Post-Easter Resolutions

Boy, was Easter fun! We made eggs benedict for breakfast, we colored eggs, we went for a hike with the pup, we made a dinner with all the household Easter traditions, like mustard sauce for the ham, and spaetzle. And oh, those soft cookies with the pink frosting and sprinkles.

Today: penance. I forget how good the right foods make my body feel. They take away my hunger and keep food off my brain. They prevent me from desperately craving the kind of foods that promote the endless cycle of bingeing.

Here’s my go-to meal plan for a “back on track” day:
8:00am     Oatmeal with almond milk, coffee
10:30am   Hazelnuts
12:00pm   Broth-based bean soup, veggie salad with vinaigrette
2:30pm     Banana with peanut butter
3:30pm     Black tea
6:00pm     Fish with veggies
7:30pm     Frozen banana slices dipped in dark chocolate

I try to work a few “treats” into the day so I don’t feel totally deprived, and this has worked well for me. I’m always looking for new ideas, so let me know what gets you back on track!

Dinner on the Run: Panera

On nights I go to the gym, I know I only dare venture home long enough to change my clothes and scoot out the door. If I linger and let myself get comfy, it’s all over. So I tend to eat dinner out on these nights. The good thing about this scenario is that since the gym is involved, I’m completely motivated to find a healthy, points-friendly choice. Panera was my spot this week, and it worked perfectly! My favorite thing about Panera is that their You Pick Two combos can be fashioned into any number of arrangements to fit perfectly into whatever number of points I have left for the day. If I have a lot of points, I’ll have a more indulgent soup. If I don’t, I’ll go with a broth-based soup and a salad. The low-fat veggie soup and the classic salad are 4 points. It’s completely customizable.

For this particular night, I had 11 points to work with, so I chose the Chicken Noodle Soup and the Napa Almond Chicken Salad Sandwich. And my other favorite thing about Panera: I can pick an apple as my side! It’s been a good week so far. 3.5 days left before my next weigh in, with one lunch and two dinners out on the agenda. I have a plan, just need to keep up the motivation to stick with it!

Overnight Oatmeal

This has been a tough week for sticking to the mission. I’m surrounded by tempting choices this week, in part because my office had a big event with lots of leftovers, and in part because all of my favorite restaurants and food trucks have great specials for both Lent and Saint Patrick’s Day.

I promised myself I wouldn’t just write about the good days on here, so let me confess that I’ve been struggling with breakfast more than anything else this week. On the mornings I wake up early enough to cook oatmeal I’m good to go, but I’m always tempted by the case of pastries in our office building’s coffee shop. It’s not a fancy place, but there’s this one spiral of phyllo dough stuffed with spinach. It’s like a siren song. So if I don’t have breakfast ready to go the night before, I’m already fighting my craving for butter and flour and eggs and cheese before I’ve even left the house. Breakfast sets the tone of my day. If I’m not on track at breakfast, it’s almost guaranteed I will not be on track for the rest of the day. For me, a naughty breakfast is the kiss of death.

I’m a firm believer that preparation is the tool I need to overcome challenges, so here’s my game plan. Today I bought packs of oatmeal I can cook in the microwave at work, plus a bag of apples and chopped walnuts. Oatmeal with apple and walnuts holds me over until lunch, easily. On the nights I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll make overnight oatmeal. Here’s my recipe:

Overnight Oatmeal

(adapted from Bon Appetit)

Grate half an apple on a box grater. Mash one clementine in a small bowl with a fork. In a container you can take to work, mix 1/2 cup old fashioned oats, 1/2 cup frozen raspberries, 1/3 cup plain nonfat yogurt, the apple, the clementine, and a pinch of salt. Cover and stash in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, mix and top with 1 tablespoon of chopped, toasted hazelnuts. Serves 1.

Chicken Stew with Butternut Squash and Quinoa

Days like today remind me of why I’m putting so much effort into eating real food, all the time. Sometimes it’s not easy to pack breakfast and lunch when Daylight Savings Time hits. Sometimes it’s not easy to cook when you come home from work tired. But I have yet to regret having eaten a healthy meal when I could have had Mighty Taco. In fact, I’m usually proud of myself for putting in the work. I have to keep reminding myself that unless I’m sitting in The French Laundry staring down a plate of butter drenched deliciousness, I’ve probably eaten that food before, and will be able to have it again if it’s a dire necessity. I felt great all day today. No cravings, no sugar crashes, no gross feeling of being stuffed. Just a constant state of satisfaction. It’s so nice.

