I love carrots. Always have. Except that when I was a kid, they had to be raw. That makes sense, considering how much more yang I was then. Today, carrots are one of my most favorite vegetables, cooked, raw, or baked in a cake!
The carrot is one of the most yang of all vegetables, because it grows slowly, vertically under the ground, and it's orange. What else? It's one of the most yang of all the root vegetables too, because of its color, its shape, and its size, and probably for other reasons too. The carrot's yang qualities are especially great during the cold winter months. Carrots are also "generally alkaline-forming," which is good for balancing with acid-forming grains. (See The Acid And Alkaline Dimension Of Food, Part 1.)
I love cooking and eating carrots "nitsuke" style, as described by George Ohsawa in his book, Zen Macrobiotics. For my lunch today, I grated the carrots into tiny pieces, sauteed them in sesame oil for a few minutes, added pink Utah sea salt, covered the pan, and let them cook in their own juices for about 9 minutes more. I didn't cook them the whole-nitsuke way to juicelessness, because I wanted that bit of juicy yin today. The flavor was incredibly delicious.
Carrots are included in the basic macrobiotic diet and they're also in the more restrictive macrobiotic centering diet. Come to think of it, these first six weeks of my special weight-loss diet is very close to the macrobiotic centering diet (with the exception of Bio-K Plus, for strengthening my digestive system).
Related Blog Articles:
MY DAILY DIET REPORT — Day #6 Of My Weight-Loss Diet
What Is The Macrobiotic Centering Diet?
My Notes About The Macrobiotic Centering Diet
