Out of Town/holiday meals

I'm heading up to visit family for the next few days. We will be taking care of a sick relative so it won't be very celebratory. I'll bring my own food. It will be simple stuff. I already had my holiday treats ("healthy" though rich) and really don't want anymore.

I made a big pot of beans, cooked up a bunch of veggies from the fridge (brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower), cut up some carrots & celery and bell peppers; and have bags of lettuce chopped bok choy. I'll pack the beans & veggies & some seeds into individual plastic containers for two meals a day. I'll pour the veggies & beans & seeds over the raw greens (lettuce & bok choy). I'll bring a pomegranate for the 3rd meal. The raw veggies (carrots, celery, bell peppers) will be for sides or if I'm hungry.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My new staples

Before I learned to eat healthy, my breakfast and lunch were actually pretty boring--the same thing every day: cereal for brekky, sandwich for lunch. Dinner was kind of boring too, some meat, some veggies, some pasta or potato. I have so much more variety now. But I'm starting to find some staples that are repeatable, with variation, every day. Maybe it's boring but it also saves time and energy and I like them. These staples are:

beans, greens and/or veggies, seeds. These beans, and these beans are good, because they have carrot or other veggie juice in them and that makes them sweet and flavorful. So they end up flavoring the other stuff too. Greens can be raw lettuce or other greens, bok choy (raw or cooked) or cooked greens (kale, collards, mustard, etc.). Veggies can be almost anything: chopped celery, cook brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, etc. Then ground flax or hemp seeds to make it creamy, or unground sunflower or pumpkin seeds for crunchiness. You can make something different every day with this combination.

salad: greens, seasonal fruit, seasonal raw veggies, edamame, sweet pea dressing or some other favorite. See the dressings label for a bunch of them. I usually develop a seasonal favorite salad that I repeat for a few weeks because I just like it.

fruit: whatever's in season, or frozen berries in the dead of winter. Right now it's pomegranates.

These three staples make up my three meals a day usually. At least that's been my habit the last few weeks. Lately the biggest meal, beans & veggies, has been my late brekky. Then a salad at dinner. Fruit in between. But sometimes the fruit meal will switch with brekky or dinner, depending on my schedule.

pumpkin pie pudding

It tastes just like pumpkin pie. So much so that it's almost too rich for me. But good for a treat.

Ingredients:

1 small pumpkin or one can of pumpkin

1/2 cup raw almonds, soaked

4-6 dates

pumpkin pie spice (cinnamon, nutmet, ginger, clove)

To cook the pumpkin (if not using canned), cut it in half, scrape the seeds and stringy stuff out, put upside down in a pan with about 1/2 inch water, cook for an hour at 375 or so.

Soaking or boiling the almonds briefly (blanching) makes their skins come off easily and they taste sweeter without the skins.

Remove the pits from the dates.

Blend everything in a blender.

What I've been cooking

I've been too busy to blog lately, sorry. I've been eating my usual meals, but I've also had a lot of opportunities lately to make "healthy" treats for various social events. I made up a pumpkin cream pie last Friday. Well, actually I just combined two different recipes, one for pumpkin pudding (from the Fuhrman recipe site), and a pie crust from a fruit tart recipe. The pie crust was a treat in itself, made with dates, nuts and ground oats. It was so sweet and delicious (and I couldn't stop eating it while preparing!). But the problem was it overwhelmed the more subtle pumpkin pudding, made from pumpkin, bananas, a peach, some almonds and some dates (and of course pumpkin pie spice). So I didn't post it because I didn't really consider it a success. My very polite guests said it was good but they were mostly enjoying the crust.

A few days ago, I made my own version of pumpkin pie pudding that did taste just like pumpkin pie. I love pumpkin pie, or so I thought. It's almost too rich and sweet for me now. I'm beginning to realize that pies are loaded with sweets and fats (duh), and if you make a "healthy" version, it's also probably loaded with sweets and fats, that is, if you are trying to make it taste like the version you remember. Pumpkins are kind of dull on their own, which is why you add all that sugar and fat to it. An easier way to get my Fall pumpkin pie spice flavor is to just make my mashed sweet potato with pumpkin pie spice.

