Playin’ The Edge

Wow, I finally finished the cookbook and got it up on the site.  I’m really excited about it.  I figured how to make a detox granola.  I know, another breakfast option – woohoo!

I also really got thinking this time about the best ways to keep the whole 80/20% food thing straight.  It’s one of the challenges of doing the Wild Rose D-Tox.  I heard someone say once that eating on the detox is no big deal, they just make a big pot of chili and then eat it constantly.  And I thought, um, aren’t beans and meat 20% foods?  So shouldn’t chili maybe make up one meal?  Or at least put it on brown rice which you can eat in unlimited quantities?

My point is that it’s hard and I included some advice on how to figure it out in the cookbook.  I also included 6 recipes that you can make with all 80% or foods from the unlimited list.  In other words, eat up.  No math required.  Things like Lemon Rice and Almond Crusted Salmon.  Those dishes are so yummy I eat them when I’m not detoxing.

So check it out if you’re thinking about your next detox.  For a mere $4.95 e-book, it costs less than your next bag of organic brown rice.  Happy Detoxing!

I recently paged through Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights, which as much fun to read as it was to drool over the recipes.  She’s a good writer (happens to be grand daughter to Roald Dahl of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory fame) and her words make you taste the food she describes.

She’s also a foodie and a transformed one.  She went from eating anything to enjoy herself to eating more carefully to take care of herself.

I was reading her recipes and then realized they were healthier than i thought.  Voluptuous health food?  She clearly loves food but she’s smart about it.  Sure she’ll use creme fraiche in a recipe but often only a tablespoon to add that creamy punch.  Also, a bunch of them are detox friendly.  Like the Scrambled Tofu breakfast.

Only she uses mushrooms which aren’t on the list but I thought you could handily substitute pretty much any veg.  Greens would be tasty, so would lightly fried grape tomatoes.  Maybe peppers and onions.  See I’m drooling again. Here’s the recipe:

Scrambled Tofu with Cumin and A Detox Friendly Veg to Take the Place of Shiitake Mushrooms

1 T of sesame oil

1 c of substituted veggies

salt and pepper

1/2 a block of firm tofu

1 heaping t of cumin

1 T of chopped fresh thyme plus extra to serve

Heat the oil in a pan and saute your veggies.  Season and set aside.  Add a little more oil to the pan and crumble the tofu in with your fingers and cook until it looks like scrambled eggs.  Stir in the cumin and thyme with a wooden spoon.  Make sure the tofu is coated evenly.

Spoon onto two plates and pour the veggies on top adding some more thyme if you please.

When you’re planning your next detox, I highly recommend getting your hands on Tosca Reno’s Eat Clean Cookbook.  She’s the 50-something chickie who’s often on the cover of Oxygen magazine becuase she’s married to the publisher and really hot.

She has a recipe for Exotic Spice Mix on page 190 that looks like this:

1 t cumin seeds

1 t black peppercorns

2 t sweet paprika

1 t cayenne pepper

1 t cinnamon

1 t coarse seasalt

1/2 t anise seeds

1/2 t ground nutmeg

You toast all the spices dry in a frying pan over medium heat for several minutes until the pan just begins to smoke.  Then let the mixture cool, pulse it in a spice mill until it’s finely ground and transfer to a jar and seal.

Doesn’t that look amazing?  And all detox friendly, you would never have a to have a boring flavoured meal ever again.  I don’t have a spice mill but thought I would just grind it by hand in a bowl.  It wouldn’t be fine, but I like a mouthful of surprise when I eat!

She uses it in a sweet potato salad.  That would definitely not be like Mom’s half-a-jar-of-mayo potato salad.  If you turfed the molasses and used a couple sliced prunes instead of raisins it would also be detox friendly.

Sometimes you have to get creative when you’re detoxing or 10 days can feel like a year.  Pick up Tosca Reno’s book and get inspired!

Honeybunny was bbqing our steaks last night and I decided after a couple of gin and tonics to start my detox this morning.  I normally detox in April and here it is May, and I still hadn’t started.  So I finally did a “what’s the worst that can happen??” and decided to jump in.  No regrets this morning.

Because although I hadn’t done a detox grocery shop, i wasn’t in bad shape.  I threw a butternut squash (sliced in half, de-seeded, coated wtih olive oil, salted and peppered) on the barbecue to roast while the steaks cooked.  The skin got charred a bit and the inside looks soft and sweet.  I’ll use it to make a pureed squash soup with onions, garlic and chicken stock – my favourite.

