It took over 2,000 years, but Okara is finally available in America

Everybody knows that kids won't eat anything that is good
for them, but it seems that adults aren't much different.
It has taken over 2,000 years for people to catch on to
the fact that okara, a soymilk by-product, is one of the
most effective diet foods in the world.

Okara has been well-known in asia for more than 2000 years,
but wasn't used as a human food until the last couple of
hundred years because it has so few calories. During all
that time the low-calorie, high protein mash was fed to
the pigs while the village peasants starved.

Okara came to America during the civil war, but remained
obscure until recently. Even today, it is largely unknown
to anyone outisde of the Vegan community, even though
there are more than 100 million overweight Americans who
could benefit greatly from eating low-calorie okara.

For those who don't know what okara is (meaning almost
everybody) it is the indigestible shells of soybeans which are
left over after the beans have been ground up and turned into
soymilk and tofu. An awful lot of it is produced during the
process, making it is a serious disposal problem for most
manufacturers. As in China, the only demand for it is for
animal feed.

Even people who make their own soymilk find it almost impossible
to use all the okara, and end up throwing most of it in the
garbage.

In an article on the Wisconsin Gold Harvest website, explaining
how to make soymilk, author Chad Crabtree advised his readers,
“The Stuff that's left over from soy milk, it is edible, however,
if you make any quantity of soy milk you will quickly become
weary of eating it. Get some goats or pigs and feed it to them,
or composte it.”

What Chad didn’t say is that wet okara spoils very quickly
and has to be used amost immediately or frozen - and therein
lies the problem with it. If it could be easily stored, it
wouldn't be thrown away. Drying it gives it a very long shelf
life, even longer than that of flour. It can be stored in a
kitchen cupboard for a year or more.

But drying okara, which is 80% water, is a major problem
requiring a lot of elecrtical power and too much work. Just
describing the process is more of an effort than I care to
make here. If you interested in reading a rather humorous
experience I had on one occassion, see my Mad Okara Scientist
article at http://nowyourecooking.blogspot.com/.

It’s really too bad the stuff is so difficult to dry. It is a
great product with lots of benefits. You can make practically
anything with it...and save a bunch of calories doing so. I
consider it a miracle food for anyone wanting to lose weight.
You can stuff yourself with okara pancakes, scones, muffins,
and meat substitutes and still melt off inches of fat. It's
a real waist solution!

To give you an idea of the calories you can save with
okara, a delicious wheat-and-okara scone contains less than
160 calories, compared with a similar sized, 600-calorie bun
zerved by most coffee shops. Make your own and save 440
calories!

That's really huge. You can have deliciously satisfying meals
or snacks like that ten times a day and still lose weight.

Given that okara is so nutritious, delicious, and versatile,
it's kind of strange that hardly anybody has ever even heard
of it. Not even the local grocer. In fact, if you ask for
okara at your local supermarket you’ll just get pointed to
'okra' in the vegetable department.

But okra is not okara. Okra is a green, pepper-shaped
vegetable, three to four inches long, that originated in
West Africa but is now grown in the southern US. It
belongs to the same plant family as cotton and hibiscus.

As a champion and propagandist for okara, which I
truly believe can help solve America’s overwhelming obesity
problem, I felt I had to somehow make dried okara
available to people who might use it if they didn't have
go to all the trouble of making it, so I spent a year trying
to find a company with the ability to dry large quantities
of okara for me at a reasonable price. It has finally
happened and now I have okara available at Spartica.ca
for only $1.49 per pound - just about the same price you
would pay unprocessed soybeans.

So now all you have to do is buy a package and try it. If
you want to lose a bit of weight, okara is a delicious way
to do it. And, by the way, if you are a bodybuilder trying
to put weight on (muscle) okara is high in protein making
it ideal for getting big and cut!

Cal Smith

Don't let the years get you down.

My father, who stood at five foot ten all of his younger life, barely reached five feet by the time he died at the age of 84. It wasn't hard work that ground him down because he didn't do much anything after he turned fifty. I sort of blamed it on smoking...he was never without a cigarette.

But I didn't smoke, so why was I, in the year 2000, at the age of 70, following his footsteps down the pygmie trail? I had already shrunk almost 3 inches from my lifelong height of five-eight. I can't say I 'lost' those inches though, because I knew exactly where they were...they were around my waist, putting pressure on my belt buckle.

