On Tin Foil Hats and Blueberries

Lord Married With Veggies likes to dismiss my craziest worries by saying "is it time to whip out the tin foil hat?" when I get creeped out that my money is all digital and wonder if we should buy gold instead or handing my produce to the cashier at the grocery store because the thought of putting things I'll eat on the conveyor where every other thing has been wigs me out or insisting that the little camera that's used with one of his gaming systems be turned to the wall when it's off  because having a camera trained on me makes me feel like Big Brother's watching. Fine. Yes. He has a point. All of the preceding really are kind of tin-foil-hat worries, and I'm glad to have him tease me to remind me that I'm veering dangerously close to becoming the kind of person who thinks it's perfectly normal to write X-files fan fiction all day.

But I draw the line when he tries to tell me it's tin-foil-hat thinking on my part to revere the superfoods that contain a higher than normal concentration of nutrients, antioxidents, and all the rest of that good stuff (now seems like an excellent time to remind our dear readers that nobody at Married With Veggies is a trained nutritionist, so this is our experience and not actual medical advice--kay? Kay.).

Yes, "superfood is an umbrella term that is more marketing than science, but I find it a helpful shorthand to think about the kind of foods I should be reaching for. And many lists of superfoods have sirloin and salmon and eggs and yogurt on them, so as a person gravitating toward a more plant-based existence, it's confusing. But! I can definitely agree about avocado and blueberries and spinach and all the rest of the glorious plant-based superfoods on so many of the versions of the lists (I'd include a list but it changes all the time. Google it to get an idea).

At one point about a year ago, I read that blueberries and spinach and avocado were kind of aces on the superfood list (the favorites on those lists tends to dance around a bit, but these three are almost always on any given list). So I started to experiment. At the time I was making myself a smoothie of banana and cocoa as a treat, and I tried adding a little frozen blueberries to see what would happen...and it was delicious. If banana and chocolate and almond milk were milk chocolate, then banana, almond milk, and chocolate plus BLUEBERRIES was dark chocolate. Yum!

I kept experimenting. One day I was out of bananas so I tried avocado, and that was thick and oh so  delicious. And then I started to sneak in a tiny handful of spinach...and it disappeared into my fruity chocolate-y goodness, so I added more and more and more until I was basically topping the blender with spinach.

Now I basically eat this smoothie every morning. And when I don't have one in the morning, I'll whip up a version of it for a treat at night.

Why?

Because (and here's where Lord Married With Veggies cries tin foil hat) I believe that my superfood smoothie keeps me healthy. Oh, I get migraines from other things, but I don't get colds and flus. Or rather, this fall when everyone was on Facebook talking about the cold that lingered for weeks and could it  be gone right now, please, I got the sniffles for a grand total of half a day.

This week lord Married with Veggies was home with a coughing cold and wonky tummy for a day and a half. The Married With Veggies dog wasn't feeling too hot either. But I just kept making my superfood shakesand skated past it. Maybe it isn't the smoothie. Lord Married With Veggies believes that working as a tutor I have been exposed to a petri-dish gauntlet of viruses that has turned my immune system into a teflon iron man of you-can't-touch-this beauty. And maybe. But I feel better when I drink my superfood smoothie, which means I believe in it.

And if that means I need to start wearing a tin-foil hat, so be it.

Superfood Breakfast Smoothie1 cup almond milk
1 banana (spotted is best because it's sweetest) (1/4 of an avocado will work here)
1 cup blueberries
2 TBSP cocoa powder
1 packet of stevia
four handfuls (four cups maybe?) baby spinach 

Blender that baby! I usually eat a slice of backed tofu with it for protein, but you can sub soy milk for almond milk instead.  

Variation--Just do almond milk, blueberries, cocoa and sweetner for a end of the day lighter treat. Add avocado if you prefer it thicker. 

Lady Married With Veggies CANNOT Be Trusted With Vegan Baked Goods.

The title says it all, don't you think?

Death to Ginger!

When I was in second grade, I had a hamster named Dicey (his repeated attempts to climb the water bottle to safety resulted in falling and tumbling along the cage in a way that reminded me of Parcheesi dice*). The thing about Dicey was, well, there were lots of things about Dicey, though  given that this is basically a food blog I feel the need to quell any rising  unease that this story is going to end with Dicey making the acquaintance of my Easy Bake Oven in any alarming kind of way. He does not. What he does do--did--was stink.

I don't mean he was a bad hamster--penchant for escape attempts aside, he stuffed his cheeks with lettuce and toddled around in a way that brought me hours of glee. But that tiny sucker pissed like he was trying to swim free, and it was my unhappy chore to clean the cage. I thought that Dicey's untimely death in fourth grade put an end to the sourly pungent torture of the smell piss-soaked shavings for good, but then I caught a whiff of ginger.

Uncapping that first ginger jar unleashed an exact scent replica of those terrible, terrible shavings. You would think that if the smell of a spice most of the world loves reminds me of the smell of Dicey's dirty cage, then logically the smell said cage could never have been as bad as I remembered it in the first place. But my sense of smell does not follow your stinking (ha!) logic!

