I’ve been meaning to get on the whole grain band-wagon for awhile, but anything that isn’t gluten-free has potential to be hard to digest for me, so buying a big package of buckwheat, barley, bulghour, or kamut seemed foolhardy when I could stick with brown rice and get oh-so-many nutrients without the worry.
Still, I was craving something toothsome, dense, and filling in a way that brown rice never seems to achieve in my belly, and that meant I finally bought kamut. The package said cook it for an hour and a half in 4 times as much water, but another resource on the Montreal Gazette website said soak it overnight and then cook it for substantially less (40 minutes) with a 4:1 grain to water ratio. I’m a big fan of soaking things overnight, so I went with option no. 2.
Nope, somebody at the Gazette messed up, or my stove sucks. Probably my stove sucks, because I brought 4 cups of water to a boil with my soaked kamut, reduced the heat, and let it simmer for 40 minutes. The grains were still pretty hard. So I let it simmer ten more minutes. Surely ten minutes would be all it needed. Nope. Thirty minutes later it was almost at a point where I was happy to eat it. Fortunately my roasted vegetables took 1 1/2 hours at a really low (for roasted vegetables in my experience) temperature – 325 Fahrenheit – and the big chunks or sweet potato, turnip, onions, zucchini (the zucchini requiring far less time, so being added half-way through the cooking period), and cloves of garlic went very well on top of the hearty, almost-cooked grains. The nice thing about roasted vegetables is that you make a huge batch of them and they last for awhile. You need to enjoy them slowly or you’ll end up inhaling 6 sweet potatoes before you realize you should have stopped. Six zucchini in one sitting are maybe not necessarily a good thing, but have far less dramatic effects on your digestion than an entire turnip or a pound of sweet potatoes.
I also broiled 4 peppers (reds and greens) until their skins charred (the trick is to cut them in half, remove the seeds and white parts with your hands – just tear them out – and press them completely flat on a baking sheet). On high it only takes about 5 minutes, and you should try not to set off the fire alarm like I did. Fortunately the cat I was house-sitting at the time was a stereotypical scared-y cat and didn’t even try to run out into the snow, and when my kitchen door blew open of its own accord a few days later, the cat still decided it was better off inside. I gave it a salmon-flavoured treat for that good behavior, though I kind of don’t want to think about the salmon-flavoured-ness and where it comes from…
But I digress. All cats aside, don’t trigger your smoke alarms because it’s cold outside and wasteful of energy to have to swing the kitchen door open and closed to get the smoke out.
The point of this post is that whole grains are substantially more filling than white rice or potatoes and can make a whole meal with just a few additions. They’re higher in protein, too, so if you don’t even feel like adding beans or lentils (also hard-to-digest foods) that’s okay. Kamut would be perfect with fish, though, as it’s relatively cooperative in your belly with the slow-moving grains. You really don’t want to eat more than about 1/2 a cup of cooked kamut because it takes so long to digest anyway. You do, however, want to eat it with roasted root vegetables…not too much, as Michael Pollan says. Real food. Just probably not fruits, which would turn acidic in your stomach by the time they got through your digestive system thanks to the slow-digestion of the kamut.
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