Organic Foods

Now that we have a family member diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, the neurologist told us that person's diet must include "only organic food." Oops. Since then, I have re-organized our refrigerator, cupboards and pantry shelves to support our family's new 100% organic reality.

About 2 weeks ago, I read a news article on pesticide contamination found in leading brands of ground coffee, including some organic varieties. Wouldn't you know ---> my favorite Starbucks variety of Pike's Place is among the problem flavors. The news article recommends ground coffees with no detected pesticide residues. The ones we therefore switched over to are Starbucks Colombia, Peet's Organic Dark Roast, Newman's Organic Special Blend Medium Roast, and Starbucks French Roast. Luckily, some of those are also organic.

Thanks to lesmel's writings about flaxseeds, I've been looking for a bread recipe using flaxseeds. I found one:

https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/flaxseed-bread/

I adapted that recipe and baked my first flaxseed loaf today. It's good, but the recipe uses too much sweetener for my taste. If you have a good flour within its use-by date, using a lot of sweetener in that recipe is unnecessary. If you mill your own flour, you may not need *any* added sweetener.

My substitutions or additions include Bob's white flour, 1/4 cup oat bran (also from Bob's), sea salt from New Zealand, soy milk, and instead of butter I use Spectrum Culinary's organic sesame oil, which has an amazingly buttery flavor. (It is sold at Bristol Farms supermarkets in California.) I omitted the whole flaxseeds. (According to the Mayo Clinic, most of a serving of whole flaxseeds is not absorbed in the human body.). I also omitted the whole grain flour; my added oat bran replaces much of the fiber lost in using white flour. One loaf yields about 10 slices of bread. I will probably bake this bread about twice a week from now on. With the exception of sourdough bread, I find most commercial bread to be tasteless. Bakery bread is better, but it too often uses less healthy ingredients, and is very expensive.

We made a batch of blueberry pancakes today to try out the organic buttermilk I recently found. Results are good, but one cup of buttermilk makes the pancakes way too tangy. In future I will use 1/4 cup of organic buttermilk, with 3/4 cup of either soy milk or homemade almond milk to make up the 1 cup measure. 1 batch of that pancake mix, from Deborah Madison's recipe in The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, makes around 12 medium-sized pancakes.

Flaxseed update: If it's hard to find quality flaxseeds in your region, Bob's flour website sells two varieties of ground organic flaxseeds:

https://www.bobsredmill.com/product/organic-brown-flaxseed-meal

Bantam Books published a US paperback edition in May 1986 of a bread cookbook Uprisings: the whole grain baker’s book. That ISBN is 0553342606, if anyone wishes to track down a used copy of this cookbook, which weighs in at a respectable 293 pages.

I will try their recipe for peasant bread the next time I have handy 1 + 1/2 cups of what they call “crushed toasted bread.” So that means leftover bread… (but don’t use it if it already tastes stale or is starting to get any mold).

Here’s how that book was compiled: “Over a period of 2 1/2 years, many volunteers at a US midwest bakery cooperative did test-baking of the recipes from independent bakeries across North America. Each recipe was then reduced to home baking size. The editors note that “It would be impossible to list everyone who contributed."

It won’t be anytime soon that a similar cookbook is published, since many of those original collective bakeries no longer exist, for many reasons. It represents the peak of the wave of natural foods cooking that emerged soon after the onset of the age of Aquarius.

Since we became an elder-friendly (+ Parkinson’s) household, we use pod-type coffeemakers. The periodic descaling process for those models is *not* intuitive, however, and printed instructions are cryptic to the max. So I tried asking for help on the new AI option on the privacy-protecting DuckDuckGo internet browser. It gives me the step-by-step procedures I need, and quickly answers any new questions. Evidently hundreds of folks had the same questions, because the AI program offers fistfulls of great tips I can’t find documented anywhere else.

There are additional descale instructions on YouTube.

I just cooked my best scrambled eggs ever, using instructions from the May/June 2026 issue of COOK’s ILLUSTRATED magazine, their 200th issue of that magazine:

That magazine article is titled “A Crash Course in Scrambled Eggs.” Here is the link:
https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/8680-a-crash-course-in-scrambled-eg...

I’m also preparing to make a batch of organic cottage cheese this week. Prices keep going up in 2026 for organic cottage cheese, and this week even Whole Foods market is out of stock of our favorite brand. It is becoming too much of a rat race tracking down organic cottage cheese in any food market, and the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you are still a rat. So it’s time for a different approach.

Same problem + same solution with prepared organic crackers.

Then there is the shrinkflation: Evolution orange juice, also sold at Starbucks, just shrank their large size of orange juice from 59 ounces to 50 ounces, for the same price.