Menu Mondays: Coconut Chickpea Soup*

The cream from the coconut milk and the kick with the curry will make your belly warm and happy. Plus, this has to be the tastiest soup you'll ever whip up with less than 5 minutes prep time that  doesn't involve pouring said soup from a can.

See Mrs. Married With Veggies Go All Artsy with the Spinach.

Minutes before full fat coconut milk got cut from Team Coconut Chickpea Soup.  

THE TEAM:  

• 3 cups cooked chickpeas (or 2 15-oz canned chick peas)
• 2 cups vegetable broth
• 2 cups baby spinach (The recipe actually called for roughly-torn kale leaves with the rough stems removed, but kale doesn't play as nicely with the blender as spinach does, so I swapped it .) 
• 2 cloves garlic (optional)
• 15-oz low-fat coconut milk (Low fat is totally key because low fat is a liquid and regular has the consistency of shortening. Interesting note: Shortening doesn't play nice with the blender, either.)
• 1 tBsp curry powder
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp apricot fruit spread (Yeah, it's weird. But it was the best sub I could think of for honey, which is not technically vegan.)
• 0.5 tsp salt
• 0.25 tsp fresh ground black pepper 

 GAME PLAN:

Action shot! 

STEP 1. In a blender, combine chickpeas, broth, spinach, garlic, coconut milk, curry powder, cumin, apricot spread, salt, and pepper. 

Alien slime! 

STEP 2. Puree until completely smooth, about 30 seconds. Thirty seconds, my ass. I don't know what size blender you have, but one more measly chick pea would have sent food stuffs steaming down the outside of mine. I started at blend, worked my way up to liquify, and then I let that puppy whirrr until the spinach polka dots disappeared into the muck. 

Well, this looks like paste...

STEP 3. Transfer to a medium pot and heat on medium-high. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Divide among 4 serving bowls,  waste several minutes trying to get cute with a not-so-artful arrangement of spinach leaves, and serve with a side salad. 

317 calories, 14 grams fat, 47 mg sodium, 9 grams fiber, 13 grams protein (per sparkpeople.com)

*Adapted from a recipe in Clean Eating Magazine

Let There Be Salt!

Of all the things we've cut out on this program (which is practically everything), I miss sodium the most. I've long been a serial salt abuser, so I never realized just how bland everything is without it. Sure, I knew that I used so much salt because it made things taste better, but little did I realize what would happen in its absence. Basically, food without sodium no longer tastes like food.

Try this experiment: At your next meal, put away the salt and soy sauce. Use ingredients with little or no sodium. Then take a big bite. What do you taste? That's right: not food. The problem is especially  bad with soup because soup without sodium is just stuff floating in hot water.

This lead me to do some research, and it seems that sodium isn't as bad as it has been made out to be:

"If you are under age 50, your blood pressure is in a healthy range, and your health is good, you probably have little reason to worry about salt intake. A lower-sodium diet is good for people who are older, who are of African American descent, or who have high blood pressure or diabetes"(from http://www.health.harvard.edu/press_releases/daily-sodium-intake)

So my conclusion: I'm going to let a little salt back into my diet so food can taste like food again. Hallelujah!

Accidental Cannibal?

So if a trace amount of anchovies in my Worchestshire sauce makes for a non-vegan dish, does swallowing the food in my mouth after I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood make me a cannibal?

What?!

This is the question plaguing me today!  

Menu Mondays: Baker's Dozen Salad

Fear not! This salad's phenomenal taste is
indirectly proportional to the blandness of its photo. 

BAKER'S DOZEN SALAD (aka that grilled veggie salad thing)--In the book Eat to Live, author Joel Fuhrman, M.D. advises his patient to stick a sign to the refrigerator that says, "THE SALAD IS THE MAIN DISH," and Married With Veggies took that advice as a challenge! The Baker's Dozen Salad whips 12 vegetables into a delicious frenzy (13 if you think corn counts as a vegetable the way Mr. Married With Veggies does). Even better than packing a shit ton of veggies into one meal? The recipe provides opportunities for iterations limited only by the produce in your refrigerator. And best yet, the theory of the salad (as much as a salad can have a theory, anyway) is simply* this:

-- whip together a traditional salad two to three times the size of a garden salad in a restaurant;
-- toss your favorite cooked veggies and  beans into a skillet with water or your favorite oil;
-- dump the hot stuff on top of the cold stuff;
-- dress with diced avocado, seeds, and your favorite dressing, and dig into a green meal that will leave you feeling satisfied for hours and hours and hours.  

