Day 5 - Good So Far

Today's menu:

• Half an avocado with salt, pepper, and lime juice
• Carrots and hummus
• Leftover cold soba-noodle salad from day 3
• Lemon-ginger tea
• A handful of grapes
• Honey glazed chicken, salad, and leftover lentils from day 2
• Another cashew cream smoothie

Today it seems like we've finally gotten into the swing of things. While we're still following the week 1 detox diet to the letter, by day 5 we've figured out how to do that and still manage to eat a normal day's worth of food. Hooray!

But for those of you who never clicked through the links to find out what this detox diet is all about, let me just give a quick recap of the foods we've been avoiding this week:

• Added sugar
• Processed foods and beverages
• Alcohol
• Caffeine
• Wheat gluten
• Eggs
• Dairy
• Peanut products
• Fruit juices (because they're usually high in sugar)
• Soy
• Corn
• Farm-raised fish and fish high in mercury

If that seems like a lot of food to cut out of your diet all at once...it is. But we have been successful for 5 straight days now and I feel pretty great. Knowing that an end is in sight helps a lot. Giving up chocolate for a week is doable. Giving it up forever is just not.

I also want to quickly say that our dinner menu tonight did not come from the 28-day Challenge recipes. The chicken recipe was one I found elsewhere (ok, still on the Martha Stewart website. The woman does everything!) that conveniently fit into the dietary restrictions. And it was amazing. Note to self: if you're oven-roasting chicken breasts, always use bone-in. They are so much more tender and juicy than boneless ones!

Day 3 - Lots of Cold Foods

Today's menu:

• Cold Soba-Noodle Salad with Chicken, Peppers, and Cucumber
• Carrots with hummus
• Leftover salmon and lentils from yesterday
• Leftover fruit with tahini dressing from yesterday
• Cashew Cream Smoothie

Three's a charm. This was the easiest day yet, except that I felt super hungry all day. It seemed like all I did was eat (small servings, but still). Matt also found that he had a lot more energy today than usual. Maybe there's something to this detox diet after all!

The highlight of today's dishes was the cashew cream smoothie. It is basically just cashews (ok, plus a little vanilla, ice, and agave nectar) but to our dairy-starved taste buds it was almost like eating ice cream! It helped that we poured them into cute glasses and ate/drank them while watching our restricted 30 minutes of TV....oh yes, a "media fast" is part of this 28-day challenge too.

In any case, I'm thrilled to have this new healthy, vegan ice cream substitute recipe for future use.

New Year, New Adventure

Today's menu:

• Almond Chicken Soup with Sweet Potatoes, Collards, and Garlic
• Carrots with hummus
• Fresh fruit
• Lots of ginger-lemon tea

Matt and I are trying out something totally different this year...the Martha Stewart Whole Living Action Plan: 28-Day Challenge. Yes, it is quite a mouthful and yes, I feel a little silly admitting that we are doing it. But somehow it just came together.

We were both feeling a little unhealthy after our holiday break indulgences and this seemed like a great opportunity to try and make some changes in our lives. Of course we always eat well, but that doesn't always translate to eating healthy foods.

This was our menu for Day 1 of the plan and I must say, it was pretty great. I thought I would feel hungry (no junk food), tired (no caffeine), and grumpy (no chocolate). Instead I felt fabulous all day. And this soup was pretty freaking amazing! We tripled the amount of garlic called for in the recipe and used mustard greens instead of collards because they were cheaper. This photo doesn't do it justice, except to show that it was so good I got halfway through the bowl before remembering to take a picture.

I'll keep posting on our progress, and more importantly, on all the delicious, healthy food we'll be eating over the next month. A perfect way to kick off 2011!

Wednesday Dinner - Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Tonight's menu:

• Tricolor Penne Pasta with Chicken
• Buttered Green Peas
• Oven-warmed Baguette

Ok, so there's really nothing Irish about the dinner we had today...but there is a big spot of bright green on the plate! I had forgotten how much I like green peas. They're not something I ate much of growing up. We had them at Thanksgiving and Christmas and that was about it. I don't know why, but as a result they always seemed like holiday-only food to me. So I'm happy to have rediscovered them as an adult. They are just satisfying, especially with heaps of butter melted into them.

The real highlight of tonight's dinner, though, was this pasta dish from foodnetwork.com. It has three different kinds of lettuce and is so full of healthiness it doesn't seem like it should taste good. Sundried tomatoes, garlic, endive, radicchio, arugula, basil, and chicken all went into this colorful, tasty mixture. We used leftover chicken from our Sunday roast (yes, we roasted another chicken this past Sunday. I failed to post on it because it was exactly the same as the one we did last week). Using leftover chicken made the meal a little cheaper and easier to cook, and not having to deal with raw chicken is always a bonus. This would also be a great vegetarian dish if the chicken were replaced with garbanzo beans, tofu, or just omitted altogether.