Then I started weight lifting and found the answer. I didn't know it at the time, but it seems that regular exercise not only helps your muscles, heart, immune system, and brain, it also keeps the pads that separate the bones of your spine from drying out and shrinking. Not only that, but it strengthens the bones themselves and keeps them from becoming crushed and deformed.

Anyway, it has now been more than 8 years since I started exercising, and I haven't lost a millimeter since. I'll admit I haven't gotten taller but I've added a lot of muscle and the 3 inches have long since disappeared completely.

If you too, want to live a long life riding tall in the saddle, I can't recommend exercising stongly enough. Start a weight lifting program today.

Cal Smith
http://spartica.ca

I Dream of Okara

Like Martin Luther King, I have a dream!

I dream of an America where everyone is slim. Where overweight people are as rare as they are in the Orient. Where personal-ad weight descriptions that say “a few extra pounds”, mean six or seven, not sixty or seventy. Where it is a pleasure, not agony, to sit and watch people go by.

I dream of an America where old people are slim and attractive well into their 90s. Where matronly means mature and ladylike, and not overweight and unattractive. Where men over the age of 50 can still see their toes without bending over and their belt buckles aren’t hidden underneath an overhanging bulge. Where senior means advanced, not decayed.

I dream of an America where people walk instead of waddle. Where young men and boys don’t wear their pants around their thighs, in training for the future when that style is not just an option. Where girls and women with short skirts and bare midriffs are attractive, not disgusting.

I dream of an America where obesity is not a national epidemic. Where all children can participate in team sports, unlike today where one out of five are left out because they are too fat. Where obesity isn't a major health issue, consuming more than $183 billion every year. Where we no longer need to spend over $98 billion fighting fat-related type 2 diabetes problems. Where arthritis is on the decline, instead of increasing rapidly.

I dream of an America that has discovered okara!

Please pass this on and help make my dream come true.

Cal Smith

Oh, the wonderful things you do with okara

You can whip up some pancakes
That’s what you can do.
You can stew up some soup,
You can soup up some stew.

You can add it to flour
to make muffins and cake.
Even scones and soufflés,
Oh the things you can make.

You can even make meat balls,
and sausage, and fish.
I could go on for pages
If that’s what you wish.

But where do you get it,
this marvelous stuff?
You make it yourself
and the stuff isn't tough.

Just start off with soybeans,
they're easy to get.
And soak them in water,
they love to get wet
and the longer they soak
the bigger they get.

They swell and they swell
till they're three times the size
they were at the start,
now they're fat little guys.

I hate what comes next,
it couldn't be fun,
to be put in a blender
and get chopped up and spun.
and your bones turn to soymilk
before it gets done.

But then to get boiled.
What a terrible thought.
To get dumped in a pot
and that pot it gets hot.
I wouldn't want that,
Oh no, I would not!

The milk is delicious,
but cows don't like it a bit.
Milk can't come from a bean
cause a bean's not a bit
like a cow,
and they're off in a snit.

The pulp is strained out
of the milk by the way.
And up until now it was all thrown away,
or fed to the cows
who were happy that way.

WE call it okara
when we use it to bake
those wonderful goodies,
that great tasting cake
The sandwiches that I
take to the lake.

And the cows are contented
they don't mind what we do.
We eat the okara,
not beef in our stew,
and they know that most soymilk
is used for tofu.

At last! A hunger-free diet plan

Traditional diets require you to ‘tighten your belt’ and go hungry for weeks and months on end, which almost always fail and result in cries like: "I starved myself for two months and all I lost was eight weeks".

The problem is that most weight loss planners look at dieting the wrong way. They try to force people into rebellion against their own brains. But, leopards can’t change their spots, and people can’t resist eating as much as they can hold. Our bellies don’t know how many calories they are getting. All they care about is the quantity and satiation-quotient of the food delivered to it.

Any diet that ignores these facts, is doomed to failure in the long run. The No-diet Diet approaches the weight loss problem from a new angle and with a couple of new products that you have probably never heard about – okara and CLA.