But maybe you need a hit of the baker's dozen goodness as is in a recipe before you see how this concept can be the basis of many of your best stand-at-the-fridge-and-choose-ingredients-to-improvise-a-meal dinners. So here's a recipe that incorporates what I think to be the ideal base. Try it, love it, then improvise away!

How worried should I be that my warring veggie factions seem to have adopted gang colors? 

THE TEAM: We tried to get a nice family photo of Team Baker's Dozen Salad--we really did. But a rift has developed between the cold team and the hot team. The cold team can understand how the beans, the frozen corn, and the mushrooms might prefer to be cooked (though the cold team points out that mushrooms are a fungus and not truly a vegetable), but they see the defection of the asparagus, zucchini, and green peppers as a betrayal of the highest order. Personally, I think the raw veggies have a collective inferiority complex because the American diet pretty much ignores them, but whatever.  As a direct result of my failure to mediate the vexed veggies, I have been directed to list the teams separately.

The traitorous three ringing the sunflower seeds

THE HOT TEAM

• 1 tbsp Earth Balance whipped buttery spread (use an oil if you like, but I think there's nothing like a mushroom with a  buttery taste soaked in)
• 5 spears of asparagus snapped into roughly 1-inch pieces
• 0.5 cup frozen yellow sweet corn
• 0.5 cup diced zucchini
• 1 cup diced  green bell pepper
• 1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms (for the love of all that is holy about your time, buy them pre-washed and sliced!) 
• .25 cup water
• 1 cup pre-cooked black beans (you could use any beans you have on hand--cooked chick peas are phenomenal, too, but I thought black beans would show up better in photographs)
• 0.5 oz raw sunflower seeds (roughly 2.5 tBsp)
• 0.25 cup diced raw onions 

Mediation between factions was going GREAT until...

...the carrots decided to get together to flip off the hot team *sigh*

THE COLD TEAM

Diced avocado

• 3 cups baby spinach (3 cups of any green leafs, really, but spinach is delicious and ridiculously nutritious. Technically, I use 2 cups of spinach and a cup of baby arugula blend because I like the mingling of flavors, but the choice is yours.)
• 0.5 cup chopped broccoli 
• 0.5 cup baby carrots
• 0.5 cup diced celery 
• 1 cucumber, peeled and cut into half moons (The half moon shape is not strictly necessary, but it makes me happy.)
• 1 tomato, diced 
• 0.5 cup diced red peppers
• 2 tBsp lemon juice (roughly the juice from half a lemon)
• 1 tBsp balsamic vinegar 
• Half an avocado, diced and set aside

GAME PLAN

The dump! 

STEP 1. Heat the Earth Balance in a skillet on high until it starts to sizzle, then dump the hot ingredients into the pan.  And, yes, I really mean dump it all in a big mountain of hot team goodness. If you really need direction, then start with the onions, but seriously, throw it all in there. Stir until most of the hot ingredients are shiny with Earth Balance, then let the lot cook at high until the pan starts wafting out a  buttery mushroom flavor. And if you've gone and left out the mushrooms (Why would you do such a thing?! Did I not explicitly mention the joys of their buttery GOODNESS??!!)and are worrying about how the heck you'll know  it's time to move on if you don't have your Pavlov mushroom smell to motivate you, then fine--let the lot cook at high for about a minute and then turn the pan down to a more respectable medium  temperature.  Add the water to the skillet now. 


STEP 2.While the hot ingredients cook down, separate the spinach between two big salad bowls. Split the broccoli, carrots, celery, cucumber, tomatoes, and red pepper between the two bowls. Give the hot mixture a quick stir. Water should be boiling off while you're working. 

See? Impossible to miss!

