Cleanse – Harmonious Belly

January 17, 2012January 15, 2012

Food Lover’s Cleanse 2012, Days 5-8

I ended up taking several days away from the cleanse for various reasons, mostly due to social events and meetings with friends that came up. Connecting with the people I care about is important to me, so I take advantage of it when I can. Good news is that I didn’t over do it with sweets and I ate smaller portion sizes, not because of a conscious decision, but because my body is better regulated these days after eating mostly real food; I don’t feel the need to overindulge. The times spend with friends were so fun and I’m really glad I had those opportunities.

Day 5 (Thursday) started with 2 pastured eggs topped with a spicy fermented relish. I love this relish, and adore pastured eggs, so it was a great combination for me. And I get my fermented foods right off at the start of the day. I also had some pear ginger tea.

Lunch was leftover pumpkin chicken curry, based on the pumpkin shrimp curry for that week. I don’t care for shrimp and I had this lovely pastured chicken breast, so I made the curry earlier in the week, simply swapping one protein for the other. It worked out great! I also used coconut oil, which added a nice flavor. And it was delicious over the carrot brown rice pilaf. I soaked the brown rice in water and whey to deactivate the phytic acid.

Dinner was a spur of the moment trip to Adrienne’s, my favorite pizza spot in Manhattan. I was pleased to have comfortably restrained myself to two slices – they make something called an Old Fashioned, which is essentially a grandma pizza. It’s fantastic; we get it with pepperoni. We treated ourselves to a serving of their delicious meatballs and a glass of wine, with a couple of sweet treats at the end (I wasn’t able to finish my tiramisu, and I am a sucker for tiramisu).

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January 7, 2012January 7, 2012

Food Lover’s Cleanse 2012, Day 3

Day 3 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse went well! I started out using the set schedule, with a two egg omelet with caramelized onions. I finished it with some of the wonderful paprika salt from my friends at Gardenfreude. I love this salt – it is my favorite of the herb salts they prepare. It has an earthy sweetness that I find irresistible.

I found this omelet to be pretty filling, so I wanted something light for lunch. So I chose to eat Day 2’s snack for lunch, along with half an avocado with meyer lemon juice. Pictured are CSA apples, AkMak crackers with VT chevre, kalamata olives, and slices of spicy pork sausage. It was perfect! I think my favorite flavor combination was the sausage and apple.

Dinner was the beet soup and the salmon from Day 2’s dinner. Now, I was hesitant when I saw the 5 Spice Beet Soup as part of the menu – last year it was there and I found it lacking in flavor. I had to doctor it up with extra spices and everything. Well, this year something changed – likely, it’s my taste buds. I loved the soup this year!

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January 5, 2012

Food Lover’s Cleanse 2012, Day 2

Well, the Food Lover’s Cleanse is coming along. I’m enjoying following it as well as diverging from it. On Day 2 I only used the cleanse as a template, and chose a variant path. For breakfast, I ate the leftover soaked oatmeal and topped it with whole milk yogurt, walnuts, and unsulphured dried apricots.

I love the Blenheim apricots from California that I get at Trader Joe’s, and especially that they are unsulfured. I much prefer them to the Turkish apricots, too.

The rest of my meals were full of leftovers. Lunch was leftover kimchi pancakes, and lentils with yogurt and caramelized onions; dinner was more leftover lentils, cheese grits, butternut squash, and sweet potatoes. I remember last year’s cleanse having an incredible amount of leftovers by the end of the week. This year I want to keep that in check by eating more of the current leftovers.

The best part about this is that food isn’t being wasted.

More to come!

January 4, 2012

Food Lover’s Cleanse 2012, Day 1

As you may remember from last year, I did the two weeks of Bon Appetit’s Food Lover’s Cleanse – this is not one of those vinegar-cayenne-honey liquid cleanses, but is basically two weeks of eating real, whole foods after the abundance of fractured foods present at the holidays.

This year, I’m doing it again, though not as strictly as last year (it made lots of leftovers and was a little overwhelming). Plus I’ll change things up to be more compatible with NT ways of cooking. So with this in mind, I know 2012’s Food Lovers Cleanse is going to be a fun adventure.

In the tradition of being less strict, I didn’t start until Tuesday the 3rd. From the start I altered things. I chose for breakfast to do soaked oatmeal (rolled organic oats, since I don’t have any steel cut right now) with whole milk, grass-fed yogurt, and the last of the frozen blueberries from the summer. I also spiced it up with cinnamon and freshly grated nutmeg.