So for tonight’s post, I’m sharing a recipe I’ve adapted from the website Cookin’ Canuck, which I just love. You can view the original recipe here. This woman is a genius. All of her recipes have a healthy undertone, but they’re satisfying. I came home tonight to find the hubster had already started steaming the squash. Nice hubster.

 

 

 

I followed her recipe with some minor changes. I poached and shredded my chicken last night, and bought my squash at Wegmans already cleaned and cut. The recipe serves six, so we each had a serving for dinner, plus a serving for lunch tomorrow and a serving in the freezer for some night when I’m contemplating Mighty. This will absolutely go into my permanent rotation.

Hearty Chicken Stew with Butternut Squash & Quinoa

Adapted from Cookin’ Canuck

• 1 1/2 lb. butternut squash, peeled, seeded & chopped into 1/2-inch pieces
• 3 1/2 cups chicken broth
• 1 1/2 lb. boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cooked & shredded
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 1/2 tsp dried oregano
• 1 can (14 oz) petite diced tomatoes
• 2/3 cup uncooked quinoa
• 3/4 cup pitted and quartered kalamata olives
• 2 tsp sugar (you can use agave if you don’t eat sugar)
• 2 tsp red wine vinegar
• Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• 1/4 cup minced fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 6 ounces of crumbled goat cheese

1. Steam the butternut squash until tender, about 20 minutes. Remove half of the squash pieces and set aside.
2. Steam the remaining squash until very tender, an additional 6 minutes. Mash this squash with the back of a fork. Set aside.
3. Place a dutch oven on the stovetop over medium heat. Add olive oil.
4. Add onion and salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onion begins to brown, 8 to 10 minutes.
5. Add minced garlic and oregano. Cook, stirring, for 1 additional minute.
6. To the saucepan, add tomatoes, butternut squash pieces, and mashed butternut squash. Stir to combine.
7. Stir in chicken broth and quinoa. Bring to a simmer, cover and cook until the quinoa turns translucent, about 15 minutes.
8. Stir the chicken, olives, sugar, red wine vinegar and pepper into the stew and simmer, uncovered, to heat, about 5 minutes. Taste for salt.
9. Ladle into six bowls. Top with parsley and one ounce of crumbled goat cheese per bowl. Serve immediately.

Whole Fish: Our First Attempt

I can’t tell you how many times the hubster and I have talked about cooking a whole fish. We’ve ordered them so many times in restaurants, and we have yet to be disappointed. I fondly remember a whole Bronzino stuffed with Greek bread salad in Baltimore that was so meaty and flavorful, bursting with feta, onions and hunks of moist bread. Most recently, we had a ginger poached fish at Peking Quick One in Tonawanda, NY that was smooth and silky and just fell off the bones.

Sunday was an uncharacteristically warm day in Buffalo, so we decided this would be our chance to throw a guppy on the grill. We went to Wegmans and picked up a snapper, plus some fennel and a lemon.

We caramelized the fennel in a sautee pan and stuffed it in the fish with a copious amount of lemon slices. Perhaps we were a little too generous with the stuffing. Nothing a little kitchen twine can’t fix!

In a strange twist of fate, it turns out the guy who was repairing our brick work this week took the propane tank off the grill and attached it to one of his tools. We had no idea what it was, much less how to get it off. Cue the charcoal. The fish grilled for about 5 minutes on one side, then we flipped it and let it go until the meat started to flake.

Voila! Perfectly grilled fish.

Okay, maybe not perfect. His tail broke off. But he was tasty!

Whole grilled snapper (a small fish serves two):

Note: In retrospect, we would have just stuffed the fish with lemon, thyme & bay leaves. The recipe below reflects that change.

