Curry leaves: If you can't find them, why not grow your own?

I’ve got a bit of cabin fever this holiday season.  Between yesterday’s all-day rain-athon, the gray, dreary weather last week, and having to work on Thanksgiving, Christmas eve and Christmas day, I’ve been dreaming of getting away.  Alas, since there are no vacation days in my future, I decided to create a faux getaway by visiting Newark Avenue near Journal Square in Jersey City, a veritable slice of India right in my own backyard.  Granted, it’s not the most picturesque of neighborhoods.  But it boasts a half dozen “cash and carry” markets where the offering of vegetables, herbs, beans and pantry items capture the imagination… and inspire me to cook dishes that make my house smell wholly unfamiliar.  The perfect cure for cabin fever.

I scored a bag full of goodies to fuel a week’s worth of cooking experiments, but the fresh bag of curry leaves I bought for a mere $0.50 turned out to be the magic ingredient I needed to transform a pantry of mundane, workaday foods into Iddiyappam: a bright, unusual accompaniment to the aromatic lentil dal (stew) Alex was working on.

Curry leaves bear no relation to the spice we know as curry powder.  (In fact, curry powder isn’t actually a spice so much as a blend of multiple spices that vary by brand.)  Curry leaves are narrow, edible, green leaves grown on (what else?) curry trees–also known as Kari trees– and are sold fresh on the branch.  They smell nothing like curry the spice, nor do they taste anything like curry the spice.  To me, they smell a little bit nutty, but others describe the aroma as bell-pepperish or citrusy.  To unlock their distinctive flavor, you just fry them in some oil; this process unlocks their alchemistic ability to transform a dish beyond the mere sum of its parts.  (If you’ve ever fried sage leaves, you’ll understand what I’m talking about here.)  I don’t recommend leaving them out of a dish that calls for them.

If you are lucky enough to live near an Indian market–or a specialty grocery that carries fresh curry leaves (you may seem them sold as “meetha neem” or “kadhi patta”)–buy them. Alternatively, if you love Indian food and live in a temperate climate– California comes to mind– why not consider planting yourself a curry leaf plant? The species name is Murraya Koenigii, and you can order one online from a variety of sources.  According to Carol Selva Rajah, the Sydney-based co-author of The Food of India (Murdoch Books, 2002), her outdoor curry plants have grown to over six feet tall (!) in sunny Sydney.  (However, you can grow more modestly-sized plants potted indoors).  Just think of all the great produce you could barter with your neighbors with that many curry leaves!  Note that dried leaves have nowhere near the flavor or aroma as fresh leaves, so if you find some fresh ones, it’s best to freeze any extras for a rainy day and thaw them when needed.

So once you’ve scored yourself some leaves, you can try frying them in a bit of oil before starting your favorite curry recipe (especially fish) and then proceed as usual; they’ll add a surprising bit of depth and complexity. You can use them as a garnish to mulligatawny (or any lentil) soup, as Carol suggests.   Or you can use them to try out the Iddiyapam recipe that brightened up my dreary weekend; it’s a Southern Indian rice noodle based dish that makes an interesting substitute for plain old rice alongside a more strongly-flavored sauce or stew.  With Carol’s permission, I offer you her recipe–adapted only to reduce the oil slightly for my calorie-conscious readers.  (I assure you, it’s no worse for it.)  I recommend getting a big pot of water boiling at the outset and cooking the eggs while the rice noodles are busy soaking.  After 10 minutes, scoop the eggs out with a slotted spoon and keep the boiling water going for the rice noodles.

