Last night's No Starch Stirfry Cauliflower, broccoli, a red pepper past it prime, mushrooms, carrots, asparagus, and a tablespoon of walnuts, sauteed in a tablespoon of olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper. Cook it til you're bored. Include onions and add gf soy sauce and serve over rice for a more traditional stirfry. Personally, I'm working on minimizing grains, and the great taste is driven by the veggies. Make a lot and enjoy! I was so taken with the attractiveness of my dinner last night that I snapped a picture of it and shared in on Twitter in a short conversation with @gfdougie (who also has a helpful blog: http://glutenfreetip.com/). I was flattered when he asked for the recipe, because it is essentially just fresh vegetables cut up and and a tablespoon of chopped walnuts sauteed in a little olive oil in a non-stick pan with some Trader Joe's smoked sea salt, fresh ground black pepper, and sometimes (but not last night) I throw on some nutritional yeast. If you are thinking "I could never take the time to chop all those veggies," here are some tricks:
1) Buy them already cut up if possible. Produce Junction sells bags of broccoli florets. It's easy to find mushrooms already sliced. A nutritionist friend of mine suggested this to me a long time ago, and I felt strangely freed from the guilt of not doing all the chopping myself. 2) Since many fresh veggies are fine eaten raw, chop them big (which goes much faster) and cook them longer or shorter depending on your patience level. This won't work for folks who have trouble with raw veggies, but I find them most enjoyable when there is still some structure left to them. Not crunchy exactly, but that place between crunchy and soft. "Cook it til you're bored" is a common phrase in our house for recipes. 3) See my blog post on Beans and Greens (another common go-to dinner in my house) for other ideas for seasonings to keep things interesting. Keep it easy! Yes! Candle Cafe was definitely the culinary highlight of Jenn's and my recent trip to New York. It's a vegan restaurant with a dedicated gf menu and loads of stuff for the celiac and gluten intolerant crowd. It was an easy walk from the Met, casual enough that our travel-and-museum ensembles of jeans and mostly comfortable shoes were not out of place, but with enough ambiance to befit a date on Saturday night. We arrived at 7:45 pm and though the place was crowded, we lucked into getting a table right away (they don't take reservations.)
I had the Paradise Casserole: "Layers of sweet potato, black beans and millet over steamed greens with country gravy" for $16. With the gravy, it was moist and flavorful and greens were gently prepared and had loads of personality. Jenn ordered the Mediterranian wrap in a whole wheat pita for $14 followed by chocolate mousse pie. The serving sizes were generous, the prices reasonable, the service impecible, and the food was delicious! I highly recommend Candle Cafe East if you are in the vacinity of Central Park. And if you are on the Upper West Side, check out Candle Cafe West, the more swanky cousin of the original Candle Cafe. At least I think they are more swanky -- they take reservations. I haven't talked much about my weight loss journey, but since it's the season of over-indulgence, I thought I'd share. I was always on the heavy side and decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to be thinner. It was a warm day in late April in 2009, my shorts from the year before were too tight, and my family had joined a neighborhood pool that was set to open in 6-weeks' time. I finally felt like I had had enough and I was ready to do the work to change things.
