Indian Summer Dinner

This is a guest post written by my stepmom...when she and my dad came to visit, we cooked (and ate) some delicious meals.  Here's a little sample of what happens in our house when guests come to town!

Menu

Baked organic whole chicken, with gravy made from the juices

Farmer's market salad greens with roasted glazed beets and sweet and spicy pecans

Roasted backyard cherry tomatoes with fresh basil

Brown rice (to go with the gravy)

Preparation for our meal began early in the day with a stroll through the Norwich farmer's market for  fresh vegetables and organic meat from the CSA.  Everyone seemed to be out basking in the final warm days of the year.  After a freshly grilled papusa and a few oatmeal raisin cookies, we were off to the food coop to complete our purchases.

I love to cook, but I infrequently share this activity with others- which made this meal especially enjoyable.  Ms. Melon's large kitchen is well equipped which made it easy for us to work together in our culinary composition.  Pleasant weather, fab food, and enjoyable company - what more do you need to fully experience an Indian Summer day?

Steffie Grow

4th of July Breakfast!

 

We started off our July 4th holiday with a lovely, sunny breakfast on the back porch.   It of course included the usual breakfast requisites: bacon, eggs, coffee, orange juice, toast.  But this holiday meal had a little something special.  Any guesses?  I'll give you a hint.  Those are no ordinary eggs.

Actually, the eggs themselves are quite ordinary.  But what's in them is divine.  The egg scramble we made is chock-full of local, organic produce from our summer CSA!  This one little serving has heaps of spinach, radishes, onion, fresh basil, and garlic scapes.  It tasted green and delicious.

I'll be posting more about our CSA adventures soon.  Stay tuned!

Days 11, 12, & 13 - A Big Blur

Well, we haven't exactly failed at the diet, but we haven't totally succeeded either. Our schedules have been so hectic for the past few days that we haven't had time to cook and have been relying on takeout. We've attempted to be as healthy as possible with it...maple turkey burgers with sweet potato fries instead of bacon cheeseburgers with regular fries, for example. But still. It's probably not what Martha would have wanted.

In terms of the restrictions, we gained dairy back on Thursday, eggs back on Friday, and soy back today so we're almost normal again, foodwise. This diet confirmed my single apparent food allergy (or intolerance, technically it's not an allergy according to my research). Eggs. I'm fine with eggs as ingredients in baked goods, even quiches and other dishes where eggs are the main focus. But give me a poached or boiled egg by itself and I will have a killer stomachache 2-4 hours later. This is not something I've dealt with my whole life, it developed over the past few years. And it sucks, because I love eggs! Over-easy, sunny-side up, scrambled, poached, hard-boiled, soft-boiled, on toast...you name it, if it's an egg I want to eat it. And now I can't. Lame.

But back to the big challenge. The one major thing we're still lacking (aside from processed food, which as Martha says we should probably just keep out of our diets for good) is caffeine. And it's a huge lack. Part of the reason our schedules have been so crazy for the past few days is because we can't rely on caffeine to tame them. Because you know how the experts always say things like, "everyone needs a different amount of sleep; you should find the number of hours that's right for you"? Well it turns out that if there's no caffeine in my life, the right number of hours for me is 9. Nine!

If that doesn't seem crazy to you, here are some quick calculations to show you why it is. Let's assume there are 24 hours in a day.

9 hours of sleep +

9 hours at work +

2 hours getting ready for work/traveling to and from work (we have a 20-minute commute) +

2 hours cooking dinner, eating dinner, doing dishes, sorting the mail, feeding the animals, etc.

= 22 hours

That leaves exactly two hours of free time in which to do fun things just because I like them. Oh, and to do my second job, and clean the house, and do homework (that one's for Matt), and do any other major chores that need doing. This is not ok! I can totally see why most people only sleep 6-7 hours and then drink a ton of coffee. If you can shave two hours off your sleeping time, that doubles the amount of time left for enjoying life! So, much as I've loved getting nine hours of sleep every night for the past week...I think tomorrow we'll be buying some coffee. Hold the sugar and half n' half but give me extra caffeine, please.

Days 9 & 10 - Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut

Today's menu:

• Whole-wheat toast with peanut butter and banana slices
• Sushi (veggie and fish only, no cream cheese or other fun ingredients, and no soy sauce)
• Carrots and hummus
• Thai beef salad

Tuesday we allowed ourselves to have peanuts again, which was not altogether exciting. Neither of us has a peanut allergy, but we also don't eat them as much as we eat, say, wheat or dairy. So it wasn't that big of a deal. We did incorporate peanuts into two meals though, just because we could.