I'm trying to reprogram my irrational ginger revulsion, I really am. And I've had some success with Indian cooking, in no small part because the other spices--BURNING!--mean I can't taste the ginger at all. But I just made a carrot soup recipe that included the heinous herb, and I  thought, be an adult, Lady Married With Veggies. There's allspice in there to dull the ginger, so maybe this is the ginger gateway you've been hoping for, but alas no. I probably should have paid attention when my stomach flipped as I opened the jar and caught a whiff--Dicey, is that you?--but I pushed through and tried the soup, and....hamster piss.

Total hamster piss.

Some quick thinking and a shit ton of cinnamon and salt later, and the soup was saved, but the conversion to all things ginger I was hoping for? Just not meant to be, I'm afraid.

Thanks for nothing, Dicey.

*I like to think the more mature writer I am now has a bit more flare for metaphorical thinking.

Vegan Cooking *FAIL!*

The snapshot at right of the spicy vegan sausage and the spicy greens from the Happy Herbivore cookbook.

"Why, no, it did NOT look this in the picture," Lady Married with Veggies says, batting her eyelashes. "Why ever do you ask?"

Some days  we make beautiful and delicious things here at Married With Veggies.  Other days, Lord Married With Veggies turns to hand me my meal, lowers his voice and says, "Your vegan turd, m'lady."

Once we crumbled the "turd" and mixed it in, it was quite delightful (that sentence is all kinds of wrong) because it mostly tasted like fennel. Yum! No, really. It was. Whatever.

Lord Married With Veggies is scheming for the next time. Lady Married with Veggies says there are so many recipes that don't look like turds left to try.

Lady Married with Veggies is also suspicious that the Happy Herbivore cookbook used a food photographer. The photo for Aztec corn chowder is yellow as the sun and beautifully smooth. There are no little turdling chunks of black beans in that photo to be seen at all. When I write my cookbook (it's a figure of speech), I will NOT use photographer's tricks. Because some times food looks beautiful, and sometimes it looks like a giant vegan turd.

A Juice for the New Year

It's been a dog's age since I've written a post for Married with Veggies, and it's not been a pretty epoch on planet good health. Pounds have been gained. Couches have been surfed. Eyeballs have popped out looking down at numbers on scales we'd sworn never to be at (and in Lady* Married with Veggies' case MORE than at) again. Like I said. Not pretty.

In December, Lady Married with Veggies had a wake up call. After a relatively fallow period in the migraine suffering department, during a 10-day period in December she (OK--I) had six very bad migraines. Couldn't see. Couldn't talk. Couldn't think. Worse? The headaches  freaked me out enough that I refilled a prescription for the blood-brain barrier medicine my doctor advised me to stop taking. I know. Believe me, I know. But when you know the old stuff works and don't yet trust the new stuff, well. Bad choices can sometimes seem like the only way out.

I was doing pretty well with this cycle of head hell, all things considered. And by all things considered I mean my rampant hypochondria. But an hour into migraine number 6, I cracked. Convinced myself I had a tumor. That I was dying. And I was going to leave Lord* Married with Veggies alone on Christmas. So I slinked away to be scared and alone, but sir Married with Veggies found me crying and curled up on the bed in the guest room. In retrospect, our condo probably isn't  nearly big enough to nurture selective disappearance. 

Lord Married With Veggies brushed my hair back and assured me I very likely wasn't dying and gently reminded me about all the shit we'd been eating over the last few weeks and months and suggested that before I write out my last will and testament, I might want to consider getting back on the horse. The, err, veggie horse. 

I'm paraphrasing.   

So that's what we're doing. But in true disordered fashion, I decided it would be good to combine our New Year's Eve movie marathon with a last hurrah of Chinese food and baked goods and chocolate and, well. I did say it hasn't been pretty. 

The first movie of the feasty film fest?  Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead. A documentary about an Australian who saves his life by rebooting his body with a 60-day juice fast. It was inspirational--though not inspirational enough to inspire me to lay down the fork full of (vegetarian!) chow mein. Though I did cheer (out loud) twice while watching. 

By midnight we'd watched The Artist and The Avengers, and I'd eaten myself into a big belly ache. I asked Lord Married with Veggies where exactly the appendix was, and he bopped me in the head. No, he did not. But you get the idea. 

I would like to say I got up this morning and started my own 60-day juice fast, but that would be freaky crazy nuts talk. What I did was I got up and reminded myself that I want to try and be 90 percent plant based in 2013, and with the inspiration of Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead fresh in my mind, I decided to juice a big plate of fruit and veggies...and it  took me nearly an hour to choke down the results.

Will I do a juice fast any time soon? I think I want to concentrate on eating better first, but when I feel better, I may give it a try.

For now, it was a very vegan breakfast to start off 2013 right. Now I know that a quart of juice isn’t exactly going to wash away the sins of the last half year or anything, but watching Lord Married with Veggies' face when he tried the results of my juicing experiment gave me my first belly laugh of the new year…and that’s a very good thing.

Pre juice: A head of broccoli, 2 cucumbers, 2 green apples
2 oranges, 2 red peppers, and 4 handfuls of baby spinach

Post juice: Sorry. It looks WAY better in the before picture. 

Dressed up with a fancy glass and a colorful straw! 

Veggie blood! 

The purple dress I had dry-cleaned
to serve as motivation. Perhaps I will
wear that on New Year's Eve....2015 (it's
veeerrry small).

*Mayhap Lord and Lady Married with Veggies  have been watching a wee too much Downton Abbey this fall.