Fresh Habits

Mushroom & goat cheese tart

2012-02-11T19:40:00.001-08:00

Mushroom & goat cheese tart
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

We gave up on going out to dinner for Valentine's Day years ago. It's really the worst night for eating out... rivaled only by trying to find a table for brunch on Mother's Day. Not only are all the tables booked, but the wait staff and kitchen staff would really rather be spending the evening with their loved ones. And now that we have a 3 year old, we'd have to find a sitter on top of all that? Forget it. I'd much rather fix a fancy dinner at home.

Anyway, who said you have to go for chocolates and fancy desserts to be romantic? Our menu this year is going to include cedar planked wild salmon, artichokes with homemade mayo, and this amazing mushroom & goat cheese tart. I did a trial run tonight, and my husband was raving about how amazing it was.

(My son on the other hand, was super excited about having "pie for dinner", then when it appeared on his plate, he refused to eat it and instead ate his weight in roasted cauliflower. Kids are weird. )

Mushroom & goat cheese tart

Crust:
1/2 cup blanched hazelnuts
1 cup almond meal
1/4 tsp ground sage
1/4-1/2 tsp table salt
2 tablespoons melted ghee
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon water

In a food processor, fitted with the S blade, process the hazelnuts until they are finely ground. Add the almond meal, sage and salt, pulse to combine. Mix the ghee, olive oil and water in a small bowl, turn the food processor on, and pour into the dry ingredients. Run until it is well mixed (should be no more than 30 seconds). Press the crust into a tart or quiche pan, thinning it out in the middle and pressing it gently up a the edges of the pan. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 18-20 minutes. Let cool.

Filling:
8oz crimini or oyster mushrooms
1 small leek
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 eggs
1oz soft goat cheese

Preheat oven to 350.
Split and rinse the leek, then thinly slice the white portion crossways. Thinly slice the mushrooms. Saute the mushrooms in the olive oil; when they soften, add the leeks and saute a little longer until the leeks and mushrooms start to brown. Take the leeks and mushrooms and spread them evenly across the crust. Blend the eggs and cheese together with an immersion blender or mixer. Pour eggs over the vegetables. Bake for 20 minutes. Serve.

Sodium: 1/4 of the tart has 230mg sodium, when made with the smaller amount of salt in the crust.

What I learned on the Whole30

2012-02-02T17:29:00.000-08:00

My Whole30 results in a nutshell are that I lost 7 pounds with no real cravings or struggle. Which is revolutionary for me because since I was 11, losing weight has almost always been a struggle. I've been on the chunky side since I was 10 or so... just always a little overweight, only once or twice crossing over into the realm of "obese", but I've had a hard time getting down into the "normal" weight for my height. And believe me when I say I've tried everything. In high school I started running and capped my daily calories at 900, I lost some weight for a few months, but put it all right back as soon as I hit the college cafeteria (even though I was doing plenty of trail running in the gorgeous mountains of New Mexico). And since college I've run through everything. Weight Watchers. Low fat vegan. The Zone. Atkins. Body for Life. SlimFast. Stupid "fat burner" pills that just made me hungry. They had varying levels of success (and when I lose weight I can often keep it off, barring pregnancy or major injury), but one thing they all had in common were that they all took a lot of mental struggle and cravings.

The other thing they had in common? Diet coke. Splenda. Nutrasweet. Diet red bull. More diet coke. You get the picture here?

And that was my #1 biggest change with the Whole30, I gave up all sweeteners (real and artificial) for a month. Wow. That's big. I'd been drinking diet soda since I was 14! Now the coffee thing I had worked out, I'd switched to drinking black about a year ago and never looked back. But the diet soda thing was a big change. Even when I was pregnant with my son I still had splenda in my decaf coffee and the occasional diet coke. Now for the first time in 24 years, I went a full 30 days with no artificial sweetener in ANYTHING.

And what did I find? My cravings for junk food, sweet food, breads, pastries and fried food DISAPPEARED. A co-worker would pass my desk with a box of doughnuts and I would think to myself "that looks good, but I'll pass." That wasn't just what I said out loud, that was what I said in my head, to myself. Instead of struggling and debating and passing on the doughnuts in front of her, but then grabbing two out of the break room an hour later (OK, let's be honest, 10 minutes later). All the mental gymnastics just disappeared. I did have a little bit of wrestling with myself over wanting a diet coke. But that was fairly easy to resist, since I wasn't spending all my mental energy wrestling with myself over other stuff.

The most surprising thing? I did not expect this AT ALL! I expected to have a month of arguing with myself over what not to eat. Because that has been my experience for most of my life. No more. I had always glossed over arguments against diet soda thinking to myself "it's just flavored water... what can it harm?" I had no idea that it was completely messing up my relationship with real honest food.

Bacon Nut-o-la

2012-02-01T19:28:00.001-08:00

Bacon Nut-o-la
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

Sometimes I get inspired to be very, very naughty in the kitchen. Today was one of those days, I was randomly pondering what I could do with some leftover dried coconut, and then it occurred to me, granola... well, not grain-ola per se, but maybe a nut-o-la. And then that little devil on my shoulder whispered "bacon"... Bacon? Yes bacon!

Bacon Nut-o-la

5 slices natural, nitrate free bacon
1/3 cup unsweetened dried coconut flakes
1/2 cup sliced almonds (the kind that look like thin flakes)
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 tablespoon reserved bacon fat
Dash of ground cardamom (optional)

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

In a large pan, cook your bacon slowly over low heat, you want to render out a lot of the fat and pour it out a couple times while cooking, so that the bacon gets nice and crispy. When it's crisp, take the bacon out and drain on paper towels, then chop coarsely with a knife. Mix the bacon crumbles, coconut and almonds together in a small mixing bowl. Separately, mix the vanilla, maple syrup, reserved bacon fat and cardamom. Pour over the bacon/nut mixture and toss to distribute evenly. Spread the nut-o-la out evenly on a cookie sheet lined with baking parchment. Bake for 15 minutes, stir it a bit, and continue to bake checking every 5 minutes until the mixture is lightly browned. Watch it carefully for burning. Remove from oven and allow to cool, then break up (it should crumble easily). Store in the refrigerator.

The sodium content of this seems like it would be stupid high. But you're not going to eat much of it, I'm showing just about a tablespoon over yogurt in the picture. Using low sodium bacon (70mg per slice) I'm guessing it's about 50mg per tablespoon.

Out with a whimper

2012-01-31T09:39:00.000-08:00

Well, sort of. I ended on a rough note. Let me backtrack to Saturday night... a friend had a big blow-out birthday dinner. I went! I got dressed up fancy(ish)! I drank tea instead of cocktails! I interrogated the waitress and decided on scallops over a lobster & mushroom hash (hold the sauce and hold the potatoes on the hash). It was fabulous. Except that Monday morning I woke up at 4am with an obvious case of food poisoning. I'm pretty sure it was the damn scallops because my husband had the same entree and also had some tummy problems, AND I've had this happen with undercooked scallops before. Damnit! Scallops are so yummy, but I think I'm going to need to pass on them in the future.

Anyway, yesterday morning, I called in sick from work and spent most of the morning in the bathroom. I ate a banana and had some applesauce, but by noon I was really feeling rough. I was feeling shaky and having heart palpitations, and I just wanted to eat something starchy. I couldn't stand the idea of eating any protein and fruit was just making me more shaky. So I cooked up a little bit of tapioca and had it with some coconut milk (no sweeteners). I wasn't going to spend 12 more hours suffering just so say that I was totally 100% clean for 30 days instead of 29.5. Especially since about an hour after I ate the tapioca the shakes and palpitations were gone and I actually felt like eating a little chicken. I've been steadily feeling better ever since.

I'm going to call it as completed though. I lost 7 pounds without any real difficulty and no serious cravings for anything except diet coke. That continues to be the most amazing thing to me, that there are just no internal struggles if I eat this way. I'm going to make a big long post about just that issue... but really given my history with food this is just a revelation!!! I've felt strong and healthy the whole time, no trouble recovering from workouts or keeping up with an unexpectedly stressful month at my job. I hate to say this... but it was pretty easy. Way, way easier than I had thought.

So what now? Well, I want to try dairy products, but I'm going to hold off on them until at least next weekend. Right now I want to let my GI tract heal before I go eating anything different. I need to be able to tell if any symptoms are due to cheese or just residual suffering from the damn scallops.

Poblano breakfast hash

2012-01-30T13:50:00.001-08:00

Poblano breakfast hash
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

I've been doing a few variations on the same theme for breakfast these days. It's a ground beef & cabbage based breakfast hash, that's super easy to partially cook ahead and then throw it together in the morning. This particular flavor combo, with the poblanos & cumin is pretty yummy... but the basic model can be adapted ad infinitum.

Meat mix

1 onion
2 poblano chiles
1 pound grassfed ground beef
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1/8-1/4 teaspoon salt (lower amount if you're sodium sensitive)

Thinly slice the onion and the poblanos. Using a large saucepan, saute the onion in the olive oil until it starts to soften, then add the poblanos and continue to cook until they soften as well. Add the ground beef (break it up into smaller chunks before adding it to the pan), sprinkle the spices over the top, and cook it all together until the beef is cooked through. Store in the fridge.

Breakfast hash

3-4oz of pre-shredded cabbage (yes, the kind in the bag, I use about 1/3 of a 12oz bag, or 2-3 handfulls)
Olive oil
1/4 recipe of the meat mix above
1/4 sliced avocado

Heat a frying pan over medium heat, add enough olive oil to swirl over the bottom of the pan. Throw in the cabbage and saute until the cabbage starts to brown. Add the meat mix to the pan, and continue to saute until it's thoroughly heated and the cabbage is well browned. Serve with thinly sliced avocado over the top.

Obviously, you can change the flavor of the meat mix considerably according to your tastes... I'm a huge fan of southwestern food, so this is a nice combo for me. If you're not sodium sensitive it would work really well with some bulk sausage and mushrooms (yum). Or you could use a thai curry paste and go the southeast asian route. Endless possibilities. But the best part is that it assembles lickety split in the morning and you have a nice filling breakfast with almost no work.

Sodium: 1/4 of the meat mix with 4oz cabbage will run about 175mg of sodium when made with the smaller amount of salt

Day 28 and Day 31

2012-01-28T08:11:00.000-08:00

Today is day 28 of my Whole30 and I've been doing a little bit of thinking about what I'm going to do day 31. Ohmigod you guys... I'm busting out here... with dinner I'm going to have my favorite low sodium spaghetti sauce* that has a wee tiny bit of added sugar!!! And I'm going to have it over baked eggplant with a nice Shelton's italian sausage on top.

So basically, the only thing that's changing right away is that there are a few natural convenience foods with a bit of added sugar that are going back in my diet. Pasta sauce, a little bacon... ummm... OK, so those two things are pretty much it. But man, on a busy weekday night (and Tuesday I'm seeing the eye doctor after work) it sure is convenient to pop open a jar of sauce rather than simmering a sauce from scratch, even if it means a wee bit of sugar.

And planning for this transition back to everyday eating is why I really liked having gone to hear Dallas & Melissa speak. They're big on context. Considering your food choices in light of your whole life. Are you insulin sensitive or not? How active are you? If you're active, how well are you recovering? What foods may have caused problems during the Whole30? What is your sleep & stress situation like? The Whole30 gives you an opportunity to see how food choices are affecting all those things.

If I step back and look at my life, here's what I see. I'm insulin sensitive and our whole family is active, so a few grams of sugar in otherwise good clean foods probably isn't going to be that bad. The artificial sweeteners on the other hand? Those have been messing me up badly, they're gone for good now, I'm not going back. I'm probably going to test out dairy and white potatoes carefully and see how I react. Duck eggs will come back, but only as a binder or occasional homemade mayo; chicken eggs are out, I'm just not going to play around with known intollerances anymore. Red wine, cider and beans will go back to being occasional party food.

Grains are another story. I don't think I'm even going to test out how I'm reacting to grains for several more months, or until I'm at the weight I want to be at for optimal performance. They just don't seem super necessary to eat, I'm fine without them. I don't even have really strong cravings for them. If I can get starches from sweet potatoes, root veggies and possibly white potatoes, then there's really no reason to add them back. On the culinary side, I've found plenty of veggies that can suck up yummy sauces... eggplant with Italian food, roasted cauliflower with Indian, extra cabbage in Thai curries. I may go back to sometimes having grains as special occasion foods (sushi!), but I'm not even going to try that out for some time. The same thing with eliminating seed oils, I don't have any good reason to make any changes there, so I'm just going to continue on the same path.

* Note on the Enrico's sauce: The jars I get locally has a slightly different ingredient list than healthyheartmarket.com, mine does have some sugar, but then has less overall sugars/carbs in a 1/2 cup serving. I don't know if they need to update their info, or I have a slightly different product (Enrico's has a few no salt added options).

STOP THE PRESSES!!!

2012-01-23T18:56:00.001-08:00

People, I have found nirvana! Breakfast nirvana at least. I stopped by our local indie health food store today and they'd rearranged their freezer section. So I had a peek and right there they had some new frozen products from Sheltons a local company known for good quality (though not pastured) poultry. Without much hope, I turned picked up the turkey breakfast sausage and read the stats... HOLY COW 170mg of sodium??? And no sugars, fillers or other junk in the ingredients? This is too good to be true... normal sausages run 300-350 for a single sausage patty and often have added sugars on top of it. But nope, this is the good stuff, turkey, turkey fat, water, sea salt & spices.

You see, once you start looking around at anything that's processed in any way, you're going to find salt & sugar. Usually together. Some smaller companies are catching on, they realize that people want processed foods with less junk in them. But invariably if they take out the sugar they add in more salt. Or if they take out some of the salt, they add sugar that never needed to be there in the first place. It's like they feel compelled to "amp up" the food for fear no one will eat it unless it fits with hyperprocessed tastes. When in reality, I think there is a genuine demand for honest food. Not oversweet, not oversalted, just plain honest food.