Iddiyapam: Easier to make than to pronounce

Recipe: Iddiyappam (adapted everso slightly and reprinted with permission from Carol Selva Rajah)

Serves 6

8 oz rice vermicelli (look for these in the Asian section of any supermarket)

2 TBSP oil

1/3 cup cashew nuts

1/2 onion, chopped

3 eggs

1 cup frozen peas, thawed

10 curry leaves

2 carrots, grated

2 leeks, finely shredded

1 red pepper, diced

2 TBSP ketchup

1 TBSP soy sauce (to make it gluten-free, use wheat-free Tamari sauce instead)

1 tsp salt

1. Soak the rice vermicelli in cold water for 30 minutes
2. Meanwhile, get a pot of water boiling and cook the eggs for 10 minutes to hard boil, the remove with a slotted spoon and cool in cold water.  When cold, peel them and cut into wedges.
3. Drain vermicelli and put them in the pot of boiling water.  Remove from the heat and leave in the pan for 3 minutes.  Drain and rinse in cold water.
4. Heat 1 TBSP oil in a non-stick frying pan and fry the cashews until golden.  (Note: don’t be tempted to toast them without oil to save calories; frying them in oil results in a ridiculously delicious effect)
5. Remove cashews from pan, add the onion to pan, fry until dark golden, then remove from pan and set aside.
6. Heat the remaining 1 TBSP oil in the frying pan and briefly fry the curry leaves.  Add the carrot, leeks and red pepper and stir for 1 minute.  Add the ketchup, soy sauce/tamari , salt and vermicelli, stirring constantly to prevent the noodles from sticking to pan.
7. Serve on a platter and garnish with the peas, cashews, fried onion and egg slices.

Approximate nutrition info per serving (assumes 6 servings per recipe): 300 calories, 44g carbohydrate of which 3g are fiber (total 3 diabetic exchanges), 8g protein, 10g fat.

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Hope Santa's got some Cod Liver Oil for us in that sleigh

Monday, December 21st is the Winter Solstice: the shortest day of the year.  What better occasion, then, to issue a wake-up call to my dear readers that you are all most likely deficient (or insufficient) in Vitamin D, the so-called “sunshine vitamin”?  (So much for spreading holiday cheer, huh?)

It’s not your fault, really.  As I’ve written previously, Vitamin D was never supposed to be a dietary vitamin at all.  It’s a hormone that our bodies manufacture from a cholesterol-derived precursor that lives in our skin and gets activated by the sun’s UVB rays.  For millennia of human existence, this system worked pretty well: minimally-clothed people spent long days outside working, hunting and gathering, making loads of D in their skin and storing the excess in their fat cells for the winter months.  Humans who wound up in sunlight-deprived places like Alaska or Scandinavia compensated by evolving into a diet rich in fatty fish–one of the only good naturally-occurring food sources of D, since these fish consume algae that manufacture D from the sun’s UV rays (remember photosynthesis?), and wind up storing it in their fat.  Fast-forward to our modern lifestyles: more time spent indoors, limited outdoor time spent in smoggy cities with tall, sun-blocking buildings, sunscreens, clothing, fortified foods that don’t contain the advertised levels of Vitamin D and a recommended daily value that most experts agree is entirely too low… and lo and behold, we find ourselves in an epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency.

Recent government data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) confirms my own unscientific observations that most of us have insufficient Vitamin D status.  Not a single person I’ve encountered in the past year who had their Vitamin D levels checked–from infants in the hospital I work at to my 30-something year old colleagues to our parents and their 60+ year old friends  — has been Vitamin D sufficient.  The most recent NHANES data I’ve come across, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2008) suggests that about 77% of all American adults are Vitamin D insufficient by currently emerging standards… and an astounding 90% of Mexican Americans and 97% of African Americans are insufficient.  A large study published this past September the journal Pediatrics suggests that prevalence of Vitamin D insufficiency is about 60% in young people aged 1-21.

In other words, unless you are a Caucasian sun-worshipper living in Miami, I’d be willing to bet that you, too, are Vitamin D insufficient.

