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Corn is a bit of a sore subject for me. I grew up on a farm in the Midwest and when corn was in season we would have it every day, often twice a day. I can’t point to a single moment when it happened but after I moved out of my parents house I stopped eating corn. I didn’t make a big deal about it but I would never order anything that contained those crunchy kernels in restaurants.
So, I tell myself that I don’t like corn but I still make and enjoy this recipe. When I first set out to make it I intended it to be like a classic chowder with lots of cream. However, I didn’t want to make a roux so I mulled over ways to thicken it without resorting to flour. Thickening it with both cashews and pureed onions is, in my estimation, a far superior method for two reasons. One, there is very little nutrition that flour offers. With onions you get fiber and a very powerful antioxidant called quercetin. Cashews offer protein and copper. Two, the flavor is boosted by both ingredients, particularly the onions. They enhance the level of umami in the chowder, which balances the sweetness of the corn.
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2020 is the year that stopped drinking caffeinated coffee. A test with Viome confirmed what my intuition had long told me: coffee isn’t my friend. I knew for ages that caffeine affected me more than the average person but I didn’t know that the catechols in coffee were unfavorable to my microbiome as well as my gut integrity and function. No bueno.
I was musing about my desire to concoct a coffee-esque beverage to an herbalist friend and she immediately suggested bay nuts. Of course! I’d heard of them before and was seeing them on my hikes in the East Bay hills but I had never tried them. Bay nuts ticked all the boxes: they are similar in flavor to coffee, can be processed into a beverage AND I can forage them. Yes! Yes! A friend forwarded me this amazing article on the nuts and I was further convinced that this was something to pay attention too. I started hiking with clothing with deep pockets or a fanny pack. The flavor is really special. It’s toasty, bitter and earthy. One foot in coffee territory and one foot in unsweetened chocolate. In fact, I struggled a bit to name this beverage… Bay Nut Coffee? Bay Nut Hot Chocolate? The answer, of course, is the genius beverage that merges them both: the mocha.  What’s life without a little sweetness? These little bites are so simple to make… don’t be scared off by the double boiler!
The antioxidants in the dark chocolate help to mitigate the effects of inflammation and promote vascular integrity. Walnuts have been found to improve the signaling between neurons in the brain and to promote neurogenesis, the production of neurons. Be sure to use dark chocolate for this recipe and not milk. While milk chocolate is very tasty, the milk has a protein called casein that binds to many of the antioxidants in the chocolate rendering them unusable to our bodies. |
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