I was sad to see the blueberries go, but dang they were tasty. I will definitely freeze blueberries again next year, and in bigger quantities. I’m currently eating a pasteurized whole milk yogurt from Trader Joe’s, since I ran out of raw yogurt; I’ll get some more of the raw stuff soon. This is a pretty decent commercial product, though. I like that it’s full fat and made from the milk of cows that eat grass.

For lunch I ate leftover Hoppin’ John from new years – leftovers are actually called “Skippin’ Jenny” (one day delayed for me). I had some roasted butternut squash with that, too.

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February 1, 2011

Final Thoughts on the Food Lover’s Cleanse

As I mentioned in my last post regarding the Food Lover’s Cleanse, I’d write some final thoughts, so here they are. Overall, the first week was definitely more satisfying for me. The recipes were more engaging on an intellectual, technical, and visceral level, but that’s not to say that week two’s dishes were bad or anything. I just preferred the first week’s menus to the second.

Pros: I had a very positive experience with the cleanse during its two weeks. I thought for the most part the recipes were excellent in concept, well-written (there were only a couple exceptions) and I discovered some real keepers that will go into the regular rotation. I’ve made a couple of the things twice now: the Ottolenghi couscous and the black eyed pea curry. These were real hits at our house. I also loved the smoothies, especially the vanilla date shake. It’s just fabulous.

Cons: Not many, but complex dishes scheduled on weeknights – not to mention during weekday lunches – simply were not feasible for me as a working person. A lack of clarity in the directions for the steak recipe was the beginning of the problem for me with that dish. That being said, failing at cooking a steak did provide the impetus to learn more and now I’m much better equipped to cook slabs of meat in the future.

Most challenging dish: No, not the steak – it was the Japanese vegetable dish, mostly because of the unfamiliar terminology and new-to-me terchmique. I really had to concentrate while making it, and read the directions over and over. I even took the recipe with me to work to study it during lunch. I did enjoy the end result, though. And I discovered the beauty of mirin from that dish.

Surprisingly easiest dish: Endives, apples, and grapes. It was one of my most joyous discoveries of the cleanse. The flavors were incredible, especially for how easy it was to make. I learned to love endive.

Biggest flop: The steak, because of my unfamiliarity at that time with cooking grass fed beef.

Quickest meal: Roasted salmon with a grapefruit-avocado salad from Day 8. 20 minutes from start to finish and dinner was on the table. And so delicious!

My Top 5 Favorite Dishes in the Food Lover’s Cleanse

The Ultimate Winter Couscous
Black Eyed Pea Curry
Vanilla Date Smoothie
Muesli
Endive, Apples and Grapes

I’m really glad I did this cleanse – it was an excellent way to start 2011!

January 16, 2011

Food Lover’s Cleanse – The Final Days

The last days of the Food Lover’s Cleanse were scattered, but such is life. I was able to prepare some of the dishes despite the demands of the week, and for that I’m happy.

Day 11 started not with the compote, but steel cut oats.

I took some cues from similar previous breakfast dishes, and added chopped pecans, currants, cinnamon and chia seeds to the oats, topped with raw milk. It was pretty good! I eat a lot of oatmeal in the winter, so I’ll definitely be doing more creative things with it.

Dinner was actually the content of Day 5, and the results were… disappointing. The menu was beet soup, warm escarole salad, and hanger steak. This was probably the least successful menu of the cleanse for me.

First, I left out the ginger in the soup, thinking one of my dinner guests hated ginger, but I was wrong – she is ok with it, so without it, it tasted a bit lackluster. I doctored it up with five times the 5 spice powder, a tablespoon of butter, and a few tablespoons of red wine. It turned out ok, but not great.

I’d definitely add the ginger next time.

The escarole salad was probably the most successful element of the dinner – I loved the addition of the dijon mustard to the shallot vinaigrette I already had on hand. It helped ameliorate the bitterness of the escarole, too. It’s not a very pretty dish, and I forgot to take a picture.

Cooking the hanger steak also proved quite daunting – my first go around yielded a very rare steak. We cooked it a couple times more to get it to medium, a process which is just too funky. I have a lot to learn about cooking a steak, and blame my 13 years as a vegetarian for the lack of skills in this area.