STEP 3. Squeeze about 2 tablespoons of juice from half a lemon, and combine with 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. Tip: Because squeezing a lemon can be a pain in the ass, do it over a large measuring cup so that you don't have to add aiming to your troubles. Also, if you want to get one of those plastic lemons from your produce aisle and skip the whole fresh squeezed routine, I'm totally down with that. But holy mother of god are you totally neglecting team hot right now??? For the love of all that is holy, give team hot a ride on the wooden spoon, stat! 

STEP 4. Remove the hot vegetables from the heat and spoon the contents onto the top of the two bowls filled with raw salad components. The vegetables will look a wee bit tired--the corn may have even browned--but while this might be overcooked as a stand-alone side dish, the slightly overdone consistency means these veggies  have definitely released all inner sweetness (hello carmelized onions!). Top with half the dressing each, mix, and  eat it all, and I'm totally serious about that: eat it ALL!

Don't throw away my favorite part of the salad, dude! 

STEP 5. Dude, I totally told you to eat it all. That stuff at the bottom that looks like litter? That's a flavor bomb of beans and avocado and sweet, sweet corn that's been basically steeping in the lemony goodness the whole time you've been munch, munch, munching your way down to it--it's it's pretty much the best part, so if you're really going to insist on tossing it, can I eat it?

445 calories, 17 grams fat, 161 mg sodium, 21 grams fiber, 18 grams protein (per calculator on sparkpeople.com)**

Happy Menu Monday from Married With Veggies! 


* I have OFFICIALLY turned into my mother. She's no vegan, but ask her for one of her recipes, and she'll slap her hand on her knee and, in a faded (but still adorable) French-Canadian accent, kickstart an on-the-spot recitation of the what-for with the following three words: "It's very easy!"


** The fat is coming from the avocado, the sunflower seeds and the Earth Balance. Change your mix and shave fat and calories, though remember--the avocado and the sunflower seeds are the good guys in this three-fat fight . ****


***I'm putting this in as a guideline, but I'm not 100 percent sure this is accurate. 


**** I am not a nutritionist. I don't even play one on TV!

Leftovers are tasty

On Monday we introduced the world to Menu Mondays with our recipe for Smashed Peppers. I'm not sure what possessed me to dump the leftovers onto a salad, but my tastebuds were all like, "what is this taco salady goodness?" so I'm glad I did. Best part was the juices from the smashed peppers mingled with the raw veggies in a seriously drool-inducing way. Yum!

Fairies Taste Like Walnuts

The fairy beast hiding out among the walnuts in my lunch.

I still remember the way my heart broke when the adults in my life told me the fairies I was deadly sure lived in the swamp down the road were fantasy creatures that never existed--not even during the time of the dinosaurs. Though I wasn't allowed to go into the swampy areas of the neighborhood, I searched those swamps for proof until the day I slipped off a log and got my jeans totally algae covered and panicked--no hiding where I'd been now. So as an adult in Ireland four years ago, the kid in me that still wants to believe perked up when our tour guide pointed out fairy rings in the middle of actively farmed fields--apparently farmers won't tear down trees in a ring or stones in a circle for fear of angering the fairies.

"What do you mean, angering the fairies?" I asked him, thinking vindictiveness didn't fit the two images of fairies I'd flitted between as a kid. "Aren't fairies either fireflies on steroids or pint-sized Gilda*-the-good-witches-from-Oz?" 

Not so, I learned.

Some fairies are kind, but far too many of them are mischievous little beasties who steal--STEAL!--the very kids who defend their honor. The jerks. Is it any wonder they don't show their faces very often?

But today at lunch I made a discovery that adds a new chapter to existing fairy lore: The fairies are not hiding out in the round groves of Irish farms or the the swamps of my youth--fairy folk are hiding out in plain sight ingeniously disguised as raw walnuts.

And boy are they delicious.

*Of course I meant Glinda--thanks AGAIN to Noah Tobin for his eagle eye editing skill. Wanna copyedit my novel? 

Menu Mondays: Smashed Peppers

We here at Married with Veggies are launching our first weekly feature: Menu Mondays.

What's Menu Mondays, you say?

