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Brassicas are among my absolute favorites!! especially arugula. Nothing beats homegrown arugula in flavor. Store-bought and restaurant commercial varieties are often disappointing in flavor comparison.
And cruciferous veggies are indeed cancer fighters - so eat up. Here is an article with more information http://www.todaysdietitian.com/newarchives/100111p20.shtml
- and check out the title... I never thought about wasabi being a brassica; guess it is. No wonder I love it
I have seeds for interesting mizuna and bok choy varieties we're going to try growing this summer: Shanghai green choy and Mizuna red streaks.
Thanks Sally for writing about such nutritious garden vegetables!
Hi Diana! Thanks for the link and information!
I've grown mizuna, tat soi, komatsuna, mustard, and a mix of oriental greens from Pinetree gardens. I'm happy to have discovered another continent of leafy Brassicas, cuz the regular ones (broccoli, cauli, cabbage) are harder to master in my garden.
I'd go for cooked and/or raw. You could drive yourself crazy otherwise. Some people do vote for only raw, hence raw foodists. Whatever... bottom line > eat more veggies! especially brassicas. Coleslaw is a great recipe for cabbage, just avoid excess mayo.
Cooking does destroy some enzymes and cooking in water pulls out water soluble vitamins. You can always boil and save and use the water in soup stocks and sauces so as not to waste any nutrients. Otherwise, probably best to saute, oven roast, grill, microwave or steam.
And, Sally, we tried growing Brussels sprouts and the plants looked gorgeous one minute, then somewhere along the line every one got attacked!! I have a photo somewhere... all the leaves had holes and not a single sprout! Never had luck with broccoli either.
Now...give up on DH, and find a coleslaw recipe I like! Thanks for the link, Miss Diana (that's how people talk here). I spent an hour reading about organic milk, mattresses, etc.
...found my pic of our attempt at growing Brussels sprouts last season. I put the photos side by side of the beautiful before and then the unsightly after. I think we should probably have to tried netting over hoops to keep the buggers off. We used organic pesticide powder out of desperation, but as you can see it didn't work very well. You really need to reapply often for it to work. We generally don't like to use any pesticides - organic or not.
Anyhow, have a fun upcoming season and enjoy whatever nutritious Brassica plants you decide to grow and eat!
How sad! THanks for the pics.
Cabbage whites love my kale but I think it was striped garden cats that loved my other brassicas more, and looked like your pictures. Harlequin bugs are devastating too. I love winter- no bugs!!!
It is cole crops instead of cold crops?
56 years I thought and called it cold crops.
I thought they called it that because it likes the cooler weather.
You all mentioned cole - slaw - -- cole crops ; my feeble brain made the connection.
Well, hump!
I am going to forgive myself because cole comes from a Latin word caulis meaning stem or cabbage (why stem?)
The cole plants are every high in choline too.
Got this off of WIKI:
"Choline deficiency may play a role in liver disease, atherosclerosis, and possibly neurological disorders,[2] One symptom of choline deficiency is an elevated level of the liver enzyme ALT.[23]
It is particularly important for pregnant women to get enough choline, since low choline intake may raise the rate of neural tube defects in infants, and may affect their children's memory. One study found that higher dietary intake of choline shortly before and after conception was associated with a lower risk of neural tube defects.[24] If low choline intake causes an elevated homocysteine level, it raises the risk for preeclampsia, premature birth, and very low birth weight.[2]
Women with diets richer in choline may have a lower risk for breast cancer,[25][26] but other studies found no association.[27][28]
Some evidence suggests choline is anti-inflammatory. In the ATTICA study, higher dietary intake of choline was associated with lower levels of inflammatory markers.[29] A small study found that choline supplements reduced symptoms of allergic rhinitis.[30]
Despite its importance in the central nervous system as a precursor for acetylcholine and membrane phosphatidylcholine, the role of choline in mental illness has been little studied. In a large population-based study, blood levels of choline were inversely correlated with anxiety symptoms in subjects aged 46–49 and 70–74 years. However, there was no correlation between depression and choline level in this study.[31]"
Thanks Liquidamber! That is some interesting stuff ! I've really never heard of choline .
Carrie- I'm picky on coleslaw too. Some of my faves seem to be from BBQ places and are lightly dressed. But I don't know how they do it. I shred mine and try to use a minimum of mayo and a little bit of vinegar and sugar. Or I make the oil and vinegar, pepper and onion slaw ( 'Crispy coleslaw, Southern Living cookbook)
Nice article, Sally (I gave credit to wrong person the first time sorry about that). I enjoy eating Kimchi which is uses Chinese cabbage and diakon radish as ingredients. Kimchi is one of the healthiest meals you can make. This year I will be growing some of the ingredients in my garden so I can make it fresh.
The cole slaw from our BBQ place (which I'm eating right now) has these great little black things in it which I always thought were caraway seeds. Maybe they're pepper? Or poppy seeds? I need to know. And I wouldn't mind if you copied that recipe.
My husband started a huge eating change plan a few days ago, and admits that 1) he's never actually tried cole slaw, 2) he's prejudiced against it because his mother made a lot of boiled cabbage 3) he likes egg rolls which have cabbage in them ... maybe he'll like cole slaw! So I need a good recipe for his first time!
water sun grow--Hello!