Anyway, cheers to Shelton's... they get it.

And now I have another breakfast option! :-)

Whole9 Foundations of Nutrition

2012-01-22T08:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was fortunate to attend the Whole9 Foundations of Nutrition workshop. I was lucky enough that they were scheduled to speak at a local crossfit studio in the middle of my Whole30. And by local, for once, I don't mean on the OTHER side of Los Angeles, I mean up in Monrovia which is a foothill community right down the road (OK freeway) from me. So here's my highlights & thoughts.

1. Melissa leads with the psychological impact of good food choices and this has been SO important to me. I'm going to write a long, intimate post on this when my Whole30 is over. But so far the last 21 days have been a revelation to me about the interaction of my neurochemistry, my mind and the food that I eat. Basically, her discussion made it very, very, VERY clear to me that my reliance on calorie free pseudo-foods (especially for me Diet Coke) has been a massive problem in my life. When she asked people in the audience to picture the thing they'd want most to eat, something really amazing, they all jointly came up with a chocolate cake with snickers on top... my brain just totally shorted out and all I could think of was Diet Coke. Melissa would say "Snickers Cake" and my brain just kept snapping to a picture of a 20oz bottle of Diet Coke next to an ice filled glass half full of Diet Coke with a straw in it. Yeah, things are that bad. I think I'm giving up Diet Coke for good... nothing that's such a big obsession can be good for me.

2. The technical discussions on hormonal interactions & gut permeability were interesting. Most of the insulin stuff I knew, but some of the details about other hormones like glucagon & leptin were interesting. I think it's the kind of thing that if I was an endocrinologist, I could understand in depth, but when I try to dig into it on my own I get really confused. Stats I can do, biochemistry ain't my strong point. Dallas did a really good job of explaining a lot of complex interactions without being obtuse. Well... maybe his diagram was a little messy, but we all got the point. The gut permeability issues were something I understood roughly with regards to a couple of my friends who have celiac or severe food allergies, but I didn't understand the ways in which it affects someone with relatively normal gut function... Which leads me to my next point.

3. I think I gotta give up the duck eggs. I've known for a long time that I have a moderate gut intolerance to chicken eggs... it waxes and wanes, but I've never been able to down an entire chicken egg without some problems. Then late last year I discovered duck eggs and HEY, I can eat these! Except that on the Whole30 I've been eating one every day, and at day 21 I'm still having GI symptoms. GI symptoms that I did not have before the Whole30 (with the exception of eggs I've always had an iron gut, in the face of everything I throw at it). I discussed it briefly with Melissa and she was really thinking the eggs could be a problem, maybe they're cross reacting, maybe I'm just not very good at breaking down egg protein. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to reintroduce them later. So from now on, I'm egg free... I need some help with meat/veggie breakfast ideas if anyone has them. I've never been the kind of person who's able to face a leftover roast first thing in the morning. :-/

4. The rest of the day was devoted to going over food types and what works and what doesn't. Most of it is stuff that's covered in some way on the Whole9 website, but we got a little insight into how Melissa and Dallas implement things, as well as which guidelines go out the window when they're vacationing in Mexico. But most valuable, we took some time to swap local resources for grassfed and pastured meats. I need to check into a new option for a pastured chicken supplier that looks cheaper than our old supplier AND may have livers (our old supplier would bundle the chickens with feet for stock but no organs). The one kind of dangerous thing is that Melissa was really pushing the superiority of macademias over other nuts, with regards to fatty acids. The only problem: macademias are like crack to me. I can eat a small handful of almonds and be fine, but macademias I just keep coming back until the bag is empty. Maybe I need to try some hazelnuts... monounsaturated fats, tasty, but not tropical nutty nut-crack.

5. There was an extensive discussion of pre & post workout nutrition for crossfitters that was interesting, but I'm not entirely sure how it applies to me. Circus arts are challenging, but it's more like a 1.5 hour gymnastics class than an all out punishing workout. There are portions that are all out, then there are portions that are conditioning and recovery, and portions where you're not doing anything except getting instruction, or watching someone else work through instruction. However, I'm starting partnered aerial work, and that's definitely verging on "punishing", since for portions of the class I'm lifting someone else my own size. There's two ways of pairing people up, either a strong base and a light flyer, or two equally sized strong people who trade off base & flyer. My partner and I fall into the latter category, so it means we're going to be lifting each other a lot. Anyway... this means I may have to get more serious about post workout nutrition. I feel like I kind of have some tools, but I'm still a little shaky on how to apply the ideas to my situation.

6. After the workshop there was a fish oil tasting with Stronger, Faster, Healthier. Yeah... I know... a FISH OIL TASTING! Just those three words had my husband cracking up over the dinner table. But honestly, their stuff is GOOD! And I've taken some fish oil in my day, but this stuff was nearly tasteless except for the flavors. I was not entirely impressed with the chocolate, but the lemon & tangerine were good and OMG... THE VANILLA SMELLS LIKE CUPCAKE BATTER! It doesn't taste quite as sweet as cupcake batter (no sweeteners), but it's still very mild and vanilla-y. The thing is, personally, I like to get my fish oil from eating actual fish rather than a disembodied oil. My son even likes fish quite a bit, so we do eat it often in our house... I'm not sure if "often" is optimal or not, especially considering that >50% of our beef is grassfed. But this stuff might be helpful for my husband who has to travel a lot, and eat sub-quality meat (SFH even makes a TSA compliant sample pack!!!), if I can get him over the idea of actually tasting it.

Pork & mango cole slaw bento

2012-01-16T12:36:00.001-08:00

Pork & mango cole slaw bento
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

This is my bento lunch for the week. I didn't post last week's because it was yummy, but not very colorful. Today's lunch though is tasty AND good looking. It's a bunch of leftover cuban pork roast with the Kids Love Cabbage cole slaw from Everyday Paleo. Forget the kids, I love this cole slaw enough to hoard it for myself. :-)

A note on the bentos: Bento lunches can look small, but the idea is to STUFF the food into your little bento box so there's no extra room left over. That right there is probably 1/2 of the full cole slaw recipe and about 4-6oz of pork. I also typically pack an apple or another piece of fruit along side my bento box. It doesn't look like a lot of food, but it's plenty filling.

Monday in the garden

2012-01-16T09:10:00.001-08:00

Broccoli fail
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

I think I'm going to try to make a semi-regular Monday morning gardening post. It's funny, I'll be all garden, all the time during the summer months and then slack off during the winter... even though we still have things growing!

This Monday however, I want to share with you my fail. My broccoli fail. Both my hubs and my son LOVE broccoli, so it was a natural to try and grow it. For the last two years I've started broccoli from seed and I get bupkus. The leaves come up, but no stalks, no flowers. I've tried a couple varieties of seeds, but still no dice. So this year I decided to just go out and buy a plant and see how well it does. You know, $1.50 for a start isn't too bad if you grow $5.00 worth of broccoli! And this is what I get... TWO MEASLY FLORETS!!! Really broccoli? Why do you do this to me? Do you hate me?

I think this is one thing that I'll stick to the farmer's market & supermarket. Especially when the frozen stuff goes on sale, because frankly, with broccoli, it all tastes the same.

Assemble & eat

2012-01-13T10:55:00.001-08:00

I have two ultra quick "recipes" I want to share. No pictures because this stuff is super fast, throw-together, OMG-IT'S-MEALTIME??? type food. But both are pretty awesome.

Tuna Salad

Serves 1, double or triple as needed

1 can tuna (I use a no salt added variety)
1/2 a red bell pepper
2 small or 1 large cucumber
1 tbsp finely chopped onions of some sort (green onions or red onions are the best)
Any bits of random veggies you have sitting around in your fridge that are good raw (celery, cauliflower, etc), finely chopped (optional)
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
Salt & pepper to taste
1 tbsp olive oil

Cut red pepper and cucumber into chunks. Drain the tuna and dump over the veggies. Throw in the onion and any other veggies. Pour on the balsamic vinegar, and season with salt & pepper (I just use pepper). Toss. Do this before the olive oil so the vinegar gets evenly distributed. Pour on the olive oil & toss again. Chow down.

Coconut Ambrosia

Serves 1

1 ripe banana
2 tbsp coconut milk
1/3 cup fresh berries
1-2 tsp unsweetened dried coconut (optional)

Break banana into chunks in a bowl. Mash with fork. Add coconut milk & mash some more. Throw in the berries and coconut, mix up and enjoy.

Update and some recipe reviews...

2012-01-11T09:52:00.000-08:00

I'm on day 11 of the Whole30 and things are pretty much going smoothly. I don't feel super amazing, but I also haven't been struggling in the least. Aside from resisting the siren call of Diet Coke, it's actually been easy. My gut has been readjusting itself quite a bit and that's still a little uncomfortable, but the headaches and sluggishness are gone even with far less caffeine.

The biggest change though, is one I really wasn't expecting. For as long as I can remember I've had that thing where a few hours after a meal, I know I'm not actually hungry, but I still want to eat something. I can resist it, but it usually takes effort. Well, after a week on the Whole30, that feeling is gone. Sometimes I feel like "Hey, I could go for a snack right now", I ask myself if I'm hungry and I'm really not and the urge to eat goes away. That has never happened in my life, usually it's something I wrestle over. That alone is really super cool because it saves me a lot of mental stress!

OK, onto some recipe reviews...

1. Better Butter Chicken from Everyday Paleo. Since I started avoiding salt, Indian take-out has been off the menu, not because it's high sodium by definition, but because the restaurant doesn't have a way to adjust the sodium in each individual dish, so as a whole I know I'd be getting way too much. But man, I've missed Indian food BAD! This recipe really satisfied that craving. My husband typically hates coconut curries, but he didn't even notice the coconut milk in this one... he loved it. I replaced the butter in the recipe with ghee (which frankly gives a more authentic Indian flavor anyway). Big thumbs up. I think next time I'm going to try serving it over cauliflower roasted with curry powder.

2. Chocolate Chili from the preview of Well Fed. This was another big thumbs up from the husband, great dinner while watching his team win a NFL playoff game! I substituted in some ground feral swine (yes really, they have it frozen at my natural foods store) for the beef, and used real beef broth (with no added sodium) instead of the canned stuff. Even using no-salt-added canned tomatoes, this was still super yummy. I served it with a bunch of little small bowls of toppings (a la Chili My Soul, now defunct) including minced green onions, chopped avocados, pumpkin seeds and a bit of shredded cheese for the menfolk. My son whined that it was "too spicy" for 10 minutes before trying his first bite and then decided it was "good" and ate a bunch. Gotta love 3 year olds.

3. Grain free dolmas. This one takes a little bit of a rewind... back in June, I put up some grape leaves in the freezer and they've been sitting there ever since. I finally got up the nerve to put them to good use to pack in my lunch bentos this week. This dolma filling is actually awesome, I used GF beef instead of lamb because the 3 markets where I'd usually get ground lamb were all out, but it was just as good with the beef. I had about 1/4 of the filling left over and I cooked it up with some shredded cabbage for a breakfast hash this morning and that was also yummy. The biggest revelation though was the actual grape leaves. You ever have dolmas in a restaurant and they taste good, but the leaves itself are chewy and stringy? Well I can tell you that homegrown leaves preserved by freezing (instead of brining) are soft and tender. Yum, yum, YUM!

Ginger bombs

2012-01-08T13:40:00.001-08:00

Ginger bomb
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

What's that? It looks awfully lot like a candy, doesn't it? Candy ain't anything near Whole30 compliant, now is it?

Basically, I need a ginger delivery system before some of my aerial classes. Not all classes, just the ones where we spin. You see... spinning sometimes makes me puke, and I've found the best thing to prevent that is gingersnap Larabars. Larabars are kind of a grey area on the Whole30, and to be frank... gingersnap is the least tasty Larabar flavor, it doesn't have enough bite for me. But they do a really good job of keeping me from puking. So I decided to try my hand at making something similar, but a little more tasty. Keep in mind that these are not for snacking on, I'm just going to grab a couple immediately pre-workout. So technically these are not candy. They're a very serious pre-workout supplement.

But really, they're pretty much candy and unless you have a damn good anti-puke reason for eating them, I'm pretty sure they're not Whole30 compliant.

A note about measuring:
I measured the ginger and dates on my kitchen scale in grams. Dates vary in size depending on variety and while I cook with raw ginger a lot and I've never been able to wrap my head around the quantities described in most recipes. So I weighed them. If you don't have a kitchen scale, the chunk of ginger I used was a little larger than my thumb.

Ginger Bombs

makes 18

3 small carrots
10gm fresh ginger, peeled and grated
10 dates pitted and cut into chunks (about 95-100gm pitted)
1/8 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1.5 tbsp almond butter
1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

Grate the carrots on the fine side of a box grater (they should be very fine shreds like this). Empty them out onto a clean kitchen towel, roll the towel up over the grated carrots and twist to wring out ALL the juice. They should be fairly dry when you're done.

Put the ginger and dates into a food processor fitted with the S blade and pulse until the dates are broken up into fairly fine chunks. Add the grated carrots and the pumpkin pie spice and pulse a few more times to combine. Make sure there aren't any large clumps of carrot. Then add the almond butter and pulse until it's thoroughly integrated and begins to come together into a lump. You can add a little more almond butter if it seems really stiff.

Put the coconut on a plate, use a melon baller to scoop out little balls of the ginger goo and smooth them into a tight ball between the palms of your (clean) hands. Roll the balls in the coconut and set aside.