Why D matters

The association between Vitamin D and rickets– the poor bone mineralization that causes bowed legs and other skeletal deformities in children– is long-established and well-known.  But in the past few decades, evidence has been mounting that points to a crucial role for Vitamin D in a host of other, unrelated health conditions.  Insufficient Vitamin D levels have been associated with an increased prevalence of diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure) and digestive system cancers (especially esophageal, oral/pharyngeal, colon and pancreatic ).  Poorer vitamin D status has also been associated with higher rates of autoimmune diseases like Type I diabetes, MS, rheumatoid arthritis and Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. (While I haven’t come across any associations specifically to Celiac Disease prevalence and Vitamin D status in the scientific literature, given the autoimmune nature of celiac and its genetic relation to Type I diabetes, its a biologically plausible connection.)  A very recent study published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology attributed the increased prevalence of end-stage kidney disease in black men versus white men to the higher prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in black men.

D for Immunity

For immunity, think herring.

I find it curious that so many Americans are obsessed with Vitamin C and its immunity-enhancing benefits.  On average, healthy American adults and children easily meet the daily recommended Vitamin C intake from diet alone (which is 60mg for adults, though smokers will have higher needs of closer to 100mg), and the maximum body pool of vitamin C is associated with daily doses of ~100mg (in adult males).  In other words, given the relatively low turnover of vitamin C in our bodies, daily intake of 100mg/day will saturate your cells and blood with all the vitamin C they can carry (1,500mg total), and all they need to optimize the vitamin C-associated functions they perform, including maximizing your white blood cell response to infectious agents.  Doses beyond 100mg/day are essentially pointless from a nutritional standpoint, and those megadoses of Vitamin C aren’t going to do much beyond filling your pee with vitamin C or give you a mild case of diarrhea.

If you’re serious about optimizing your immune system’s function and are hell-bent on popping a pill to do so, I’d suggest you replace your Vitamin C supplement stash with a Vitamin D one.  Vitamin D is metabolized by our macrophages–the white blood cells that engulf and destroy pathogenic invaders (including cells infected with flu viruses, by the way) that don’t belong there.  Vitamin D induces macrophages to produce one of the proteins responsible for the destruction of these infective agents, so being Vitamin D sufficient is an important condition to supporting the effectiveness of this important immune defense… particularly in sunshine-deprived cold and flu season.  Since most of us do have sufficient Vitamin C levels and don’t have sufficient vitamin D levels, taking a Vitamin D supplement is more likely to enhance our immune system’s strength than taking a Vitamin C supplement.

Get your D

We Vitamin D crusaders are eagerly awaiting a report from the Institute of Medicine in May, 2010 that will contain their committee’s recommendations regarding a possible increase in the current dietary reference intake for Vitamin D– as well as possible increases in the safe upper limit daily dose.  Until that safe upper limit is officially increased, food manufacturers aren’t likely to fortify our milk and cereals with levels high enough to make a difference in our collective Vitamin D status.  Currently, the officially-sanctioned safe upper limit for people over age 1 is 2,000 IU per day. (Your multivitamin or Calcium supplement probably contains somewhere between 100-400 IU/day.)

If you don’t know your Vitamin D status but are concerned about preventing a deficiency, I’d suggest taking 1,000-2,000 IU of supplemental Vitamin D3 per day right off the bat.  (At least in the non-summer months).  If you’re pregnant, I’d suggest starting at 2,000 IU/day, having your Vitamin D levels tested and working with your doctor on a dose that will bring you up to sufficient levels if need be; your needs may turn out to be higher and require a prescription-strength dose to meet them.  If you happen to get tested for Vitamin D and are found to be overtly clinically deficient, your doctor is likely to put you on a prescription-strength repletion protocol to bring your blood levels up to snuff; it usually involves doses from 10,000-50,000 IU for a short period of time, and is then tapered down to maintenance doses of 2,000-6,000 IU/day.