My only complaint about this dish was that we didn't add enough Parmesan. We got a nice block of good, aged Parmesan cheese (no tasteless crap in a green can here) and shredded it just before serving and it was amazing. There is no substitute for freshly shredded Parmesan. But the point is that next time we make this dish, I will be added a giant heap of Parmesan to it instead of the little spoonful I sprinkled on top. It's just too good!

Additional note - The leftovers of the pasta dish make an excellent cold pasta salad for lunch the next day. Double win!

Sunday Dinner - The Whole Bird

Tonight's menu:

• A whole, roasted chicken!
• Butternut squash gratin
• Biscuits

This meal was another inspiration from my coworker, Richard. He mentioned to me the other day that it was chick-ordering time. Naturally this made me curious, so I asked him to explain. Apparently, in addition to raising geese and ducks for their excellent eggs, his family also raises chickens for meat. Consequently, they eat chicken a lot, and one of their standard ways to get good use out of the entire bird is to roast it. They usually roast one or two chickens over the weekend, and use the leftovers to make a variety of meals throughout the week. This is not only economical, it's convenient and eco-friendly, as they generally make soup stock out of the bones.

So I thought, why not try it out? Obviously, not being chicken owners, we had to purchase the bird. We did get a local Vermont chicken though, so at least we tried to be green about it. Once again I do not have the original recipe source, but it was a good one. We made a paste out of mashed garlic (about 6 cloves) and kosher salt, and rubbed half of this all over the inside of the chicken. Then we mixed the rest of the paste with softened butter and rubbed that all over the outside of the chicken. We stuffed the chicken with two whole lemons (pricked with a fork so the juices could come out) and roasted it at 400 degrees for a little over an hour. Since we now have a meat thermometer, we were able to do a perfect roast by temperature rather than our usual method of slicing bits off until we're sure it's done. Our thermometer has a handy guide showing the temperature for different meats, so when it hit the "poultry" reading we knew we were good! Here's the uncarved fowl in all its glory:


Our second dish was a butternut gratin. We chose this recipe just because it looked good, but as it turns out winter squash are on sale at the co-op, so it was cheap as well! We followed the recipe from Care2.com exactly, and it turned out perfect. Sweet and savory, with a hint of cheese but not loaded down with it like so many gratin dishes are. The cumin is really what made the dish great. It's not a spice I would probably have thought to add on my own, but it was very good. Definitely recommended!


And then, after all that hard work making two dishes out of local foods, all from scratch...we cheated and made biscuits from a can. And you know what? They were absolutely freakin' perfect. Sometimes you just need that artificial butter flavor to round out a meal.

Tuesday Dinner - F Words

Tonight's menu:

• Fiery fajitas
• Friendly fruit salad

We're finally back to our planned dinners! My compulsively-organized librarian personality is much happier. This menu was one I came up with and again, I have no idea where the recipes came from. Which is ok, because we ended up not really using them anyway. Once we got all the ingredients, we realized we didn't like the cooking instructions so we made our own. It was...well, not great, but better than it would have been if we had followed the instructions blindly. Of that I am sure. The recipe called for broiling the chicken and broiling the veggies separately. I don't know about you, but in my mind that is just not the right way to make fajitas. They have to be cooked in a skillet! Over flames! You gotta hear that sizzle!

Anyway, what we ended up doing was very simple. We bought red, green, and yellow bell peppers, sliced them up with a sweet onion and some chopped garlic. We also sliced two chicken breasts and seasoned them with chili powder, salt, pepper, and our favorite Jane's Krazy Mixed Up Salt. Then we and sauteed it all together in our amazing new Calphalon stainless steel stir fry pan (a wedding gift from our dear friend Patrick...thanks Pat!). This tasty mixture was served on warm flour tortillas with Monterey Jack cheese and sour cream.

It would have been perfect, except the seasoning wasn't quite fiery enough for us. Even I, who don't like super spicy food, found these to be a little bland. I think next time maybe we'll throw some diced Jalapeno in for good measure. If you have any other good fajita-seasoning suggestions, please let us know!

The fruit salad is one of my secret weapons. Against myself. You see, I have something to admit. Something I'm embarrassed to share. Here goes...I don't like fruit. At least, I don't like fruit by itself. Give me a banana and I will turn up my nose. Hand me a freshly picked apple and I will hand it right off to someone who will truly appreciate it. I just don't like eating fruit plain. But put fruit in a dish, any dish, and I love it. Pies, cobblers, fruit smoothies, fruit salads, fruit preserves, even meats with fruit sauces...any way you can cook fruit or combine it with other things makes me happy.

So, to trick me into eating a full serving of fruit tonight, we had fruit salad. And it was amazing, even though it's still winter and none of the fruit was in season, at least not here in New Hampshire. It contained apples, bananas, grapes, cantaloupe, and pineapple chopped up and smothered in a sauce made of plain yogurt, honey, and fresh-squeezed lime juice. We added a dash of cinnamon to the sauce, stirred everything together and let it sit for a while. So incredibly good. We have a ton left over, which is great because fruit salad gets better when it sits and all the fruit can soak up the dressing. This will be excellent for lunch tomorrow. Big servings of fruit two days in a row! No one would ever guess I'm not into fruit....ssshhhhh.

