Don't Kale My Vibe

During my vegan phase, I brought a kale salad to my parents' house for a family gathering. It was awful. No one ate it. I think they picked out the cucumbers, tomatoes and other salad fixings and rinsed off the dressing to eat it separately. I still haven't lived it down. Whenever we get together, I'm often mockingly asked if I'm bringing kale salad to the party. After that debacle, I started doing practice runs of all my recipes before I brought it anywhere and haven't tried making a kale salad since.

The other night I didn't feel like cooking and decided to give Whole Foods' salad bar a try. As I collected a hodgepodge of veggies into my cardboard container, I saw some "Garlicky Kale". I threw a few leaves into my box not expecting much of it. When I got home and tried everything I got, I was blown away by the kale and have been thinking about it since!

I found a mock recipe online and, to my delight, I had everything needed in my pantry.

Here's the recipe for Garlicky Kale:

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch of raw kale 
• 2 tbs of tahini
• 2 tbs apple cider vinegar or water
• 2 tbs lemon or lime juice
• 1.5 tbs soy sauce
• 4 tbs nutritional yeast
• 2-3 cloves of garlic

Instructions:
1. Wash, de-stem and dry the kale. Cut into bite-sized pieces.
2. Puree all the ingredients except the kale into a food processor or blender.
3. Pour the dressing over the kale and massage with your hands until all the pieces are coated.
4. Let sit in the fridge for an hour. You could eat right away, but the kale may be a little tough and chewy.

Now, this is a kale salad recipe that will be brought to the next party!

The original recipe can be found here. I made some slight modifications:
1) Increasing the amount of garlic and not mincing them. I just threw the whole, peeled cloves of garlic in the food processor,
2) Using a lime in lieu of a lemon because that's what I had on hand,
3) Reducing the amount of soy sauce, because I found it a little too salty, and
4) Omitting the sesame seeds.



Note from 1/26/2016: You actually don't have to de-stem the kale if you chop it up into small, manageable pieces. I've since stopped de-stemming kale in almost all my recipes!

Juicing

We have this work horse of a juicer. When we first got it, we made juices every Sunday. A few months ago we decided to try out a 3-day juice cleanse. I compiled a bunch of juice recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and we tried them out... well, we tried many of them out.

For the most part, the juices from our cleanse tasted pretty good, but I must admit, it was overall a pretty horrible experience. Juicing for breakfast and lunch was manageable, but things went downhill around dinner time. During dinner the first night, I got a terrible migraine - presumably from cutting so many calories in just a short amount of time. As I laid listlessly in bed with a pounding headache, Sean recommended I eat just a bite of a cookie to get my sugar levels up and so I did. Having that one bite of cookie made me feel like a new woman. My headache was gone. I was energetic and ready to make the next day's juices. But on the second night, our fatigue and hunger overwhelmed us and we gave up and went to get 5 Guys. We didn't make it to the third day...

If you're contemplating a juice cleanse, here are my major takeaways:

• You're gonna miss chewing. It's amazing how much I missed masticating. I had the distinct urge to just chomp my teeth as I sipped on my juice. It was an interesting experience.
• Doing a juice cleanse at home takes a lot of time and effort. On top of buying all of the veggies, you have to wash and cut it up because the mouth of the juicer isn't that big. Once the juice is made you have to strain it to take out the bits of of pulp. It took over an hour each night for the two of us to prepare the juices for the next day's breakfast and lunch. When we juice for fun, we normally skip the straining.
• It's nice to customize the juices in your cleanse to fit your own tastes.
• There's no comparison to the deliciousness of fresh juice.

If you decide to purchase a 3-day cleanse, many of those takeaways are moot except for the masticating. I'm sure you would still miss chewing! After the experience, we didn't really touch the juicer for a while... until this past weekend!

On a lark, we bought these funky looking berries from Whole Foods; they're sweet golden berries. Neither of us really liked the taste of them - they're tart and earthy - and so I didn't know what I was gonna do with them until I remembered our little ol' juicer. 