Store these in the FREEZER if you're not serving them at a party immediately. They're damp enough that I don't think they're entirely safe being stored at room temperature or for very long in the fridge. Plus, if they're frozen it's a lot harder to pop down the whole batch.

Ironman vs. grassfed tri-tip.

2012-01-07T12:04:00.001-08:00

Ironman vs. grassfed tri-tip.
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

I'm on Day 7 of my Whole30, and I can't say that I'm doing much more than hanging in right now. Yesterday was kind of rough, I didn't get enough coffee in the morning, which resulted in a headache that chased me around until this morning. Then in the evening, I had the beginnings of a vertigo attack. A low sodium diet controls about 95% of my Meniere's symptoms... but I still occasionally get attacks. Stress particularly can be a trigger, and the stress of listening to my 3 year old have a 1.5 hour INTENSE screaming tantrum over going to bed was just too much. A couple hours after he settled down the world around me started doing the shift-spin-stop thing, a sure sign that a full fledged attack was on it's way. I took my meclizine and went to sleep.

Fact of the matter is, I just never feel good the day after a vertigo attack. If I have a full fledged attack I'm just exhausted by it. If I have to take the meclizine and the zofran I'm a total zombie, I have to take the day off work. I really try to avoid the zofran if I possibly can. If I catch the attack early and only have to take the meclizine, things are better, but I still feel really blah and depressed the next day. This is why I'm so aggressive about the low sodium thing, I would rather sidestep the attacks completely. There's probably no eating plan or exercise regimen that's going to combat the fact that the meds make me feel crappy.

But I was really hoping that my energy level would start to kick back up today... I've got silks class in an hour and I know I'm going to be dragging through even having an extra iced (black) coffee with lunch.

In good news... Our favorite grassfed beef producer is back at the farmer's market! See the picture above of my little superhero pretending to chow down on a frozen tri-tip. We had to buy that package because he licked it while she was reaching in the freezer for more. :-/ I chatted with her a little bit, and she's really hopeful that they'll make it to the market more regularly in 2012... they had a lot of transportation & logistics problems last year. Comes with the territory of running a ranch. I also got my lovely duck eggs, some avocados, a big bag of AWESOME local tangerines, and some dates that I'm hoping will turn into a new recipe. Stay tuned...

Whole 30 update

2012-01-05T17:32:00.000-08:00

No fabulous new recipes today, I've been mostly trying to keep my head above water. Partly, the elimination of Diet Coke is really getting to me in the afternoons. I don't work tomorrow and you'd better bet I'm going to spend the afternoon taking a fat nap in the sun like a kitty. But also, I've been really overwhelmed at work, my boss/mentor is on a medical leave and I'm swamped with new responsibilities in her absence, plus pretty concerned about her well-being. So far, I've been rising to the challenge, but sometimes it's meant that I'm running late to pick my son up from preschool while texting my husband "Do we still have leftover tri-tip in the fridge for dinner????" I've stuck with it though... the only rule I've broken is the one about weighing myself, and frankly, it was reassuring. :-D

However, in lieu of an actual recipe, you want to know something that's majorly awesome while you're on the run... Balsamic tuna salad. Basically chop up 1 bell pepper & 1 cucumber, dump your best canned tuna over the top and toss with 1 tbsp each balsamic vinegar & olive oil. Quick, easy, low sodium (depending on the tuna) food is in tummy, it's time to go play circus! I should probably just keep cucumbers and bell peppers in my fridge at all times, since you can pretty much combine them with any leftover meat and any Whole30 friendly sauce and have a pretty fine meal or snack, with no additional fuss.

Paleo lunch bento

2012-01-03T12:19:00.001-08:00

Paleo lunch bento
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

So just because I'm doing a strict Whole30 does not mean I don't intend to enjoy my food this month. Oh no. Today's lunch bento is a perfect example:

Thinly sliced applewood smoked tri-tip (with an olive oil, garlic & pepper rub)

Eggplant relish, to cut the overwheming smokiness of the beef

Lebanese lemony spinach & beet greens

Belly dance beet salad

Tangerine (not pictured)

Generally speaking, things have been going pretty smoothly. I haven't had any "carb flu" kind of thing going on because there's no fixed schedule of what to eat when or complicated food combinations, so if I feel a little queasy and it's a long way to a meal, I just eat an apple or a banana. It's nice to not be in service of any kind of dietary perfection, just focusing on eating real food when I'm hungry and letting all the other eating stress fall by the wayside. I've only had a couple potential pitfalls.

1. Cheese and diet coke. Midafternoon I'm used to having a chunk of cheese & a piece of fruit for a snack and then a diet coke at some point. It's totally mindless I've found myself wandering to the fridge, opening up the cheese drawer and reminding myself "Oh yeah, not eating cheese right now!" and redirecting myself to some fruit with either nuts or meat. The diet coke is a little harder because I get a bit of a headache if I skip it, but as long as I remember to make myself some green tea it doesn't bother me too much.

2. I want to weigh myself SO BADLY! I usually weigh myself every day, or at least a couple times a week. The last time I went a whole week without weighing myself I was camping in the desert. I weighed in at 137 pounds on 1/1/2012, and for the next 30 days the only measure I'm going to have of my weight every morning is my chin-ups. Right now my chin-up-o-meter says I haven't drastically dropped 10 pounds in two days or anything crazy. The chin-up-o-meter isn't more specific than that.

In other news, Saturday was such a rough workout (after 10 days off from playing circus) that I'm just barely NOW not sore anymore. But at least my hands didn't rip this time, so I'll be good to go on Thursday.

P.S. I got a new black bento box for myself for Christmas and man, the food looks WAY more appetizing in a black box than the previous sage green box I had. In pictures and in person!

Sweet Potato Puffs

2012-01-01T10:34:00.001-08:00

Sweet potato puffs
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

Good morning, a happy new year to you and a happy Whole30 to me. I'm starting off the morning with a cup of coffee (black, natch) and these awesome sweet potato puffs. Looks are deceiving, these are not really pancakes, if you bite into them expecting something pancake-y you'll be sad. They're really more of a savory fritter.

Don't use a nut flour here, use minced or crushed nuts, they add a nice crunchy texture. Or leave them out completely if you want a silky smooth puff.

Sweet Potato Puffs

Serves 1, double as needed

1 egg
1/2 of a previously baked sweet potato
1 tablespoon minced or crushed pecans
Coconut oil

Scoop all the innards out of your sweet potato and mash them up in a small bowl. Crack an egg in and whip it up to combine evenly with the mashed sweet potato. Stir in the nuts. Add the coconut oil to a heavy pan over medium heat, and fry small scoops of the batter till crispy. Turn over halfway though. They're pretty squishy, so you may need to use a fork on one side and the spatula on the other to flip them.

Sodium: 100mg

New year, new post...

2011-12-31T11:21:00.001-08:00

Hi there! Haven't blogged here in a little while. Mostly because my autumn was major hectic and the holidays have been busy, busy, busy. And full of awesome, non-healthy, home cooked food. Yay for holidays! But, like a lot of people, I put on a few pounds over the holidays, and now it's time to indulge in some good HEALTHY food to take them off.

Actually, I want to take off more than a couple pounds. I want to lose about 15-20 pounds next year. I'm not at a totally unhealthy place right now, but losing some weight would really help my performance at my circus pursuits. 15 pounds less is 15 pounds less to lift. And since I'm starting to do some partnered aerials and partner balancing, it's 15 pounds less for someone else to lift too.

However, in the past, I've had a really hard time balancing weight loss and activity. Don't get me wrong, I know how to lose weight and maintain it... but the only thing that has really worked is dropping my calories WAY down and quitting my exercise. If I drop my calories a little and keep exercising, I don't lose weight. If I drop my calories very low (like 1000-1200 calories) I lose weight, but I don't have the energy to keep up my normal activity... if I try to keep exercising I start catching every cold that comes along and I'm pretty darn miserably sick.

So I'm going to try something different this time. I'm going to try the Whole 30. I'm going to lean towards including more starchy vegetables, like beets & sweet potatoes, because I know I don't do super fabulous on low carb diets (or frankly any extreme low-anything diet). But I'm going to keep it really clean, no grains, no dairy, no packaged foods. It's something I can do for a month and see where it gets me.

This will mean I'm going to be posting more recipes, yay!

Hopefully this will mean I can lose some weight without suffering performance-wise. And if it doesn't, it'll be a learning experience. I'm curious too what it will mean for my burns and bruises. Aerial arts are pretty brutal. I walk around all summer showing off legs that look like they've been randomly beaten. For whatever reason, the bruises take a long time to clear up on me... I don't know if it's because of my age or if it's something missing nutritionally or what. (I've had bloodwork recently and I'm not anemic.) I use arnica gel, but they still take forever to clear. I'm curious if there's anything I can change in my diet that will improve the bruising.

Sangria

2011-12-09T09:46:00.000-08:00

This is my all time favorite Sangria recipe. I make it all the time for summer BBQs, and our friends love it. Why the heck am I posting a summer BBQ drink recipe in the middle of winter? Because celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito posted about the alarming calorie count of sangria to his twitter. And then, his twitter followers started posting back monstrosities involving diet soda and sugar free fruit cocktail. YUCK!!!

My sangria is more of a fruit studded red wine spritzer, but that's never bothers anyone. If you want to be a party pooper and watch your calories like a hawk, then yes, it has less calories than the syrupy brandy spiked sort. But I mostly make it because it's super easy, super tasty and you can drink it all afternoon and never get uncomfortably drunk.

JJ's Sangria

2 oranges (valencia preferred)
1 lemon
2 Tablespoons sugar, maple syrup or honey
1 green apple, cut into small chunks
1/4 cup sliced strawberries, cherries, peaches, pears or other fruit
1 bottle decent but not great red wine
1 bottle San Pellegrino or lemon flavored sparkling water

The night before the party: Juice one orange and the lemon. Peel the other orange and cut it into small chunks. Put the fruit juice, sugar, fruit chunks and wine into a large bowl and set in the fridge overnight to soak. Stick the sparkling water in the fridge.

Day of party: Fill your pitcher half full of cold sparkling water and ladle in an equal amount of wine/fruit. Serve!

Salt & food reward

2011-08-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, since I've dropped much of the salt in my diet, I have been looking to a lot of paleo type cooking blogs & recipe books because they often (not always) are much more adaptable to low sodium cooking than more typical American fare. I'm not a die hard by any means... I've been finding that it's easier to stick with eating real natural foods if I have a balance of starches & protein. Extremism doesn't work for me, never has.

Through that route, I've come across the blog of a gentleman named Stephan Guyenet and his series on the issue of 'food reward'. His thinking is somewhat similar to David Kessler's in The End of Overeating, a book which I found fascinating if a little flawed. The more experience I have with a radically reduced sodium intake, the more I think that these guys are onto something with their characterization of American industrial food as hyperstimulating. Kessler calls out salt more explicitly than Guyenet (though I may be wrong, as I've only gotten about halfway through Guyenet's series), but I think it's a huge factor.

You see, I've always been a fairly healthy person with a bit of a compulsive eating problem. I eat (and cook) for entertainment and sometimes to soothe my emotions. I sometimes have days where I really feel COMPELLED to eat a ton of stuff that I know isn't very good for me, and often I don't even find it very enjoyable, but I keep doing it. It's never risen to the level of an eating disorder, I'll go out on a limb and hazard a guess that LOTS of Americans eat that way some of the time. For me, it's not been too damaging to my health, when I've been inactive or injured I sometimes get moderately overweight, but otherwise if I eat well and am active things are generally pretty good.

And then this Meniere's thing hit. If I prepare my own food from scratch, I keep my sodium levels low (800-1200mg) and generally avoid vertigo attacks. If I eat out in restaurants, like on our recent vacation, no matter how I try to keep my sodium down it creeps in. And, not surprisingly, I get an attack. So I've been pretty good about keeping my sodium levels low for several months now. The thing is, I sometimes still binge eat. I guide it a little bit now, I'll go for ice cream (which is low sodium) over a bag of pretzels (which are high sodium), but it's been a hard thing for me to completely stop. However, I've been using a nutrition app to track my food and I've noticed one really important change since I've dropped my sodium intake... when I do binge, I binge on far less food than I used to. I feel grossed out, bloated and done with eating after eating maybe 1/4-1/3 of the food that used to constitute a binge.

My theory is that with less salt in my diet the food reward response has begun to be blunted. Kessler theorizes that the trinity of hyperstimulating ingredients is fat, sugar & salt. The only thing that's been a solid consistent change for me is that I've cut the salt.

I'm in the planning stages for a bit of an experiment this fall about what happens if I eat a really REALLY bland & repetitive diet. Not unpleasant. Just bland. I'm curious to know if it would make a major adjustment in my susceptibility to hyperpalatable industrial foods.

*** And for the record, eating very low carb makes the binge eating worse rather than better, so it's not simply an insulin thing. That is generally why I avoid extremes in terms of low carb, low fat or low protein because eating a diet that's relatively balanced with plenty of fruits & veggies seems to be the best thing for preventing binges.

A note about sodium

2011-07-22T09:58:00.000-07:00

This is just a sticky note for my profile.

I've been submitting some recipes lately to paleo/primal-ish sites like Chowstalker. If that's where you came from you may be wondering "What's up with all the sodium counts?" There's a lot of debate lately about how "heart healthy" reduced sodium diets really are, and whether reducing salt actually affects blood pressure on a population level. Some paleo/primal folks recommend moderation in salt intake, while others fully reject the "conventional wisdom" about reduced sodium diets.

My reasons for restricting sodium sidestep that entire debate. I have an inner ear condition that causes intermittent severe vertigo attacks. My doctor and I are currently operating under the assumption that I have Meniere's disease, however I haven't fully completed the testing for that (it is expensive and not urgent). A low sodium diet is recommended for Meniere's sufferers to reduce the amount of fluids in the inner ear. For me, it has reduced the frequency and severity of the vertigo attacks. It seems to have done nothing for the other symptoms, but I can live with those.

