Staying Healthy… And What It Really Means

Why are we doing this – we ‘healthy living’ folk? Why don’t we just eat whatever the *!@# we want?

I think we have different reasons. Some people want to lose weight. Others want to have a lot of energy. Some want to be in peak athletic shape, to participate in their favorite sport. Still others want to live a long, radiant life.

Today I visited the page of one of my favorite DJs from NYC – the great John Bell, who was unfortunately laid off from a radio show he helped to make great. John Bell has taken to posting on this page since then, and I enjoy checking his posts a few times a week. Today, I was surprised to see that none of the usual updates were there – instead John Bell had a dedication post. Today is the day when TV works for good, as advertised in this post – when TV people group together to help fight the battle against cancer.

My father passed away from cancer, when I was still in high school. Cancer doesn’t just strike elderly people, as I’m sure you’ve seen. I’m sure many or most of you reading this know someone that was affected by cancer who was middle-aged.

Study after study has pointed to the fact that a healthy diet can help people to live longer, healthier lives. I don’t really need any more studies to convince me to avoid chemicals, preservatives, and pesticides in food. It makes sense. It’s not really that difficult to realize that things you ingest will have a drastic effect on your well-being.

Of course, food is only one piece in the puzzle. If you eat healthy foods, but are too stressed to properly digest your food – getting digestive disturbances due to mental distress, the healthy foods can’t work their full magic. Nothing can work its full magic when its under stress. So much stress is pointless, too – feelings of tension over fleeting things that won’t amount to anything. When that stress builds and turns into a stress mountain, it’s dangerous. It’s not worth it.

Anyway – on a different subject…

For dinner tonight, I tried one of the Ezekial Sprouted Tortillas for the first time. I assembled some black bean salad to go inside the tortilla, with beans that had been soaking along with kombu the whole day in the refrigerator. Kombu is supposed to improve the digestibility of beans, along with adding some great nutrients. After I cooked the beans, I added some olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, cilantro and yellow tomato – which together had a nice zing. To add some texture and flavor inside of the tortilla, I crumbled some feta cheese. On the side was a fresh spinach salad with Caesar dressing.

Dessert was blog-inspired: Vegan Spiced Pumpkin Pie Glo Bites. I made a few alterations, which included 1) not using a muffin pan, 2) using spelt flour for the filling, 3) using regular milk instead of almond, 4) using ‘pumpkin pie spice’ in lieu of the cinnamon and nutmeg, 5) not using vanilla, 6) using honey instead of sugar in the filling. Basically – I didn’t have some of the ingredients, so I figured I could substitute.

These were super tasty. Angela always has such great recipes. And even better – the recipes on her blog are presented in a context of truly caring about and nurturing oneself. They’re about taking the time to use the best kind of ingredients to truly help your body + mind thrive.

Long post I have here. I guess that for me, Fridays are about processing ideas.

I hope that you have a great weekend and – enjoy each moment!

The Joy of Recipe Sharing

Now that I have found myself reading all of these food blogs, I just can’t help but to want to make some of these recipes.

After Sonia of Master of Her Romaine mentioned homemade sweet potato fries (awhile back), I felt like a light switch had just flipped on in my brain. I’ve kept meaning to make them since then. I love sweet potato fries – of course it would make sense to make some at home! Then, she gave me the recipe… and I thought: cumin? A brilliant choice to pair with the sweetness of the vegetable. I decided to substitute some salt for the chili powder (I can’t do spicy foods too well), and I changed the oven temp/time to suit what I already had baking…but in any case, these turned out great! My husband also really enjoyed them.

So – what else was baking in the oven, might you ask?

Banana bread! Everyone keeps talking about banana bread lately on these blogs. I can’t give you an exact recipe because I didn’t follow an exact recipe and didn’t even measure all my ingredients, but it went something like this:
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup spelt flour
About 1.5 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
4 mashed bananas
1/2 cup applesauce
A few generous splashes maple syrup
One generous glub of honey
3/4 tsp cinnamon
3/4 tsp nutmeg

I think that’s it. I baked it for about an hour at 350. It turned out on the lighter side, probably because I didn’t use any butter. I think it’s a good late-summer bread, though, not too dense.

And then, one last blog-inspired recipe from yesterday: Chickpeas with Spinach. Again, thanks to Sonia of “Master of Her Romaine”. I slightly tweaked this recipe that Sonia had linked to on her site. I used kombu leaves to soak the dried chickpeas with, which eventually became incorporated into the dish. I also added garlic afterwards, instead of during the cooking process. Anyway, I thought this dish was another fairly light one which I was able to chill in the refrigerator and bring to the picnic that my husband and I attended today, with fellow blogger and friend, Anna, and her husband Ryan. (Anna brought a great fresh and summery Mediterranean pasta salad to share – lots of good picnic food was had.)

Here’s a photo of the chickpea dish cooking:

This food blogging thing is all about sharing, isn’t it? That’s the joy of it to me. Through passing forth our recipes, we’re actualizing something our grandparents used to do on small sheets of paper – exchanging a bit of culture, tradition, and/or contemporary invention. Through giving each other these plans to work with, we set forward a chain of momentum, as families and friends experience the fruits of creation.

Food blogging may be our generation’s answer to a food industry that has tried to feed us things fashioned by machines, things that fell forth from conveyer belts. We’re bringing back the human element to food: the patience, the caring, the attention – things I think we really need. Ironically, we’re doing these very human things over the internet… But it does bring people together from all over the country, and all over the world. And it even allows you to discover great friends in places not-too-far away that you never would have found without the blogs.