Lenten Season Part 5 Latin American Foodways and Traditions

Frederick Douglass Opie

Lenten Season Series with Related Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/search?q=Lenten+Season

Guatemala Foodways and Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/search?q=Guatemala

Mexican Foodways and Recipes:

 http://www.foodasalens.com/2010/03/culinary-look-at-women-in-history.html

http://www.foodasalens.com/2011/03/culinary-celebration-of-womens-history_03.html

Lenten Season Part 4 Fasting and Dr. Alvenia Fulton

Frederick Douglass Opie

The Best of Dr. Alvenia Fulton with Related Recipes:

http://www.foodasalens.com/2011/02/black-history-month-for-foodies-series_21.html

http://www.foodasalens.com/2011/01/food-and-new-years-resolutions-series_05.html

http://www.foodasalens.com/2010/02/dr-alvenia-fulton-look-whats-cooking-on.html

http://www.foodasalens.com/2010/02/dick-gregorys-mentor-dr-alvenia-m.html

Lenten Season Series with Related Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/search?q=Lenten+Season

Fasting For Lent: "Good Health Begins in the Colon"

Comedian and activist Dick Gregory first met Dr. Alvenia M. Fulton during his 1967 campaign for mayor of Chicago against the incumbent, Richard Daley. Fulton came by campaign headquarters and dropped off some salad for Gregory and his staff. Someone at the headquarters informed him that a really nice black woman “‘brought all these salads here for you’; I had been a vegetarian,” says Gregory. When he went by to thank her, his encounter with Fulton turned “my whole life around,” said Gregory. They sat and talked and Fulton heard that Gregory was going to go on a forty-day fast in protest of the war in Vietnam. “And she thought I knew something about fasting, which I didn’t! And she taught me from day one to day forty what was going to go on in my body.”During the fast Gregory went from 350 to 98 pounds and ran twenty-five miles a day before and after sun up. After the fast, his weight returned to 148 pounds, he was totally healthy, and he began to fast on a regular basis. Over the next several years, Gregory and Fulton became close friends as she shared her knowledge about fasting, herbs, and nutrition with him. Here is a smoothie recipe I use when I fast like many maybe doing during the Lenten season. Dr. Fulton mantra was good health begins in the colon, that’s why she championed the merits of regular fasting using natural colon cleansers like psyllium husk and raw foods.

Ingredients
1/2 cup of frozen strawberries or your favorite fruit
1/2 cup of frozen bananas
Cup or more of vanilla soy milk or use fruit juice if you prefer
1 scoop of a good protein powder supplement
2 table spoons of psyllium husk
1/3 cup of soy yogurt
¼ cup or more of honey or maple syrup

Method
Combine fruit, milk, and yogurt in a blender and turn on high until the ingredients is mixed, add more soy milk if necessary. Next had the dry ingredients and sweeten to taste. Be sure to not overload your blender because you could burn out the engine on that bad boy!

Lenten Season: Dr. Alvenia Fulton A Food Pioneer We Should Know

Vegetarian chili and corn bread, recipes below

Master Herbalist Dr. Alvenia Moody Fulton held a Masters of Divinity from Greater Payne Theological Seminary in Birmingham, Alabama (she was the schools female student and graduate) and a PhD. in naturopathic medicine from Lincoln College of Naturopathy in Indianapolis.  She served as an African Methodist Episcopal pastor in Louisville, Kentucky, Birmingham, Alabama, and Manhattan, Kansas (the home of Kansas State University). She would go on to open a business/ministry on 52 Street on the south side of Chicago in a rough part of the city but the criminals protected and looked out for her. “The word on the Southside was leave that old lady alone,” she cares about us, said Dick Gregory.  In 1962, actors and activist Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee met Fulton when they went to her store while in Chicago performing Purlie Victorious. The entire cast was invited to Fulton’s store and home for dinner. “She prepared an unusual, most tasteful meal. It wasn’t until it was over that we realized that no meat had been served. The meat substitutes were delicious, fulfilling, and only a small part of the vegetables feast, topped off with a marvelous dessert and a truly believable coffee substitute.” The dinner, writes Ruby Dee, “was the beginning of a long relationship in which she changed my way of thinking about food. She not only showed me better ways to prepare and enjoy it, but also introduced me to the concept of food as medicine.” More on Fulton later but here are several recipes for vegetarian chili which was a dish on Dr. Fulton restaurant menu.


Vegetarian chili recipes: http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/cat/1275/


Lenten Season Series with Related Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/search?q=Lenten+Season

Lenten Season Series: Food is “among the major recreations of Bahía”

A Bahian shrimp gumbo called carurú, recipe below 

“Food must also be considered among the major recreations of Bahía,” says Vera Kelsey about Brazil’s most African influenced region where Yoruba culture from West Africa is clearly seen in the region's music and food. A trained sociologist and writer, Kelsey (1891-1961) traveled extensively in Central and South America in the 1940s and published several books on Brazil (her papers are archived at the North Dakota State University library). Kelsey writes, “And here particularly are served the rich dishes imported long ago from Portugal’s cuisine, and many more of African origin” such as the Bahian fish gumbo called “carurú” made with okra, and African plant, peanuts, cashews, “dried shrimps, peppers, and other spices,” which is a “notable dish” in Kelsey’s words. Here is a recipe below.