This blog exists largely to share how I cook. And I cook low sodium now. If that works for you great, it's been helpful to share recipes with some of my friends who have similar issues. If it doesn't work for you, feel free to add additional salt to my recipes. I won't be sad... personally, I really do love salty food, so I know where you're coming from.

I will go out on a limb here and say that if you're interested in eating from a evolutionary perspective, you should at least think about your sodium intake. NHANES data indicates that the American adults consume on average 3,466mg of sodium per day. That is similar to some of the highest sodium traditional diets in the world (Japan & Korea), while it's likely that paleolithic people consumed in the range of 600-1200mg of sodium. The largest category of foods contributing to the high intake in America is actually grain foods; breads and baked goods are highly salted, and cutting them out of your diet can cut sodium considerably. However, if you're eating a lot of bacon & sausage or salting your food to suit the modern American palate, you're probably still consuming a lot. Before you decry the "conventional wisdom" on salt, think a little bit about whether you're actually consuming a level of sodium only accessible to neolithic man. Cavemen didn't have collectible salt shakers or bottles of fish sauce and they didn't crust their meat in a salt rub before throwing it on the grill.

Cucumber Soup

2011-07-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

We are overrun with cucumbers!

Not really, of course. Our cucumber plant is producing about 2-3 a week, which is approximately 1-2 cucumbers more than we usually eat in a week. So I've been trying to figure out how to use the extras. Today's recipe is a super easy chilled cucumber soup for one. I made it in 5 minutes this morning and it's a nice fresh complement to a lunchtime salad.

Cucumber Soup

1 cucumber, peeled and cut into chunks
2-3 sprigs parsley
1 tsp lemon juice
A pinch of dried dill
1/2 cup full fat greek yogurt

Throw the cucumber chunks & parsley into your food processor and process until they are the consistency of a smooth salsa. Add the other ingredients and pulse to blend them in. Chill until lunch. Enjoy.

50 measly mg of sodium. Plenty of cool deliciousness.

Now that's what you call kid food!

2011-07-15T19:33:00.001-07:00

IMG_7850
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

If you're not a parent of a preschool boy, you may have never heard of Dinosaur Train, but it is a big deal in our house. A BIG deal. It's the only kids TV show we watch. My little man could care less about Diego or Thomas anymore, he's all about the dinosaurs. And there's nothing cuter than a 3 year old declaring "Mommy, I have a hypothesis!"

A big part of the dinosaur facts they present is about the dinosaur diet. They talk a lot about the differences between meat eaters & plant eaters. It's given my son a huge appreciation for the joys of eating "leaves." He brings his toy dinosaurs to the dinner table and asks for a bowl of leaves for them. And then there's the garden. Most of our kale and beet leaves look pretty darn scraggly, because he walks right up and takes big ol' bites out of them like a triceratops.

Now I'm not saying that Dinosaur Train is going to have every preschooler eating their greens. Mom and dad have to set a good example, and of course kids need to opportunities to see that vegetables come from the earth instead of a bag. But people who believe that children need processed junky "kid food" obviously don't have as much imagination as a 3 year old!

Let's talk salt...

2011-07-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

So as anyone who's read this blog knows, I'm currently following a greatly reduced salt diet due to (probable) Meniere's disease. My sweet spot for salt intake seems to be somewhere in the 1200-1500mg range. This is fairly low. It's not unusual for someone eating the standard American diet to be well over 3000mg.

With that background, I give you a phenomenal interview on salt from Scientific American. Mr. Moyer is actually a old friend of my husband and I've been an admirer of Ms. Nestle's work for years. They're both fabulous. Go read it! I have a ton of thoughts.

1. It's the food supply, stupid. Notice how much Ms. Nestle refers to the salt that's added to processed & restaurant foods? That's important. In order to really reduce your salt intake to low levels you either must prepare your own food from scratch or be exceptionally careful of food prepared for you by others.

2. She makes excellent points about how challenging it is for processed food producers and restaurant chefs to reduce the amount of sodium they use in food. Once our taste buds are accustomed to all that excess salt, we have a very hard time adjusting downwards. For me, it really took a health crisis to do it; and it has not been easy. Without some kind of commitment on the part of food suppliers to reduce salt, we go into an upward spiral. Since food with just a little more salt tastes more appealing and there is no commercial downside to adding more salt, food processors add just a little more and just a little more and just a little more. And our palates slowly adjust to expect more and more salt. It's not clear to me that there is ANY biological top limit whatsoever to this palate creep.

3. When it comes to so-called "nanny state" regulations, I think sodium in restaurant food is a different beast from regulations on other dietary factors. As Ms. Nestle points out, a diner can always add more salt at the table. However, a diner can not remove salt once it's been added. Sodium is added to most restaurant foods way up the supply chain, you can't just ask the chef to leave the salt off and expect to enjoy a low sodium dinner. Reduce the sodium in the supply chain and put the power in the hands of the chef, which gives restaurant diners more options.

4. I wish I was part of the population who's blood pressure doesn't adjust in response to changes in sodium intake. I started out with blood pressure on the low side of normal, now I have real issues with postural hypotension. I don't think I could sustain the kind of super low sodium diet needed for people with renal insufficiency like Sodium Girl. The dizzies aren't much fun when you're chasing after a 3 year old. Better than a vertigo attack, by a long shot, but still.

For me personally, this all goes back to the fundamentals. I buy real, unprocessed food and cook it for my family. If I do that most of the time, it really doesn't take much effort to eat a lower sodium diet. But once I choose to join my friends at a nice restaurant for dinner, I step into a minefield. One that I don't always negotiate all that well.

Cowboy Rumaki

2011-07-10T21:14:00.001-07:00

Cowboy rumaki
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

Ever heard of rumaki? It was an appetizer back when I was a kid, chicken livers marinated in god-knows-what, wrapped in bacon and deep fried. Doesn't that sound just delicious?

Well, this recipe actually is more delicious than it sounds. Frankly, I've been playing around with beef liver because I know it's nutritious, and it seemed to me that there had to be a more creative approach than the same ol' liver & onions. Then, over the 4th of July weekend, we were grilling bacon wrapped jalapeno poppers, it occurred to me. An unholy alliance of liver, jalapenos & bacon. And I'm pleased to report that it's pretty darn good. The beef liver brings a heartiness that's missing from the cream cheese filling, but the jalapenos & bacon are strong flavors that stand up for themselves. Liver ain't pushing them around.

There are copious ingredient notes (and some credits) after the recipe.

Cowboy Rumaki

Jalapeno peppers
Grassfed beef liver
Bacon

Cut the tops off the jalapenos, cut them in half and scrape out the seeds and membrane. If you like things hot, you can leave in a bit more of the membrane, that's where a lot of the spice is. Rinse your liver thoroughly and pat dry. If you're running a very hot BBQ or will be cooking these in the oven, briefly sear the outside of the liver, about 1 minute each side in a cast iron saucepan. If you're going to be cooking the poppers over a slower heat then go ahead and leave the liver raw. Cut the liver into chunks about 1/2" x 1/2" x 2". Cut your bacon in half, so the strips are a manageable size. Put 1 piece of liver in each jalapeno, wrap with a 1/2 strip of bacon, and pin it together with a toothpick. If you're doing them on a grill, put them in an mesh pan intended for grilling vegetables and grill until the bacon is crispy. If you're using the oven, put them on a pan and throw them under the broiler (on low) until the bacon is crispy. Enjoy.

Notes:

If the whole procedure of coring the peppers and wrapping them with bacon is somehow confusing, please see these lovely illustrations from the Pioneer Woman.

GET GRASSFED LIVER! No, I'm not being a snob here. I tried working with normal supermarket liver once and it was DISGUSTING. Sliced super thin and it was slimy, slimy, slimy, like a slab of leech. Grassfed liver is firmer, less slimy and much tastier. It appeared to be actual MEAT rather than a meat by-product intended for pet food. It's also way cheaper than grassfed muscle meat, and you don't need a whole lot. One pound of grassfed liver costs me about $4 and will stuff about 32 jalapenos... that's 64 individual poppers!

As you can see in the picture, I tried a couple with cream cheese and liver. This was a failure (on texture), and didn't add to the flavor. Go ahead and skip the cream cheese. Or make some with just liver and some with just cream cheese. But don't cross the streams.

When I first got this idea, I googled "jalapeno liver" and found a very similar recipe from Kelly the Kitchen Kop. If you're trying to sneak some liver over on unsuspecting family members, you might want to give hers a try. Personally, I don't like the sneaky food approach... Cowboy Rumaki is liver, straight up, no apologies.

Bacon is a high sodium food. Oh yes it is. I continue to eat some bacon, but I restrict myself to small amounts of the lowest sodium nitrite free bacon I can find. 4 poppers have about 240mg of sodium. That's an amount that sometimes works for me, sometimes not, depending on what else I've eaten that day.

Leeks & Chicken

2011-07-09T19:58:00.001-07:00

IMG_7719
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

Isn't this a lovely leek? Leeks are one of those vegetables that's awesome to grow in a home garden. They're expensive in the grocery store and when you grow them at home, you realize why. They don't actually require a lot of work, they just require time and patience... things in short supply on commercial farms. I think we started these leeks back in January, and only now are we getting some ready to harvest. However, with a little care, they are BEAUTIFUL. Clean, white, fresh and sweet.

Today I did something really simple with our leeks, a luscious dinner that took only 5 main ingredients and a sprinkle of whatever herbs you happen to have on hand.

Slow cooker leeks & chicken

2 Leeks, rinsed and thinly sliced
1 Chicken cut into parts, skin removed
1/2 Cup chicken stock
8 oz Fresh mushrooms, sliced
Butter or your cooking fat of choice

Fill the bottom of your slow cooker with the sliced leeks and add a pinch of whatever dried herbs you happen to have handy (I used sage & dill). Don't use a whole lot of herbs, you don't want to overwhelm the dish. Put the chicken parts over the top of the leeks and pour in the chicken stock. Cook for 1 hour on the high setting and then 4-5 hours on low.

When the chicken is done cooking, saute the mushrooms in the butter, until they are soft. Take the chicken out of the slow cooker and set aside. Pour all the leeks & cooking liquid from the slow cooker, into the saucepan with the mushrooms. Cook down until the leeks are falling apart and the sauce is starting to thicken. Serve the mushroom leek sauce over the chicken.

Circus stuff

2011-06-27T09:49:00.000-07:00

One thing this blog has really never covered is my fitness shenanigans. It's mostly a food/garden blog and that's OK for me. I know a lot of people have more of a food/fitness blog, but there's one big reason I don't think I can do that.

You see, my main form of fitness is playing circus. Yes, I sometimes go to a normal gym to help build strength and from time to time I go out for a jog or do a yoga DVD. But for the past two years my main form of "exercise" has been climbing up and down 20' of fabric hanging from a warehouse ceiling. Lately I've been also learning hand balancing and partner balancing and I'm planning to get into wire walking. It's awesome. It cured my post-partum depression. I've lost a little weight and gotten a LOT stronger.

And I've met some truly amazing, truly inspiring people of all ages from all walks of life.

But it's not something I talk about much. You see, I find it really hard to talk about circus training. It's not something you talk, it's something you do. There are no rep schemes, no cute abbreviations... in fact the terminology for many of the tricks varies from performer to performer, depending on where they trained. I can sometimes explain it to myself out loud, but it really doesn't make sense to other people who aren't doing the same thing all the time. It's like trying to talk about meditation, only with more bruises and burns to explain.

Anyway... just thought I'd throw that out there. I may actually try the impossible and talk about it from time to time. But for now, here's a video from my school's showcase. Sorry for my dirty feet.

Hamsters

2011-06-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

News item: I read this and my first thought was "Why on earth are the French growing corn?" Really, I'm trying to figure that out. It seems like a fundamentally bad idea, they're likely hurting not only the endangered hamsters (jeez, how do hamsters ever get endangered, they're little breeding factories), but also their own, highly respected, food culture.

North America may have an unfortunate addiction to corn farming, but at least corn has some fundamental connection to the earth and to food culture here. France? Really???

Grapes...

2011-06-07T13:35:00.001-07:00

Ah... the garden again. My leafy green love.

So this is what our grapes are looking like about now (well, a week ago), first the Concords:

And then the Flames:

Luscious aren't they? I'm so very much hoping we actually get a crop this year. Last year, by the time it came to harvest them, they looked like this:

Yup, they were DECIMATED by the birds and squirrels. Just gone. I think we ate a handful of individual grapes and that was it. The rest of it fed the urban wildlife. We were sad pandas about the whole thing. This year however, we have high hopes. We have a plastic hawk, we have mylar ribbons, we have plenty of hot pepper to dissuade the squirrels. Fingers crossed that some of those lovely baby grapes will actually become our food for once!

(Nevermind, the fact that we may also have a fungal disease of some sort. I'm trying to ignore that for now and stick with the power of hope. Hope and sulfur.)

And for a secondary harvest from these fruity beauties, we have grape leaves! I culled them from the trimmings this spring, and following the instructions at Mama’s Taverna blanched and froze them for later use. Now I just need to get up the energy to turn them into happy little dolmas.

Update and some changes

2011-06-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

First... I have been brewing a LONG overdue garden update. Long, long overdue. Things are busy growing and I even have a cache of photos, but just haven't got around to writing things up.

