little tool on the internet, a recipe calculator, I found out that one slice only has 12 grams of carbohydrates per slice, and only 134 calories.  (Now to be honest, who can ever stick to that serving size….. that wouldn’t be me….)  Also, I have very successfully substituted half of the gluten free flour with almond flour, and that would lower the carb load considerably.

Still, you get the point.  So, yes, Shirley cake is practically a health food!  🙂

Since Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s birthday was February 2nd, and since she was out of town for this, we’ll celebrate upon her return, and guess what cake I’ll be making!

 

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

My Birthday Dinner

Today was my 58th Birthday, and this is what I had for dinner.  Looks delicious and I can vouch for it that it sure was!

Dr. Tae Yun Kim has encouraged all of us Jung Suwon warriors to focus on our health this year, and that of course starts with a healthy diet.

This above warrior feast has all the good stuff in it – a mixture of veggies: brussels sprouts, broccoli, onions, garlic, red bell peppers, yellow bell peppers and mushrooms.  Of course you can use a medley of whatever you have on hand, or whatever you like.

I started by sauteing the tofu with the onions and garlic first, added some gluten-free soy sauce, and added the rest of the veggies.  I added a little water too, and covered and let it simmer for about 5 minutes, then topped it with 2 very fresh eggs and covered until the eggs were done – in this case done meant still a little runny inside.

If you either can’t have tofu or simply don’t like it, you could easily substitute boneless chicken for it, just make sure you cook it all the way through.  Or, to change it all up, you could use any meat you have left over from another meal.

Dr.  Tae Yun Kim has been encouraging my self-imposed weight loss – I set a new Year goal to get back down to 130 lbs, my ideal weight – and I enjoyed this meal without rice – although it would have been superb with some brown rice, or even noodles, for sure.

Go ahead and try it out – let me know if you like it!

 

 

Read Full Post »

New Beginnings

It’s been a couple of years since I have come to this spot and shared some great food creations with you.  It’s not that there hasn’t been any new food in my life, but that wonderful life things have kept happening and there simply wasn’t any time to do any  writing to do these special meals justice.

But Dr. Tae Yun Kim has been coming up with a myriad of healthy and very tasty breakfast, lunch and dinner meals that just blow the mind. Maybe we can even talk her into putting it all together into a cook book!

Dr. Tae Yun Kim has a very unique cooking style as you might remember. She goes by Ki energy, and will put together whatever works best for the people she cooks.  The above dinner was a spur of the moment kind of dinner, naturally gluten free, and some of the most delicious and healthy creation ever.

Not only did it taste heavenly, it was also very healthy, full of protein, vitamins, fiber and all the good stuff.  There was lots of ginger and garlic in the sauce, and it was made creamy by the addition of ground yucca, another of Dr. Tae Yun Kim‘s additions.

Because this dish is naturally low in carbohydrates it is great for diabetics and those that want to reduce their carb intake.

I will get you the basic recipe tomorrow.  For now I just wanted to let you all know – this blog is alive and well and will supply you with great new recipes!

Thanks for sticking with me, I look forward to more happy bloggings!

 

 

Read Full Post »