Canned fish, like salmon, mackerel and sardines, are among the best dietary sources of Vitamin D

Of course, maximizing the Vitamin D in your diet will also help.  While surveys have shown that the actual amount of Vitamin D found in fortified dairy is significantly less than what the labels claim (I’ll add this to my list of grievances against the U.S. dairy industry), fortified milk (or your favorite dairy-free milk analogue) is still among the most convenient food sources of Vitamin D. Since Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin–meaning that your intestines absorb it only in the presence of some dietary fat– skim milk isn’t going to do the trick unless you’re having it as part of a meal with some other source of fat.  Go on…switching to 1% milk in your breakfast cereal or latte isn’t going to kill you; for each cup, it’s a 20 calorie difference from skim milk, but those extra 2g of fat will help you absorb the D.  (And ordering your tall, double no-whip latte only ‘half-skinny’ will add another element of snootiness to your custom coffee creation at Starbucks.  Fun!)

Other good food sources of Vitamin D include:

• canned salmon (3oz of canned sockeye salmon contains ~675 IU; your typical farmed salmon fillet will have about half or less due to the lack of algae in the fish’s diet.  Wild sockeye used in canned salmon is among the more sustainable seafood choices available.)
• cod liver oil (1 tsp contains 450 IU.  Grandma knew best!)
• mackerel (3oz of cooked mackerel contains ~390 IU, and Spanish Mackerel is among the more sustainable seafood options currently available)
• herring (3oz of cooked Atlantic herring contains ~180 IU, and is another good choice from a sustainability perspective)
• sardines (3oz of canned sardines contain ~165 IU, and are an excellent choice from a sustainability perspective)
• canned tuna (3oz contains ~150 IU)
• fortified breakfast cereals (check the label, as it will vary by brand, but most contain 10-25% of the current daily value per serving, or about 40-100 IU)
• vitamin D-fortified orange juice (100 IU per 8oz)
• dairy products made with Vitamin D fortified milk (e.g., yogurt.  Typically, one 6oz container contains 80 IU)
• dried shiitake mushrooms (you can, of course, reconstitute them and still get the D.  But its the drying process that activates the D, so fresh shiitakes will not contain the same levels.  My calculations suggest that 1 cup of rehydrated shiitakes (0.5oz, or 3/4 cup, dry) contains about 130 IU of Vitamin D.

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Dear Santa (and by “Santa” I mean food manufacturers and marketers):

Below is my wish list of products I wish you’d develop and market.  Instead of filling supermarket shelves with more crap we don’t need, won’t you please make any of these useful products and put them in our collective stockings?

Readers: I hereby invite you to add to this wish-list by submitting your comments below!

• Lactose-free, (organic) cow’s milk yogurt:  The #1 search term that brings people to my blog, hands down, is “lactose-free yogurt.”  There is a huge need for it in the marketplace, and the only company that had been marketing such a product, True Yogurt, has recently disappeared from supermarket shelves due to the loss of their production facilities.  I hope they will re-appear in the not-too-distant future, but their absence calls attention to this massive gap in the over-assorted yogurt aisle.  Instead of launching more so-called “functional yogurts” with bogus, unsubstantiated health claims about immunity, heart health and digestive health, won’t someone just make a plain ol’ lactose-free cow’s milk yogurt? Not a highly-processed soy yogurt.   Not a highly-processed rice milk yogurt.  Just a natural, just-sweet-enough yogurt made with lowfat lactose-free milk and no processed crap, preferably made with hormone-free, organic milk.  At the risk of being called greedy, I’d order up a lactose-free Greek Yogurt variety, too.

• Individual packets of wheat-free Tamari sauce: If these babies existed, I’d keep them in my purse (just like my mom keeps Sweet & Low in her wallet) and feel at liberty to join my friends for sushi whenever I pleased.   If they were reduced sodium, all the better.  Of course, if enlightened Asian restaurants across the country started offering these on the table for us wheat-free customers, that’d be swell, too.

