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Nutrition - What The Body Is Built On.
What Are We Building Our Bodies From This Autumn?
There is something about this time of year that changes the way we think about food. Through the summer, we can walk outside and pick something from the garden, stop at a roadside stand, bring home a basket of berries, or find local vegetables piled high at the market, but by the end of September the question begins to change from “What is ready to eat?” to “What are we going to do with all of this before we lose it?” Even if you do not grow your own food, the same decision is happening around us because many of the fruits and vegetables in the grocery store are reaching the end of their local season, and suddenly we are choosing between eating something fresh today or finding a way to keep it for the months ahead.
If you have ever grown broccoli, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, beans, herbs, grapes, or zucchini, you already know that gardens rarely provide exactly the amount you need for supper. There may be hardly anything ready one week and then far more than you can possibly eat the next, which leaves us deciding whether to freeze, can, pickle, dry, store, or give away what we have grown. Somewhere along the way, however, many of us have picked up the idea that fresh food is automatically the most nutritious choice and that everything we do to preserve it somehow makes it less worthwhile. Fresh food certainly has enormous value, particularly when it has been harvested ripe and eaten soon afterward, but preservation is not just a second-best option we use when we cannot eat something fresh. Each method has strengths, each changes food in a different way, and sometimes preserving food promptly can protect more of its value than allowing a supposedly “fresh” vegetable to spend another week deteriorating in the refrigerator.
Fresh Is Wonderful, But Fresh Is Also Temporary
A head of broccoli picked from the garden and brought into the kitchen for supper has had very little time to lose anything between the soil and the plate, and this is one of the tremendous advantages of growing food ourselves or buying locally when produce is in season. Fresh fruits and vegetables give us fibre, vitamins, minerals, water and an enormous variety of plant compounds, but the moment a plant is harvested it begins to change. Time, temperature, exposure to air and light, and the conditions in which it is stored all affect what happens next, which means that the word fresh can describe something harvested an hour ago or something harvested many days ago and transported hundreds or thousands of kilometres before reaching us.
That does not make grocery-store produce a poor choice, but it does remind us that nutrition is more complicated than saying fresh is best. If we have ten heads of broccoli ready at once and can only eat two of them before they begin deteriorating, freezing the remaining broccoli while it is still in excellent condition makes considerably more sense than insisting that fresh is nutritionally superior and then allowing half the crop to become yellow and limp in the refrigerator.
When We Freeze Food
Freezing is one of the best tools we have for holding onto the quality of fruits and vegetables for later use. Most vegetables are briefly blanched in boiling water or steam before freezing, not because we are trying to cook them completely, but because blanching slows the natural enzyme activity that would otherwise continue affecting colour, flavour, texture and nutrient quality even in the freezer. That brief heating can reduce some of the more delicate water-soluble nutrients, particularly vitamin C and some B vitamins, especially if vegetables are over-blanched or left sitting in a large amount of water, but once properly prepared and frozen, deterioration slows dramatically, and much of the food's nutritional value is retained.
This means that if broccoli is overflowing from the garden, there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating some fresh, blanching the rest and putting it into the freezer for December, January or February. The broccoli will change somewhat in texture, so you may not want thawed broccoli on a raw vegetable tray, but it can still be wonderful in soups, casseroles, stir-fries and meals like the chicken pot pie we are making this week. Frozen peas, beans, corn, berries, and many other foods can become some of the most useful ingredients in a winter kitchen, and having them available often means we eat a greater variety of plants throughout the year rather than eating whatever will survive longest in the refrigerator.
When We Can or Pickle Food
Canning preserves food in a completely different way because heat is used to destroy microorganisms and create a shelf-stable product, and with that heat comes a greater effect on some of the vitamins that are particularly sensitive to temperature. Vitamin C and several B vitamins are among those more likely to decline during heating and storage, while fibre and minerals are much more stable. This is one of those places where I do not think it helps to declare one form of food good and another bad, because a jar of tomatoes from September that can become part of a stew in February is still providing us with vegetables, fibre, minerals and plant compounds at a time when those freshly picked garden tomatoes are long gone.
Pickling also deserves a little explanation because not all pickles are made in the same way. Cucumbers may be preserved with vinegar, or they may be fermented, which relies on microorganisms to produce acids that preserve the food and create the characteristic flavour. Fermentation changes food differently from vinegar pickling and can create additional fermentation products, while pickles that are later heat-processed for shelf storage will not be the same as a living, refrigerated, fermented food. They are all forms of preservation, but they should not automatically be treated as nutritionally identical because they all happen to be called pickles.
