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Food Lover’s Cleanse Day 8

Day 8 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse gave me the opportunity to be successful in cooking potatoes for breakfast.  So often I cook them and they still taste raw, yuck.  I learned some tricks this morning (peel and boil the potatoes for 5 minutes), and I’m so pleased.  Cooking this hash also brought back many happy memories of sitting at the counter at the Homemade Cafe in Berkeley, CA and watching the cooks prepare the home fries. Mmm…

It was sweet potato hash and fried eggs this morning.  I was pleased to be able to alter the dish to include more saturated fat, in the form of healthy virgin expeller-pressed coconut oil and grass-fed butter.

The potatoes were seasoned with cinnamon and a little brown sugar.  Really good and a nice accompaniment to the fried eggs (topped with chipotle Tabasco).  Had some coffee (Stumptown) with raw milk.  Was so happy to receive my raw milk yesterday, I can’t even tell you.

Lunch was leftover curried lentil soup with a glass of raw milk.  Shortly after that I made a date shake (with raw milk and raw yogurt), which was a great afternoon treat.

Dinner was so, so, so simple: roasted salmon with a grapefruit-avocado salad. Took about 20 minutes to prepare total. Gotta love it.

This sockeye salmon is part of my salmon CSA stash.  It continues to be such a taste treat, though with only two filets left I’m starting to feel a little melancholy about its impending absence.  So, I was happy to have been able to stretch this last filet for two meals. Gorgeous fatty fish.

As for the salad, again I used mâche for the greens, and put the grapefruit-avocado combo on top, dressed with a shallot vinaigrette.  It called for walnut oil, which adds such a good, nutty flavor.  I will use walnut oil more often in the future.

Tonight was the first real deal dessert on the menu – trail mix cookies.  However, I had a log of korova (aka “world peace”) cookies in the freezer, so I thought why not use them!  These are incredible cookies – made with grass-fed butter, organic cocoa, and Scharffenberger bittersweet chocolate.  I sliced up a half dozen and baked them tonight, and was reminded just how chocolatey, melt-in-your mouth good they are.

Looking ahead to the coming week, I’m going to have to leave a number of recipes out.  As a working person, it’s just not possible for me to make, for instance, soup from scratch at lunch.  My hope is that making the full recipe for dinners will allow me to have leftovers the next day. The lunch recipes look good, though, so I plan to make some of them for dinner the following week.

All in all, this first week was highly successful.  I learned some new techniques, new flavor combinations, and was introduced to some new ingredients that really thrilled me.  Here’s hoping the second week is just as impressive!

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Food Lover’s Cleanse Day 7

Day 7 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse started with a delicious combination of raw yogurt, half a pear (diced), roasted pecans, chia seeds, and maple syrup.  It was an incredible combination – tasted a bit like dessert, actually.  Pecans and maple syrup are a winning combination, and I think that those were flavors that really made this dish.

This was the first time I’d tried chia seeds, and I really liked them.  The recipe originally called for flax. Chia has a similar nutritional profile as flax, but contains a little more ALA (alpha linoleic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid).

Lunch was leftover roasted broccoli with apples and walnuts added.  Not very pretty, but very tasty.  I ate it with leftover bulgur pilaf.

I snacked on marcona almonds and a couple of dates in the afternoon.

Dinner consisted of a delicious curried lentil soup and some salmon cakes which contained the new-to-me kaffir lime leaves.

They have the most incredible aroma and taste.  I found it was easier to work with them by soaking them in hot water for 5 minutes or so.  If you don’t, they’ll just shatter and turn into a kind of dry leaf dust, but that might be something appealing in certain cases.  I just couldn’t get over how amazing these leaves smelled.  They really did add something different to the salmon.

The lentil soup was really good and I am going to enjoy eating it for the next few days.  The resident picky eater did not like it, though.  The most unusual element in it was the chickpea puree and butter added toward the end of the cooking time.  It makes the soup creamy without adding cream; it adds a nice richness that I like very much. It also tastes great with extra lemon juice squeezed into it.

I rounded out the meal with a mâche salad with shallot vinaigrette. Dessert consisted of a tangerine and an ounce of dark chocolate with almonds and sea salt. Love that combination.  Fruit and chocolate for dessert is much more satisfying these days.

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Food Lover’s Cleanse Day 6

Day 6 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse started out in a very familiar way – a bowl of oatmeal (soaked with water and whey) topped with fruit. I replaced the banana with organic blueberries and raspberries. I added cinnamon but forgot to add the nuts.  Oh well.

Lunch was very interesting – I had no leftovers, which was too bad, so I bought lunch out (at a place I regularly go).  The food was completely unremarkable and frankly, tasted a little gross.  I’m not going to say what I ate or where I bought it, it was so meh.

