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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.

soaked oatmeal with dried apricots and walnuts

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.

lentils with yogurt and caramelized onions

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

More to come!

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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.

soaked oatmeal blueberries

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.

Continue reading “Food Lover’s Cleanse 2012, Day 1”

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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!

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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 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

While on twitter the other day, I came across a link (via @glutenfreegirl) about a “food lover’s cleanse.”  There was something about it that intrigued me – a cleanse that focuses on actual food, rather than just juice or some strange concoction of disparate ingredients. Sounds like it has potential.

I took a look and was really pleased with what I saw – 14 days of essentially whole foods eating, with lots of variety.  Makes sense to create something like that, as the holidays often focus on fractured foods – sugar, white flour, an excess in caffeine and/or alcohol.  I’ll admit I boarded that train from time to time during the holidays.  Time to hop back on the real foods wagon!

This cleanse has been put together by Bon Appétit (aside: I adore how easy it is to type accents on a Mac!)  magazine and the introduction is as follows:

Forget juice fasts and calorie counting. Start the year with a resolution you’ll actually want to keep: a fresh, healthful approach to cooking.

Amen!  Although my idea of healthful and their idea of healthful does diverge at certain points – the use of soy and low fat dairy, which I don’t partake in.  Still, I am encouraged by the use of whole grains, seasonal vegetables, grass fed meats, and eggs.  Apparently most of the dishes are gluten-free, too.  There’s even one recipe where they acknowledge that one might actually want to eat the chicken skin!  Nice.

I’m seriously considering trying this out, as I mentioned on twitter, but adjusting some of the recipes to be NT-friendly: use of raw, full fat dairy, and soaking grains (I handle grains ok), to start.  Oh, and eschewing all that canola oil.

I’d also probably not do everything in order – one of the dinner recipes takes hours to prepare (close to 4) and is slated for a weekday evening.  With my work schedule, that’s just not practical.  Dinner on one of the following days looks like it takes much less time, so I’d likely switch them.  I also have meetings some nights where I just won’t be able to cook; though one of those nights I’ll be at a chicken carving and bone broth making workshop!

What are some of the recipes?  Here are some examples (breakfast, lunch, dinner), which sound delicious:

  • Breakfast: omelet with mushrooms, thyme, and caramelized onions
  • Lunch: black-eyed pea curry; spinach salad with apples, sunflower seeds and vinaigrette
  • Dinner: five spice beets soup; seared grass-fed hanger steak; warm escarole salad with mustard vinaigrette

I’ll need to put in my orders with my CSA and buying club in the next day or so if I want to do this.  Thankfully, BA put together a shopping list (warning: pdf) with all ingredients on it, so that part is easy – just print and go.

I’ll definitely chronicle my experience with this cleanse if I decide to follow it!  But I’d love to know, have you ever done a cleanse before?