• Mini cans of LITE coconut milk:  A few food companies have finally caught on that very few of us ever use a 14.5 oz can of coconut milk at a time, and are tired of seeing the leftovers grow moldy in the fridge within a few days.  The resulting 5.6 oz can is a welcome addition to the supermarket, and given the price premium per ounce that marketers are charging, would seem to be a profitable item for manufacturers as well.  Unfortunately, these baby cans are as yet only available in full-fat coconut milk, which I am loathe to use for its whopping saturated fat and calorie content.  Won’t someone please start selling LITE coconut milk in the 5.6oz can?

• Whole grain, gluten-free cereal fortified with iron, B12 and folic acid:  While the universe of gluten-free cereals is slowly growing, the universe of healthy gluten-free cereals made with whole grains and containing fiber is not.  While I appreciate the gesture that Chex made with their gluten-free varieties of corn, rice, honey nut and cinnamon Chex cereals, these products contain a maximum of 1g fiber per serving–and some varieties have none at all.  I think you can do better, General Mills.  Take a page out of the Puffins playbook: Barbara’s Bakery managed to squeeze a more respectable 3g of fiber into their new gluten-free Multigrain Puffins cereal from whole grain sources and they fortified it with Iron, Vitamin D and calcium to boot… all of which are nutrients that people consuming a plant-based diet have a hard time getting enough of.  If they had thrown in some B12, it would have been perfection…

• Oat Matzoh: Granted, matzoh is a bit of a niche product, purchased by Jews (and the closeted non-Jewish Matzoh fans whose love for this constipation-inducing, bland, aptly-nicknamed “bread of affliction” continues to puzzle me), once a year during Passover.  Each year, the presumably static matzoh market is further segmented by new and fashionable varieties to address imagined consumer need states: whole wheat matzoh, “thin tea matzoh” (perhaps for those Jews expecting to have High Tea with the Queen of England during Passover?), spelt matzoh, unsalted matzoh, egg matzoh, yolk-free egg matzoh (for lovers of Egg Matzoh with high-cholesterol?).  And yet, not one gluten-free Matzoh variety is available for a population with higher than average incidence rates of Celiac disease.  (Sounds like someone in marketing has not been doing their homework…)  Last year, my mom hunted down a box of gluten-free Oat Matzoh from England for me.  They cost her $30 for an 8 oz box whose ingredient label read: “Oat flour, water.”  At $60 a pound, these matzohs produced a week’s worth of matzoh brie for breakfast that cost about the same as an equivalent amount of Kobe beef.  Surely, an American company could produce an equivalent product locally to meet the demands of the wheat-free crowd?

• Heirloom, heritage and novel varieties of fruits and vegetables: Overwhelming–and arguably unnecessary– variety dominate the modern supermarket in all aisles except one: the produce aisle.  Why is it that I can get 20 different types of Colgate toothpaste in most supermarkets, but only 3 types of lettuce?  Or just 4 types of apple?  Some scary stats to ponder from the Sustainable Table:
  • Almost 96% of the commercial vegetable varieties available in 1903 are now extinct
  • Twelve plant crops account for more than 3/4 of the food consumed in the world, and just three–rice, wheat and maize–are relied on for more than half of the world’s food.

The textbook rationale for this unacceptable state of affairs is that marketers can only make money from selling “value added” (read: processed) foods, and that produce is a commodity with thin margins.  Perhaps this is true if you are producing and selling commoditized varieties of produce, like generic, tasteless heads of iceberg lettuce for which consumers are understandably unwilling to pay a premium.  But those few growers who have dared to introduce a unique varietal of fruit or vegetable that is differentiated on the basis of its awesome flavor (like Honeycrisp apples, for example) have demonstrated that there are price premiums to achieve and profit to be made even in the produce aisle. (Mind you: I’m not talking genetically-modified species here.)  News flash, produce managers and agribusiness mongers: you can actually make money while restoring some of the planet’s biodiversity and enriching our collective lives by reaching back into the vast archive of plant species that once roamed the earth and re-introducing the delicious-est ones back into our diets.

Thank you in advance, Santa, for considering my requests above and passing them along to the naughty food marketers who seek to make your “nice” list by next Christmas.