I had lots of brown rice in the cupboad so I set up the rice cooker and cooked up a bunch. 

I also threw a chopped onion and oil in a pot over heat until it started to soften, threw in garlic and 2 cups of chopped tomatoes and mashed them a bit while they cooked.  Then I added a can of chick peas.  I felt in the mood for italian flavour so I threw in some oregano, basil and thyme with salt and pepper.  I’ll eat it with the rice for lunch.

My mid-morning snack was a kale salad.  Last night I ripped up some kale into bite sized bits, added a handful of sunflower seeds and topped it with olive oil, salt and pepper and a squirt of lemon juice.  I wouldn’t normally put dressing on my salad when it’s going to sit overnight, but it works with kale.   The leaves are so chewy that it just softens them up and makes you feel less like a horse munching on hay.  Or a cow chewing her cud.

This morning i was stuck on breakfast (the detoxers dilemma!).  I didn’t have any unsweetened soy milk and i hate it anyways.  I thought, what the heck can i add to my oatmeal?  So i made this dead simple breakfast:

Oats & Berries

I put 1/2 cup of oatmeal in a bowl and added 1/2 cup of frozen berries (blue, black and raspeberry).  I added enough water to a little more than cover the food and microwaved it for 60 seconds.  I stirred and microwaved for another 30. 

The berries really add flavour and some sweetness to the oatmeal.  They also keep the oatmeal from being a tasteless gluey mess.  This is my new favourite breakfast.

Some days I think my kids are eating too much processed food and that’s when i need to get baking.  There’s something about colorful food packaging, it just lures them in like the lights of Time Square.  

The other thing I’ve found is that if you’re a Baking Mom your kids take it for granded.  Fresh baked things from the oven?  Yeah whatever.  Then when a kid visits who doesn’t have a Baking Mom, they clean the place out.  

Saturday afternoon I made a coffee cake with cherries in it.  Who can turn down warm coffee cake on a chilly day?   My son. He wanted popcorn instead.  The kid of my friend who’s a Non-Baking Mom meanwhile had three helpings. 

So you gotta make the right things for the jaded children who have consumed baked goods since they were tiny.  And Feisty Chef’s Carrot Muffins fit the bill.  Gussie had three for lunch.

I didn’t include the grated apple because I felt like there was already a ridiculous amount of good things in it and i was tired of grating.  Also a tip – finely grate the carrots.  Once I made carrot muffins and I used coursely grated carrot and it was like hot carrot coleslaw.  Anyhoo, enjoy Feisty’s recipe which also worked for her child:

Terrible Two’s Carrot Muffins

• 1 1/2C sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1C oil
• 2tsp vanilla
• 2C flour
• 2tsp baking soda
• 1tsp baking powder
• 2tsp cinnamon
• 2C  grated carrots
• ½ C  raisins
• ½ C chopped walnuts
• ½ C coconut
• 1 apple; grated

Cream together sugar, eggs, oil and vanilla. Add dry ingredients and fruit. Mix and spoon into greased muffin tins and bake at 400°F for 18 – 20 minutes. Remove from pan and let cool on a wire rack. Consume with your kids!

Volume 1 of my detox cookbook has been selling regularly and I’m thrilled about that.  The idea that I might be helping people eat well on the detox so they don’t “fall off the wagon” makes me feel really good.  Good enough to keep working on recipes for a second volume! 

I figured out a way to make detox-friendly granola, which is exciting.  You may not think that one can get excited about granola but if you’re like me and enjoy an a.m. bowl of cereal (anytime really) you really miss it during the detox. 

And this granola is yummy.  I just miss the dried fruit, but I’ll live.  I also figured out a nutty salmon recipe that I plan to make all the time,  not just when I’m detoxing. 

I’ve been thinking about how to keep track of the 80% and 20% restrictions of the Wild Rose Detox.  I want to include more “eat as much of this as you want” recipes so we can spend less time figuring out how much 20% food can be squeezed into our daily diet. 

That’s one thing I love about the Wild Rose detox, i don’t have to quit coffee and there *are* foods i can eat as often as i like.