Okara is a miracle food, but it is not available in stores, so you have to make it at home. Fortunately, that is very easy to do, and - because it's made with soybeans - quite inexpensively. Complete instructions are available free at http://calsbooks.com

The idea of the diet is to fill you up with good tasting, nutritious food with the least possible calories, which is not all that difficult, with pancakes, omelets, and some great meat substitutes. But when you add okara to your meals, you are using the ultimate in ‘bulky calories’ – calories that are big, filling, and delicious – and dieting success is absolutely guaranteed!

The book introoduces four new ideas to make the No-diet Diet the world's easiest weight loss program:

· Bulky Calories to strip the fat off
· Fun activity instead of exercise to make you fit and healthy
· Daily journal to ensure smooth weight loss progress
· CLA to prevent 'bounce back' weight gain.

Get the book today at http://calsbooks.com

The mad okara scientist

My three sons all swear that I burn everything I cook. It's not true. Maybe the toast is too dark, the egg yolks too hard, and the steaks kind of leathery, but I seldom serve anything that's actually burned.

I'm really a very good cook, but I'm a 'multi-tasker' and sometimes after I put a pot of rice or spaghetti on the burner, I get involved with something else while I'm waiting for it to cook. I don't use mechanical timers because my nose tells be when it's done. I am particularly sensitive to the smell of smoke and can usually get to the stove in time to salvage the stuff in the top-half of the pot. Anything burned on the bottom is too hard to scrape off anyway, and I swear I never serve food that has even the slightest tinge of brown.

That's what happened yesterday. During the process of making okara I got distracted a bit by my computer after I had put a pillowcase in the microwave, set it on high, timed it for five minutes, and went into my den to check my email.

Don't misunderstand. I wasn't trying to cook the pillowcase. I was just trying to sanitize it, so I could put the okara in it. You see, okara has to be dried before you make pancakes with it, and I thought it might be a good idea to use the clothes drier. A cotton pillowcase seemed an ideal container, but not without some kind of sterilization first. Enter, the microwave.

Anyway, I had hardly sat down at the computer when my nasal smoke detector picked up the warning. Rushing to the kitchen, I found the whole room enveloped in smoke. It was so thick my gold fish were choking. I groped my way to the microwave and opened it. The pillowcase, which - before I opened the door - had been smoking but only smoldering without oxygen - now exploded into flame.

Heroically, I reached into the chamber, grabbed a corner of the cloth, and pulled it out. Fortunately, the microwave is on the counter near the kitchen door which opens directly onto our concrete patio, so it should have been no trouble simply opening the door and tossing the burning pillow-case out. But there's many a slip twixt cup and lip!

I got the door open alright, but when I hurriedly tossed the pillowcase out, a flaming piece of it stayed behind and landed on the floor. My first instinct was to step on the errant cloth and grind it into ashes on the ceramic-tile floor, but I was barefoot and resisted the impulse. Instead, I reached down and picked it up.

That was a mistake too. The pillowcase must have had some acrylic content because a molten mass of plastic as big as a pair of coffee grounds glued itself to my fingers. Ouch! I cursed under my breath and straightened up quickly. As I did, the top of my head made sharp, painful contact with the open microwave door on the counter. It didn't hurt the door, but cut my scalp and released a river of blood down my forehead. Another curse - louder this time.

Blinded by blood, choked by smoke, and with a flaming cloth welded to my fingers, I staggered to the sink and torqued open the cold water tap to soak my burning fingers and wet a hand towel so I could stem the flow of blood from my head wound.

Then I remembered the burning pillowcase outside the door. I hadn't had time to see where it landed. Luckily, the patio lounge chair it had landed on was getting old anyway, and the melted cushions weren't much of a loss. It was touch-and-go getting the lounge fire out, having to run in and out of the house carrying full coffee cups of water, but cleaning the mess up afterward was the worst part.

I guess my gawking neighbors thought I'd gone mad, giggling like I was while throwing burned-up cushions and pillowcase remains into garbage cans, but I couldn't help it. I was just glad my sons weren't home.

So maybe it's not such a great idea, sterilizing a pillow-case in the microwave. But drying okara in the clothes drier is unorthodox enough without putting it into an unsterilized pillowcase . Perhaps boiling it would be a better idea. I remembered my grandmother boiling the white stuff on wash days and she never once burned a sheet. So I dug out another pillowcase and stuffed it into a pot.

