Hello everyone! Not only are there some new faces around here - Welcome! I’m so glad you’re here - but, today marks a new era for my newsletter! I’d like to welcome you all to The Kitchen Table, a weekly newsletter of my personal musings on health: practices, techniques, and teachings I’m turning to, and what I’m exploring about the body beyond the realms of nutrition to also include art, fashion, pop culture, spirituality, and mental and emotional well being. You can also expect recipe drops, seasonal guides, resources, recommendations, and meal planning/shopping/preparing tips.
Kitchen tables are very personal to me for many reasons. It’s where we gather, break bread, explore the senses through food, connect, laugh, philosophize about life, and ultimately learn more about ourselves and each other. When I think of a kitchen table, my mind is immediately transported to my grandparents' home, and their large farmhouse table that greets you as soon as you enter the door. We have shared and prepared many meals with family, both blood and chosen around that table. I also think of a very special time in my early twenties when I lived in a magical apartment across the street from Jean Mance Park in Montreal. We had a large eat-in kitchen with my great grandparents' table in the centre where my roommates and I hosted a rotating door of friends, multiple times a week. The kitchen table has served as a source of inspiration in my art practice as well, literally in a collaborative work with my roommate Kaeten Bonli where we staged a performance around a kitchen table, and figuratively as I assumed tabletop position in the nude, painted yellow for three hours at the Art Gallery of Ontario in homage to the seminal work This Bridge Called My Back, by the pioneering Black feminist publishing house Kitchen Table: Woman of Colour Press. It’s only natural that in my new career venture, this symbol makes its way into my food and nutrition-focused newsletter, but I also want this space to *feel* like a kitchen table: the center of the home where we can hang out, chat in the comments, and work through what health and life mean to us. Pull up a chair!
In other news, over the past few months, I have really fallen in love with quinoa. I used to label it as basic and pasée, as I had never really found my groove with it after it had its moment in the early 2010s, but now I am here to tell you that I am perhaps her biggest fan? Quinoa’s 15 minutes of fame goes waaaay beyond my reference point, it is an ancient food and sacred food of the Inca people. Although we consider and prepare it like a grain, it is actually a seed, and it comes in many types: red, black, and white - I like to buy the multicolour for variety's sake, it’s also very pretty. My first favourite thing about it is that it is nearly a complete protein! This means that it contains all 9 essential amino acids, it just contains some in low amounts - we can’t all be perfect. It is also higher in fibre than most grains, which is so important for digestive health. Quinoa being high in protein in fibre makes it a great food for balancing your blood sugar which is key in regulating your mood and energy levels. It also contains antioxidants, important vitamins and minerals including magnesium, potassium, iron, fibre, and folate - a very important nutrient for those trying to conceive or who are pregnant. Quinoa is also naturally gluten-free. One important thing to note is that quinoa contains some anti-nutrients that bind to the nutrients we do need and inhibit their absorption, so it’s important to rinse, soak, or sprout it prior to cooking it to make the nutrients more bioavailable. It’s very easy to soak, just cover your desired amount of quinoa in filtered water for at least 2 hours or up to overnight. You could also add a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to help fermentation along. In terms of cooking, I’ve found that the perfect ratio is actually 1 ¾ cups of water to 1 cup of quinoa as opposed to the 2 cups of water method, this way the integrity of the shape remains intact so that you don’t end up with a pot of mush. The rest goes as usual: bring to a boil, turn to low heat and cover for about 20ish minutes.
On Tuesday nights my partner Jesse has a class that runs late, so I’m always on my own for dinner. I had dreamt up a hearty grain bowl with roasted pumpkin, steamed kale and a miso almond butter sauce, and as I went to reach for black rice - another favourite of mine, featured in this Scorpio season plate - I saw half a mason jar of quinoa lingering ahead of it and decided to use it instead. I soaked and cooked it and had plenty left after my dinner serving to tuck away in the fridge for another meal's use.
The next day I had some quinoa with leftover roasted pumpkin, avocado, feta, pumpkin seeds, sauerkraut and made a batch of garlicky vinaigrette. Lunch happened in under 5 minutes and I was incredibly satisfied. The following day I made a variation on the same thing by roasting some delicata squash and adding in some organic mixed greens from a lovely farm down the road.
Then, on friday I had the same thing for lunch (it’s truly a dreamy combo) and for dinner night, I decided to make braised meatballs and used the quinoa in place of breadcrumbs which was quite genius if I do say so myself! This is the kind of low-impact meal prep that really gets me going, which grains lend themselves so well to because they are a blank canvas and can be used in so many different meals. The next time you see a lingering container of quinoa in your pantry, think of me.