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tie the napkin with the rubber band, insert the stick through and hang it on the pitcher

I heard about whey and protein whey, both in the form of powder, for a long time. I only heard about liquid whey when I started fermenting whole grains and vegetables.

It sounded difficult talking about it, but it’s actually very fun and easy to make.

If you like cream cheese, you’ll like making liquid whey as you get homemade cream cheese from the process too.

You can use liquid whey in all kinds of soaking and fermentation of foods, so if you want to start a new way of eating through fermentation, it’s very handy to have on hand. It keeps in the fridge for up to 2 weeks, but I usually use mine up quickly and make it fresh almost every week.

Here are the things you need:…

Being Thai, pomegranates are no strangers to me. For some people, pomegranates look like something from a different world. I know, we can’t just pick one up, wipe it off with our shirt, and eat it. Pomegranates require more work, but every single seed of them is worth your patience!

Pomegranates are full with precious goodness. I have read that pomegranate juice (real 100% juice) has 3 times higher antioxidant activity than red wine or green tea.

Now that you know about the great benefits of eating them, you might wonder how on earth to eat them fresh without fighting to peel them. I have gone through years of frustration trying to add them into my daily fruit dishes when they are in season, and finally I have mastered the technique. I’m proud to share this quick and easy method so pomegranates don’t have to be love-hate fruits to anyone anymore.

The skin is tough, but not too tough to give up eating them. Pomegranates have so many different color varieties, from clear-pale transparent, light pink, light brown, red, to very dark red. It takes a little bit of luck choosing pomegranates, as sometimes they look perfect from the outside but bad when you cut them open.…

Organic whole grain cereal and whole oatmeal were the ideal options for healthy breakfasts in my family for a long time. It was easy and convenient to open a box of cereal, or to cook oatmeal straight from the storage jar in the morning. However, I completely changed my way of eating whole grains since 2013, when I learned how phytic acid might be associated teeth problems.

Soaking and fermenting whole grains can reduce phytic acid, and this method was how people in the past prepared their grains before consuming them. Unfortunately, nowadays, people aren’t spending time doing it much. I was fascinated with what I learned, and it steered me to prepare grains in these ways.

Are you ready to try eating fermented whole grains properly prepared in a traditional way?

I’m going to show you first how to soak or ferment and cook raw whole grains, and the second one is how to soak rolled oats & barley flakes. I used both of them mostly for breakfast….

My discovery about soaking whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds started out when we took our daughter to see the dentist in Taiwan in 2013. The dentist and soaking whole grains–you may wonder what the relation is? First let’s start a few years back when my daughter had so many problems with her baby teeth. As hard as I tried to keep her teeth healthy, she had her first signs of cavities when she was only 18 months old!

Born as a preemie, I would give her all the food, which was breast milk, she needed at any time she wanted to make sure she grew. We were co-sleepers, and she was nursing around the clock then. Even though we weren’t sure if breast milk caused the problem, the day we found out about the cavity was the day we decided to stop nursing her during the night altogether.

Ever since she had the first sign of a cavity, I took extra care of her teeth hoping that she wouldn’t have any more. However, things got worse, and she still had new cavities after every dentist check-up….

Vegetables are my main food each day, and garlic has become an important part of offering them extra tasty flavor. I used to fry garlic at the same time I cooked each dish, like this one, but I soon realized it’s much easier and faster if I have fried garlic ready to go.

This method is a time saver, and I can get my vegetable dishes done as fast as I can think of what to make with fried garlic on hand!

Things you need:

2 heads of garlic or more, depends on how much you want.
2-3 Tbs (30-45 ml) of coconut oil

…

In southern Thailand where I was born, turmeric is very common, and I grew up eating turmeric as part of my daily diet. We put turmeric in almost every dish, and we even have one dish called “gaeng leang” or “yellow curry” because we use so much turmeric in it. Whenever I helped my mom in the kitchen, my fingers got stained for days!

When I first moved to the U.S, I found that turmeric was not so common, and that made me forgot about it for a while. Like everything, when it’s out of sight, it’s also out of mind.

It came back to me when I happened to read an article about the benefits of turmeric. Some research says curacumin in turmeric has a powerful anti-inflammatory, which is a strong antioxidant that can fight or even cure some kinds of cancer. The article brought so many memories of eating turmeric back to me. How could I forget about that yellow root I didn’t like when it stained my hands?

I wanted to add turmeric back to my diet, so, I started to search for it again. To my happy surprise, it wasn’t hard at all to find turmeric powder. Sometimes, I can even buy fresh turmeric like we use in Thailand. As more people know about its benefits, it seems to be more popular nowadays.

One day, I was craving the salty taste of garlic and turmeric in my mother’s fish dishes so much. I decided to try making that dish, but replaced the fish with tofu. It turned out very similar to what I wanted, and satisfied my craving!

So, here is another way to add turmeric in your diet:…

For sentimental reasons, what I’m going to write in this post reminds me so much of my childhood and what my mom did raising us. It’s been so long since I left my Thai home. Thinking about my memories gives me a lump in my throat–oh how I miss those days!!

I remember seeing my mom’s joy of growing vegetables in our garden. I also remember her pride in cooking and fermenting vegetables in our kitchen. We had a great garden by a river in our backyard, and my mom would plant everything she could think of in it all year round. I can still hear my mom’s voice asking me and my sister to stop playing and go to the garden and get what she needed for her.

