WLC: What's for dinner? Creole Stuffed Peppers.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Last week I'd tagged a few Whole Life Challenge-compliant recipes from one of my favorite cookbooks, Veganomicon, and made sure to get all the ingredients.  The one I made tonight was REALLY good!!

Creole Stuffed Peppers
From Veganomicon 
Serves 8 as a side dish, or 4 as a main

Ingredients:
4 large bell peppers
2 tbsp. olive oil
1 medium-size yellow onion, chopped
2 jalapenos, cut in half, seeded, and diced
1 cup carrots, finely diced
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 dried bay leaves
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried basil
2 tsp paprika
3 sprigs fresh thyme
1 tsp salt
1 (15-oz) can diced tomatoes
2 (15-oz) cans black-eyed peas, drained and rinsed (about 4 cups)
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

Preheat the oven to 350 F and grease a 9x13" casserole dish with olive oil.  Bring a pot of water to a boil.

Cut the peppers in half lengthwise through the stem end.  Remove the seeds & membranes.  Submerge the peppers in boiling water and cover.  Let them boil for 5 minutes, then drain them immediately and rinse with cold water to cool them.

Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Saute the onions, jalapenos, and carrots for about 10 minutes.  You want the veggies to brown, especially the carrots.  If it looks like they are steaming rather than browning, raise the heat.  Add the garlic about 5 minutes into the cooking process.

Add the bay leaves, other herbs and spices and salt; saute for 1 more minute.  Add the tomatoes and peas, stir and cover, and cook for 10 minutes.  If it seems too liquidy, remove the cover and cook long enough to reduce some of the liquid.  Mix in the parsley.

Remove the bay leaves and thyme sprigs.  Spoon a little less than 1/2 cup of the veggie mixture into each pepper half.  The filling will be hot, so be careful while you are handling it.  Place the pepper halves in the casserole dish and bake for about 25 minutes.

WLC lunches: Sweet Potato-Cauliflower Soup

I always try to make a big batch of soup on Sunday to have for lunches the following week.  I made this soup on the last round of the WLC and it was tasty.  With a head of cauliflower in the fridge needing to be used, I decided today was the day to break out this Sweet Potato-Cauliflower soup again.  My pics didn't come out nearly as gorgeous as the ones on her blog, so I'll just show the "before" :)

All told, I wound up with 7 servings, so that should get John and I through about Thursday (there's a bit of leftover lentil soup that I made last week).  I made the lentil one up as I went along, but here's what I threw in:  Green lentils (rinsed and cooked for several hours, in a mix of this broth and water), diced tomatoes, basil leaves, onion, garlic, red pepper flakes, salt, pepper.  Probably some roasted cumin and coriander, too.  Good stuff!

Go-to items for the Whole Life Challenge

Whenever we start the Whole Life Challenge, I always try to make sure we have the WLC staple items on hand, as well as a selection of "compliant" fast foods to grab in case we didn't plan ahead.  I thought it might be helpful to list out some of these items so that others can just grab and go as needed!

Basic items to have on hand at all times for snacks:

• Eggs and Hard Boiled Eggs
• Nuts of various varieties (ligthly salted or raw)
• Sunflower seeds
• Lara Bars - several compliant varieties, a few aren't; be sure to check ingredients
• Bare Fruit Apple Chips
• Celery, carrots, home-made hummus
• Star-Kist Yellowfin Tuna in EVOO

For the store-bought staples, here's a list.  Hope everyone finds this helpful!  Let me know what your go-to items are.

First, coconut milk.  Aroy-D is my favorite, but not widely available.  There are several varieties that are compliant, but those can be hard to find in my small town.  For anyone who lives nearby (Blacksburg, VA), I found all of the following items at either Oasis or Eats.

Next, grab-and-go soups.  These are super helpful for times when you realize you're dead tired and there's no way you'll be preparing a full meal.  You have to read your ingredients carefully, but upon close inspection these seem to meet all the criteria:

Amy's Split Pea (no pic).

Amy's Curried Lentil:

Jyoti Aromatic Lentils and Beans:

  Amy's Low-Fat, Medium Black Bean Chili:

And finally, for building soups and seasoning other foods, Coconut Secret Raw Coconut Aminos

 

and Pacific Natural Foods Organic Vegetable Broth:

 

All of these have become ongoing kitchen staples, and have really helped John and I keep our diet in line both on and off the challenge!