I made a pretty delicious juice with them yesterday using some other fruit we had on hand. Our juice contained:

• Sweet golden berries
• Plum
• Elephant heart plum
• Peach
• Watermelon
• Carrot

Even though our initial juicing experience wasn't the best, we plan on doing another one - with modifications. Juicing for breakfast and lunch was doable so we'll keep that. On our second go-round, we're going to  eat a very light vegan dinner. I'll tell you how it goes!

You're How Old?

I love reading how our eating habits are shaped by our culture. What can I say, it's the American Studies in me.

Earlier this summer I read The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People by Dan Buettner. Great beach reading right? I've been thinking about the book ever since and Buettner was the subject of a recent New York Times's piece. 

I found the book to be super interesting. Basically there are five "Blue Zones" in the world. A blue zone is defined as being home to the longest-living and healthiest people. They are:

• Okinawa, Japan
• Sardinia, Italy
• the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica
• Ikaria, Greece
• Loma Linda, California

Buettner takes his research on these blue zones and boils them down into simple habits that can be translated to an American lifestyle. He received grant money to implement pilot programs in cities and towns across the nation to see if these habits can work; and they did. Here are some basic principles from the book:

• Create communities - all of the zones have strong (often religious) communities and support networks from which residents can seek guidance and support during stressful times
• In the pilot program, residents were assigned to walking groups that met weekly to walk around the neighborhood. The walking groups were based on location and general interests. Many walking groups transformed into social networks where members brought a healthy side to share after the long walks.
• Make eating a more enjoyable experience and basically - eat less.
• In all of these communities, meals often lasted hours and were times when families would sit down together at the end of the day to catch up and eat. There was no tv, no eating alone or eating while reading, looking at the computer or anything else. 
• In blue zones, sweets and meat were saved for special occasions and eaten in moderation. It's hard to break the habit of a decadent dessert at the end of a meal, but it really does make a difference.
• Eat whole foods with an emphasis on plants.
• Eating meat in moderation can be perfectly healthy. Of the five zones, only one - the Loma Linda community in California - is strictly vegetarian. 
• The problem with the average American diet is that we eat way too much meat. Meat is a staple at every meal and our portions are large. The amount of meat many American consume in one meal is comparable to what a blue zone resident would eat in an entire week.
• Walking is the best form of exercise.
• Walking is your body's natural movement and it's far better for you than super strenuous exercise. Don't think that you need to be a marathon runner or extreme athlete to have a long, healthy life. You just need to keep your body moving in natural ways.
• Drinking isn't terrible!
• For the most part, consuming moderate amounts of alcohol - wine in particular - on a daily basis is good for you. Yay!

The book has definitely inspired me to incorporate more beans and lentils into my diet. When I was at my local MOM's, I stocked up on lentils, beans and TVP (textured veggie protein). I wasn't thinking and bought the kindle version so it's a little harder for me to flip through the pages in search for an especially tasty-looking recipe. I will do so soon and will share my results!

I highly recommend the book to those interested in healthy eating and living - get the paper & ink version though! 

A New Direction

It's been some time since I last posted, hasn't it?

Previously I devoted this blog to the various going-ons of my life. I enjoy the writing process and thinking up different topics to write about, but in the past year or so I've decided to be a little more discriminating in the information I share about my private life. Heck, they call it private life for a reason right? The blog will continue to have more personal elements but it will no longer be a hodge podge of my random musings. As I do like to share what I learn from books and personal experience, I plan to use this blog in a more focused manner.

In the past few years, I've really taken an interest in cooking and so this blog as a recipe-sharing tool for my friends. I spend a fair amount of time perusing the interwebz for good recipes, reading reviews and modifications. I hope that this blog serves as a useful tool for those who enjoy a good home-cooked meal but don't have the time to look up recipes from various websites.

I am by no means a food expert. I wouldn't even venture to call myself a connoisseur or a foodie. Consider this a collection of recipes so if you've made something amazing recently and want to share, please send them my way and I'll share it with our little community.