It's a menu idea. On a Monday. Try to keep up!

We're starting with (drum roll, please!) SMASHED PEPPERS!

Yeah, well, insert hilarious quip about yo mama's face here.

For all of you who took one look at the food photo at the left and made that I-just-pictured-Cathy-and-Mike-eating-cat-puke face of yours (you didn't know we could see you, did you?), I have three  things to say: 

First, screw you!

Second, dammit reader, I'm a writer, not a food photographer!

Third, we're not cooks, but we promise to make things at least twice before sharing them with you, but then again, Mike thinks the smoothies I wake up craving taste like tree bark, and I think the fresh green beans he's started eating like potato chips taste like dirt. In other words, we make no promises that your tongue will think these here smashed peppers are good news should you whip them up. But we like them enough to give them the green (ha!) light. And with all that out of the way, let's go smash some peppers!

SMASHED PEPPERS--Think of this recipe like a deconstructed stuffed pepper without the beef or the rice or the, oh screw it. The cumin and the peppers make this mess in a bowl taste like a deconstructed stuffed pepper to me, but the writer in me wants something a little sexier than deconstructed anything in a title, so sue me. Or don't. This is the part where I tell our readership of three that this recipe started its life as on the pages of the March, 2012 Clean Eating magazine. But that recipe had meat and dairy and salt in it. My version has none of those things, and a f'awesome name.

Team Smashed Peppers reporting for duty!

I'm no cook, so this is what dicing looks like to me. Make it so.

Shut up. It will look less nauseatingly bland in a moment.

THE TEAM: 

• 1 tsp olive oil
• 1 8-oz package organic tempeh, cubed
• 3 diced tomatoes 
• 1 diced green bell pepper
• 1.5 cups frozen corn
• 1.5 tbsp VEGAN worchestshire sauce*
• .25 cup water
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp balsamic vinegar

 GAME PLAN:**

STEP 1. In a sauce pot, heat olive oil on, well, hmm. The recipe always says medium or medium-high, but who has that kind of time? Turn your stove to high and let that oil get hot and drop that tempeh right in there and, shit--OK, maybe medium. Because when you drop that tempeh right into hot oil, funny thing about that (heh, heh) is that it splatters. So medium and bombs away or high and gently lower your tempeh onto the cooking surface. 

Crumble = nom!

STEP 2.Cook for four minutes, using a wooden spoon to break up about six cubes worth of the tempeh into crumbles. Is crumbles the technical term for it? Money's on no, but the point is you want some crumbly goodness is the end so you have to start the process now. You'll thank me later.

These colors put the pretty in pretty easy!

STEP 3. Add bell peppers, tomatoes, corn, water, and Worcestshire sauce, and stir to combine. Take a moment to admire the colors in your pot. Drooling is optional, though I suggest not drooling directly into the pot because we want to keep this Vegan and I'm pretty sure your spit counts as an animal product--just saying. Bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 15 minutes.

STEP 4. Remove from heat and stir in cumin and vinegar. Will the cumin look alarmingly like you've sprinkled your dinner with dirt? At first, a little, yeah. Mix well.

STEP 5. Split into four servings.Cute owl bowl is totally optional, but choosing to add whimsy where you can is a no-brainer because, like, it just is. Serve with a side salad (this is how we roll) or scoop it up with corn chips. I imagine it would be a killer vegan taco filler with the cumin and all, but I haven't tried that. OK. I'm drooling and it's kind of making a mess of my keyboard, so I'm signing off.

230 calories, 8.8 grams fat, 23.6 mg sodium, 3.9 grams fiber, 14.5 grams protein (per calculator on sparkpeople.com)

Happy Menu Monday from Married With Veggies! 



LEFTOVER UPDATE: Dump a leftover portion onto a salad for a scrumptious taco-salad-esque bowl of delicious.

 

*Guess who learned that "normal" Worchestshire sauce has anchovies in it this week? 