Take one whole snapper, gutted and scaled by your fishmonger. Open it up and season the inside with salt and pepper. Slice one lemon into thin slices, and then cut the slices in half, so you have half-moons. Stuff the lemons inside the fish with three sprigs of thyme and two bay leaves. If the stuffing is overflowing, tie the fish with some kitchen twine to keep it contained. Rub the outside of the fish with one tablespoon of olive oil. Season with salt & pepper. Grill the fish over medium heat for five minutes. Flip the fish and grill on the other side until the flesh flakes when poked with a fork. Take off the grill and let rest for two minutes. Snip the twine and pull the fish open. Lift the meat off the bones and enjoy carefully, as some of the smaller bones are hidden.

(Hint: Start the fish with its back to you. When you flip it, you just have to roll it over toward you. That helped us flip it without losing any stuffing.)

Cookbook highlight: A New Way to Cook, by Sally Schneider

Our friends Melissa and Nino at Wabi Sabi Foto sent us a gift this week. It’s a copy of A New Way to Cook by Sally Schneider. The foreword describes it as a “an introduction to a way of cooking truly delicious food simply, easily, healthfully, and with pleasure, and to enhance the joy in sharing it.”

 

 

 

At first glance, this cookbook is a behemoth. I usually gravitate toward cookbooks that are a manageable size, so I can read every page cover-to-cover. Once I start looking through the recipes, I notice the value immediately. In the Root Vegetable Crema soup, the vegetables are “slowly braised in water with a little butter, so the small amount of fat gives them a rich texture.” The recipe for Meat Loaf with Wild Mushrooms is topped with an Ancho Chile Ketchup. Every ingredient on the list, from the porcini/shiitake/cremini/oyster blend to the Smoky Tea Essence, which is essentially Lapsang Souchong tea run through a spice grinder, adds depth to the dish. The whole book has a Mediterranean flair, with a focus on reducing fat while imparting flavor. I can’t wait to start cooking my way through it!

On a side note, we were out of town today, so I missed my weekly weigh in. I’m a little disappointed, because I was spot on this week, but that should make next week even better! (I have a pedicure waiting for me to hit 174.)

The challenge of constant cooking

My recent challenge to myself of eating real food all the time hasn’t been too difficult. The hubster and I both like to cook, so our day is pretty easy to plan. Breakfast is usually oatmeal, lunch is leftovers from the previous night’s dinner, snack is fruit and a little protein, and then we repeat the cycle by making dinner again. The part I’m finding difficult is maintaining my commitment to real food when I haven’t cooked.

Having a refrigerator full of real food means you have to create your own “convenience” items. If I don’t commit to a few hours of food prep on Sunday afternoons, I’m stuck. When I’m truly hungry, opening the refrigerator to a bunch of raw produce and meat makes it difficult to stand by my good intentions. But frankly, there are times when I’m unprepared.

Tonight, for example, we had the pleasure of visiting Gatur’s Ethiopian Cuisine. Ethiopian tends to revolve around meat and vegetable dishes, so no problem here. But now I don’t have leftovers for lunch. On top of that, I’ll be eating on the run tomorrow, which makes my back-up plan of salad with beans and chicken a difficult endeavor. If I know I’m going to need a grab and go breakfast, I make overnight oatmeal. If I need a snack, a handful of nuts does the trick. I can even find a plethora of healthy dinner options on most takeout menus. But lunch on the run tends to stump me. I definitely have to come up with a solution for this one, quickly! I suppose I’ll be spending a little time with Google tonight. (As always, feel free to share any of your tips below in the comments section!)

A change of scenery

Blogging for me has always been about my current passion. It’s a way of expressing what I’m excited about at this moment, hence the lack of any recent posts. While I’ll always love macarons, they haven’t been passionately inspiring me for quite some time. What’s really inspiring me right now is learning how to cook again, but in a way I haven’t before.

Over the weekend, my husband told me he found an old journal I used to keep. Apparently, I had been keeping it quite early in our relationship. He told me that it made him sad that I had been on a diet for five years, and he didn’t want me to live my whole life that way. I guess when I think about it that makes me a little sad, too. But really, I’ve been dieting for more than half of my life.

So for the first time EVER, I made a true effort to focus on changing the way I think about food. My husband and I decided to try the Bon Appetit Food Lover’s Cleanse for 2013. If I’m being honest, it’s not that much of a “cleanse,” and frankly, the whole idea of doing a “cleanse” goes against everything I believe in, but this two-week meal plan was all about real food. It wasn’t about deprivation, and it wasn’t about what you don’t eat, but instead what you do eat. I loved every bit of it.