Second, I'm slowly making some other changes to my eating habits to support the low sodium thing. In short, I'm moving towards a Paleo/Primal eating style. Basically, I've found that when I eat any substantial amount of grains (particularly higher salt processed food, like bread or crackers) I find myself really struggling to stick to an appropriate amount of food. When I have bread I want more bread... and "more bread" usually has too much sodium to fit into my day. As a result, I've been ending up with lunches & dinners that look a lot like a friend of mine who's eating Paleo. A moderate portion of unprocessed meat, chicken or fish with a fairly hefty side of veggies, all of it containing some fats to prevent me from being overly hungry. And a piece of fruit, because fruit is yummy.

I'm not terribly into the idea of being all dogmatic about it. If you google Paleo or Primal you'll get many people who are fairly extremist. I'm just working with the idea because it looks like it might be a good way to sort out the sodium thing without dealing with a lot of stress and cravings. As of right now, I'm just focusing on the grains issue, and doing some studying about vegetable oils. At the moment I don't picture a future where I'll be giving up beans or yogurt, just moving the bulk of my eating in that direction.

A couple of articles from bloggers I've found helpful and interesting:
Archevore: Get Started
Hunt Gather Love: Start Here and Paleo Priority Diet

Low sodium in Vegas

2011-05-23T13:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been lagging a bit on updates, we've been very busy. A couple weekends ago we were in Vegas for a friend's wedding, and after that I got very sick with my usual Vegas ick. Damn smokers. (OK, it may have been half secondhand cigarette smoke and half my epic cocktail intake, but I'm blaming it on the ciggys.) I thought I'd do a brief write up on how I managed to stay with a reasonably low-ish sodium diet while in Sin City.

Breakfast: I packed a bag of low sodium granola. When I got my morning coffee, I picked up a small glass of milk and used about 1/2 cup with my granola. <100mg. This was my secret... if you start out your day SUPER low, you have a lot more leeway.

Lunch: Every day I had a large vegetable salad with some chicken or salmon. I asked the server to leave off any glazes or sauces, anysalad ingredients that I thought might have come from a food service can (beans, corn, water chestnuts) and all nuts (in case they were salted). Either a very small amount of dressing on the side, or liberal amounts of olive oil & balsalmic vinegar. The sodium level probably varied a lot based on the type of meat and whether it was brined or marinated, but I'm guessing the salads generally clocked in <300mg, or not much more.

Snacks: I packed my own, homemade ZERO sodium trail mix. Beyond that I did not snack at all. While I was drinking, I avoided sugary mixers and super sweet cocktails that would make me more prone to snack on other people's munchies & appetizers. I stuck to rum & diet coke and gin & tonics. Not harmless, but at least reasonably low sodium.

Dinner: Coming into dinner time, I was probably <500mg, counting breakfast, lunch and cocktail mixers. So for dinner, I ate what I wanted, just intentionally avoiding obvious sodium bombs like soy based sauces or items described as "salt crusted". If I even went up to 1000mg for dinner, I still was at a reasonable level overall.

Low sodium product review: Vital Choice canned salmon

2011-05-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

I have made no bones about my love for salmon cakes. At this point I've done 4 or 5 variations on that basic recipe, it's a weeknight staple. My husband loves it, my kiddo loves it, and it's made with handy, dandy shelf stable canned salmon. Which makes it a great fallback when I can't get to the grocery store.

But wait... canned salmon? Isn't there a lot of sodium in canned salmon? Yes, yes there is, 306mg of sodium for a 3oz serving. Not good. However, there is an alternative. Vital Choice offers no salt added "traditional pack" canned sockeye salmon, with a mere 64mg of sodium for a 3oz serving. (Their serving size is a bit odd, so I did the math for you. Their standard "traditional pack" salmon is comparable to the nutritiondata numbers.)

But here's the key: how does it taste? It tastes EXACTLY like the full sodium version. Last year, I ordered a box of their standard variety to keep in our pantry, and the Vital Choice was clearly a taste winner over the canned wild salmon at our local grocery store. The no salt added variety shares that same rich, fatty sockeye flavor... which beats the pants off of farmed atlantic salmon (even fresh farmed salmon). And in every other way, it tastes absolutely identical to the full sodium variety.

If you order a 24 can pack you get free shipping, which makes the cost is equal to the price at my local grocery store. Full flavor, low sodium and the same price? No brainer!

Fruity Custard Pops

2011-05-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

This post goes out to everyone with a teething toddler. My 3 year old is finally getting his last set of molars (he's been late with all his teeth), and you parents know what teething does to a kid. Their poor mouths hurt a lot, which means they don't want to eat much. The combination of pain, hunger and blood sugar swings makes them into cranky little beasts. Can't say I blame them, I'd be pretty miserable too.

I discovered the original recipe for these custard pops about a year ago and they were a big favorite last summer. I've tweaked the recipe more and more and eventually I just had to write down my variation. They're pretty tasty, teething or not... but they're a godsend when you have a sick or teething toddler who won't eat much proper nourishing food. If you're making them for a child who's not eating much, be sure to make them with full fat milk and yogurt.

Fruity Custard Pops

1 cup milk
2 eggs
1 tablespoon honey, maple syrup or sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 banana (on the brown side)
1/2 cup plain or vanilla yogurt
1/2 cup fruit puree (applesauce, freshly pureed berries or soft stone fruit... strawberries and peaches go well) or 1 jar fruit baby food

Put the milk and eggs in a small saucepan over medium low heat. Whisk regularly as it warms up, once it starts to get slightly steamy add the sweet stuff & the vanilla. After that whisk continuously until it starts to thicken. (Food safety note: I've checked with a candy thermometer, the point where it starts to thicken is around 165 degrees, which is the safe point for cooked eggs.) As soon as it starts to bubble, take it off the heat and pour into your blender. Add the banana, yogurt and other pureed fruit. Blend thoroughly until there are no more banana chunks. If it's very frothy, let it sit for a bit before filling molds. Fill your ice pop molds to about 1/4" below the top of the mold, put the sticks in and pop in the freezer until frozen. Makes 8-12 ice pops.

A few words about ice pop molds: I see these fancy, expensive instant ice pop molds are all the rage. I'm not impressed. To be honest, I'm lazy. I would rather make 8-12 healthy ice pops in one fell swoop and have them sitting in my freezer than mess around with fixing up a fresh pop every time a whining child asks for one.

However, I also don't recommend going with the cheapest ones you can find in the Summer section at your local discount store. When you try to pull the pop out of the mold, you'll often find that the stick pops right out. Cue sobbing toddler. The ones we use most are Tovolo molds, we have the ones that look like ice cream cones and some of the normal ones. They're a little more expensive, but they're sturdy and frustration free. We also sometimes use the Kinderville silicone molds, however those are a little tough for little hands to manage squeezing the pop up without squeezing it out and onto the floor. The Kinderville ones are nearly drip proof though, which is nice.

Tropical Cod with Mango Relish

2011-05-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

This recipe kind of came together over a few meals. First I did the relish just scrounging things that were about to go bad in the fridge... it was so tasty, I've made it a few times since over broiled fish. But frankly, the fish was a wee bit bland, so today I got the idea to do a coconut crust... oh man it's tasty! And so easy!

As is it serves 2-3, but obviously if you doubled it to serve 6 you'd use up the whole avocado & mango. It comes to about 100mg sodium per serving.

Tropical Cod with Mango Relish

1/2 of a medium mango
1/2 of an avocado
1/2 tablespoon minced red onion
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice

3/4-1 pound cod or another mild white fish
1 whole egg
1/2 cup shredded dried coconut (unsweetened)
Coconut oil for frying

Cut the mango and avocado into roughly 1/4" chunks. Mix them with the red onion, cilantro and lime juice. Set aside so the flavors can meld.

Heat a small amount of oil to a medium high heat. Divide the cod into a reasonable size pieces. Whip up the egg with a fork and spread the shredded coconut on a small plate. Dip the cod first into the egg and then coat on both sides with the coconut. Fry the fish on both sides until lightly browned and the fish flakes in the middle. Serve with the mango relish over the top.

Low sodium bento

2011-05-02T07:40:00.001-07:00

Bento 5/2/11
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

I've been doing lunch bento boxes for maybe 6-8 months now. Not all the time, and they're not always photo-worthy. But this week's quasi-Italian bento turned out fairly well.

Included:
Red pepper & smoked zucchini salad: 10-20mg sodium
Low sodium meatballs: 100mg
Fresh mozzarella (2oz): 90mg
Low sodium pasta sauce: 15mg

No recipes yet, the meatballs are going to need quite a bit of tweaking before I'm satisfied with them. I used to use the South Beach greek meatballs recipe (as illustrated by Kalyn's Kitchen), but of course, that quantity of feta is out of the question these days.

Early easter lamb

2011-04-23T18:58:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the lovely greek style infused olive oil I made yesterday, I decided on a whim to make my first attempt at cooking lamb. It's one meat that I've actually never eaten, but I know it's traditional for greek cooking, and they had it at a halfway decent price. Remarkably, it came out very good, even though it's also the first time I've roasted meat without a salt rub. Here's a rough recipe.

Greek lamb with cherry sauce

1 pound lamb shoulder fillets
2 tablespoons lemon oregano infused olive oil
A handful dried oregano
Pepper
1/8 cup dried cherries
2 ice cubes of real chicken broth (maybe 1/4 cup?)
Balsalmic vinegar

Rub the lamb liberally with infused olive oil. Sprinkle freshly crushed oregano on both sides and then lightly sprinkle with pepper. Let sit for 1 hour. Soak cherries in about 1/4 of hot water.

Heat the oven to 350. Rub a cast iron pan with a light coating of olive oil. Pop it in the oven for 30 minutes. (I roasted some potatoes at the same time.) When the lamb seems done, remove from pan and allow to sit for 8-10 minutes before slicing. In the meantime, put the cast iron pan on the stove, add the broth, cherries and soaking liquid. Bring to a simmer and add a few glugs of balsalmic vinegar. Cook down to a thick sauce and serve over slices of lamb.

If you use low sodium chicken broth (I make my own from chicken bones), a 3oz portion of the lamb with 1/4 of the sauce should come out to about 85mg of sodium.

I'd show you a picture, but we sort of ate it all! ;-)

Oregano

2011-04-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

When we first planted our herb garden, I found a little potted greek oregano at our local indie nursery. It was astonishingly fragrant and I figured a greek variety might do well in our mediterranean climate. Little did I know.

That first year the mint moth caterpillars got to it. I had to hack the entire plant down to the ground and it didn't put out too much in the way of foliage. Year two, I went on the offensive, when I first noticed the moths I cut it way back and applied BT. The plant thrived. We used a bunch for fresh cooking and in early fall I cut the plant back and got 1/2 pint jar full of dried leaves. That was last fall.

This winter/spring the plant went WILD. In February I cut it back and got another 1/2 pint full of dried leaves. Now, the mint moths are on the loose, so it's time to cut it back again.... This morning I trimmed them back and got this:

Yes, that's a standard full sized colander! Holy cow... I have every expectation that I'll harvest that much again in both July and October now that the plant is established. Seriously, I'm going to be giving it away, take my oregano please! And it's the most intense oregano you've ever smelled or tasted.

Since I'm going to have dried oregano coming out of my ears one way or the other, I decided to use a little of it (like 1/3 cup chopped) to make an infused olive oil. We also had some fresh lemons from a neighbor, so I used the zest from those as well. Doesn't look that pretty, but I have a feeling it's going to taste completely amazing.

(Yes, I'm aware that there's some small chance that infused oils can harbor botulism. But the risk is primaraly from root herbs like garlic, not from leafy ones like oregano. I'll probably refrigerate it after a few days anyway, just to be safe.)

Random update...

2011-04-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

This week I've started seriously tracking grams of sodium. It took me a few weeks of just looking at labels and trying to figure out where it was hiding before I could really take the bull by the horns.

I've realized some interesting things. Breads have a lot of sodium, honestly I was sketched out by white bread before, this sodium thing is probably going to put me over the edge to eliminating all bread. Plain, uncured meats aren't nearly as sodium filled as I thought, but no matter how much you rinse it, a brined chicken retains a LOT of sodium. There have been some good discoveries though. Corn tortillas have a miniscule fraction of the sodium in flour tortillas. And fresh mozzarella has far less sodium than other cheeses, and can even be used to stretch a little bit of high sodium cheese in gratins, casseroles or quesadillas.

I don't talk about my work too much here, but I got sucked into a project that is actually relevant. I work in health behavior research, mostly on drug abuse issues. But because of my technical skills in survey development, I've been recently working on some nutrition research for a diabetes project. As part of this project, I've been hunkered down with the nutritional information for several fast food & chain restaurants. Sodium is not the focus of the research, but I've been scanning that part of the menu for my own interest. HOLY COW there is a LOT of sodium in restaurant foods. I knew that in the back of my mind, but looking closely at the numbers, it's astonishing. Right now I have a target sodium intake of 1200mg, many items on the Denny's menu are DOUBLE that amount. Even some of the items on the children & seniors menus have OVER 1000mg of sodium, just for ONE meal of the day!!! That is astonishing! Fundamentally, I don't want to restrict my son's sodium intake because he's healthy and active and growing well... but I also don't want to feed him junk that's been artificially pumped up with WAY more sodium than he needs. At McDonald's a basic 6 piece Chicken McNugget Happy Meal with the fries & ketchup has 870mg! The chocolate chip pancake kids meal at Dennys has a whopping 1160mg of sodium! That's crazy.

The wonderful world of sodium

2011-04-14T18:26:00.000-07:00

1/2 cup of our standard issue bottled pasta sauce = 410g of sodium.
1/2 cup of very low sodium pasta sauce + 1oz of creamy goat cheese = 165g of sodium.

I'll let you guess which one is tastier.

Sodium and a nice new garden...