** I have no idea why I've adopted a running sports theme. 

Feeling Good

When I read the Eat to Live book, it promised a vegan diet would make me "feel good."  This sentiment was echoed by many people that I talked to about the plan. "It's going to be hard, but you're going to feel so good!" The problem with such a high level assessment is it falls under the psychological phenomenon discovered in a study of manufacturing process almost 100 year ago: When people are asked about how well something works, they will always say there's an improvement because the process of asking affects their assessment.  So now that I'm asking myself everyday if I feel better, I'm psychologically inclined to say yes.

So what metric can I use that 's more accurate than "feeling good"?  I'm tempted to use energy level, which has indeed improved. For a long while, my night of sleep would begin on the couch after conking out while watching TV or reading a book.  This hasn't happened since the diet change.  However, there are too many factors to simply declare this is because of what I'm eating

Even if I discount energy level, there are several tangible changes I've noticed over the last week:

1. All my life, I've had dry scalp problems (that's a coded way of saying dandruff, since no one wants to admit they have dandruff).  It was severe at times and the only relief was through the regimented use of medicated shampoos.  Within a week of my improved diet, my dry scalp is gone.
2. I also had severely chapped lips.  While this hasn't gone away, it has greatly improved in the last week.
3. Cathy informs me that my skin is much healthier now.  I have to take her word on that one, since I don't look at my ugly mug in the mirror often, and when I do all I see is an ugly mug.
4. Here's the big one.  Whenever we'd go out for a big meal, especially a dinner after a good size lunch, I would have cramping that would result in running to a bathroom and [gory details omitted].  This was particularly annoying when the cramping and need to go would kick in soon after we left the restaurant and we had a long drive home.  Yesterday, after our second enormous vegan restaurant meal of the day (I swear the burrito I had for supper was the size of my head), I realized hours later that there had been no bowel issues.  This was the first time in memory that I'd eaten two large meals in one day and not had problems.

I need to point out that I'm not connecting these improvements with any single change in my diet.  For example, I'm not concluding that not eating meat or dairy is what cured my dandruff dry scalp.  The more likely cure was removing caffeine and minimizing salt, but I don't even know that for sure.  While I can't say with any certainty what part of my dietary changes solved these problems, I can say that the sum of the changes did solve them.

Looking at those four changes, I can say that I'm feeling pretty good right now.  While I could focus on the removal of meat and dairy as the reason, the frightening thing I've noticed is how much crap is in all the processed foods we eat. I've always had an unhealthy love affair with salt, and would douse dishes with generous dashes before even tasting them (to Cathy's dismay).  I stopped doing that for this program,  but immediately noticed that almost everything you get out of a can or box or bottle has a ton of sodium in it, as well as an array of chemicals that I'd need a PhD in chemistry to comprehend.  As I said previously, I'm applying common sense to my dietary choices, and the less my food resembles a chemistry experiment, the better it is for me, in my opinion.  The huge companies that dumped all that shit into our food didn't do it because they were worrying about our health. Now that I'm avoiding these processed foods, it seems likely that their absence contributes to the changes I've seen.

Even if you don't feel the same way, I encourage you to read labels. Perhaps the tenth chemical on the list will cause a change of heart (and if not, those chemicals may literally change your heart).  Thanks to lobbyists and our government, you might also be getting additives like pink slime that aren't mentioned on the label, so don't believe everything you read. A little more food for thought: When you eat at a restaurant, they don't tell you what they put in the food.  If that doesn't scare you, I'm not sure what will.

P.S. Whenever I read about pink slime, the theme song from the movie Green Slime pops into my head.

Everything You Eat Is Killing You

My modus operandi has traditionally been to eat just enough healthy stuff to convince myself that the all the bad stuff isn't really a big deal.  As long as I snuck a salad into a day, all other gastronomical sins were forgiven, or so I'd convince myself in the way that's only possible when you don't actually think about something.  So it's pretty safe to say that when I really do think about nutrition and my eating habits, the result will almost certainly be healthier.

However, whenever I try to get healthier, it amazes me how everything seems to be bad for you. For example, as part of my new vegan lifestyle, I've started to consume more soy products.  It didn't take long to be informed that soy can actually be bad for you, potentially causing thyroid problems.  Other soy consumers I talked to didn't think this was a significant risk, and I feel pretty safe in assuming that, unless I start mainlining soy like heroine, I probably won't have a problem.