Caruru-de-camarao recipe: http://www.mangerati.com/caruru-de-camarao

Lent and Fish, and Street Venders in Nineteenth Century Rio

Coarse sea salted marinated and pan fried sardines, recipes below

It's the Lenten season which means fish for lots observant Catholics and many protestants. Here is a related story about 19th century Brazil and street venders selling fish. The Parisian Adèle Toussaint-Samson (1826-1886) traveled to Brazil in the early 1850s where she would live with her husband and children for twelve years. Toussaint-Samson had a wealthy uncle who lived in Rio. Adèle Toussaint-Samson serves as keen observer of Brazilian foodways including seafood and African slavery; Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888. She provides a wonderful description of a fish market in Rio “where abound sardines, shrimps, oysters, and delicious fishes, which are bought alive.” She goes on to describe a female Afro-Brazilian street vender near the market selling “smoking batatas doces [sweet potato dish], fried sardines, and some angú” (manioc flour gravy) under a large linen umbrella. Here are two Brazilian sardine recipes appropriate for this memory of fish in nineteenth Rio.

Brazilian fried sardine recipe: http://www.all-fish-seafood-recipes.com/index.cfm/recipe/Sardinas_Fritas

Marinated pan fried sardine recipe: http://www.audreycooks.com/audreycooks/?p=394

Lenten Season Part 3 Fish Fridays and Lent

Frederick Douglass Opie, Babson College

Elizabeth Henry The Queen of Fish Fry: http://www.foodasalens.com/2010/03/culinary-look-at-women-in-history-cast.html

Fish Series with Related Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/search?q=fish+series

Lenten Season Series with Related Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/search?q=Lenten+Season

Fasting During the Lenten Season: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2011/04/25/135577006/status-update-unknown-or-fasting-from-social-media

Lenten Season: Part 2 Polenta, Lentils, and Food Equity

Frederick Douglass Opie, Babson College

Polenta Related Stories and Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/search?q=Polenta

Vegan Stuffed Pork Chops: http://jennshaggy.blogspot.com/2008/12/vegan-goat-cheese-spinach-and-sun-dried.html

Vegan Roasted Chicken Soup: http://www.bookofyum.com/blog/gluten-free-progressive-dinner-vegan-un-chicken-roasted-vegetable-soup-recipe-4437.html

Vegan Smothered Cabbage Recipe: http://www.all-creatures.org/mhvs/recipes-

Lenten Season Series: Part 1 Ash Wednesday

Frederick Douglass Opie, Babson College

Fat Tuesday and Food: http://www.foodasalens.com/2010/02/new-orleans-and-gumbo-history-on-fat.html

Vegan Gumbo Recipe: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=27730.0 

Veggie Patty Recipe: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/jamaican-veggie-patties-recipe.html

Vegan Rice and Peas: http://www.ivu.org/recipes/latinam/jamaican-rice.html

Vegetarian chili recipes: http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/cat/1275/

Vegan Ropa Vieja Recipe:http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=27125

Vegan Mofongo Video Recipe
http://veganricans.blogspot.com/2008/11/vegan-mofongo-w-fried-tempeh.html

Fat Tuesday and Food in Mardi Gras and Carnival Cities

New Orleans Gumbo, this and other recipes below

I decided to turn my attention to culinary history of New Orleans today in honor of Fat Tuesday and the start of Mardi Gras and Carnival around the world. In New Orleans, Rio, Spanish Town, Montevideo and other cities with rich carnival tradition, Mardi Gras represents the last party before Christians societies turn to serious reflections on the life of Jesus Christ as he prepared to go to the cross and die for the sin of the world. Ash Wednesday for many believers begins a season of sacrifice and serious reflection that last until Good Friday and then celebration on Resurrection Sunday!. As part of the Lower Mississippi Valley region, New Orleans historically as a rich Native American cultural heritage including the Choctaw and others. Starting in eighteenth century French settlers migrated to New Orleans establishing it as French controlled city in 1718. The French ceded the city to the Spanish in 1736 and then regained control of it in 1801. The demand for enslaved Africans to work sugar plantations throughout Louisiana and the shipping industry in the port New Orleans resulted in black majorities in the state and the city with large shipments of slaves arriving from the Caribbean and directly from Guinea in West Africa and Angola in Central Africa. Whites in New Orleans who could afford to, consumed large amounts of beef, veal, mutton, and pork. Enslaved Africans survived on rice and sagamité—a salt water boiled corn mush as rations from their owners, meats scraps from the tables and rubbish of city elites, and gardens where they raised okra and other produce. They also had permission in most instances to hunt and fish on Sundays. Hence New Orleans creole cookery as three roots: Indian, African, and European however the African is the predominate influence in New Orleans cuisine. One finds a similar trinity influenced Caribbean and South American foodways.


Traditional gumbo recipe: http://www.bigoven.com/170608-New-Orleans-Creole-Gumbo-recipe.html


Vegan gumbo recipe: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=27730.0


Brazilian Feijoada History and Recipe : http://www.foodasalens.com/2010/07/july-soul-food-in-nineteenth-century.html


Rice and Beans/Peas and Rice Series With Recipes: http://www.foodasalens.com/search?q=Rice+and+Beans%2FPeas+and+Rice+Series