Today I made a few things for a reception: an almond chocolate dip (for dipping strawberries, bananas, apples, carrots and celeries into), and a sweet potato apple bake. Here's a picture of the latter:

Both are from the Fuhrman recipe site. The almond chocolate dip has almonds, dates, vanilla, and cocoa powder. It is very rich. I tried not to eat too much because chocolate makes me jumpy. But it was hard to resist nibbling so I got jumpy, which is why I'm still awake at this time. It is very rich, and I feel full. I think my favorite treat of the whole week was the sweet potato apple bake. That just has sweet potatoes, apples, cranberries, raisins and orange juice baked in the oven. Simple, not too sweet, in fact, kind of tart with the cranberries, and not loaded with fat. Though I bet it would have tasted good with a few chopped walnuts. Someone else (Laurie) recommended cinnamon. That would have been good. I would definitely make this one again. All the other treats were too rich. I'm kind of surprised to hear myself say that!

This weekend I'll be away helping out with a sick relative so I'll just bring my own food from my staples list.

beet sauce for veggies

Ingredients:

1 large beet or 2 medium

1/2 leek or onion

1 Tbsp blueberry vinegar

Steam the beet and leek/onion in a pressure cooker (for 2 minutes) or on a stovetop pan for 20 minutes. Note: steam with your other veggies if you are cooking them too. Blend the beet, leek/onion, liquid from steaming, and vinegar in a blender. It makes a very pretty red sauce! And it's good too.

Nov. 18 & 19

This has been a busy week.

Yesterday for brekky I had a really good meal: steamed cabbage and brussels sprouts topped with lots of beans, some ground flax seeds, a few currants, and topped with sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I ate this after yoga (10:20 am).

Then I had a pomegranate during a lunchtime talk. This was a great way to sit through a talk (that I don't have to pay a lot of attention to).

Then I had a salad during a meeting at about 5:30 pm. I don't like eating during meetings that involve work on my part. But I didn't have much choice as I didn't have time to eat before the meeting.

Today for a very late brekky (11:30 am) I had beans over chopped salad, and then a pomegranate.

Dinner at 5 pm (before a 5:30 meeting, this time I did have time to eat but was perhaps a little rushed) was lots of steamed cabbage and brussels sprouts (steamed in the pressure cooker for 2 minutes) topped with beet sauce. yummy. and some raw carrots and cabbage. Then at 7 pm (after the meeting) I had an orange, an apple, and a few pecans (0.5 oz probably).

Nov. 17

I was out most of the day today, so brought brunch with me, and then ate an early dinner at home which was too rushed. It's hard to eat a salad fast.

Brunch was beans over steamed greens & leek with ground flax and hemp seeds, and sunflower seeds sprinkled on top (1 Tbsp each). This batch of beans is really good. I had a little leftover orange juice yesterday so threw that in the beans and it added a nice flavor! I steamed the veggies real quick in the pressure cooker this morning before leaving. Then heated it all up in the microwave later on. Let's see, I also had my daily pomegranate (sooo goood, and it takes about 30 minutes to eat it), and some carrots and kohlrabi. These 3 kohlrabis I got from the co-op are the best I've ever tasted, sweeter than the ones from my garden. Oh, I also had a little glass of blended blueberries/orange that I made last night and wasn't hungry for. I really wasn't hungry for it now either but I ate it.

Dinner was a salad, and an apple. Oh, in the salad I ate pineapple instead of apple because I stopped at the co-op and bought some fresh pineapple. That's hard for me to resist. And I had a carrot. I didn't like feeling rushed while eating. I think I overate a bit. I didn't need the apple after the salad.