Vegetables such as lemongrass, Thai chilies, or limes were typical things for us then. Back in those days, seeing my mom work so hard to get simple food, that at the same time was sold everywhere, I wished she would go to the supermarket and buy everything just like other “modern families” did. I’m so glad she didn’t do that now, and instead she went the extra mile to feed us well….

The easiest dish I ever prepared was the dish for my daughter when she started to eat solid food. At the time, I didn’t have to do anything besides giving her plain steamed vegetables. I gave her one cooked vegetable at a time to observe her reactions with each type. I tasted everything before I fed her first, and was surprised they actually tasted good the way they were–plain. When I was finally sure that she wasn’t allergic to anything, I started to add some seasoning to her vegetables and thought she would love to eat them even more. Hmm. . . no, she didn’t like them any better than the plain ones. So, I adjusted how I cook vegetables to the way my daughter liked to eat, which was incredibly simple.

That made me realize that we are actually born to eat food close to its original form. Ever since, I have kept this idea in mind and tried to keep my food as simple as possible. I love how I can tell what each vegetable tastes like just by looking at it.

Here is one of my many plain vegetable dishes. With just broccoli, garlic & coconut oil, a pinch of salt, and lemon juice, it’s so plain yet very tasty:…

Being vegetarian and raising my daughter, I have to be very careful and make sure I’m not doing anything nutrition-wise I’ll regret years from now. Also, thanks to all the questions and concerns from both sides of my family, I have been very cautious. I’m already inclined to be very cautious, so this has taken it to an extreme regarding nutrition. I’m glad for that though because nutritional knowledge and cooking techniques have also become my passion.

Breakfast is our biggest meal of the day, and I make sure that we all have good, balanced food, to start our day with. We eat a full breakfast every day. It’s sad knowing there are so many people skipping breakfast because they don’t have, or make, the time to eat it. Even though there is no scientific proof that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, I know from experience that it’s very important.

a few kinds of seasonal fruits

I’m going to share how I prepare breakfast with you, which is rather gourmet, but simple at the same time. Each morning, we all have fruits, proteins, carbohydrates, and a probiotic drink. How on earth can we eat all that for breakfast you might think, right?…

What I miss most about the first three years of being a new mom is the special time bonding with my baby during breastfeeding. I’m so lucky to experience such a sentimental time once in my life. There were some difficult times I thought would never end though when I was dealing with the painful cycles of mastitis.

It’s been so long, and I never thought about it ‘til I got a phone call from my friend who was taking the same Spanish class with me last night. She has 2 daughters: one is almost 3 years old, and the other just turned 1 and is still nursing. Her family just moved from Hong Kong and is new to town like us so we became friends instantly. She needed my help taking care of her daughters, while she was going to see a doctor. She told me that something serious might happen to her as she found a few lumps on her left breast and they were so painful.

I was fine taking care of her daughters, but what she was telling me brought back memories. It’s hard to believe that many years have flown by since I stopped breastfeeding, but everything during that time was still clear in my mind. I was pretty sure that she must be having mastitis as her little one, who is still nursing, had been sick and couldn’t nurse like normal. …

Like most people, I considered yogurt a healthy part of my diet for a long time. Even though I always saw Kefir on the same shelf as yogurt, I didn’t know its real benefits until a few years ago when I was learning about fermentation. It surprised me to find out it has many more beneficial bacteria strains (probiotics) than yogurt. Before long, I tried it and quickly switched from yogurt to kefir almost entirely, as it actually tastes great, and is easier to drink too.

Whenever I hear fellow parents complain about their children’s upset stomachs, that they can’t go to the bathroom on a regular basis, or being lactose intolerant, I try to introduce kefir to them. Most of the time I end up answering this question: “What is kefir?” Well, from all my research, I can easily explain that kefir is one of the most probiotic rich foods, and it has been used in European countries for many centuries.

Similar to yogurt, it can be made from either cow’s or goat’s milk. The magical 24-hour fermentation process transforms the regular milk into a slightly sour and thick milk when it becomes kefir. During the process, yeast and good bacteria eat most lactose, also known as “milk sugar,” from the milk. It has been proven that many people who are lactose intolerant can safely drink kefir. It’s also rich in vitamin B, calcium, magnesium, folic acid, and has a lot of good bacteria known as probiotics that help with digestion….

When I was ready for a change 20 years ago, travelling and getting away from my interior design work sounded great. I wanted to go somewhere completely different from where I was, so I got a visa and decided to explore the U.S. Once there, I discovered so many more options in life than just working and saving money for a future that I didn’t even know what would be. I knew I made the right decision then, and I still do now!

Both my husband and I love traveling, but we didn’t get to do much during the years when our daughter was still young. It’s also nice to have extended periods of being completely dedicated to where you are. In fact when we live in other countries we also try to focus on being there and engaging the local culture as both residents and tourists.

In 2011, on the way back from Thailand we stopped in Taiwan and stayed for a week visiting both urban and more rural areas, thanks to a family friend. We were fascinated by the friendliness, kindness and generosity of Taiwanese people. We all agreed on the idea of spending a school year there, and started working toward that goal. Our first year living abroad as a family was in 2013-2014–as hoped.

What did we get after one year there? SO MUCH!, I hardly know where to start….

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