Sunday Dinner - Superbowl Edition

Tonight's menu:

• Oven-baked wings with classic hot sauce
• Oven-baked wings with garlic-teriyaki sauce (not pictured)
• Cold leftover take-out pizza
• Chips with corn and black bean salsa
• Ranch and blue cheese dipping sauces...because we're serious about wings

So let me start out by saying that Matt and I don't really care much about football. In fact, we didn't even know who was playing in the super bowl until we sat down to start watching the game, at which point we decided to root for the Saints (a good choice, as it turns out) because we had actually been to New Orleans...clearly we are not real football fans. But we decided to watch the super bowl because it seemed like a great excuse to eat a lot of really unhealthy, completely indigestible, and absolutely delicious food.

Also, I found this recipe for baked wings that supposedly taste like deep-fried, an assertion we felt we needed to personally test. So we bought 5 pounds of wings and underwent the 8-hour drying process, and while it was a lot of work, it was so worth it. These wings were amazing. So tender they were falling off the bones, but still crispy on the outside. And we didn't even do it right, we stopped drying them and started baking after only 6 hours!

Matt made two kinds of sauce for the wings: a classic hot sauce, consisting of Frank's Red Hot Sauce (it has to be Frank's. Trust me.), melted butter, and a dash of Worcestershire. The other sauce was one he just concocted out of his head (he's so good at creating sauces and marinades). Its ingredients were soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic, ginger (freshly minced ginger root, not powder), sesame oil, and orange juice. I would share the proportions, but I'm pretty sure Matt just keeps adding and tasting until it's delicious.

The other dishes were just things we had around that seemed like they fit into the football-food theme. Ironically, we actually bought celery stick and carrots in a half-assed attempt to add something healthy, but we were so excited about the wings that we forgot to serve the veggies. In any case, it was a great game and we certainly enjoyed it to the fullest!

Note: If reproducing this meal at home, we recommend taking an antacid before eating. Seriously, you will thank yourself later.

Wednesday Dinner - Chicken Satay

Tonight's menu:

• Sauteed chicken with peanut dipping sauce
• Cucumber salad
• Basmati rice

This dinner was extremely satisfying. The chicken is based on a Thai dish, but we used a recipe from my files that called for sauteeing the chicken rather than grilling it (since grilling is rather unpleasant in 20-degree weather). Unfortunately, I don't know where the recipe came from so I can't give proper attribution. If you've seen it somewhere, let me know!

The ingredients (for 4 servings) are:

• 1.5 lbs chicken cutlets
• 1 tsp Asian chili sauce
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp rice vinegar
• 2 tsp lime juice
• 2 tsp brown sugar
• 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
• 1/4 cup hot water

Cooking it was very simple. We just sauteed the chicken in oil until it was browned on both sides and cooked through. Then we mixed all the other ingredients together for the dipping sauce, and it was done! The cucumbers were just sliced and mixed with a little rice vinegar, lime juice, and brown sugar. A fast, easy, and delicious meal.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the rice. Normally I wouldn't even comment on cooking plain rice but tonight we discovered a new method that was so great we were both raving about the rice...just the rice! The instructions, from startcooking.com, involve adding some butter to the rice as it's cooking, and the butter makes a huge difference. The rice came out creamy and wonderful. If you've never cooked rice this way, I definitely suggest trying it.

A quick note: I really liked the peanut dipping sauce, but Matt thought it was too rich and too peanut-y. I'm thinking this could be toned down some by thinning it with extra water. It was a little thick for a dipping sauce, so maybe we'll try that next time.

Sunday Dinner - Finger Food

Tonight's Menu:

• Homemade chicken tenders
• Carrot and cucumber slices
  
• Homemade honey mustard dipping sauce

Today's dinner was a fast, easy comfort-food meal because we spent the whole day cleaning and were too tired to do anything more elaborate. However, even though it's not exactly gourmet fare, this was a tasty and satisfying dinner...all the more so because we got to eat with our hands and pretend to be kids for a while.

The big upside to this meal was that we got our fast-food fix without actually buying fast food, thus upping the health factor considerably and lowering the total cost. Win-win! For the chicken tenders, we dipped them in flour, then beaten egg, then a breading of cornmeal mixed with garlic powder, salt, and pepper. We baked the tenders instead of frying them, which meant there was almost no added oil, just enough to coat the baking pan.

The best part of this meal was definitely the honey mustard. I've never made this condiment before, I've only had store-bought prepared versions. I will never go back. This was a simple mixture of sour cream (reduced-fat organic...we always get organic dairy products), dijon mustard, and local New Hampshire wildflower honey. It was so much better than the pre-packaged stuff, and with the added bonus of not having weird color or flavor additives. I highly recommend making your own honey mustard!