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By Root 1422 0

20 minutes. Cool under cold water when cooking time is up. You may wish to vary the amount of water in order to create the texture of grain you prefer. If you have trouble with sticking, here’s the trick I use: put about 1 inch of water in the bottom of the pressure cooker. Put the grain into a stainless-steel bowl that will fit easily into the pressure cooker (with plenty of room between the top of the bowl and the lid of the pressure cooker). Add water to the level of about ¾ inch above the level of the grain. Put the bowl inside the pressure cooker, cover, and begin cooking. This method is also handy when I need to cook both grains and beans at the same time, but separately. I merely put the small stainless-steel bowl inside the pressure cooker. I then put the beans with adequate water around the outside of the bowl, and the grains inside the bowl.

3. Sautéing: this method is most frequently used in cooking bulgur wheat and buckwheat groats, but can be used with any grain to achieve a “nuttier” flavor. Wash the grains and put in a dry saucepan or pressure cooker over low heat. Stir until dry. Add just enough oil to coat each kernel. Sauté the grains, stirring constantly, until all of the grains are golden. Stir in boiling water or stock (amounts as for regular cooking, above) and bring the mixture to a boil. Cover and simmer 30 to 45 minutes; or, if using a pressure cooker, bring to 15 pounds pressure and cook 20 minutes. Cool cooker immediately.

Cooking Nuts and Seeds

1. To roast whole seeds or nuts: place in a dry pan and roast over medium flame until they have desired brownness; or spread them on a baking sheet and toast them in a 200°F oven. Use the seeds whole, or grind them in a blender, a few at a time, or with a mortar and pestle. Add salt if desired.

2. To roast or toast ground seeds or nuts: buy the meal or, to make it yourself, grind the seeds or nuts in a blender. Then roast the meal in a dry pan, stirring constantly, adding salt if desired. Or spread the meal on a baking sheet and bake at 200°F, stirring often. (You can also grind small quantities of whole grains in your blender.)

3. Nut and seed butters: it is easy to make your own fresh nut and seed butters if you have a blender. From whole roasted or raw seeds or nuts: grind as for meal, adding a little oil to “start” the butter; continue adding as many nuts or seeds as your blender can handle. From roasted or raw ground nuts or seeds: stir a little oil, and honey if desired, into the meal, and you will have creamy nut or seed butter.

Appendix C. Protein-Calorie Guidelines for Evaluating Foods

One way to demonstrate that most plant foods are good protein sources is to ask: do most plant foods provide adequate protein without exceeding calorie needs? By this test, most plant foods not only qualify as good protein sources, they excel.

First, from a day’s diet, let’s subtract those foods that provide no protein—oil, butter, sugar, honey, alcohol, and most fruits (fruits provide so little as to be almost insignificant). In a diet of people conscious of the need for moderation in fat and sugar, these foods provide roughly 25 percent of the calories. (In the day’s menu in Figure 10, such foods provide about 25 percent of the calories.)

So this means that the remaining 75 percent of one’s calories—or 2,025 calories for an “average” American male of 154 pounds—comes from foods containing some protein. The average American male, according to the National Academy of Sciences, needs 56 grams of protein a day. This allowance assumes a diet with considerable animal protein. In a diet with much less animal and more plant protein than the typical American diet, that allowance would rise to 65 grams. And since each gram of protein has 4 calories, this average male needs a total of 260 calories from protein out of a total of 2,025 calories from foods with protein, or 13 percent. Now we have a basis for judging what protein foods will meet the average person’s needs on a plant food diet.

Using this guideline, if a food has 13 percent or more of its calories