When you’re a regular dieter, people tell you all the time to embrace a new lifestyle, but I never understood how I could do that without living a life of deprivation and longing for the foods I would miss. For the first time in my whole Kentucky life, I feel like a switch has flipped, and I get how to incorporate what I love into a rotation of foods that don’t leave me clamoring for that salty/sweet/fat combination the food industry has trained us to crave. I post this not only in hopes of inspiring others to celebrate real food, but also to remind myself that when times get tough, it’s not how far I have to go, but how far I’ve come.

Starting weight: 196

Today’s weight: 176

(I would also like to add that I’m not from Kentucky, but I sure do love that phrase.)

My latest inspiration: Eleven Madison Park

Lately I’ve found myself jonesing to try a plethora of new recipes. I’m certain a large part of this inspiration comes from my recent discovery of the Eleven Madison Park cookbook. It’s a beautiful work of art, and would look spectacular on my coffee table, if I had one.

Since I don’t, I downloaded the electronic version. This book is full of beautiful photography and recipes that would take me weeks to prepare, as each component of the dish is a recipe in itself. That does not, however, deter me from the pursuit of the glamorous section called “mignardises.”

“Mignardises,” per the Wikipedia definition, are tiny, bite-sized desserts served at the end of a meal. The Eleven Madison Park recipes for mignardises involve playing with such fun items as nitrous oxide, liquid nitrogen, and other chemistry lab supplies. I, on the other hand, am starting with my first use of sheet gelatin. (No, wait! Come back! I promise I won’t bore you to tears…)

So finding gold-strength sheet gelatin in Buffalo is like finding a moose in Iowa. I’m sure there’s one in a zoo somewhere, but I wouldn’t call them rampant. As always, Premier Gourmet to the rescue!

Gelatin is sexier in German. So, off we go! I read the recipe a few times, and got cracking. It’s essentially a cinnamon macaron shell with a carrot curd filling, plus a dab of cinnamon-sugar cream cheese in the middle for good measure. About halfway through reading the recipe, I noticed the “curd” called for whole eggs. Whole eggs? In a curd? That can’t be right! So now I start the frantic Googling.

Lo and behold, I find a great blog by this chick named Victoria who moved from Hollywood to NYC and took the dive into culinary school. She has already made the carrot curd, and lived to write about it. The bonus is that she made a few adjustments to the recipe, making it much easier to understand. Click here to see it.

Long story short, I followed her tips, made the carrot curd, and the macaron is delicious! End of story. (Okay, almost.) See, her version used powdered gelatin, where I used the sheet gelatin mentioned in the original recipe. It didn’t bloom properly. So my curd is a little runny. I’m sure it will be better in round 2.

Okay, that truly is the end of story. And if you haven’t checked out Victoria’s blog yet, this specific entry gives you a great idea for what to do with that giant batch of “almost perfect” carrot curd. I’m enjoying my cake right now.

I Can’t Win.

My new issue of Bon Appétit arrived today! I love this magazine. I feel like it’s designed for intermediate cooks like myself. Advanced enough to keep my attention, but not so complicated that I have to go Google the ingredients (like a recently found recipe that called for “sodium alginate.” I have to be in the right mood for that kind of experimentation.)

I have a routine for reading Bon Appétit. I tear off the plastic wrapping and dive for the dessert spread in the back. There’s always a dessert spread in the back. So imagine my pleasant surprise to find this:

Chocolate orange…..wait for it…..macaroons?  Two o’s!?!!??!?!? For crying out loud, THE TITLE OF YOUR MAGAZINE IS IN FRENCH!! Ugh.

Now here’s my frustration. I read magazines like Bon Appétit for a few reasons. One of them is to be able to hold informed conversations with people who know more than I do about food.  And I expect that if a magazine is going to be educating the public about food, its writers and editors should should know a lot about food. More than most people. Certainly more than I do.

Thank you to The High-heeled Contessa for this illustration.

So I plead with you, Bon Appétit. Stop dumbing it down for the masses. Spread the joy of the macaron to the world! And leave the macaroons for another article.

On a side note, props to Oprah magazine for getting the spelling right, even if these might be the ugliest macarons I’ve ever seen.