But this underlines a fundamental problem: How does the average person figure out what is healthy when it feels like nothing is healthy?  With so many conflicting opinions, who can we trust to give us the straight dope on the food we consume?  I'm going with a common sense approach (pound of bacon, bad; organic leafy greens, good), but it is one of the factors that leads to thinking, Whatever the hell I'm going to eat is going to kill me, so why not enjoy it? Not a logical approach, but as already established, I'm able to make decisions about my nutrition (and many other things) without actually thinking.

So instead of stressing about it, I'm just going assume that when I think about what I'm going to eat, it's going to be better than when I don't, proven by the numerous 4000 calorie Chili's meals in my past.

P.S. That link is for just the appetizer.

Um, wait, what?

Yesterday I had a headache so persistent I ended up taking enough Advil and Aleve to get an elephant high. The dose that finally kicked the pain was taken with a snack of raw almonds and a banana that tasted sweet as a cookie to me, so I can't be sure if it was the illegal-in-most-states number of over-the-counter drugs I took or the sugar that sent the headache packing, but whatever.

Today I've felt, well, amazing, and I couldn't help but wonder if that feeling's related to the shit ton of veggies Mike and I are cramming down our gullets. And it has to be said, I feel totally awkward wondering if there's a connection between the two because I don't want to be the kind of person who leaps on the first conclusion that presents itself. Like the people you know who are convinced they're psychic because, like, twice in their lives, they thought about a person who called right before the phone rang and never mind that it was actually said psychic's birthday and the friend calling phones every year like clockwork.

Thing is, though, it's not just the headache, you see. Today I was quick to giggle for no reason--I'm talking about busting a gut* while slicing up veggies for a mondo salad because I remembered how funny I found the title of this here blog:

"How To Go Vegan Without Wanting to Kill Yourself" by Milo Jaroniec.

Believe me, I know it's too early to make sweeping statements, but the thing is, three days in, the anecdotal evidence about the benefits of a plant-based diet are starting to pile up:

• No hunger or cravings
• A reduced bodily insistence that I need the caffeine in my black tea, stat.
• Down 3.5 pounds in two days.
• Fruit tastes like it's been laced with crack
• Carrot juice tastes so mind-blowingly delicious I would choose it over a Guinness
• We actually went out and bought a juicer so we could make said carrot juice
• I'm sleeping through the night (I'm a sleep walker and talker who rarely sleeps through the night)
• I'm craving healthy foods (hello, carrot juice?)
• Mike and I decided to nix anniversary plans to indulge at one of our favorite carnivorous-themed restaurants and have decided to celebrate by trying out Grasshopper instead (vegetarian and vegan Asian cuisine)
• I worked against a writing deadline today and didn't panic when I thought I messed up the submission at the 11th hour (things worked out fine, thanks!).
• I'm giggling.
• Giggling.
• Did you catch the part about my giggling?

Yes, yes, yes, I know it's only been three days, but the list is pretty damn compelling, don't you think? Let's just say I'm keeping an eye on things. Well, mostly. Tonight Mike baked a loaf of wheat bread that used butter in the recipe, and I ate a slice without beating myself up about it.

Which means one very important thing: I should go back and add "cessation of self flagellation" to the list above.

*Edited thanks to eagle-eye Noah Tobin who informed me the typo-ed original "busting a nut" was anatomically impossible for me and just plain weird. 

Withdrawal

It took no time at all for me to start feeling like utter crap. Yesterday, about an hour after lunch, my stomach started hurting, as if was rebelling against the change in plan from a shitload of meat at every meal to zilch. Soon after, my head started to ache (though that may be partially due to the caffeine withdrawal) and I had little energy.

By the time I dragged my carcass home, I had to take a nap. I set the trusty old nap alarm to sixty minutes so I could start cooking lentils before Cathy got home. When the alarm went off an hour later, two thoughts occurred to me:

1. There's no way I'm going to get out of this bed feeling like this to cook lentils.
2. The fact that the next activity of my night was going to be cooking lentils makes me want to cry.

