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!

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 4 - Pot on Fire!

Today's menu:

• Blueberry-Almond Butter Smoothie
• Leftover cold soba-noodle salad from yesterday
• A tangerine
• Pot-Au-Feu

So tonight's dinner dish was this lovely soup called Pot-Au-Feu, which translates to pot-on-fire. Not sure why, exactly, but I like the name. And the soup. Matt and I agreed that if we were to make it again, we'd change the recipe in the following ways:

1. Season the beef. A little salt and pepper can make a big difference.
2. Saute the beef and add it to the soup at the very end. It's not cooking long enough to really get a lot of the beef flavor in there, anyway.
3. Possibly add some greens. Spinach would be a nice touch.

However, even without those changes the soup was great. I've never had a beef-stew-like-dish that included parsnips and rutabaga. They are so much more flavorful root vegetables than potatoes! Will definitely be using them more in the future.

Regarding this smoothie, which we also ate on Day 2, I just want to say that it may be my new favorite smoothie recipe. The almond butter makes it so good and filling. Plus I love blueberry anything. If only we had picked and frozen our own blueberries last summer...this would even have been really cheap! Have to remember that this year.

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.

Day 2 - Fruit and Fish

Today's menu:

• Wild Salmon with Lentils and Arugula
• Carrots and hummus
• Fresh Fruit with Applesauce-Sweetened Tahini
• Blueberry-Almond Butter Smoothie

Day 2 was harder than day one. For sure. I was very, very tired and there was no coffee to help me through the afternoon. But the food we ate today was amazing. I never realized that wild salmon tastes so much better than farm-raised! It was a tasty and satisfying dinner, and quick to boot.

The fruit salad was also excellent, although we just used apples, tangelos, and grapes...mango is expensive and bland up here. I would never have thought to mix tahini with sweet foods, it always seemed like a savory item to me. It worked really well though, and made a light but filling dressing for the fruit.

And the smoothie was a perfect start to the day. I have to say that doing this whole "detox diet" thing is much easier when there are weekly menus planned out with simple recipes to follow. We just went through the master recipe list and picked out a handful that looked especially good. I would have been super stressed out trying to come up with appropriate detox food on my own. Thank you, Martha!

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 Farmer's Market - Delightful Dessert

Today was the season opening of our town farmer's market, so of course Matt and I had to go see what was available! Plenty, as it turned out, but we restrained ourselves to only buying these few "necessities"...and a block of cheese.

In addition to the edibles, we also purchased an investment item: this lovely tomato plant!

Our gardening skills are admittedly limited, but we were told this reliable Jet Star variety would be easy to manage. And what could be better than eating our own home-grown tomatoes later this summer? More posts on that adventure to come.

In the meantime, we arrived home with our bounty and promptly got to work cooking. Rather than labor over an intensive dinner, we ate leftovers so we could focus on the most important meal of the day. Dessert. Starring...rhubarb!

I have never cooked rhubarb before in my life, but I've eaten it and I know I love it. So when I saw this bundle I couldn't resist picking it up. I was also recently inspired by this post on Simply Breakfast and really wanted to try some kind of fruity tart-like thing.

This was the result. I followed this Smitten Kitchen recipe for rustic rhubarb tarts, and it was great. Crispy, super tangy, just slightly sweet, and delicious with a little Breyer's vanilla ice cream. Side note - Breyer's has been my favorite kind of ice cream for as long as I can remember. Why, aside from the taste? The ingredient list: milk, cream, sugar, vanilla. No artificial crap!

I was happy to discover that rhubarb is not at all hard to cook. And these made-from-scratch tarts were so good, I'm just sad it's the end of rhubarb season. But there will be much more farmer's market enjoyment over the next few months. I can't wait!

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.