Dinner was a different story altogether. It featured Itamar’s Bulgur Pilaf, oven-roasted broccoli, and 2 fried eggs in grass-fed butter. I also added a mâche salad with the shallot dressing. So delicious! The pilaf comes from Yotam Ottolenghi again, and was simply fantastic. It was very easy to put together, and by soaking the bulgur all day in water and raw apple cider vinegar, that greatly sped up the most substantial step. Plus, it makes wheat more digestible. I was thrilled to be able to use the red peppers from the CSA that I froze this summer, and the coriander seeds I saved from the cilantro I grew this summer. Loved the pink peppercorns in it as well – just so fun!

Originally, I was to include cauliflower with the roasted broccoli, but I just haven’t been feeling the cauliflower lately. I do love broccoli, and had not roasted it before, and I loved the outcome! It really transforms the broccoli. I tossed the florets with both olive oil and a little walnut oil (broccoli and walnuts go well together, so I thought, why not?!), a little kosher salt, then sprinkled on a bit of fleur de sel after they came out of the oven.

Poached eggs were on the original menu, and while I love poached eggs, I really wanted to up the fat content of this meal, so I fried (sunny-side up) two pastured eggs in grass-fed butter. NOM. So good.

The mâche salad with shallot vinaigrette rounded off the meal, and was simple and fantastic.

I loved how quick this meal came together. I started at about 6pm, and sat down to eat at 6:40pm. This is a meal worth repeating, as it is both highly delicious with the bonus of being relatively quick to prepare.

And good thing that it was quick, as I had to scoot out of there to attend a meetup with the Queens Community Kitchen folks for a viewing of Food, Inc.  I’ve seen this movie before, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to be reminded of that which is discussed within.  Some of the images are really hard to watch, but seeing such things just reinforces my desire to continue buying as much food as I can from my CSA, buying club, and the greenmarkets.

It was a really nice group of folks and I look forward to more QCP meetups this year.

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Food Lover’s Cleanse Day 5

For Day 5 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse, I basically adhered to the suggested breakfast, while eating leftovers for lunch.  I had a business meeting at night, so I was away from the cleanse for dinner.  My dinner was a bit more indulgent, and quite tasty.

Breakfast consisted of slices of orange and grapefruit with mint and Ak-Mak crackers topped with raw yogurt, chives, and smoked sockeye salmon.  So delicious!  I loved the citrus and mint together (classic combination) and the salmon with the yogurt and chives was outstanding.  Love those Ak-Mak crackers, too. I really enjoyed this breakfast and would totally eat it again.

I had leftover cleriac-apple salad, endives, apples, and grapes, and the roasted sweet potatoes for lunch.  A very nice meal of beautiful food.

Dinner was out and consisted of an iceberg lettuce salad with buttermilk dressing and bacon, and then a quesadilla with skirt steak, cheese, and mushrooms.

One thing I’ve noticed is that my sugar cravings have gone way down.  Whole, real foods will do that to me.  I’m really pleased with this development.

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Food Lover’s Cleanse Day 4

Day 4 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse started off with a tasty smoothie, with leftovers for lunch, and a nice dinner. And what a different dinner menu from the day before!  Like night and day.

Breakfast: Raspberry milk smoothie. Originally it was supposed to be an almond-banana smoothie, but I somehow forgot to buy bananas, so I used frozen organic raspberries instead. I also used whole milk in place of almond milk. The original recipe also included a little brown sugar, but I chose to sweeten it with 2 medjool dates. It was very good – not very sweet, but that was perfect for me post-run (2 miles this morning!).

(oops, I forgot to take a shot before I took a drink or two)

Lunch: Leftover couscous; leftover celeriac-apple salad. Again, substitutions. I ate all the vegetables last night, so I had no lefovers. I did, however, have the last of the couscous, and I had forgotten all about that cleriac-apple salad! So, I had some of that. Mizuna has been hard to find, so I simply chose to forgo the mizuna salad.

My snack today is a cup of genmaicha, green tea with toasted brown rice.

Dinner: Pan-roasted chicken with persillade; endives, apples and grapes; roasted sweet potatoes. This was an amazing meal (I’m sorry I didn’t make the salad, though). The chicken was perfectly cooked and that parsley-garlic mix gave great flavor.  Next time I’ll plan further ahead and do it with a chicken breast on the bone with the skin (all I could find was boneless skinless breasts).  The endives roasted with apples and grapes in butter with rosemary was simply amazing. Rich and succulent, it seemed the embodiment of a winter meal.  Along with it was roasted sweet potatoes, one of my favorite winter foods.

I’ll be away from the cleanse for dinner tomorrow due to the business meeting. Friday night may also be a bust, but we’ll see.

I have to say, the food has been amazing and I’ve been having a great time with this program!