Wednesday we ate almost the exact same thing as Tuesday (substituting leftover pasta from Monday instead of sushi for lunch). We were going to reintroduce eggs on Wednesday, but we were just too tired to cook anything. So we didn't.

However, there is nothing better left over than this Thai beef salad. It was amazing the first night we had it, and equally amazing the second. Plus, as a leftover, it was much faster to prepare! Our only complaint about this dish was how long it took us to make it. The prep work is almost all active: chopping, measuring, mixing, etc. Which means we couldn't just set one thing to cook and prep other things in the meantime. But the effort was totally worth it. This dish was truly fantastic.

Day 8 - Hello, Bread!

Today's menu:

• Whole-grain toast with almond butter and banana slices
• More fresh fruit with applesauce-sweetened tahini
• Carrots and hummus
• Whole-wheat rigatoni with spiced meat sauce and salad

Today we reintroduced wheat into our diet! Cooking is so much easier when you don't have to worry about gluten...bread, pasta, all the wonderfully easy-to-prepare foods are back in our pantry. And toast is just so much better on a freezing winter morning than smoothies.

We tried out this new pasta recipe (also from Martha) but modified it slightly. We used extra-lean ground beef and substituted fresh tomatoes for the tomato paste. It was really good! I'm not usually a huge fan of meat sauces or pasta dishes in general, but I loved this. The cinnamon in particular added a really nice flavor to the sauce. I would definitely make it again.

After eating wheat all day, neither of us noticed any changes that would signify a gluten allergy. I actually had more energy today than any day last week, although it's hard to say whether that's due to the wheat or the fact that I got 10 hours of sleep every night over the weekend. In any case, it's nice to know that we can happily continue including wheat and gluten-containing products in our diet in the future!

Day 7 - First Week Recap

No pictures today because all we did was eat leftovers from earlier in the week. It was nice to have a day without cooking, especially since we had to plan and prepare ourselves for week two! This coming week we'll be reintroducing the restricted foods into our diet one at a time. But first, a quick note about week one...

This whole challenge has indeed been a challenge, but a fun one. We've managed to maintain a diet that eliminated the most common food allergens, along with alcohol and caffeine, in order to give our systems a break. The food has been excellent, but what has it done for our health?

Well, it's hard to say. There were times this week when I felt much more energetic than usual, and I didn't have my typical 2pm need for coffee every day. However, given that there was no coffee to get me going in the morning, I found myself requiring a full 8 hours of sleep every night, which meant going to bed at 9:30 on the dot. And frankly I still felt kind of tired, like I would have done better with 9 hours. But there just isn't enough time in each day for me to spend 9 hours of it sleeping!

In other health areas, Matt experienced considerable improvement in his digestive issues (he suffers from bad acid reflux). I, on the other hand, found my IBS-like symptoms to be just as uncomfortable this week as any other. And we both felt hungry a lot. Which of course made it difficult to resist the junk food temptations that seemed to be waiting everywhere we went.

So overall, while I appreciate the value of this week's challenge as an exercise, it's not a diet I would want to be on permanently. Perhaps every so often to rejuvenate my body and remind myself of what healthy eating really means. But in general, I am more in favor of allowing treats in moderation than feeling constantly limited by dietary rules. Good to know...apparently I have a personal eating philosophy!

Day 6 - Weekends Mean More Time for Cooking

Today's menu:

• Ginger smoothies
• Hot water with lemon
• Quinoa salad with toasted almonds
• Guacamole with homemade potato chips
• Orange-and-ginger-glazed pork chops with mustard greens and baked acorn squash

We had friends visiting this weekend, and since they were stuck sharing our restricted diet with us for a day we decided to go all out and try to have the best detox food possible! We started the morning with some zingy smoothies, which were quite good although very gingery. Then we had some excellent, light and tasty quinoa salad for lunch. We substituted yellow squash for the zucchini called for in the recipe and it was quite a good meal.

For dinner, we went a little overboard. It started off with an appetizer of guacamole with homemade potato chips (to get around the no-corn and no-processed-food rules). In fact we had a guacamole-off with two types: Matt's favorite, from this recipe, and my favorite, which is just avocado, garlic, lime juice, and salt. We all agreed that Matt's was more flavorful but mine highlighted the avocado flavor better. Win-win!

Then we had a full meal of pork chops, mustard greens, and acorn squash (leftover from our CSA). None of these were official 28-day challenge recipes, but they all conveniently fit into the first week's restrictions. Well, except for the acorn squash. The recipe called for butter, but we just omitted it with no substitution and all though it was fine without it. Another meal to prove that eating healthy can still mean eating truly delicious food.