Love, Tamara

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With about 5mg of iron per serving, this hearty vegetarian chili is far from an anemic entree.

Iron is a problem for lots of people.

While the average American man eats enough of it, most babies, children and pre-menopausal women do not.  And that’s not even including the vegetarianally-inclined.  Iron deficiency is the #1 nutritional deficiency in the world, and remains a problem even in over-nourished America.  Data from population surveys (1999-2000) show that toddlers and females aged 12-49 have the highest rates of iron deficiency in our country, with prevalence of  7% and 9-16%, respectively.

The majority of iron in our bodies exists as part of hemoglobin–the oxygen-transporting complex in red blood cells.  (A much smaller amount is used for other functions, such as DNA synthesis, the synthesis of neurotransmitters, immune function and the metabolism of food to create energy.)  Given these varied roles of iron, it makes sense that (1) people who lose more blood lose more iron, and (2) people who are growing (infants, children, pregnant women) will require more iron to manufacture more red blood cells, new DNA for each new cell in their growing bodies, and to promote brain development.  When someone has an insufficient number of red blood cells due to a lack of dietary iron, the condition is called Iron-Deficiency Anemia (though there are other types of anemia caused by non-iron factors as well).  Symptoms of anemia range from mild (fatigue, always feeling cold, rapid heart rate or palpitations) to severe (all of the above, plus atrophy of taste buds, sore tongue, sores at the corners of the mouth and spoon-shaped fingernails.)  Children with iron-deficiency anemia may experience retardation in cognitive and motor development that may be irreversible, irritability/attention deficit, stunted growth, and increased susceptibility to illness and lead poisoning.  Pregnant women with iron-deficiency anemia are more likely to miscarry and have low-birth weight babies.

Iron absorption and storage is a very tightly regulated process in our bodies; iron is efficiently recycled from old red blood cells that have been decommissioned, and used for the creation of 200 million new red blood cells per day.  On average, we only lose about 1.2mg of iron per day, which is approximately the amount that we absorb from our diets.  When we’re deficient, our body is able to absorb more.  When we’re awash in iron, our body is able to absorb less.  (Although large doses of supplemental iron can overwhelm our body’s natural feedback mechanisms, which is why it’s important to keep your iron supplements out of reach of children–iron overdose is the #1 cause of poisoning among children under 6 years old.)

Don’t let the Daily Values deceive you

Officially, the recommended daily value for iron is 18mg, which is the amount of dietary iron needed by adult women aged 19-50. (Though women who use birth control pills only require about 11mg per day due to an average of 60% less blood lost in their monthly periods.)  Adult men and women over age 50 require significantly less–only 8mg.  Pregnant women require 27mg/day, which is why a prenatal vitamin is recommended; it would be incredibly challenging to meet these needs consistently through diet alone.

More interestingly, infants 7-12 months need 11mg–or almost 40% more than a grown adult male! This is the reason why experts recommend iron-fortified cereals or pureed meat as baby’s first complementary foods after age 6 months; with the amount of iron infants need and the tiny quantities they eat, it’s virtually impossible to meet their needs on breastmilk or formula and foods like applesauce or pureed veggies alone.

But the daily values can be deceiving, as they assume one important fact: that the average American consumes an omnivorous diet. Since iron from animal sources (called “heme iron”) is up to 10x better absorbed–and the presence of meat, poultry or fish in a meal containing vegetarian sources of iron (called “non-heme iron”) helps increase the body’s ability to absorb it– the vegetarians among us actually have significantly increased irons needs as follows:

Vegetarian adult males: 14mg/day

Vegetarian pre-menopausal women: 33mg/day (though less if you’re on the pill)

And for those of you who donate blood with any regularity, know that each pint of blood you donate has over 200mg of iron that you’ll need to replace over time (though NOT all at once… iron toxicity is very serious, and wholly unpleasant).

What foods are the best sources of iron?

