Getting Your Grains: Ideas for Your RDA

How can RDA of grains be included in each meal?
In you include 1 slice of multigrain toast and ½ cup oatmeal for breakfast, add 6 wheat crackers with your favorite topping for a mid morning snack, and a sandwich with whole grain bread for lunch, you can add a 1 cup of rice, pasta, or couscous for dinner and still snack on a cup of air dried popcorn watching television in the evening for eight servings of grains per day.

What are the choices?
Instead of just using brown instead of white rice, try purple or black rice from Thailand or mild-tasting barley, great in soups or for cereals? Substitute oatmeal or cold cereals, with cooked millet, amaranth, or quinoa which are also delicious spiced up for side dishes for lunch or dinner, chewy, filling, flavorful, and very easy to make. Other delicious choices for grains are semolina or durum wheat; faro, spelt and kamut, rye, and a rye/wheat hybrid called triticale.

What's on the package?
When choosing multigrain bread, check the ingredient panel for seeds, the names of several grains. If sweeteners are used, sugar cane syrup or honey are better choices than high fructose syrup or corn syrup. When choosing pasta, the ideal first choice is whole wheat or rice pasta, or choose those made with semolina or durum wheat. Most other grains listed above should not include anything else.

A word about bulgar.
One wheat grain that's hugely popular in many cuisines is bulgar, (aka bulghur, bulgur, or burghul,) made by parboiling wheat, drying it, then grinding it to a coarse grain. The outer layers of the bran are removed, usually by hand, and the grains "cracked" into fine, medium or coarse grains suitable for steaming or boiling. It has a nutty taste that goes with vegetables, fruit, or as a side dish to poultry or meats. The Middle Eastern salad tabbouleh made of bulgur and parsley and tomatoes is just one example of how this international grain is used. Some manufacturers skip the boiling and drying stages and simply crack the whole wheatberry and label it "cracked wheat". Look for bulgar in Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Indian (daliya), Kosher food, and organic grain sources.

Gluten-free ideas.
For those who are gluten sensitive, choose buckwheat flour or buckwheat groats (kasha,) which looks, cooks, and tastes like a grain but is actually a fruit seed related to rhubarb and sorrel. The South American grain, (Incas' gold) is quinoa, an amino acid-rich (protein) seed with a fluffy, creamy, slightly crunchy texture and a nutty flavor when cooked. It is a relative of spinach and Swiss chard yet considered part of the growing family of nutritious grains. Teff is similar to millet and most common in Ethiopian fermented breads called enjerra and wild rice which grows in water like rice yet is a highly nutritious, a water-grass seed (zizania aquatica) is a wonderful choice. It grows naturally in the cold rivers and lakes of Minnesota and Canada and most recently in Montana where it is known as montina. Also try millet, amaranth, hominy grits, wild rice or rice sorghum.

Posted on Thursday 9/6 by Sharon
A word of warning about enjerra: I cannot eat it although I love the taste. I become quite ill about an hour after indulging---and I have met several other people who have the same problem. I don't know whether I'm sensitive to teff itself or whether my reaction has something to do with the fermentation process, but if you've never eaten injerra, sample it carefully the first time.

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