I lay there for ten more minutes before mining the depths of my willpower to find the ambition to get up. I started the lentils and when Cathy got home we did a no-oil stir-fry that was... well... food.

I ended up crashing early and slept for 11 hours, and woke up feeling like someone had beaten me with a baseball bat while I slept. All this after only 36 hours without all the stuff we'd given up.

I've heard I'm going to feel amazing very soon, and this will all be worth it. Hell, I actually believe that. I know I'll be much healthier in the long run for this reboot. But I sure feel like crap today.

And Then I Remember I Hate Vegetables

My first lunch of the program was a large Tupperware container full of raw veggies, a cup of black beans, an ounce of raw cashews, and an apple. I seasoned the veggies with some black pepper and extra spicy Mrs. Dash. It was about halfway through the Tupperware's contents when I remembered that I hate vegetables.

I started off okay with some green beans and celery, was happily munching the mushrooms, and then I got to the spinach and broccoli. I usually love both, but what I mean by that is I usually love the dressings and sauces on top of them.  Up to this point in my life, vegetables have been mechanisms to transport delicious things.  Since it's a bit awkward to just drink dressing, I always had to put it on something.

So there I sat, mouth full of broccoli that I was slowly chewing, wondering what I'd gotten myself into.  I had to concede that I wasn't going to be able to eat all the veggies dry, and proceeded on to the other items.  And let me tell you, never have cashews and an apple tasted so wonderful.

It was at this point that I had to accept that I wasn't going to be able to treat food like fuel with machine-like efficiency.  There had to be a minimum amount of flavor to allow me to actually eat something.  So I dragged the cast-aside veggies home and dug out a non-fat balsamic vinaigrette I had purchased on a whim when we were loading up on roughly a ton of veggies at the grocery store.  I perused the nutrition label:

Officially, this wouldn't pass muster by the sadist doctor that had designed the program.  After all, there was sugar AND salt in the ingredient list (TWICE!). It was this point I made the executive decision that a small amount of salt and sugar with no fat and only 15 calories would be an acceptable addition to my food intake to allow me to actually consume all the veggies that I, in fact, hate.

So I measured out a tablespoon (just half a serving!) and dumped it on the left-over broccoli and spinach.  It was like a mouthgasm.  Suddenly, those disgusting little veggies were delicious, all for the price of eight calories and a smidgen of salt and sugar. In my post-consumption euphoria, I proceeded to their website and discovered you can buy this stuff by the case. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't considering placing an order.

Strawberry Lust (or How I Know My Body is Changing Already)

You know how baking cocoa smells like heaven and tastes like aspirin dust?

Last night for a dessert, I dipped my strawberries into unsweetened almond milk and then rolled them in said aspirin dust. Except the aspirin-dust-covered strawberries actually tasted like chocolate-covered strawberries, and my face did that annoying swoony thing I hate seeing from chefs and foodies on TV.

But if that's what it takes for me to know my body's changing, whatever. Plus it's a hell of a lot more pleasant than the cloud of stink the demons in my general colo-rectal area seem hellbent on producing.*

But that's a post for a different day.


*So the gas thing. It gets better right? Please tell me it gets better.

Reboot

There are the equivalent of ten teaspoons of sugar in a can of Coke. Of course, the actual sweetener is high-fructose corn syrup. Consume enough Coke, and you greatly increase your risk of diabetes, as well as numerous other health problems. I know this, yet I still find myself consuming it on a regular basis.

The theme repeats across much of my diet. I know what's bad for me, yet I eat it anyway. Even attempts at healthy eating are scuttled by too much junk sneaking its way into my meals. A nice salad is healthy... until it's doused with four tablespoons of dressing. Lean meat is okay... but the quantity I consume keeps increasing.

That's not to say I try to eat healthy all the time. Many meals come from restaurants, where the primary goals are to supply flavor and quantity, not health. I could go into how many calories there are in a meal at McDonalds, but what's the point? We all know how bad it is.

And we eat it anyway.