I’m also realizing that spring is upon us and it’s time to plan my own bi-annual detox.  I’m thinking of doing more juicing this time.  I’ll keep you posted.

I was at the gym this a.m..  It’s packed with the usual suspects plus all the folks that are there driven by post holiday guilt or a new year’s resolution, which is pretty much the same thing in my books. 

I feel bad for the folks just starting up because it looks so darn uncomfortable.  I’ve been there.  Once you’ve sat on your bum for a while not doing anything, it’s so hard to get going.  And if you were just starting for the first time at 30 or 40-something, well i can’t imagine.

I saw a woman on the stepper and she was barely moving, like it was all in my head.  Another woman had the resistance so high on the bike that she looked like she was in pain, hunched over the handlebars like someone was beating her with a stick.  I wanted to say, girlfriend, you’ll get there!  It doesn’t have to be today, lighten up on the resistance and have some fun with it!  But I was too busy hunching over my own bike

The exercise pundits say that anything more active than being a total couch potato is good.  Sure, the magic 3 times a week at some sort of intensity is awesome, but really any activity beats sitting on the couch listening to your arteries harden.

There was a bit in a recent Shape magazine where one of the women who lost a bunch of weight said that she found that being unhealthy and overweight is hard.  Losing weight and getting healthy is Hard and maintaining all that too is Hard.  So just pick your Hard.

I’ve been thinking about that.  Life is often hard in ways that we don’t choose.  Health issues come up, our loved ones, our pets and ourselves deal with difficult things.  There’s plenty of Hard that we don’t get to pick.   But I’ve also noticed that if I pick the Hard that allows me to take care of myself, there are plenty of long term benefits that make it less Hard, easy and enjoyable even. 

That’s different from consuming a container of ice cream on the couch in front of Mad Men.  That would be long-term Hard because I’d regret it in the morning.  On the other hand, the Hard part of having salad for lunch is rinsing and cutting all those lousy veggies.  After that it gets easy, the salad tastes good and I get to feel real Virtuous which beats regret hands down anyday. 

And I guess that’s why I’m all for trying to take care of myself even though it’s Hard.  If I can be fit enough then when I exercise it’ll be fun and give me a good endorphin rush.  Maybe by picking the Eat Hard path it will become more and more of a habit and therefore less Hard to answer the “what am i going to eat??” question.  

My hope is also that if I take care of myself then maybe I won’t have to deal as often with the Hard that I don’t choose, like health issues.  There’s no guarantee of course that I’ll never get sick.  But they seem to say that being active and eating your veggies are the two biggest things you can do to help your health.  So any Healthy Hard choices I make is all gonna help.

And I have to say, as I look at the folks I know who are older than me, it seems to be pretty consistent.  Those who have taken care of themselves have aged more gracefully than those that haven’t.  It seems like you can do what you want and get away with it in your 20′s and 30′s but once you get to your 40′s and beyond, the results of your bad habits really come into play.   And they’re much harder to turn around when you’ve picked Unhealthy Hard for that long.

And hey, i’m not a proponent of all-or-nothing on this health thing.  I just believe in doing my best to minimize the lousy stuff and maximize on the healthy things where and when I can.  All I can do is pick my Hard every day.

I’m still thinking about the Goop email I got last week.  Gwynie always has interesting stuff to share.  Last week she had Dr. Frank Lipman write about sugar addiction.  He reported on a study:

One study out of France, presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, showed that when rats (who metabolize sugar much like we do) were given the choice between water sweetened with saccharin and intravenous cocaine, 94% chose the saccharin water. When the water was sweetened with sucrose (sugar), the same preference was observed—the rats overwhelmingly chose the sugar water. When the rats were offered larger doses of cocaine, it did not alter their preference for the saccharin or sugar water. Even rats addicted to cocaine, switched to sweetened water when given the choice. In other words, intense sweetness was more rewarding to the brain than cocaine.

Let me get this straight, even addicted to cocaine, the rats still chose sugar.  Wow.  The newsletter is still up on the site if you want to read his suggestions for avoiding sugar cravings.  They were interesting to me. I am Corilee, and I am a sugar addict

Detoxers often shake in fear of the thought of breakfasts for 10 days while detoxing.  Because if you don’t like hot cereal your options are incredibly limited.  You can do an egg and some sauteed veggies. 