Whole Life Challenge Spring 2013!

Saturday, February 16, 2013

John and I are doing the Whole Life Challenge again.  In short, the WLC (I'll call it that from now on) is a 2-month healthy habit challenge, that makes you focus in every day to make sure you're making the right choices.  It includes a pretty restrictive diet (if you go "prescribed"), and the expectation that you'll do at least 10 minutes of active recovery and 10 minutes of mobility (stretching) every day.  In addition, they rotate in other challenges, like drinking a certain amount of water, practicing mindfulness, etc.  All good stuff!  You can read more about the rules here, if you want.

Since I'm a pescetarian (I only eat fish and no other meat), the WLC "paleo" diet is harder for John and I (he's not cooking a lot of steaks for 1, so he eats what I eat 90% of the time).  Since I'm sort of on the line as far as using the "vegetarian" rules, the way I manage the challenge is that I allow myself to use the vegetarian rules if I am making a meal that won't include any fish.  That way I have the option to include quinoa, amaranth, etc. for some additional carbs/protein if needed.  There were some times on the last round of the WLC (which ran from Sept-Nov) that I could definitely tell I needed those options.  I'd realize that I had a funny sort of light-headedness and could feel that my body was running down its reserves.  I'd add sweet potatoes, quinoa, fish, eggs-- basically mix it up adding protein and the allowed carbs-- until I felt normal again.  I really needed the veg-friendly flexibility to be able to stay on track, without winding up with mercury poisoning from fish at every meal! All that said, I *rarely* take advantage of this exception, and prefer to try to come up with meals that meet all the requirements without using the veg-allowed crutches.

I'm going to try to keep up with documenting our WLC meals as we go, so that you can see what it is we're eating.  Here is our meal for night one (today):
 

This is a very simple recipe - shrimp scampi served over zucchini noodles with sauteed red pepper and onion.  The shrimp scampi is basically this recipe.  I discovered this awesome little gadget about a month ago, and John has fallen in LOVE with it, because it allows us to have "allowed" foods as the base for what would have been on pasta in a prior life (he's not a big fan of spaghetti squash, though I keep trying!).

So you use the awesome gadget to make the zucchini noodles then zap them in the microwave with a bit of water (so they steam).  Sautee the sliced pepper & onion in some butter, add them to the cooked zucchini and top it with the shrimp scampi.  Delicious!

What's for dinner - Whole Life Challenge VEGETABLE edition

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

I wanted to try to highlight some of the veggies we are enjoying during the Vegetable challenge week of the Whole Life Challenge.  The challenge is to eat a different vegetable every day this week.  No problem!

Day 1 was a beautiful simple meal of Tilapia with sauteed onion & garlic, avocado and broccoli:

Day 2 the featured vegetable was Butternut Squash, via a variation of this chili that I'd made on Sunday (hey, no rules against cooking it in advance!).  I left out the chopped chipotle in adobo because the can said the ingredients included corn oil, wheat flour and a couple of other disallowed ingredients.   I added diced fresh jalapeno, cayenne, chipotle chili pepper powder and some red pepper flakes, and still went back for some Tabasco to splash at the time of serving.  It was OK, but I think the chipotle in adobo would have rounded it out more.  I also added a dash of cocoa powder to the mix toward the end to give it a little more depth of flavor, which I think was good.

Day 3 (today) we kept it simple and just nuked sweet potatoes for our meal.  Sweet potato + butter & salt = perfect.

I guess I need to get my game plan together to use up all the other veggies we have around here!  We got another CSA share today which included a turnip (greens attached) and some spinach, so I suspect there may be some cooked greens in our future - that's one that John's been on a kick with for a few weeks now.

Here's some photos of other recent meals:

I got John to make this recipe of the egg inside an avocado.  It was REALLY hard to tell when the egg was cooked, was the one observation.

I like to take random leftover vegetables and cook them together, which is what you see below, made a few weeks back after that Saturday tailgate.  Leftover celery and peppers mixed with some squash and broccoli, some beans and I think a can of tomatoes, some spices...  It was pretty good!