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Food Lover’s Cleanse Day 3

Well, Day 3 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse was quite different from the two preceding days, for sure!  I ate leftovers for breakfast (quinoa) and lunch (couscous and black-eyed pea curry), and attempted a complicated Japanese dish tonight.  I mean, it probably wasn’t really that complicated, it’s just that it presented new ways to use the knife, new ingredients, and new cooking techniques. I definitely learned some things tonight, and that is very cool.

I made a lot of adjustments, too.  First, the miso soup.

The recipe indicated both tofu and dashi flakes.  Well, I don’t eat unfermented soy, and I couldn’t get my hands on dashi flakes, so my soup consisted of water, miso paste, and wakame.  It was delicious!  The miso is a dark, brown rice miso, the soybeans fermented 18 months.  The wakame was purchased no knowing if it was exactly what I needed, but it ended up being perfect.  I prefer dark miso to light miso – I love the deep, rich flavor of this brown rice miso.  It’s very comforting.

The main event was koya-dofu and vegetables. Koya-dofu is a kind of dried tofu that needs to be rehydrated with liquid, but since I don’t eat tofu, I had to find another option. I had half a large container of mushrooms from the weekend, so I chose to use that. I couldn’t find burdock root, either, so I left that out. Also, I forgot that brown rice was on the menu, but I happened to have this adorable “baby basmati”  (aka Kali Jeera) rice, so I used that instead.

Can I just say OMG adorable!!  It was very tasty and didn’t give me a crash, either.  I think it would be good in rice pudding (as it says on the label), sweetened with coconut sugar. NOM.

The recipe for the vegetables gave instructions for their placement, but I didn’t have time to fuss with it, so I arranged mine like so:

My favorite flavor element was probably the mushrooms cooked in kelp stock, tamari, and mirin.  So yummy.

I loved working with the kombu, which flavored the kelp stock and also was used in the cooking vessel, sitting atop the vegetables.  Also, the use of the otoshi-buta, which means “dropped” lid.  According to Bon Appétit, “It’s a circular lid that sits directly on the braising food, rather than on the rim of the cooking vessel. It keeps food moist as it simmers, even in shallow liquid.” I used a Chemex coffee filter, which worked great!  I loved using it, and loved how well the vegetables cooked under it.  I’ll definitely employ this tool again.  This was really my first foray into Japanese cooking – well, beyond making sushi – and I’d definitely like to learn more about this cuisine.

In addition to all this Japanese food, I had some leftover salmon from last night.

No snacks again today, and for dessert I substituted 1 oz of raw dark chocolate for the baked pears.  I’ll make the pears tomorrow night.

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Food Lover’s Cleanse Day 2

Day 2 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse started out great and ended especially deliciously. I learned some new cooking techniques and flavor combinations, which was one of my main goals in following this program.

Breakfast: Warm and Nutty Cinnamon Quinoa; kefir. This was really good and I look forward to eating the other half in the morning. I halved the recipe and that amount was perfect.  I also used black quinoa – new to me, as I usually eat red quinoa – which had a nuttier texture.  I replaced the frozen blackberries with frozen blueberries, as the blueberries were more sustainably grown than the blackberries.

Fortunately, I had some raw kefir on hand – it’s quite sour, so I added a little maple syrup to it.  I enjoyed it today moreso than in other times, so I think I’ll be drinking kefir regularly.

Lunch: Leftover couscous and vegetables, celery root and apple salad. I have so much leftover couscous that it made sense to eat it for lunch.  The celery root salad was really good, but I’m a huge fan of celery root, nom.  The mixture of the mild celery flavor, sweet-tart apples, and nutty walnuts was a total winning combination.

Snack: yogurt with tangerines and shaved chocolate. Was very busy and didn’t find time to snack this afternoon!  My loss because this combo sounds very tasty.

Dinner: Salmon in a bengali mustard sauce, black-eyed pea curry, roasted butternut squash with curry leaves and mustard seed. The salmon and curry were both amazing, the squash was good but didn’t blow me away.  The salmon came from my salmon CSA, so it’s incredibly nourishing. The curry got super rave reviews in my household, so I will definitely make it again.  I loved how easy the execution of these dishes was, and I think that’s because my mise-en-place was in order.  Lots of spices and ingredients in these recipes!

After Dinner Snack: 1 ounce of dark chocolate and rooibos tea with honey. I had some raw chocolate that I got in Washington (I’d put it in the freezer when I got home), so that’s what I ate. It is so tasty, and contains coconut (dark chocolate and coconut is a great combo).  No tea for me, just not in the mood.

It will be interesting to see how I’ll manage this cleanse program with my work schedule (read: less hours in the day to cook) starting tomorrow.  Thank goodness for the dishwasher, too – it has made the cleanup part of this so easy!

And last, it’s been fun to see what other people are doing with this cleanse.  I’m keeping an eye on both the progress of Shauna from Gluten Free Girl and the Chef, and Lexi from after apple-picking.  You should check them out, too!