2011-04-12T14:28:00.001-07:00

I've slowly been working my way through figuring out how much sodium is in things. Wow. This has not been easy for me, and there have been some big surprises. White bread (and related products like bagels) have a surprisingly large amount of sodium. You would think potato chips have a lot of sodium right? Well they do. But a one ounce serving of pretzels has DOUBLE the sodium of a one ounce serving of potato chips! (And who eats an ounce of either? I try, but fail!) I thought I knew a decent amount about food, but some of these numbers are really astonishing to me. Sodium has always just whizzed by under my radar.

It's really interesting too that I had the first of the severe vertigo attacks a few months after having my son when I had no energy to fix food. We were living on cold cuts, sausages, snack food and take-out salads & rotisserie chicken. Crazy huge amounts of sodium. But since I've always had low blood pressure, I never worried one whit about it until now.

A few of the basic changes I'm contemplating. I need to do this a little at a time and really make it STICK.
1. Far less bread. White bread is worse, but even the whole wheat bread packs a pretty major sodium punch. I should probably just get in the habit of cutting it out completely.
2. I need to switch my snacking to nuts and fruit, rather than salty snacks. One serving of something salty isn't bad, but I tend to overeat salty things and 2-3 servings can pack in a LOT of sodium.
3. Beans will now be prepared from dry, rather than canned. It's not too hard to do, I'm often just lazy about it. That needs to change. Especially in the summertime when we eat a lot of bean salads with our BBQ.
4. Meats... I'm going to need some help from my husband on this one, but I think I may be able to really cut back the sodium in the meats I eat. First, I found some well reviewed salt-free sausage seasoning mixes, and I'm going to use some ground meat to make a bulk sausage substitute for breakfasts & pasta sauces. Hmmm... I wonder if I can call my local meat market and have them grind me some good pork? They're usually super accomidating. Secondly, my husband just got a wonderful new smoker and he's been doing a lot of grilling. If I can work with him on a salt-free or low salt rub, then he can smoke me some meats and I can slice it up to make my own cold cuts, rather than the ultra processed ones from the market.

Things that will not change: Cheese. I'm sorry, but I just can't do it. I'd rather just eat a small amount of good cheese every day than give up cheese or search out low sodium varieties. Cheese is awesome.

In much, much happier news... a friend of mine wants me to help her start a food garden! She has a self-professed "brown thumb," but her 3 year old daughter has been asking about planting some vegetables. She was admiring our raised beds this weekend, and I offered to help her start a small garden that she could actually manage. I need to sit down with her and talk prices, but I'm thinking either self watering planters, or tapping a drip system into her existing lawn irrigation. Then we were talking about planting at least carrots & zucchini (both family favorites) as well as maybe some cherry tomatoes. Her daughter won't eat tomatoes, but mama loves them and we both think the little one might be more interested in trying ones from her own personal garden. I'm super excited to help them get started!

Well this is a depressing post

2011-04-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

So, I'm probably going to have to take the recipes I post here in a slightly different direction. And the reason is not a good one. I have been diagnosed with probable Meniere's disease. It's "probable" mostly because my doctor doesn't want to burn through my health insurance doing a bunch of expensive tests that wouldn't change my treatment plan. My symptoms are pretty textbook. Those tests will probably get done over the next year or two, but for now, we're proceeding as if I have it.

The primary treatment for early Meniere's disease is a low sodium diet (and meds for symptoms). From what I understand at this point, it's thought to help regulate the amount of fluid retained in the inner ear. Some people take diuretics, but I have really low blood pressure already, so that's not a good idea. Later on, when I've lost considerable hearing, there are some more drastic treatments, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Given the pace of medical changes these days, it could be a whole new bridge in 10-15 years. In the meantime, I'm going to do my best to stick to the dietary changes and hope it helps.

Now here's the thing. I love me some salt. Soy sauce? Cheese? Bacon? Sausage? Nuts? Pretzels? Dark chocolate covered pretzels? PASS THEM MY WAY! And it's been the one thing that I don't even consider in my cooking. Canned veggies? No problem. Feta cheese? No problem. Out of real chicken broth? Grab a can. This is going to have to change. A lot of the recipes I post here can be made relatively lower sodium... but many of the things we eat on a daily basis are more of a problem. I might make a nice roast chicken one day, but then the next we're having sausage sandwiches or ordering thai food. And I don't even want to think about the amount of salt that's thrown around when my husband barbecues some ribs or a nice tri-tip.

I think the key points to my cooking/eating are going to stay the same. I mean, if I was super reliant on boxed mac & cheese or casseroles with canned soup, I'd be in more trouble. Fresh seasonal fruits & veggies from my garden don't have excessive salt. Wild fish, pastured chicken & grassfed beef can be prepared with lower salt methods. I may even look into learning to make sausage so I can make it lower in sodium (stored in the freezer for safety.) But yeah, there are going to be some changes.

Spring salmon cakes with snow peas

2011-03-25T19:30:00.001-07:00

IMG_7485
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

Don't these salmon cakes look yummy? It's an adaptation of the salmon cake recipe I've used before, replacing the red bell pepper with minced parsley & chives, and using a wee bit of mustard for extra flavor.

The dressing is a garlicky buttermilk dressing, that I came up with mixing and matching recipes. It is a little thin, but full of flavor and with no weird ingredients.

Garlicky Buttermilk Dressing

1/2 cup cultured buttermilk
1/2 cup full fat greek yogurt
1 large or 2 small cloves of garlic minced
1/8-1/4 cup minced herbs (whatever you've got)
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp white pepper

Blend thoroughly and enjoy.

Raised beds

2011-03-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

I realized that if I'm going to be posting pictures of our garden, I should give a little history of how it got to be a booty kicking, food producing powerhouse. You see, when we bought our house, the backyard was just a flat stretch of weedy grass with a flat concrete patio. And by "flat" I don't actually mean flat, I mean very gently graded down towards our house, so that when it rained heavily, water poured down from the back of the yard, across the lawn and piled up near the house instead of absorbing into the soil. Basically, the yard was flat, boring and had drainage problems.

About a year after we moved in, we set about changing that. Now to be perfectly honest, I didn't do very much of the work. I had a toddler to deal with and was still suffering the after effects of post-partum depression & exhaustion. The design of the irrigation system was all my husband's doing, and a lot of the heavy labor was shared with his best friend, who had just gone through a rough break-up and needed some outdoor therapy. I can't speak to how economical the whole thing was because, frankly, my husband has a tendency to spend first and ask questions later. But man... the irrigation system in particular was SO worth it. Where we live, we get VERY hot, dry summers and having an automatic drip system makes it tremendously easy to get great veggie yields with little wasted water.

Anyway, here's a before picture...

The sod cutter made short work of the scroungy grass...

After removing the sod, there was a lot of digging and work on the irrigation system. Previously the yard had a 2 zone sprinkler system for the "lawn". He pretty much wiped out the entire zone for that side of the yard and tapped it for the irrigation to the raised beds. He ran PVC pipe under the area where we were putting the beds in, and then ran a pipe up the side of each of the beds with a faucet on it. That way we can turn water on or off to each bed individually. So for instance, when the grapes have all been eaten (by the birds & squirrels more than us), we can turn off the water to the bed that houses the grapes and keep the water flowing to the other beds. We then use a female hose coupling to attach the 1/2" irrigation tubing onto the faucets, and then design the remainder of the drip system to suit each bed. We can reconfigure the system as needed to fit the plant layout, although I'm trying to standardize that a bit so we don't have to keep reworking it all the time.

This picture shows the beds up & filled with soil, and the faucets for the drip system in place.

Garden time!

2011-03-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

OK... time for a planting & photo update around the ol' urban homestead.

First of all, SNOW!!! We live in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, so snow is not a regular occurrance around these parts. I think we had a little hail a couple of years ago. But this year, a freak storm brought us snow. Or rather something sorta like snow. It was chunkier than snow, but softer than hail; technically, I guess it was something called graupel. But I'm going to call it snow! Here's snow in our herb garden... again, probably not astonishing to most people, but around here, it was BIG news.

In other news, today I went ahead and started planting for summer. First up, beans. We had limited success with dried beans last year, but mostly because the Little One turned off the water to the bed, and I didn't notice it until the plants were yellowing. And of course, it was when they were mid flowering, so it limited our yield quite a bit. We still had enough for a pot of baked beans, but I'm hoping for more this year. I also started beet seeds around the edge of the beans, and then started a couple Japanese vegetables (shiso and shishito peppers) in pots. I've been making a lot of bentos for lunch lately, so I wanted to add some of my favorite Japanese flavors to our garden.

Not planted, but still to come: tomatoes, eggplant and more peppers. Last year was a disaster for tomatoes. One of them had an undiagnosed virus, failed to grow beyond a seedling and infected 2 of the 3 other plants. So we ended up with one brandywine plant that produced two, count 'em TWO humongous tomatoes. They were super tasty and astonishing in size... but not very useful from the standpoint of getting food on the table every night. Eggplants have been our big winners for a few years running now. I plant a chinese variety called ping tung long and they put out and put out and put out. I'm talking 15-30 eggplant per plant stretched from July through until October. I buy them as small plants with no argument over the price because the yields make them worth every cent. Especially when compared to supermarket prices.

Being as we live in California though... I'm not just thinking about summer planting, we have veggies in the ground right now. Mainly kale, turnips & beets. I harvested a HUGE pile of turnip greens when it snowed because the tops were getting damaged by the ice. But now, they've fully bounced back, as you can see in the second picture, and I've got another pile of greens to cook up AND I have to figure out what I want to do with the roots. Hmmm... I haven't really cooked turnips much before... maybe pickled or roasted?

And then there's the beets... mmmm... I love beets! I'm so excited for them to start getting big enough to nom on.

I'll leave you with some instructions on raking from the Little One. Yes, his arms are covered with temp tattoos... don't judge, it's my low clutter solution for potty prizes.

Meal planning raises it's head yet again

2011-03-08T12:23:00.000-08:00

We are busy, busy bees around our house right now. The Bearded One is busy preparing for a belt test in his martial arts class, and I'm busy preparing an act for an amateur circus showcase! So of course, we're living on take-out, fast food & pizza delivery, right? WRONG!

You see, I'm obsessed with meal planning. It's the secret to eating well. It allows me to plan out even a month in advance, with grocery lists at the ready. And that means we can have real, homemade food on the table, every night for dinner. In my book, that's family togetherness, right there.

So, yup, we get busy, I get planning. I'm currently trying to work out a meal plan from now until mid-April to have us covered. Right now, I'm only two weeks ahead, but by the end of this week, I should have the next month and a half of meals and grocery lists in place. Yipiee!

Tonight: Chicken breasts with mushrooms & sundried tomatoes.
Wednesday: Thai beef stir-fry.
Thursday: Salmon patties with roasted brussels sprouts.
Friday: Beef & broccoli stir-fry.
Saturday: Dinner out (I'm hoping for our favorite Scottish pub, but maybe Mexican).
Sunday: Grandma's special mac & cheese.

Oh wow... I realized I haven't yet blogged about the most important addition to our food arsenal, The Bearded One's snazzy new smoker grill. More to come on that as he gets the hang of it.

Amazing lentil salad

2011-01-13T09:19:00.000-08:00

I just realized that I've never posted here the amazing lentil salad I often have for lunch. It's great because it's a sturdy salad that keeps well all week, I make a huge batch on Sunday and get 4 days of lunches out of it. So here it is:

Lentil & Kale Salad

(Yes, I know the idea sounds horrible, but it's actually quite good, so hang in there and give it a try.)

1 cup dry lentils
1 bunch kale
4oz fresh shiitake mushrooms
2 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tsp dried mustard
1/8 - 1/4 cup fresh herbs (whatever's in your garden, I tend to go with parsley, oregano & sage), measure them loose and then finely chop
1/2 - 1 tsp salt
Pepper to taste

Sort through the lentils and pick out any rocks, then put in a saucepan with 3 cups of water, bring to a boil and simmer over low heat for 20-25 minutes. You want them tender, but not falling apart. Drain them and set them aside to cool.

Wash the kale, remove the stems from and loosely chop it. Slice the mushrooms into thin slivers. In a large saucepan bring 1/4-1/3 cup of water to a boil, stuff all the kale into the saucepan, then throw the mushrooms in as well, cover it, and simmer for 3-5 minutes. No longer, you don't want to overcook the kale, it should still be bright green and tender.

Make the vinaigrette dressing by mixing the olive oil, vinegar, dried mustard, herbs salt & pepper. In a large bowl mix the lentils, kale & mushrooms, then top with the dressing and toss. Chill for 2-4 hours.

2011!

2011-01-03T09:48:00.000-08:00

Wow... it's a new year! And a new post from me (for once)!

I'm not going to get all "resolutionary" or anything, but here's what I'm thinking I'd like to do over the next year:

1. Post to this blog at LEAST twice a month (come on, that's not too hard).
2. Implement a long term plan to get my family eating more sustainably year round.
3. Stretch more often! Do some stretching, flexibility training or yoga at least 5 days a week... I know that sounds like a lot, but really, I can spare 10-15 minutes every day to do it.
4. FINALLY write up the damn cherpumple post, with the youtube videos and whatnot.

What I'm reading right now: Slate's Clean Plate series

What I'm knitting right now: Still finishing the Little One's christmas sweater.

What we're eating for dinner tonight: Chicken chili made with the leftovers picked off our NYE party roasted chicken.

Wicked

2010-11-05T21:49:00.000-07:00

My birthday is on Monday, and for my party this weekend, I'm cooking up something very, very wicked. A cherpumple!

Yeah, I know, it's terrible. For godssake, the thing has been featured on this is why you're fat! It's been described as a "stunt dessert" and the dessert equivalent of a turducken. As much as I'm all about healthy food... I also love making crazy "stunt" food. I've made a turducken twice before, and frankly, the cherpumple looks 1000 times easier. So I had to ramp up the difficulty a bit...