Like everyone, I had barriers to eating better and exercising more. I have been a vegetarian for a long time, but I was eating lots of cheese and milk and ice cream, so my main approach was to cut out full-fat dairy, cut out snacking, reduce portion size, and start walking. I decided that walking could be sustainable, and that I probably wouldn't be able to keep up with something strenuous or unpleasant. I work full-time, and the only time I had to walk was very early in the morning, while my partner and two kids were still asleep. After a few days of walking and dieting, I felt like I was starving and went on-line looking for motivation to stick with it. I found a great site called PEERtrainer, which has a lot of great articles about changing one's approach to eating (not just about dieting). I got exposed to and began following the Eat to Live approach put forth by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. Eat to Live is heavy into high nutrient foods, especially green leafies, and low in animal products and refined carbs like breads. There is no calorie counting; you can eat all the fruits and vegetables and legumes that you want. I also joined some small on-line groups and teams through PEERtrainer, began logging my meals and exercise, and generally found accountability and support. I lost 30 pounds in 6 months, getting down to my goal weight of 125. Through one of my groups I learned about a website call "Couch to 5K" and decided to give running a try, since I felt like the long walks early in the morning were taking too long, and maybe I could get the same or more benefit if I went faster. Lo and behold, I found I actually LIKED it! I'm still doing it, running 3.75 miles 5 days a week, sometimes longer or more often, so I guess it's pretty sustainable. I also joined a VERY inexpensive gym -- $10 a month -- so that when the weather is too cold or yucky, I can do a circuit workout or treadmill there. And my other other back-up for days that I can't run and can't get myself to the gym are workouts at home. We have the Wii, so I do Wii Fit Plus or EA Sports Active workouts OR I do workouts that are in the On Demand section of our cable subscription. Some days I do really hard ones, like Jillian Michaels. Other days I do much gentler ones, like the walking series by Leslie Sansone. I try not to let myself off the exercise hook very often. It's so much easier for me to stick to the routine than to go day-by-day. I got the celiac diagnosis a year ago and have gained back 12 pounds. Part of it is likely a function of a healed gut. The other part is that I'm eating more refined carbs. I think it's the psychology of deprivation. Since I can't eat most of the refined carbs in the world, when one crosses my path that I CAN eat, I have a hard time saying no. The good news is that Eat to Live is VERY compatible with a GF diet. I also slacked off on the frequency and intensity of my workouts. I just need to get refocused on why I want to be thinner and return to doing what works. In some ways it's a hard time of year, since there are so many temptations. But in some ways it's easier for me because I know the temptations are everywhere and I can have my healthy eating plan ready to implement when temptation crosses my path. I hope you'll check out the links above for extra ideas and motivation. I couldn't have lost the original 30 without them, and groups like this one and the ones I mentioned will be key to my re-losing the 12. Oh, and none of them cost me any money. They all do seem to have something to sell, but I used nothing but free content at the websites and got books from the library. (I did buy the EA Sports active for wii, but my kids use it too!) Like everybody in America, we are preparing for Thanksgiving. It will be my first gluten-free Tofurkey Day. Which means no Tofurkey for me. Of course, we didn't eat tofurkey for most of our Thanksgivings together, because we heard it was awful. In the intervening years, we ate stuffed squash, which was ymmy. It was acorn squash with a wild and brown rice stuffing that had tofu, dates, nuts and cheese. Then we heard tofurkey was good, so we tried it a few years ago. It was great! Turkey was my favorite food as a kid, so it was nice to have this very turkey-like food in my life. Squash took a back seat and we recreated our tradition around it and one of the best parts of that is that the boys like it. The squash is a tough sell. For me, the squash will make a reappearance, and I expect it won't be too angry that it lost its place of importance for awhile in our traditions.
The good news is I have an easy answer for people who ask what I will be eating for Thanksgiving. I will not to be a whiner or feel sorry for myself. I will not. So as I cracked open the fourth egg in my little baking project yesterday, I admitted that i can't really call myself a vegan any more. I became a vegan for health reasons, though I could also get behind the ethical reasons also. And maybe I'll return to veganism again. For now though, while I figure out how to handle the GF diet, I'm conceding that eggs are part of my story for now.
So back to the eggs. I decided that the tapioca bread I took on the mini-vacation just wasn't good enough to continue to pretend to be bread. Plus, it has no fiber or any other redeeming nutritional value. I suspect that it instantly turns to sugar after being chewed. So what else was there to do but throw a bunch of sugar and eggs and vanilla soy milk on it, bake it, and call it bread pudding? What else SHOULD you do with bread made out of tapioca? So, the end result was okay. I'd be very dissapointed if I ordered it in a restaurant -- too sweet -- so next time (and knowing my sweet tooth, there WILL be a next time) I'll cut the sugar or use regular almond milk. |
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