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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 – 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.

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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 Is On

Happy new year, everyone!  I hope you had a lovely New Year’s Eve and that your start to 2011 has been a beautiful one.  I spent my NYE with some good friends at a local gastropub (grass-fed burgers, yum), then relaxed at home til midnight – no heavy partying for me.  We started the morning with sprouted wheat pancakes – pastured eggs and raw sour milk added extra goodness to them – and real maple syrup. Coffee, yes.  I expect to take a walk later today, and other than that, I plan listen to music, watch movies, fiddle around online, in no particular order.

So, I’ve decided to take on this “food lover’s cleanse“, which starts tomorrow!  On that first day, I’ll be enjoying an omelette, a date shake, sourdough cheese toasty (with raw smoked cheddar cheese), crudités with shallot vinaigrette, and an amazing sounding couscous dish.  I’ll write more extensively about it after tomorrow.  Really looking forward to learning a bunch of new dishes and flavor combinations that I hope will inspire me for later times during the year.

Speaking of date shakes, they always remind me of the now gone Santa Claus Lane in Carpinteria, which advertised their famous date shakes, visible from the freeway.  I lament that I never had one, to be honest, so I’m especially looking forward to trying the one I’ll make tomorrow.