This is a recipe John made, I don't know what was in it (other than garlic and butter, which I remember particularly because they were so delicious), but damn it was good:

Another random vegetable mash-up of mine, this was dinner one Wednesday when John was off at dart league.  Peppers, radishes, turnips, beets, cooked in butter with some salt.  A touch bitter (I blame the radishes), but overall pretty tasty.

WLC Vegetable Challenge!

Sunday, October 28, 2012

I'm not gonna lie, I was super excited to see that the coming week's challenge was all about VEGETABLES.  Since I eat mostly veggies anyway, I hope I've got an edge on this one :).   It gives me a great reason to prepare them in a variety of ways.  I also love that I get some new stuff from our CSA from Glade Road Growing.  I've never tried Celeriac (which we got with our share last week), and am looking forward to trying it!

Here are some of the vegetables I've got in the house at the moment (a few of which I picked up for the challenge):

The standard "side" vegetables -

Celery
Carrots
Garlic
Onion
Bell Pepper

And these -

Avocado
Cauliflower
Broccoli
Celeriac
Brussels Sprouts
Butternut Squash

Yellow crookneck Squash
Cabbage
Radishes
Pak Choy
Curry Squash*
Peas (frozen)**

* I'd never seen one before and had to buy it when I spotted it in the Glade Road Growing tent at the Farmer's Market.
** I bought these for the challenge.  In the spring we just eat the whole pod fresh off the vine and the rest of the time I forget that vegetables can come out of the freezer.

I'll try to get some shots of what I wind up making with the veggies throughout the week.

Whole Life Challenge observations

Saturday, October 20, 2012

During the course of the Whole Life Challenge, I've observed some interesting behaviors on the discussion forums.  Part of the challenge is that every single rule can't possibly be made 100% crystal clear.  One such area of discussion relates to receiving communion, and whether the wine and cracker count as lost points for alcohol and grain ingestion.  This is ONE of many, many examples where certain competitors come out to play, saying "OF COURSE" it is a point, you're obviously NOT COMPLIANT.

I am not a Catholic, and I do not receive communion, so this is NOT a personal issue for me.  It is a really good representation of something that I want to talk about. Here's my response to this example and the numerous others I have witnessed.

There are two types of competitor:

1. People who believe that the competition is for (and against) everyone else.
2. People who believe that the competition is for (and against) ourselves.

I call Type 1 "zealots."  Excess competitive juice juice sends Type 1 into holier than thou debates (or statements) about "the "right" way to do each thing, interspersed with posts and responses that are designed to highlight how lame and weak other people are.

Type 1 competitors:  If the competition takes you to a place where you find yourself putting down other people to show off how great you are by comparison, then you have lost sight of the purpose of the challenge.  One of the challenge's greatest opportunities is to share this journey with others and support each other toward individual progress and achievements.  Look in the mirror.  You are an asshole.  Stop it.

I "get" the rules, and I respect them.  Beyond that, I have been trying to be sure that I respect other people and their choices, whatever they may be.

For type 2 competitors:  If the rules aren't 100% clear*:

• If YOU think it is cheating, it is cheating.
• If you don't think it is cheating, then it is not cheating. 

In the end, you have to be accountable to yourself.  The person I am in the competition to "win" for (and, yes -- often, against) is me.


* You know what they are; don't cheat yourself and stretch the boundaries.  If you know that it's a stretch, then it's probably cheating.

Whole Life Challenge: What's for Dinner updates!

Sunday, October 14, 2012

It's been a while since I posted any updates on food for the Whole Life Challenge, and how everything is going.  We are about 1/2 way through and I've lost about 1 pound a week, which is OK I guess.  I didn't go into it to lose the most weight (but I was sort of hoping I would!).  I went into it to get fit and healthy, and push myself to "eat clean", and I've been totally winning at that.

Here are a couple of catch-up pics on meals past - First, a lovely salad with the last tomatoes from our garden, and black bean soup from this recipe (which was OK but pretty bland, a hearty dose of Tabasco, which is totally compliant, helped):

Then I made these Mahi fillets and some greens with the spinach from our CSA and some chard from the garden:

Experimented with some crackers:

Finally figured out how to make mayo (using the LOWEST blender setting, only ONE type of oil / I'd run out and mixed on the prior attempt, and letting the egg and lemon juice come fully to room temperature):

And tonight I made up TWO soups, since the coming week's challenge is all about providing for yourself for every meal (which I do 99% of the time anyway).   The first one was Sweet Potato-Cauliflower soup, which we had for dinner tonight.  Quite good!