I was looking at radishes in our local 'world foods' market the other day. They had huge and semi huge white radishes. Last year I tried some smallish ones that were just very slightly bulbed at the bottom, and loved them but I have not seen the same kind lately. My question to you is - are Korean radishes mild? One was labeled and when I googled it it said it was a "kimchi radish" and that is was used for a specific kind of kimchi.
I have some Daikon growing right now that i sowed in October. I sure hope they get bulbs as spring arrives.
Carrie- Celery seeds? My oil and vinegar recipe calls for celery seeds.
Basic coleslaw, like I used to like at Roy ROgers burger places
!/2 cup mayo
2TB vinegar
2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
3 to 6 cups cabbage
Finely shred the cabbage, mix the dressing, toss with cabbage.
I made it today with a Korean cabbage from that world foods market, it was really good. The Korean cabbage is a flat shaped head. My girlfriend had heard that flat head type cabbage makes good slaw.
Crispy coleslaw- Southern Living- also used in Williamsburg VA I hear.
1 cabbage (1 1/2 pound)
1/2 geen pepper
1/2 red pepper
1 medium onion
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup plus 2 TB vinegar
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp salt
1 tsp celery seeds
Slice or shred the cabbage, peppers, and onion. Layer in a large bowl with the sugar, mix and chill for two hours. Combine vinegar, oil, and salt and bring to boil, stove or microwave, stirring to dissolve salt. Pour over cabbage mix, add celery seeds, mix, chill two hours or overnight. I have made this for potlucks, and it seems very popular, and it is a change from mayo type salads. The red peppers are pretty but you can use all green, or yellow or orange too.),
Maybe CELERY seeds, good point! Dang, I just submitted an article saying caraway seeds were used in cole slaw. Well they are, sometimes, but I think you're right, these particular little specks are celery seeds.
My mother use to use to use her blender. Fill it up with cabbage and water - then drain the water out with a cheese cloth.
I have chopped it up by hand before -- but never got it small enough for anyone to like it.
For a very colorful cole slaw try:
red cabbage, green cabbage and carrots. I have a lot of sweet potatoes, so I use them instead of carrots and I can't tell the difference. I scrub them off with a scouring pad and put them in the food processor - peelings and all . Very colorful.
This fall I was finishing up what was ever happened to be in the garden and I used for cole slaw: broccoli, read cabbage, green cabbage, large leaves of the brussel sprouts, bok choy, curly kale, and even a few turnips.
It was the best cole slaw I ever made -- or so my family told me.
I am sorry guys - I tried chard this fall -- I dislike it a lot. Too much of an earthen taste.
I use the actually blade at the bottom - not the shredder or slicer.
I can't find my shredder or slicer - actually; it has been gone a very long time. I must have accidentally threw it in the trash -when I was slicing up zucchini for dehydration. Only thing I can think of that could have happened to it. But the blade cuts it up really fine just how we like it.
We are on a low carb diet, so we put in some Splenda, vinegar, mayo and mustard. I never appreciated how good mustard can make things and it has no calories in it.
RAW sweet potatoes? I dislike the "raw" taste in raw broccoli, zucchini and cauliflower. Spinach and cabbage I like, and then there are people who can sneak amazing things like RAW sweet potatoes in and I love it until I know what it is. But yeah on the blender trick.
Thanks for being suprised by that little trick.
I hope I have been helpful in what I discovered.
I am going to make some right now - since Save a' Lot got some cabbages in and they were cheap.
Sweet potatoes if ground up with the bottom blade of the food processor is great for things like carrot cake and I put it in my oatmeal cookes too.
Can I go back to Choline again? The title is about cancer ~
Choline is found in the cole plants a lot, but it is also high in Quinoa too, and liver (what is not found in liver?)
It helps the body use insitol.
Inositol is a B vitamin.
Insitol and choline are always together if you buy them from a vitamin company.
Research has found:
Inositiol show promising results for people suffering from problems such as bulimia, panic disorder, (18grams a day) obsessive-compulsive disorder, agoraphobia, and unipolar and bipolar depression, reduce the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) significantly, with effectiveness equal to SSRIs, decreasing the number of panic attacks, A double-blind, placebo-controlled study of depressed patients showed that a high dose of inositol (12 grams daily) resulted in significant improvement of symptoms, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), including insulin resistance, hyperandrogenism, and oligo-amenorrhea; improves features of dysmetabolic syndrome in post-menopausal women, including triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, and diastolic blood pressure.[30]
Lithium taken by mental patients - help in the absorption of inositiol and may be the reason it works.
So, I thought this might be something important that we need to know in this age of (don't know but it seems the last 50 years has been all wrong, on everything we thought was right????)
What do you call such an age?
I think we're still finding out how much we didn't know--by curing the easy diseases now we have room to research harder to figure out ones. OR, is it that our diets have changed so much in this processed century, that we've made new problems?
As Carrie mentioned recently, until maybe the mid 1800 our primary sweetener was molasses. Molasses has minerals that are refined out of pure sugar. And refined white flour too, became the staple. Is modern life making us all crazy- due to lacking some key trace nutrients?
These are mitochondrial disorders.
A lot of them look like they have to do with lipid metabolism - insulin production.
Some may exhibit the stuff that was listed above, but what it comes down to - that whole pathways in metabolism is messed up and a lot of the B vitamins are not being used as a heatlhy metabolism normally would.
This information may also be some what helpful to those with diabetes as well as other autoimmune diseases.