This time everything went fine. The water boiled and the pillow case cooked. When it was tender, I fished it out of the pot with a barbeque fork and carried it dripping to the sink. Standing there with the steaming cloth drooling scalding-hot water, I wracked my brain in vain, trying to think of some way to wring it out. I certainly wasn't about to use my bare hands, one of which already felt like it had been burned to a cinder.

But no ideas came to me, and by the time the pillowcase cooled down enough to touch, my forearm was cramped from holding it up on the heavy barbeque fork. It was only through sheer will-power and personal fortitude that I finally got the thing wrung out. I then inserted the 8 cups of wet okara, tied a knot in the open end, and put the whole thing into the drier.

I know you are expecting something else to go wrong, because I was too. I hate to disappoint you though, but within an hour the okara had dried beautifully and I transferred it to a sealed container without any further problems.

I know this sounds like a tale from Inspector Clouseau, but no matter what, you have to admire my ability to type so well with just one hand. Right?

Okara Freak and Pig Feed

There are more than 60 million Americans who are grossly overweight and could benefit greatly from eating soy products, but don't know anything about them. In fact most people haven't even heard of okara.

Because I have been a long-time okara user, user in the nutrition sense, not the psychosematic one, I felt compelled to write the No-diet Diet book to introduce these people to the fantastic weight and health benefits of Okara and tofu, and help save the economy billions of dollars every year. I know that sounds a little too altruistic to be true, so I'll admit I thought I could make a couple of dollars at the same time. I mean if Dr. Atkins can become a multi-millionaire many times over, with garbage like the no-carbohydrate diet, why shouldn't I be able to make even more money with a high-carbohydrate diet that really works.

After all, if I can make a buck a book, and all those 60-million people buy one, I'll have enough money to qualify for a job as Bill's chauffeur. Gates that is. Now if I could only figure out a way to market okara, I might even rise to the exalted heights of his private secretary. Because okara isn't available in the North American food chain, it is almost completely unknown to the average consumer. The only way to get it is to make it yourself, at home.

It's easy to make, but you and I both know that people are basically very lazy tweedles. That's one of the reasons so many of us are fat. Nobody wants to do anything, even if most of the work is done by the blender. And then there's the 10 minutes you have to spend slaving over a hot stove.

So now I've made a deal with a company that makes a counter-top machine that does the whole thing with the touch of one button. God! The potential is unlimited. I'll be Bill's partner before I know it. So what the heck do you do with okara anyway? Well, up to now, you mostly feed it to the pigs. Not the police kind, stupid. The oink, oink pigs.

You see, okara is the waste product left over from making soymilk and tofu. But it's only waste because nobody knows what to do with it. It is just as nutritious as the milk and tofu, but there's just too darn much of the stuff. In fact, your local tofu shop will probably be happy to give you all you want...if you bring your own container.

To make Okara at home, you simply grind up a cup of soy beans mixed with 3 cups of water, then drain off 3 cups of soymilk. Put some chocolate and Splenda in it and drink one cup, then make yourself a tofu lunch out of the remaining two. After all that, you'll still have 2 and a half cups of okara left over.

Talk about butchers using everything but the squeal for making sausages, rendering soy beans is like squeezing seven chicks out of a single egg.

Actually, they aren't using so many pigs for sausage any more, because some of those enterprising farmers who get the surplus okara from the soymilk companies, turn it into hamburger, sausage, chicken patties, and even seafood. And there's still a billion tons of okara that nobody can get to the retail food market.

Why? Probably because I'm the only guy in the world stupid enough to promote it. You'd have to spend more than even Bill has, to get Americans to switch from sugar to pig feed. Even if my campaign works, there will still be a lot left over because the stuff is so bulky that nobody can eat it all.

On the other hand, isn't that exactly what makes it such a great diet food? In fact, it's about the healthiest product on the planet. One cup has 3.6 grams of high quality protein, 8 grams of carbohydrate, and 3.8 grams of insoluble fiber. It's a bodybuilder's dream! It could also be a urologist's nightmare though, because it decreases the incidence of prostate cancer. Breast cancer too, I understand. And heart attack, osteoporosis, and diabetes.

Maybe I should just forget about it and go have another okara pancake. I love them!