There is also the practical matter of ingredients we add during preservation. A jar of vegetables does not suddenly lose its worth because it is canned, but it makes sense to know what else has been added. Very salty brines, heavy syrups, and large amounts of added sugar change the nutritional picture, just as they would if we added those ingredients to fresh food at the table. Again, it is not about making food frightening; it is about knowing what we are eating.
When We Dry Food
Drying gives us another completely different way of holding onto a harvest because instead of using freezing temperatures or sealing food with heat, we remove most of its water. Once that water is removed, microorganisms have far less opportunity to grow, and the food becomes smaller, lighter, and much more concentrated. Fibre and minerals hold up quite well through drying, while some vitamins, particularly vitamin C, are more vulnerable to heat, oxygen, and storage.
The concentration that occurs with drying is important to understand because it changes how we perceive a serving. A bunch of grapes contains a tremendous amount of water, while raisins are those same grapes with much of that water removed. This means that a small handful of raisins can contain the natural sugars and energy that originally occupied a much larger volume of grapes. That does not make raisins a bad food; it means that dried fruit is concentrated food, and our portions usually need to reflect that.
Drying can also be an incredibly useful way of preventing waste. Grapes become raisins, apples become dried apple slices, herbs can be used throughout the winter, and onions can become flakes or powder that find their way into soups, sauces, casseroles, and seasoning blends for months. A food does not have to remain in the same form in which it came out of the garden in order to continue contributing something useful to our meals, but the food does need to be as minimally processed as possible in order to maintain its nutrient value.
So Which One Should We Choose?
The answer is not fresh, frozen, canned, or dried. The answer is all of them, depending on the food, the season, what you have available, and how you are actually going to use it. If you can walk into the garden tonight and cut broccoli for supper, wonderful. If you can freeze another six heads and use them through the winter, that is wonderful too. If your cucumbers become jars of pickles, your tomatoes become sauce, your grapes become raisins, and your onions become dried flakes, you have taken food that was available for a very short season and extended its usefulness across a much longer part of the year.
This is one of the reasons I would like us to move away from constantly judging individual foods and instead begin asking what our meals are actually giving us. Once the food is in our kitchen, whether it came straight from the garden, out of the freezer, from a jar we preserved in September, from the pantry, or home from the grocery store, we still have another decision to make: what are we going to build with it?
Comfort Food Can Still Build the Body
As the weather cools, many of us naturally start reaching for warmer and more substantial meals. Soups, stews, casseroles, roasted vegetables, and foods that feel comforting begin replacing some of the lighter meals of summer, and unfortunately this is often where another round of food judgment begins. We have spent decades dividing food into categories such as good, bad, healthy, unhealthy, low-fat, low-carb, clean, indulgent, or forbidden when there is a much more useful question we could be asking:
What is this meal actually giving my body?
Nutrition is, quite literally, what the body is built on. Every day the body requires protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, water, fibre and countless other compounds from food to carry out the enormous amount of work we ask of it. We do not have to calculate every nutrient that crosses our plate or build every meal according to a mathematical formula, but over time we do need to give the body enough raw material to work with, and that does not mean that every meal needs to look as though it came from a diet book.
A satisfying meal can contain potatoes, butter and gravy, and it can even have a biscuit sitting on top of it. What matters is what else is there and how the whole meal has been constructed. I like to see a meaningful source of protein, because protein supplies amino acids that the body continually uses to maintain and repair tissues; I want to see vegetables and plant foods, preferably with some variety because different plants bring different fibres, vitamins, minerals and plant compounds; I want enough carbohydrate to provide useful energy and make the meal substantial; and I want fat, because fat has essential jobs in the body, helps us absorb the fat-soluble vitamins, carries flavour beautifully and contributes greatly to how satisfying a meal feels.
Rather than constantly asking ourselves, “What should I take out?”, I think we would often be better served by asking, “What could I add that gives my body more to work with?” That is exactly what we have done with this week's recipe.
The original chicken pot pie comes from a cherished cookbook of mine, and I had no interest in changing it so completely that it stopped being the wonderful, comforting chicken pot pie that made me love the recipe in the first place. Instead, we kept the chicken, kept the potatoes, kept some fat in the gravy, and kept a warm, satisfying topping, but we increased the vegetable variety and replaced the traditional rolled pastry with a easier to create biscuit topping that can be prepared with either regular flour or a gluten-free one-to-one baking flour. The result is still comfort food, but now we are asking that comfort food to give the body a little more.