So, after asking for steak cooking tips (I got some great ones!) on Facebook, a friend invited me into their home on Friday and taught me how to do it right. I learned a lot and look forward to the next time I have the opportunity to cook one. I will say – both times, the hanger steak had great beefy flavor. Definitely one of my favorite cuts of beef.

Thursday and Friday were kind of off as far as the cleanse goes, but I did manage to have a healthy smoked salmon and chevre omelet on Thursday night, and as I mentioned above, my friend taught me how to cook a steak Friday night.

Oh, and Thursday morning I prepared the coconut oat pilaf, which I just did not care for – savory oatmeal, to me, is just the oddest thing, and I find it hard to get my head around the concept. To me, oatmeal is always on the sweet side. I ended up eating it with a little maple syrup and raw cream. Odd, but it made the whole thing more palatable.

Saturday morning, I prepared the garam masala tofu dish for brunch, but substituted pastured eggs for the tofu. It worked out really well! I was dubious at first – dried cranberries in eggs? It worked, and worked well.

I split Day 14‘s dinner into two meals. Saturday night I made the curry – substituting sweet potatoes (I have a ton of them right now) for the squash, as well as using full fat coconut milk and coconut oil. Really great dish, and raw yogurt on top is a perfect accompaniment. The recipe made a lot of food, so I was able to have it again tonight along with the cumin cilantro chicken, which was fabulous. Marinating boneless skinless chicken breasts for an extended time in yogurt seems to work really well as a tenderizer.

I also loved that I shared the final meal of the cleanse with friends. I definitely want to cook more for friends this year.

So this is the end of the Food Lover’s Cleanse! I’ve really enjoyed these past couple of weeks, and have learned a lot along the way. I’ll write a wrap up in the next couple of days, with my sentiments and observations on the whole process.

January 11, 2011September 2, 2011

Food Lover’s Cleanse Days 9 and 10

For this post, I’m going to combine days 9 and 10 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse, mainly because today (day 10) was basically a day of eating leftovers. Breakfast did not match up with what was indicated, either. More on that later in the post.

Day 9 breakfast was muesli, made from scratch – not from a box. I mixed oats, nuts, fruit, and dairy products together the night before and let it all soak overnight in the fridge. It soaked in raw yogurt (with raw milk), which means the whole grains soaked in an acidic medium, which further means it was far more digestible that morning than if I hadn’t soaked it.

The recipe asked for all fresh fruit, but I chose to add a handful of currants to the mix, along with chopped apple and orange segments. I thought it was simply delicious and I will definitely be making this again. And by the way, old fashioned rolled oats work just fine in place of quick oats (which I do not care for at all).

Lunch was leftovers – sweet potato hash and curried lentil soup. I would have loved to have been able to be home to roast the butternut squash, but it wasn’t possible as a working person. Plus, I like leftovers.

Dinner was a lot of fun to make – I made two of the things on the menu, and did one experiment. The vegetables a la grecque were truly awesome – vegetables simmered in a broth of white wine, olive oil, water, and spices. They came out mildly pickled, and totally delicious. I can’t wait to make this next summer, when all the summer veggies are in season.

I also made a salad of quinoa, pomegranate, apples, and scallions. I think I added a little to much lemon, as it was quite tart. I enjoyed it regardless, though it wasn’t the most stellar recipe of the cleanse.

When I put my CSA order in last week, I neglected to order any pork tenderloin, so that was out. Instead, I decided to play around with the technique used in the chicken persillade. But in place of the parsley-garlic combo, I used za’atar, a middle eastern spice mixture. Well, it worked out great! After the chicken came out of the oven, I poured a little extra virgin olive oil over it and sprinkled the chicken breasts with za’atar. It worked very well! I was pleased.

It was a really nice meal all together.

As I mentioned earlier, Day 10 was really a day of leftovers, and I also made an error. I neglected to soak my oats the night before, so I chose to eat something else, in the form of two pastured eggs fried in butter. Dang, they were tasty. And quite healthy.

Lunch was a variety of things – some chicken, quinoa salad, and vegetables from last night, plus a little bit of fresh mozzarella and a few slices of sopresatta from the local Italian deli. I also finished up the bulgur pilaf from the weekend.

Dinner was a simple affair – leftover curried lentil soup with some raw yogurt in it; some diced chicken breast from last night; and a glass of kombucha. Really nice and tasty, and just what I needed after a long, complicated day.

Tomorrow I am looking forward to beef!