Instead of store bought pies, boxed mix and tubs of frosting, I'm doing it all from scratch. No corn syrup, no hydrogenated oils... just a pile of sugar, white flour, butter, eggs & cream cheese. Oh and a little bit of apples & pumpkin.

I'm really only making a semi-cherpumple, 2 layers (apple & pumpkin) because I'm a little worried about the stability of a 3 layer. Structural stability is my big concern overall... I'm using a sturdier pie crust than my mom's traditional recipe (the cream cheese pie crust from Mad Hungry again), using circles of parchment paper in the bottom of the pie pans and I'm arranging the apple pie to be fairly flat and stable.

For the cake, I've split a basic yellow cake recipe in half... the pumpkin pie will be in a standard yellow cake, while the apple pie will be in a spice cake. That took a bit of tricky math to split the dry ingredients, but at least the recipe called for an even number of eggs.

And I'm going to punk out on the frosting... I asked my mom to make her 7 minute icing. I'm a little concerned it will not be as stable as a cream cheese initially, but it does firm up into more of a merengue. My cream cheese frosting recipe is just too darn messy to make.

All of that and frankly... it's still way less work than a turducken. Deboning the birds was just a total pain.

Artichokes!

2010-11-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

We have artichokes!!! I planted them last spring in the bed of weeds adjoining our front porch. And then they all died. They died a horrible death. I thought they were gone for good because, well, the nursery sells them in late spring, early summer, so therefore they should grow throughout the summer, right? Apparently not in our area. They just die off in the crazy heat of the summer, only to start growing again once the winters get cool.

So like a phoenix out of the ashes... we have artichoke shoots! They're a good 18" high right now, and I'm excited because I've heard the plants can grow to a good 5' (as tall as I am). And SUPER excited because, well, I love artichokes! Best vegetable ever. I'll be so happy if we get enough cool nights this year to get a substantial crop. Artichokes need 250 hours <50 degrees in order to set fruit. These are planted in the coolest area of our lot, so I've got my fingers crossed.

I'm back... pop, pop, pop!

2010-10-12T11:52:00.000-07:00

I'm back and it's canning time!

Last year we had a bumper crop of jalapenos, so I tried making pickled jalapeno rings and jalapeno jelly. The jelly didn't go over so great (turned out fine, but we don't really eat that much sugary stuff around here), but the pickled jalapenos were a smash hit! A friend of ours, who's a connoisseur of all things hot and spicy, tasted one and exclaimed "WOW... these have terroir!" And they really do, I don't usually like taco bar pickled jalapenos, but these are quite tasty.

First things first, even if you're ultimately going to use another recipe, you'll want to check out the instructions from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. Rule #1 of canning, either read the Ball Blue Book, or NCHFP for the food you're planning to can. And do a quick review of the basics for hot water bath canning before you start.

That being said, I think their recipe is too fussy. I get firm pickled peppers without using pickling lime. I don't like using salt for a few reasons, partially it's healthier, but partially it's because these are often served alongside salty foods like nachos, carne asada and salsa and I think they're more refreshing unsalted.

Instead, I use a variation on this Pepper Fool recipe. It's pretty simple, herbs, peppers and vinegar. No need for anything fancy, full strength vinegar is acidic enough to take care of the Big Bad Botulism. I slice the jalapenos into rings, use sprigs of strong greek oregano straight from the garden, and double up the garlic. Terroir? Yeah, I think we've got that!

Today is actually my second round of jalapeno pickling this year... I did 5 half pints earlier in the season. Today I processed a full pound and a half (48 chiles) into 3 full pint jars! And believe it or not, we still have chiles on the plants!!! :-o What can I say? Chiles and eggplants just love our microclimate.

Jalapenos ready for slicing & pickling:

Canning set up, left side is my water bath canner, back right is a saucepan full of vinegar, front right is a saucepan of hot water for the lids:

Finished pints of peppers:

This little lady was pickled all by herself (like the oddities in science class). I didn't think such a modest girl would be comfortable mixing it up with the other hotties.

Update

2010-08-06T23:05:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted much. Things have been mega hectic around our home lately. We were off on vacation and then soon after we got back my husband's grandmother passed away, so we had to fly back east for the funeral.

I had a very important post I wanted to make for World Breastfeeding Week, but I'm still getting back on track with many other things, so it's going to have to wait another week or two.

Best smelling compost on the block

2010-07-14T23:21:00.001-07:00

IMG_6566
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

When we bought our house we inherited a completely overgrown rose bush/tree in a weed covered, overheated bed next to our patio. Every fall I've trimmed it back and every spring, my mom comes a few weeks before my son's birthday and mixes up her super special organic "rose cocktail" and it blooms bigger and bolder every year. This year it's just been insane... so far it's been blooming for 4 months straight. And I mean it has been B L O O M I N G!!! Every evening I'm out there deadheading 3, 4, 5, 6 flowers, and it seems like every time I trim it back, it comes back with more and more. Apparently the scraggly old bush just needed some love and care.

What does this have to do with my compost heap? Well, I'm not really one for potpourri, and it's not a particularly fragrant rose, so all the trimmings are going straight into the bin. The biomass of roses is probably equal to the amount of kitchen trimmings going into our compost. It sure keeps the compost heap smelling good though.

The joys of a kitchen scale

2010-07-13T19:39:00.001-07:00

IMG_6561
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

My kitchen scale is by far my favorite tool in the kitchen. I first got it to measure portion sizes, you know, figuring out what a 4oz piece of chicken really looks like, instead of going by restaurant portions. But it's oh so much more useful than that, especially for baking. Take the chicken pocket pies I made for dinner tonight.

When I went to the store on Sunday, I thought to myself "Oh, I have enough butter for the piecrust," then of course when I looked today, I had less butter than I thought. Poop. If you're new to baking, here's a tip. When you're cooking you can eyeball it, when you're baking, you need to measure properly or it will be a disaster. Thankfully, I had a substitute, I've been using coconut oil for pan frying lately (it's very stable at higher heats), and I knew that as a saturated fat, I could substitute it for a small amount of the butter in the pie crust. Time to pull out the trusty kitchen scale... 8 tablespoons butter should be 4oz, I had about 3.2oz, I just scooped some coconut oil in for the rest, and popped it in the food processor. Man, I LOVE making pie crust in the food processor, it's so much easier than by hand.

BTW: The pies in question were from the totally amazing cookbook Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys. There's only 4 in the picture because the others went in the freezer for the Bearded One's lunches. Beats the pants off a hot pocket, I'll tell you that much, they were pretty damn tasty.

July? Really?

2010-07-07T20:28:00.000-07:00

How is it July already? It sure doesn't feel like it! Here in Southern California the "June gloom" is still hanging around and it's cloudy half the day.

Our eggplants don't seem to care though, we've got eggplants coming out our ears. I need to make a big link-parking post for eggplant recipes, because I'm getting kind of bored with just roasting it with a little balsalmic vinegar. (I can't believe I'm saying that, the clouds must be getting into my head!) Is there any way to preserve eggplant without a pressure canner? I'm running out of room in the freezer, but canned eggplant doesn't sound all that great.

I got our chicken delivery schedule wrong this month, and they came today while I was at work. I am VERY proud to say that I got all three chickens prepped and one in the oven in less than the length of time it took for the Little One to watch one episode of Miffy the Bunny. (25 minutes?) That's pretty darn good, if you ask me.

A Month of Pastured Chickens...

2010-07-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

This post is mostly to wrap up links to this month's chicken adventure for Food Renegade's Fight Back Fridays, but also to take a moment to talk about what my adventure in sustainable meats has meant to my family, namely my husband. (Scroll down if you just want to read about the chickens.)

Now my husband eats badly. He'd be the first person to admit that to you. It's not that he eats the worst of the standard american diet, but there are a lot of potato chips, white bread & lunch meat and not much in the way of veggies. He's made some efforts to improve it in the last few years, but he doesn't seem to engage with his food in the same way I do. And frankly, it's easier to just go with the flow and eat prepackaged sandwiches than search out better quality food. So what does this have to do with chickens, wild salmon and grass fed beef? Apparently everything! You see, I pointed him to a recent study about the health risks of processed meats and it really seemed to get him thinking. As we've been talking about pastured chickens and grass fed beef, it's really seemed to click with him. And then I got it... meat makes sense to him. He can talk in a more sophisticated way about meat quality simply because he's thought more about meat than he's ever thought about veggies. Veggies are what sits on the side of the dish, meat is his main course (most of the time). So meat quality matters in his world, much more than it ever did in mine. That was a really new thing for me to realize about him.

OK.... onto the links:

Last of this month's birds

2010-06-30T16:04:00.000-07:00

I roasted the last of this month's chickens last night. This would be the one I divided into pieces and gave a garlic/olive oil marinade. Frankly, it was the least impressive bird of the month. The meat tasted nice and chicken-y, but beyond that it was nothing to write home about. The marinade was ho-hum and chicken pieces don't get the same kind of crisp skin as a roasted whole chicken. I think for next month I'm not going to bother with dividing up the bird, it's so much easier just to freeze it whole, and with vacuum sealing there's little risk of freezer burn over 3-4 weeks time.

Because of the Independence day holiday, I don't think we're getting next month's chickens until the 13th, so I'll probably pick up some grass fed beef for meatloaf this weekend. Next month, I'll probably repeat the same herb roasted chicken & 5 spice marinade for two of the birds, and scan through my cookbooks for some new ideas with the third bird. Chicken chili is on the menu again (great way to use up scraps), but I may keep a bunch of carcasses in the freezer for a couple months before I do broth again. The idea of a big ol' boiling stock pot in the middle of summer just sounds miserable.

In other sad news, I had to take out 3/4 of our tomato plants due to an unknown virus. I'm going to use the space to put in some winter (hard shell) squash, which fed us very well last year. And I might try to do some tomatoes in pots... though irrigating potted tomatoes is a nightmare around here. Mostly I'm just bummed. And really praying that whatever it is doesn't spread to the eggplants & chiles in the same bed (all part of the same botanical family and some of the virii can cross over). I can't quite figure out exactly which virus it is though, so I have no idea if they're at risk.

Fresh Produce

2010-06-24T15:33:00.001-07:00

IMG_6515
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

I'm really excited we're starting to get veggies from the garden! Last weekend I pulled out some chiles to make chicken chili. And today we have some eggplants as well, the striped ones are fairytale eggplants and they're meant to be harvested when they're young and tender. The longer one is an heirloom chinese eggplant.

Dinner tonight is going to be my husband's favorite salmon cake recipe, with anaheim chiles subbed for the bell peppers, and roasted eggplant on the side. My basic roasted vegetable recipe can be made with almost anything, it's as amazing with eggplant as it is with cauliflower.

Basic roasted veggies

Any quantity of fresh veggies, cut into chunks. Options include everything from bell peppers to cauliflower to root vegetables to squash. Mix and match according to your imagination and what you have available.
Olive oil
Salt & freshly cracked pepper

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Throw the veggies in a bowl and drizzle olive oil over the top. Toss thoroughly. Sprinkle with salt & pepper. Oil a roasting pan using either using a cooking spray, or coating it with a brush. Throw the veggies in the pan, roast for 30-45 minutes (depending on the size of the chunks and density of the veggies, large pieces of sweet potato will take longer than thin slices of zucchini). Vegetables should be starting to brown around the edges.

For mediterranean vegetables (like eggplant) sprinkle with some parmesan cheese halfway through roasting or deglaze with a tiny sprinkling of balsalmic vinegar at the end.

If you wanted more of an chinese feel (green beans anyone?), you could use peanut oil with a dash of sesame oil and add 5 spice powder along with the salt and pepper.

Links!

2010-06-23T14:22:00.000-07:00

The subject of finding great, healthy recipes online has come up a lot lately in chatting with people, so I figured I'd park a few links here so that I can direct folks to one spot (instead of re-typing up the same e-mail a whole bunch).

Two really awesome websites that I rely on for recipes are:
Eating Well magazine and
Kalyn's Kitchen.

Eating Well is a wonderful magazine and has great food photography (yum!), but let's face it, it's 100 times easier to search a website for recipe ideas than to flip through a stack of back issues! I love their quick, easy to understand "Nutrition Profile" for each recipe.

Kalyn's Kitchen is a South Beach Diet recipe blog. But unlike the recipes in the South Beach Diet books (which tend to be a little heavy for me), Kalyn's idea of good food is light and fresh. If you're scared of nuts & olive oil or think that beans have too many carbs, then her site is not for you. But if you love fresh veggies, beans, whole grains and fish (like I do) you'll love her recipes. Her way of eating suits me just fine and I'm always getting great ideas from her blog.

And as a side note: I have been positively obsessed with kale lately. I'm planting more in my garden because the plants just can't keep up. I've been making a really great lentil & kale salad (recipe to come next week), and a friend of mine has been serving a totally different amazing kale salad recipe at every BBQ and get together. I'll have to bug her for the recipe because it has even my husband wolfing down his greens like there's no tomorrow. But by far, the greatest kale recipe I've been making lately has been kale chips. Tons and tons of kale chips. Man they are INCREDIBLE! Instructions abound in the blog-o-sphere, but I'll point you in the direction of my friend Mo at Kinda Like a Chef.

Peach & pistachio salad

2010-06-14T21:23:00.001-07:00

IMG_6482
Originally uploaded by thatgirljj

Today, for Meatless Mondays, we had an awesome salad for dinner, with a side of stuffed mushrooms. The salad was a tweak of an idea I found online, the combo of pistachios & peaches just sounded luscious and I've been anxiously awaiting peaches so I can try it out. The Small One doesn't like lettuce, so I just served his portion without the lettuce, and he sucked it down and asked for more! Not bad.

