Wishing you a sweet (but not refined sugary) New Year!
The food that many of us associate most closely with Rosh Hashanah are apples dipped in honey. My daughters will try their darndest to eat apples dipped in honey all year round, but my firm response is that it’s for the Jewish New Year, which, luck has it for them, officially begins tomorrow at sunset.
Raw honey, along with some alternative sweeteners, such as maple syrup, coconut sugar, coconut nectar, and monk fruit, have “crowded out” refined sugar in our home over this past decade. While all of these have a higher glycemic load than is optimal for daily, ongoing consumption, they are all fine in moderation.
Indeed, they contain vitamins, minerals, and enzymatic properties that are not found in refined sugar, which is devoid of any nutritional content and, equally disturbing, depletes the body of valuable minerals, harms immunity, causes tooth decay, not to mention moodiness, blood sugar crashes, and a host of other insults.
This is why there’s no place at my table for refined sugar. That’s a clear non-negotiable for me, whereas there’s some wiggle room when it comes to the other sweeteners noted above. Eating probiotic rich foods, such as sauerkraut, kimchi, and miso, has helped me to re-train my taste buds so that I can taste the sweetness in fruits and vegetables like cucumbers, tomatoes, and lettuce.
As it happens, I’m in the middle of teaching my pilot program “Fasting 2.0: Yom Kippur and Beyond,” where we’re preparing ourselves, digestive-wise, for both a little-known Jewish fast day that takes place this Thursday (the fast of Gedaliah) as well as the much more “popular” Yom Kippur fast next Thursday. Part of our project is to nix the refined sugar in the weeks leading up to the fast while—and here’s the important part—eating foods that are easy on the digestive tract, so that our bodies can truly rest on what is supposed to be a complete day of rest.
One of the dishes on the menu for our Rosh Hashanah dinner, therefore, are baked apples. This is the dessert that I most often prepare and that my daughters love; and, guess what? There’s no added sugar of any kind. Of course, there are the apples, which, after all, break down into glucose, a simple sugar.
Besides the apples, there’s coconut oil, cinnamon, and, to make it a complete snack, with fat, fiber, and protein, I add some ground flax seeds or hemp hearts that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids. It is delicious, sweet, but not sugary, and I highly recommend it for your dinner table tomorrow night, whether or not you’re celebrating the Jewish New Year.
May it be a sweet year for all of us.
Baked apples (serves 5)
5 organic granny smith apples, cored and sliced in wedges
1 1/2 tbsp coconut oil
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp flax and/or hemp seeds (for best bio-availability, freshly grind whole flax seeds in your blender and store the rest in your freezer)
Grease a large pyrex with 1 tbsp coconut oil. Spread apples in the pan, drizzle the rest of the melted oil over them, and sprinkle cinnamon on top. Mix and bake at 350° F for 20 minutes, at which point, mix the apples and rotate the pan. Bake for another five or ten minutes, depending on how soft you like your apples.
Remove from the oven and sprinkle with raw flax seeds and/or hemp seeds, for a complete “fat, fiber, protein snack/dessert. Eat immediately, and store any leftovers (good luck with that) in the fridge.
Be sure to ladle the baked apples into 5 bowls (that’s one for yourself, and four for others) after removing from the oven. Enjoy every bite!
PS In case you missed it, here I am speaking LIVE with Andrea Nakayama, my very dear mentor and CEO of the Functional Nutrition Alliance, on preparing to fast on Yom Kippur.