Do you want to know, how to prepare a correct macrobiotic breakfast?
How should the proper macrobiotic breakfast look like?
And what’s the ideal morning type of food according to the macrobiotic diet rules?
At the morning, when you wake up and get up from your bed, it’s a right time to supply your body with a moderate amount of something to drink, not later than 30 minutes before your macrobiotic breakfast. It’s recommended to drink a pure water (preferably natural spring source) if you want to help your cleansing, but favorite macrobiotic tea as bancha twig tea is can not harm you. You can drink it right after you wake up, if you are thirsty, or 30 minutes before you start eating as I said before.
Usually, as the first macrobiotic meal of the day is recommended to make a porridge - generaly it means that you will use more water for preparation of your choosen cereals. Many times, simple oat flakes are used for this morning porridge. But you can also use any left-over cereals from the previous day (rice, millet, buckwheat, wheat, oat, rye, corn, barley). There are also half-processed foods on the market - kuskus, bulgur or instant milled grains, which you can also use occasionally. If you use these left-over grains, prepare them like this: add 1 or more cups of water into a pot and bring it to boil, add the whole grains and boil it on a low flame for 5 to 30 minutes. The longer you boil them, the more creamy and tasty they become, but try to experiment, to know which grains do you like boiled longer and which shorter. At the end, you have a nice and very healthy porridge, that you can make much more healthier and tastier by mixing small portion of miso paste or soya sauce (shoyu, tamari). If you don’t add these salty ingredients, nevermind, you can taste it with gomasio right on your plate.
Now, you are going to prepare crispy vegetables to complement this morning cereal porridge, because without proper amount of cooked veggies, the food would be too much acidic. Vegetables have more alkalazing energy, the same for seaweeds. The morning vegetables should be boiled shortly, to let them be a little bit more crispy. That’s because at morning you need more of the uplifting, refreshing energy (that represents yin) than at the evening. So the logic is, that you cook, boil your vegetables for a longer time as the day progress. But don’t become too much obsessed by it. Lightly cooked veggies do still maintain the more of the yin energy. From the same reason, the preferred vegetables (but not mandatory) would be these with the uplifting energy - cabbage, broccoli, leek. Try to use different cooking styles:
Put a small amount of water (1-2 cm) on the bottom of a pot and place the vegetables into the pot. Add a little pinch of salt and boil for 5-15 minutes. You can cover with a lid, or you don’t, it will always produce a different energy - that’s what we need, variability.
Sometimes bring a pot nearly full of water into a boil. The big load of water is there because you want the veggies to swim in the water, not to be placed at the bottom of the pot. When they swim, it’s different energy, because they can spin around freely if you put the heat on a big flame. Boil the veggies in this full pot of water for 1-5 minutes. Leek is much faster than carrot for example - make your own measurement. Don’t forget to add a small amount of salt into the water.
You can simply steam the veggies, which is very good for the morning breakfast. Because again, the steaming is uplifting energy, yin energy.
Another good habit that you can make, is to use something green on the top of your morning breakfast porridge - scallion, watercress, fresh leek and similar. Just 1 teaspoon of greens is enough to provide you with a fresh energy and supply your body with a lot of minerals, vitamins and enzymes.
I will repeat it once more, that you should use enough water to start your day. You don’t need to drink liters of tea or water, 1 cup is enough. But a very bad thing you can do for your health is to start your day with something like bread. It’s very dry and salty. Make healthy porridge instead as desribed above.
One more thing to all of you who like a sweet taste, especially at the morning. You can use macrobiotic sweeteners which are much more better than honey, not mentioning white sugar at all. What macrobiotic use isntead of a sugar? Here we go - barley, rice or corn malt and sirup, fruits (dried, cooked or raw), also amasake is a great product. You can buy them at the health food shops.