Peach & Pistachio Salad
Serves 4

1 head of green leaf or butter lettuce
4 peaches
1 avocado
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons olive oil
Dash of salt
Pinch of pepper
1/2 cup unsalted, shelled pistachios, chopped
Basil, thinly sliced (optional)

Wash the lettuce and tear into edible sized pieces. Divide into 4 portions among the serving bowls. Slice the peaches and avocados into chunks, mix them together and divide among the bowls. Mix the lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. Spoon the dressing over the salad. Sprinkle with pistachios and garnish with basil. Enjoy!

5 spice roasted chicken, ginger coleslaw

2010-06-13T21:57:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm just going to call a spade, a spade here: This is a food blog. Any pretensions of mine that it was going to be anything else were foolish. I'm a foodie through and through and I can't try to write about things having to do with food without getting sidetracked by... OOOOO! FOOD! So yeah, I'm still probably going to tackle some other themes, but for now, I'm just going to settle in and post some recipes.

Today I roasted the second of our chickens. I'd popped this one in the freezer with a 5 spice marinade, pulled it out of the freezer Friday night and threw it in the oven this evening and it was thoroughly delicious. The wings especially were divine, tender with a nice crispy salty skin. As a side, we had my vegan ginger coleslaw. I'm not vegan (by a loooooong shot), but eggs don't agree with me, so I prefer to avoid things that are heavy on the mayo. However, this coleslaw is so amazing, it will win you over even if you're a die-hard traditionalist. I love bringing it to BBQs because people are always surprised by the big time flavor.

5 Spice Marinade

2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons sake (I have a cheap bottle I use just for cooking)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon 5 spice powder
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)

Mix all ingredients together. Makes enough to marinade one 3-5 pound chicken. Stuff the cavity of the chicken with chunks of onion before roasting. Roast in a 350 degree oven for an hour & 15 minutes, or until a meat thermometer reads 165 degrees. For an extra crispy skin, baste with a little peanut or sesame oil after 1 hour in the oven.

Ginger Colelsaw

1/4 cup tahini
Juice of two limes
2 teaspoon roasted sesame oil
~1 tablespoon fresh ginger, peeled and grated
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 cups finely chopped cabbage (about 1 bag)
3 medium carrots, grated

Put everything except the cabbage and carrots in the food processor and whizz it until it's a nice dressing-like consistency. Set aside about 1/2 cup of the cabbage, and dump the dressing into the remaining cabbage and carrots. Throw the 1/2 cup of reserved cabbage in the food processor and buzz a couple times, then throw in the bowl with everything else. (This is just an easy way to get all the extra dressing out of the bottom of the processor.) Toss well, let sit for at least 2 hours and enjoy.

If you don't have a ginger grater, just peel about 1" long chunk of ginger, and run it through the food processor before adding the other ingredients.

Chickenpalooza

2010-06-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

Our chickens came on Tuesday!

After watching and waiting most of the morning, they showed up USPS instead of UPS like I had expected. Which is good because our UPS guy usually comes way at the end of the day, and I would have had to go to plan B for dinner. I was really impressed at how well they were packed, not a huge amount of packing material, but everything was in a mylar bag and it was a good 30-40 degrees cooler inside the bag, and even colder in the cavity of the chickens; definitely withing food safety guidelines.

So the big deal is that the chickens from this particular farm are processed "buddhist style" which doesn't mean anything about buddhism, just that the feet and heads are still attached. My first order of business was to chop them off. I am NOT going to be facing down heads and feet every week of the month. That part wasn't as bad as I had thought, I need to get better aim with the cleaver, but a broiler/fryer is a pretty small chicken so it wasn't too hard to get through the bones.

Then I got one ready for the oven and prepared the other two for freezing. Frankly, this is where I kinda got stuck. I need to look up some better "once a month cooking" recipes for whole chickens, so I can put them together as meals and pop them in the freezer. According to the USDA, fresh raw chicken is only supposed to stay in a home fridge for 1-2 days (although, they were slaughtered on Monday and in my freezer by the end of Tuesday, so it's not like they were sitting around in a supermarket cold case with people picking at them). Anyway, I left one chicken whole with a basic soy sauce, sesame oil and 5 spice marinade, and the other I cut into pieces and covered with olive oil & garlic. Both went into vacuum bags (love 'em!) and then straight to the freezer.

The one I roasted I simply rubbed with salt, pepper and oregano, popped a whole onion in the cavity and threw in the oven for an hour & 15 minutes. Let me tell you people... it was AWESOME! I don't think I've ever had a chicken where the breast meat had so much flavor, usually breast is really bland. And I was really worried that the credit for my tender chicken rested more on the shoulders of Foster Farms than my own... but nope, this bird was tender & juicy. I think because it was a broiler/fryer which is a smaller, younger chicken. Overall, I was impressed. The price is only a little more than organic breast meat, I know the quality is better than factory farmed organic chicken and frankly, it just plain tasted good!

Thursday, I made stock with the bones... I had bones & gibblets from one supermarket chicken, and the carcasses from the chicken I roasted and the one I took apart into pieces. I had roasted the carcass that I had divide up, a trick from my mom to get more flavorful broth. Oh and I also had a bunch of mushroom stems that I'd been throwing in the freezer from cooking for the past few months. I'm a big fan of holding onto veggie scraps to throw in the stock pot. The stock was way easier, I sauteed the gibblets & mushrooms, threw everything in a BIG pot (my husband brews beer so we have some MEGA POTS), covered it with water and threw in 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar to extract some of the minerals from the bones. Then I let it sit for an hour, brought it to a simmer and let it go for the rest of the day. The tricky part was after I skimmed out the bones, I had to cool the broth quickly to avoid bacteria. Do you remember those little glass plates you grew gross stuff on in science class? Well fresh warm broth is full of all those same nutrients and the perfect temperature for nasties to grow. So you can't just pop your MEGA POT into the fridge and hope for the best, you have to bring the temperature down quickly, by putting it into smaller containers and putting those in an ice water bath and then in the fridge. It was awkward, especially since I was scrambling for containers, but it all got done. I now have broth for one batch of chicken soup, some stew for my lunches next week and a 4 cup container that I'm not sure what I'm going to do with. I also got a lot more meat picked off the bones, so hopefully by the end of the month I'll have enough chicken scraps in the freezer for chili. Lord knows, our jalapenos are already going great guns in the garden!

I would post pictures of the chickenpalooza, but I'm kinda uptight about safety when it comes to food borne pathogens. I'm not one of those people who's going to go back and forth between my camera and handling raw poultry! The broth making... well, I could have taken a picture, but all it would have shown is that my kitchen was a MESS that day!

How does it work?

2010-06-01T07:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I didn't finish up last month's series, the end of the month got very hectic in our household. I promise to spend a little bit of time this month wrapping up the loose ends.

This month, however, my theme is F-ing meal plans, how do they work? (If you have not seen the Insane Clown Posse video from which the 'F-ing magnets, how do they work?' meme comes from, go watch it now. Bring chocolate, you'll need it.)

I have no CSA chickens yet! They're coming next week because of the holiday. But here's what our week is looking like.

Tuesday - Chicken with pesto, cole slaw.
Wednesday - Pasta with artichoke sausage.
Thursday - Salmon cakes, with mixed veggies
Friday - Burgers on the grill
Saturday - Dinner out

Pictures to come.

Coming up...

2010-05-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

Just a little FYI about what I have planned coming up on this blog.

June - Meal planning part II: a month in the life, in which I tackle those CSA chickens.
July - Play month. The importance of getting outside and having some fun.
August - Boobies. The first week in August we're celebrating World Breastfeeding Week, and I'll follow up with an assortment of women's health and nutrition topics.

Step 2: The meat of the matter

2010-05-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

Now that you have your framework, it's time to actually plan meals for the week. I typically do my planning on Sunday morning, just because it's an easy time for me to get the shopping done. But whatever time works for you... you could even split the week in half and plan just a few days at a time. Once you have the framework though, the planning is pretty easy. Just follow your plan and write in dishes for each day of the week. I like to try a new recipe once or twice a week, but you can also stick with your old favorites. Don't stress yourself out over it, you did most of the hard work when you made your framework, you're just filling in slots here.

I typically just plan main dishes and then wing it on side dishes. Mostly I do veggies for sides, and I pick up a bunch of whatever is on sale, what sounds good to me, or in the summer, I just go with what's growing in the garden. If you get a CSA box on a regular basis, you don't have to look much farther for inspiration. But, here's one of my important shortcuts... keep a few boxes or bags of frozen veggies in your freezer. I usually have some microwavable basics, as well as some seasoned mixes (Trader Joes has some awesome veggie mixes). I know, processed food has a bad rap, but when it comes to the choice between getting some veggies on the table and not getting veggies on the table, I'd go with the microwave. I strongly believe that it's much better to get in the habit of regularly having a vegetable side dish than it is to stand on principal against processed food and end up skipping out on veggies completely. Especially if you have kids, get in the routine, set a good example, put the veggies on the table and get on with dinner.

Whoops... sorry, got on my soapbox for a minute there, back to meal planning. Feel free to plan out your side dishes if that works for you. There are times where I think it's a good idea, like if I'm making greek marinated grilled chicken, I'll make greek style green beans. Or if I'm roasting something, it's nice to do roasted root vegetables and baked potatoes as sides because then everything's in the oven and you don't have to bother with the stovetop.

Once you've got your week planned out, make your grocery list. I like to split the groceries into two trips a week, because I don't trust vegetables and meats to sit around in my fridge for 6 days. Be sure to double check your spice cabinet, buying doubles of spices gets expensive really quickly, but it's never nice to realize you're out of something in the middle of fixing dinner. And, of course, think a bit about what you're going to need for breakfasts and lunches and add that to your list. (I'll cover a bit more about how I handle lunch planning in a later post.)

And there you are, you have a plan, you have a list... get shopping. :-)

Meal planning: Where to start

2010-05-11T22:30:00.001-07:00

Now for the basics, how to plan your meals for the week. Step 1 is to make an outline. Your outline is your framework, you go back to it week after week, month after month. It's going to help you guide your planning. What does an outline look like?

Well my current one goes like this:
Sunday: Casserole, meatloaf, chili or stew.
Monday: Chicken
Tuesday: Meatball/sausage over pasta (or sandwich)
Wednesdays: Leftovers from Sunday
Thursday: Fish
Friday: My husband BBQs
Saturday: Dinner out

It's not set in stone. BBQ night and dinner out often get switched up, depending on our weekend plans. Your plan may be radically different... say you're vegetarian or have food sensitivities. Maybe you'll start with a theme (italian, japanese, comfort food) rather than basing your meal plan around a main ingredient. Consider trying Meatless Mondays. Think about your life, maybe you have a volunteer comitment on Tuesdays, date night on Fridays or your kid wants to have buddies over to watch football every Sunday. The key is to go with a framework that works for you.

Even if you don't really know much about cooking, it helps to start with a framework. Go with things like canned chili, peanut butter sandwiches, frozen burritos... but set aside one day a week to try and cook something from scratch. Preferably a weekend day, when you have some time to really learn. And slowly, as you learn to cook one week at a time, you can start to add new, home cooked, favorites into your weekly menu.

What's the point...

2010-05-08T13:59:00.000-07:00

So if I'm so gung-ho about meal planning, well then why am I blogging about it?

Well, for several months I've been trying to figure out if I want to join a local chicken CSA (community supported agriculture program). They've got truly free range chickens, humanely raised, and I hear they're pretty tasty too. My big drawback? Well, you get three whole chickens on your doorstep once a month and you gotta figure out what to do with them. Even though I know how to roast a whole chicken, the idea of dealing with a whole chicken every week is daunting. It's not like picking up a pack of boneless, skinless breasts. I've decided to go for it, but it shakes up my meal planning a bit, because I actually need to plan for how I'm going to cook a whole chicken and what I'm going to do with the leftovers.

While I'm at it, I decided to just go ahead and do a bulk order of some sustainably fished, low mercury, canned wild salmon and tuna. So if this works for us, it's going to swing my family's meat consumption dramatically away from industrial farmed animals. But it's going to require me to up my game on the meal planning front.

Some worthwhile articles:
CHOW: Tips for responsible carnivores
Which meat harms our planet the least?

Welcome!

2010-05-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

Hi there, and welcome to my new blog Fresh Habits. What is "Fresh Habits"? Well, it's intended as a place where I can share my practice of creating a healthy, happy, sustainable lifestyle one habit at a time. Each month, I'll pick a new theme, sometimes it will be habits I already do well, sometimes it will be things I know I need to work on.

And I'll probably post some recipes and random parenting & gardening stuff from time to time. Because everyone loves food, gardens and babies!

For the month of May, I'm picking meal planning as a theme. I know, I know... WAY boring. Who likes to sit down and plan meals and make grocery lists? Not me. But you know what I hate more than planning meals? The alternative. It goes like this:

Me: Honey, what do you want for dinner?
The Bearded One: I don't know? What's in the fridge.
The Small One: Mama, mama, lookit tower!!!
Me: Nothing. You want pasta or you want to order out? Oh honey, nice tower, but let's put the soup cans away!
The Bearded One: I'm sick of pasta, let's order out.
The Small One: Mama, mama, want my milk cup! And a cereal bar! And banana!
Me: Yes, yes honey, are you hungry? Mama's trying to find the take-out menus. Hmmm... jeez, I'm sick of all our take-out places. And sick of spending big money for crappy food.

You get the picture. I get really sick of the "I dunno, what do you want to eat" every night, and we don't eat well when everything is either frozen pizza, pasta or take-out... night after night. Meal planning is a great way to get good food on the table, faster and easier, regardless of your busy lifestyle.