Autumn Chicken Pot Pie
Serves 6–8
Filling
2¼ cups cooked chicken, chopped
1 cup celery, chopped
1 cup carrots, diced
1 medium onion, chopped or sliced
1 cup potatoes, diced
1 cup broccoli, chopped into small pieces
1 cup mushrooms, sliced
1 cup green beans, chopped
1½–2 cups peas
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon parsley
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
You do not have to use every vegetable listed here. Use what you have, what is in season, and what your household enjoys, because the goal is to bring more variety into the dish rather than making the recipe difficult to prepare.
Gravy
¼ cup butter, chicken fat, olive oil, or a combination
⅓ cup all-purpose flour or gluten-free 1-to-1 baking flour
4 cups hot chicken stock
Salt and pepper, to taste
¼–½ cup milk, optional, for a creamier gravy
Warm the butter, chicken fat, or oil in a saucepan, then stir in the flour and cook over medium-low heat for several minutes, stirring frequently, so that the flour cooks through without becoming heavily browned. Gradually whisk in the hot chicken stock until the mixture is smooth, add the thyme, parsley, salt and pepper, and continue cooking until the gravy has thickened. If you prefer a creamier filling, stir in a little milk at the end.
Easy Biscuit Topping
2 cups all-purpose flour or gluten-free 1-to-1 baking flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon dried thyme, optional
¼ cup cold butter, cut into small pieces
¾–1 cup milk or buttermilk
1 egg, optional
Mix the flour, baking powder, salt, pepper, and thyme, then cut or rub the cold butter into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in ¾ cup of the milk and the egg, if using, adding a little more milk only if necessary. The dough should be soft enough to scoop easily but should not become a runny batter.
Putting It Together
Heat the oven to 375°F. Lightly steam or cook the celery, carrots, potatoes, broccoli and green beans until they are just beginning to soften, remembering that they will continue cooking in the oven. The mushrooms and onions can be lightly sautéed if you prefer the flavour and texture that gives them.
Combine the chicken, vegetables and peas with enough gravy to coat everything generously, then spoon the mixture into a large casserole dish. Drop the biscuit dough over the top in rough spoonfuls; there is no need to roll anything out, trim pastry or make it look perfect. Bake for approximately 25–30 minutes, or until the filling is bubbling and the biscuit topping is golden and cooked through.
An Even Easier Option
If you do not want to make the biscuit topping, spread mashed potatoes over the chicken filling instead and bake until the filling is hot and bubbling and the top begins to brown. This version can also be gluten-free as long as the gravy is prepared with a suitable gluten-free flour.
More Than Comfort Food
When we look at this chicken pot pie through the lens of what the body is built on, we can see far more than comfort food. The chicken provides protein, the vegetables and peas bring fibre, vitamins, minerals and plant variety, the potatoes and biscuit topping provide carbohydrate and energy, and the butter, chicken fat or olive oil add flavour, satisfaction and useful dietary fat. The vegetables could be fresh from the garden, frozen earlier in the season or purchased from the grocery store, and dried herbs from last summer's garden could flavour the entire dish.
Nothing about the meal needed to become extreme, and nothing enjoyable needed to be removed for the sake of being able to call it nutritious. We looked at an old favourite and asked whether it could give us a little more, which may be one of the simplest and most sustainable ways to improve the way we eat.
Try This in Your Own Kitchen This Week
Choose one meal that you already make regularly and look at it with fresh eyes. Instead of beginning with what you think you should eliminate, look at what is already there and ask whether the meal contains a meaningful protein source, whether there is enough plant variety, whether it provides the energy you need, and whether it is satisfying enough that you actually enjoy eating it. You may discover that the meal does not need to be replaced at all; it may just need another vegetable, a little more protein, a different proportion of ingredients, or something pulled from the freezer that you preserved when it was plentiful.
Sometimes eating better does not begin with changing everything. Sometimes it begins by building the meal better with what you already have.
From Your Kitchen to Ours
Do you have a favourite recipe that has earned a permanent place in your kitchen? We would love to hear from you, and in each Wellness Letter we would like to begin sharing some of the recipes that have become part of your homes as well as ours.
Send us your recipe along with a few words about where it came from, why you love it, who taught you to make it, or the memories attached to it. Family recipes, old favourites, recipes passed down through generations, and dishes that have stood the test of time are especially welcome, and your recipe may become one of the recipes we share in an upcoming Wellness Letter.
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