It's Now Official: Farmers' Markets have better medicine than Pharmacies

My 95-year-old uncle just emailed me the latest post in his subscription to Harvard Medical's Health Beat because Harvard Medical has finally caught up to me. The doctors there who think they know medicine apparently just discovered there are, as the post title says, more vitamins on your dinner plate than in your medicine cabinet. Provided of course, they only hinted, that food is farm fresh.

Harvard wants to sell its subscribers more information about how to eat your meds, but it's really just good old fashioned common sense. Fruits, vegetables, roots, seeds, animals as well as their eggs and milk are all dynamic, living things, made just like us of cells and molecules continually shifting. What makes them better for us than, say, one element isolated into a manufactured tablet is the interaction of all their chemical parts with all our chemical parts. In other words, if you want to be healthy and stay that way, eat fresh food--early and often!

Crucially, eat different food everyday. Eating the same ingredient over and over turns its chemicals to poison because the body can't process the overload. Eat what Mother Nature is offering you when she offers it: greens in spring, juicy fruits in summer, roots and seeds in wintertime with a touch of fatty meat.
This is in fact the wisdom of traditional medicine going back at least 4,000 years. Food is traditional medicine. Our machine and manufacture based version is actually "alternative medicine."

Here at the end of August when vitamin rich bell peppers are vividly overflowing red, yellow, orange and green in farmers' market stalls, make yourself some Piperade, the popular Basque sauté of multi colored peppers with purple onion and garlic. It's perfect with a corn souffle or corn pudding right now, on an omelet, atop baked potatoes or with fresh sausages. Its uses are endless. A recipe is in my book Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking (Wisdom Publications: 2011) available at bookstores and from Amazon, although I hate to say that these days.

Another even more memorable and just as easy way to deploy all those peppers is Shakshuka, the popular Levantine way of serving poached farm fresh eggs in a spicy tomato sauce filled with colorful bell peppers.

Here's the recipe for what you see in that photo, although the photo was Shakshuka for two not four.

Serves 4

3 tbsp fruity olive oil

3 lg garlic cloves, minced

1 lg red onion, diced

1 med green bell pepper, seeded and chunked

1 sm yellow bell pepper, seeded and chunked

1-2 hot chili peppers like Serrano or real jalapeno, seeded and minced

2 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

½ tsp caraway seeds, smashed or ground

1-2 tsp smoked paprika

¼ tsp dried mint leaves

¼ tsp turmeric

¼ tsp ground cayenne or arbol chili powder

pinch ground cinnamon

1 tsp wine/balsamic vinegar

½ tsp honey

1 tsp tomato paste

2-3 cups chopped tomatoes in their juice

salt

black pepper to taste

8 eggs

1 bunch fresh cilantro, stemmed, washed and chopped for garnish

optional add ons: feta cheese, pitted black kalamata olives, chopped spinach

In a large heavy-gauge sauté pan that has a lid, heat olive oil. Sauté onions, bell and chili peppers and garlic over medium heat til soft, about 5 minutes.  Add the spices—cumin through cinnamon—and heat until fragrant, maybe 60-90 seconds.

Stir in vinegar, tomato paste, honey and tomatoes.  Season with salt and pepper.

Cook until the sauce thickens, maybe 10-12 minutes depending on how juicy the tomatoes were.  Taste for flavor and add seasonings to your taste.

Get the sauce very hot and bubbly over medium heat and have the pan lid handy.  Carefully create 8 small pockets in the sauce and crack an egg into each one. Try to nudge a little sauce into the eggwhites.  Cover and continue cooking to poach the eggs to your liking.

Uncover the pan. Add the optionals you desire. Let them heat up 1 minute. Remove pan from heat. Garnish with chopped cilantro and serve right out of the pan.