Iron absorption ranges by food source, from as low as 2% for spinach and legumes to 20% for steak.  Average bioavailability of iron from a mixed diet is 18%, whereas it’s only 10% from the average vegetarian diet.

Oysters are an iron-rich, sustainable seafood choice. Slurp ‘em if you got ‘em.

The best non-vegetarian sources of iron are:

• • • • • Chicken liver (12.8mg in 3.5 oz cooked)
        • Clams (11mg in 1/4 cup canned)
        • Oysters (5.6mg iron in 6 oysters)
        • Shrimp (2.6mg in 3oz)
        • Beef (2.3mg in 3oz)
        • Dark meat turkey (2.3mg in 3oz)
        • Canned light tuna (1.3mg in 3oz)
        • Dark meat chicken (1.1mg in 3 oz)

When it comes to vegetarian sources of iron, it’s tricky to talk about ‘best sources,’ because the absorbability of the iron will vary widely by what you eat the foods with. While tofu is an excellent source of iron on paper, there are compounds in soy protein that have an inhibitory effect on iron absorption.  The same goes for legumes and spinach; the presence of compounds called phytates drastically reduces the absorption of their significant iron content to as little as 2%.  The presence of significant amounts of calcium can also inhibit iron absorption, which is why prenatal vitamins have very little calcium in them and cow’s milk is NOT recommended for children under 12 months old.  In contrast, several dietary factors can enhance the absorbability of non-heme iron; these include: vitamin C, organic acids such as those naturally found in certain fruits and vegetables (citric acid, lactic acid, malic acid), alcohol, and the presence of meat, fish or poultry in the same meal (the mechanism behind this last one is unknown, so the scientific community refers to this mystery phenomenon as “MFP factor”–or meat, poultry, fish factor.  I’m not making this up.)

With these important caveats in mind, here is a list of some of the best vegetarian sources of protein:

• Fortified breakfast cereals (e.g.,Total, Raisin Bran, Cheerios): content varies, but one serving may contain up to 100% of the 18mg daily value.  Sadly, gluten-free cereals tend not to be fortified.
• Tofu (6.2mg in 1/2 cup firm)
• White beans (3.9mg in 1/2 cup)
• Lentils (3.3mg in 1/2 cup cooked)
• Blackstrap molasses (3.5mg in 1 TBSP)
• Cooked spinach (3.2mg in 1/2 cup)
• Baked potato (2.8mg in 1 medium potato with skin)
• Kidney beans (2.6mg in 1/2 cup cooked)
• Amaranth grain (2.6mg in 1/2 cup cooked)
• Prune juice (2.3mg in 6oz)
• Cashew nuts (1.7mg in 1 oz)
• Rolled oats (not fortified) (1.7mg in 1/2 cup dry)

When Life Hands you Anemia, Make Chili

Whether you make it with ground beef (or better yet, turkey) or keep it vegetarian, chili is one of the first foods I recommend to my anemic brothers and sisters looking to increase their dietary iron intake.  (One can only eat so much chicken liver, after all.)  The presence of tomatoes–which contain absorption-enhancing Vitamin C, citric acid and malic acid– help improve the bioavailability of iron in the beans.  If you use ground meat of any kind, you’ll get a two-fold effect on iron content: both from the heme iron content of the meat itself, as well as though the MFP factor’s further enhancement of the vegetarian iron bioavailability.

My go-to- recipe for vegetarian chili is this classic one for False Alarm Vegetable Chili from Martha Stewart.  It will surely go down in history as the unfussiest recipe she has ever featured, as it basically calls for chopping up a bunch of vegetables, dumping them in a pot all at once, and then dumping a bunch of dry and canned ingredients in 5 minutes later.  Voila.  It serves 10, and each serving contains ~4.7mg of iron.

If you prefer some meat in your chili, try this recipe for Colorful Turkey Chili from Whole Foods market.  It serves 4-6, and assuming one serving is ~1/5th of the recipe, each serving would contain ~5mg of iron.

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