For me, there's a collection of reasons why I continue to eat poorly. I was raised with certain eating habits, and knowing that some of them are not good doesn't make the training go away. (I'm like Pavlov's dog, drooling for burgers and fries when hunger rings its bell.) Even looking at food options with greater knowledge in the present doesn't prevent pleasure, convenience, and stress from all playing a role eating what I want instead of what I need.

I'm a bad food addict, and it's getting worse over time. If I don't change this, I'm going to have serious health problems in the future. This isn't the first time I've admitted this to myself. Yet, even when such an admission has led to positive progress, I end up back-sliding into the bad stuff.

So it's time to reboot.

My wife and I are going to try the "Eat to Live" plan, a very intensive vegan diet. The initial phase of the plan is six weeks, and when we reach that point, we'll figure out what to do next.

For me, the goal is simple. I've become accustomed to so much meat, fat, salt, and sugar that I need a break from them to be able to allow them back into my diet in reasonable amount. To achieve this, I'm going to shortchange the pleasure aspect of food for a while. And before you try to tell me that cutting out numerous things from my diet will someone increase pleasure via some amazing recipes, I'll point out that if the most flavorful way to prepare something is also healthy, that's how we'd do it already.

This is not to say that there's no way to have flavorful, healthy food, but I've always found that one of the biggest problems for me is having a healthy recipe that aims to duplicate something else. Invariably, I always want the something else.

So for the next six weeks, my mindset is that food is fuel, and I want to ingest the best fuel possible (a big topic of debate which I'll talk about another day). I know that in the beginning I'll still want all the bad stuff, but after enough healthy meals, my body may reboot. That's the hope, the goal, and the plan. So let's get started and see what happens.

The Universe is Cheering Us On!

The universe of my Facebook friends anyway. This morning I woke up ready to kick and scream my way through the fear of the new frontier of my plate, but the universe cheered me on with three status updates instead:

"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.”
~ Buddha

And the above photo from the Everyday Veggie shared by a friend who's got the hobo sack of her own health journey slung over her shoulder.

Will I put black beans in a smoothie ever again? Unlikely. But I'm buoyed....just in time for lunch!

Vegan-ish Eve

Tomorrow Mike and I are diving into the culinary adventure of our married lives: six weeks (ish--we have an anniversary and a birthday in there, after all) of a vegan dietary plan. Pretty much the simple version of the plan outlined by the Eat to Live program.

Veggies and fruities and beans, but why?

Easy. We saw a Facebook post from a friend of the suffer-no-fools variety who was basically pounding his breast and hollering about how flipping amazing he felt in week 2, of his new Vegan eating plan, and I--jealous of the healthy adventure--lobbed it as an idea at the extremely dedicated carnivore I married....and he got excited about the prospect. Which is right about the time I freaked the hell out and turned into weasel-mc-quitter.

But then we watched Knives Over Forks tonight. A documentary about the quiet-yet-gigantic studies that have linked animal products to accelerated cancer rates, and Mike kept looking at my seriously cartoon eyes with total amusement.

"You would be totally freaking out right now if we weren't making this big change tomorrow, wouldn't you?"

Why, yes. Yes, I would. Even though the rational part of my brain knows that the science in this movie took some extreme liberties with the conclusions it drew given patterns witnessed (I think you science types call them correlations, right?). But still that bit about Norway's cardiac disease numbers taking a nose dive in 1941 following the Nazi's appropriation of all livestock was pretty darn convincing. Even if a quick Google search shows that fish consumption in Norway increased during that time, too.

But this isn't about Norway. The fact is, I don't know what the nutritional truth of the vegan lifestyle is independent of a documentary that was edited to support the author's hypothesis. I expect that the way I'm feeling in a few weeks will help answer that. But what I do know is this.

I have food issues. I eat too much of the wrong things. And it's worse when I'm stressed out. Over the last year, Mike and I ate our way through the worst loss of our marriage to date, and we both gained weight that absolutely needs to get the hell gone. But to do that, I need a program to dive into to make me forget how much I crave sweets and french fries and sweets and steak and sweets and bacon and fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies.

I'm out of control. Mike and I are going to help me get back in control. With veggies and fruities and beans, I take it.

Here's hoping it's way easier being green than a certain swamp Muppet would have us believe.