I do that and add a bit of brown rice too, getting it toasty in the pan.  Then I clear a spot in the middle and add the egg.  It’s not eggs and bacon with toast but it has some flavour and fills me up when I need a decent breakfast.

Lately in my non-detoxing life I’ve gotten into smoothies.  It took a long time because I could not find edible protein powder.  I find plain ol’ fruit and stuff does not stick with me.  My naturopath had told me that I need to eat more protein for breakfast and suggested smoothies but I had had a rough history with the chemical powders. 

One time I bought one of those huge containers of protein powder from some weighlifting store.  I don’t know why the containers need to be so huge, to make you feel like you’re already big and strong? 

It was some fruity flavour an it tasted like eating some Wild Berry Body Shop product.  It. Was. Awful.  And I couldn’t throw it away for the longest time because it had been so expensive and I kept hoping I would try it again and finally Honeybunny got sick of looking at it and did it for me. 

Then I heard about Whey Gourmet, people said it tasted much better.  So I played it safe and tried the Vanilla flavour with fruit and juice or milk and it worked.  Woohoo! I’d found a smoothie that tasted good!  When Whey Gourmet went on sale at my store I splurged on the chocolate and while it does taste a bit chemically, mixed with a ripe banana and milk, I can live with it, yum. 

I’ve gotten hooked on drinking smoothies before morning workouts because they digest fast and easy and I don’t “enjoy breakfast all over again” when I start working hard, like I do with solid breakfasts.  The other benefit to smoothies is that they’re much easier to consume in the car than other crumby crumbly breakfasts.  I just pour it into a big water bottle and drink it with a thick straw (thank you MacDonald’s).

So when I was getting ready to start this fall’s detox I thought, damn how will I get my smoothies fix??  Protein powder is definitely not on the food list.  So here’s what I did:

Detox Smoothie

Ingredients:  Half a carton of silken tofu, 1 cup of frozen berries, 1/2 cup of unsweetened soy milk, 1/2 cup of juice

Directions: Whir the ingredients up in a blender, pour it into a 3 cup container and enjoy.

The food lists say that you should drink juice and soy milk “in moderation”, whatever that is.  But I figure half cup of each is probably safe.  I found my detox smoothie stuck with me as well as my usual ones and tasted great.

Supposedly in 1900 there were 1,000 different kinds of apples being sold by farmers.  I can’t imagine.  I can’t keep the types of apples that are available here clear in my head – which ones for baking, which ones are crisp and sweet for eating.  But I love all the crazy varieties. 

I love seeing the little brown ones, Russets.  I get excited by the big Honeycrisps early in the season.   And fall for me is all about the satisfying heft of a bag of Gravensteins and plans to bake something fruity and delicious. 

Last year I first discovered the Ginger Golds which are a cute little bright green apple that is my son’s choice of snack, his favourite color is green.  Supposedly the Ginger Gold was discovered in a Virginia orchard growing among some twisted uprooted trees (isn’t the interweb useful?  how did we find stuff out before it came along?). 

I’ve been a Fuji girl lately and my friend who was raised in the Valley, the apple growing area in Nova Scotia goes on at length about the joy of eating a Fall Pippin.  I had never heard of it. But to each their own when it comes to apples, there are enough varieties to go around.

When apple season started I got hungry for an apple crisp and found fresh Cortlands at the farmers market.  The Cortland is also a good baking apple, the interweb tells me it’s an heirloom variety developed by the food scientists in New York in 1898.

Anyhoo, I made an apple crisp with lots of crisp oaty topping and ate it for dinner before teaching yoga class one night.  But I had three Cortlands left over and thought, hey, I should make apple crisp in preparation for my detox!

Making Applesauce

So I cut 3 peeled apples into quarters and de-cored them by cutting a “v” into them.  Then I cut them in half again and sliced them.  I added a good sprinkle of cinnamon and cut up 3 dried plums (a.k.a. prunes)  and added for sweetness.  I’m not sure it needed the dried fruit.  I added just a bit of water so the apples wouldn’t stick in the pot while they heated up.  Then I let it all simmer uncovered until the apples were soft.  I mixed it well, let it cool and put it in a plastic container, it was happy in the fridge for the 5 days that it lasted. 

If you’re someone who misses jam when you detox, this is a good substitute.  It is great on top of almond butter on a rice cake.  I also put a couple spoonfuls on my oatmeal.