And the other is Curried Pumpkin Soup, which I had a little sample taste of, and is AMAZING.

The finished product yielded 10 very orange and similar-looking servings (pumpkin on the left, and sweet potato-cauliflower on the right).  Frankly these are pretty hearty servings, so they may even go further than that.  Not bad for a couple of hours' work!

Whole Life Challenge: What's for Dinner? Sunday 09/23

Sunday, September 23, 2012

For Sunday's dinner I decided to do another round of "use it up".  I'd bought a few portobello mushroom caps for our tailgate, which we didn't use, and I'd gotten (another!) bag of spinach from our CSA on Wednesday that needed to be used.  Thus was borne a dinner that was cheeseless portobello "pizzas" and Braised Coconut Spinach & Chickpeas with Lemon.

I added some turmeric to the chickpea recipe, and I didn't have a lemon so I used lemon juice from the bottle instead.  I followed the serving suggestion of putting it over a sweet potato, which was quite tasty.

 For the portobello "pizzas," I marinated the caps in some balsamic vinegar & olive oil, sprinkled with garlic powder.  I sauteed some onions in butter and added the last of some sliced baby bellas that I'd chopped up (needed to use those up also).  A bit of diced fresh garlic finalized the main filling ingredient.  John took over while I was in the heat of finishing the chickpea mix, and told him the basic concept and gave him creative license.  He finished them with tomato paste, basil leaves and slices of tomato from our garden.  All in all, pretty cheap, tasty, and not too hard to make!

Catchin up on 'What's for Dinner?' Whole Life Challenge Edition(s)

On Tuesday I got home pretty late from work , and John and I were both pretty grouchy and hungry.  I thought he was probably missing carbs and I was just plain starving, so I offered to make sweet potatoes for us.  They were a quick meal in the microwave, served with butter and salt, and perfect.  We had some carrot and turnip slaw with them, which wound up being a very orange meal...

On Wednesdays John has darts, so I was fending for myself.  On either Monday or Tuesday I'd made quinoa to take along with my lunches (cooked red quinoa, avocado, tomato, olive oil & lime juice = amazing cold salad with great protein), and had a bit of quinoa left over.  I also had a big bag of spinach from my CSA share with Glade Road Growing that needed to be used. 

I sauteed up the spinach along with some baby bellas (grocery store), red pepper (CSA), green banana pepper (my garden) and garlic (my garden), and threw in the already-cooked quinoa at the end just to heat it up.  Awesome, quick, fresh and easy meal.

Thursday night we took the easy route and ate the soup that was left over from earlier in the week.

Friday was a fun one.  I got home a bit late from work, after having stopped off at Eats to pick up a few things (I went looking for, and found, coconut aminos, but also picked up some WLC compliant olives and vegetable juices). 

I knew that on Saturday morning we'd be tailgating.  There is a saying - "when you fail to plan, you plan to fail."  I wanted to plan ahead for the tailgate to be sure we would have the "approved" foods to take.  It's also a good "dry run" for the big Duke game where we'll have a bunch of guests visiting, and will be tailgating all day long with people who may not care so much what our diet is!

I'd tried earlier in the week to make homemade mayo.... A massive failure.  I really wanted to make slaw (which, as it turns out, the slaw recipe I chose didn't need the mayo), and also deviled eggs (which did).   We were out of eggs, so I ran out to the store and picked up two 18-packs (we've been going through eggs like crazy on this diet!).

While I made dinner, John tried his hand at mayo-making and had great success using grapeseed oil.  He whisked the whole time by hand, and it looked so beautiful and perfect in texture...   And then it had a horrible stale taste.  Which, we figured out, was probably because our grapeseed oil expired in 2005 (!).   Whoops.  And... Eww.

We threw that out, and he tried again with some (non-EV) olive oil and the KitchenAid.  That seemed to work...

Except, a 1/2 hour later when I pulled it out of the fridge to make the deviled eggs, it had separated into a not-very-good-eats looking oil slick on top of the thicker mayo-like layer.  :(  I spooned some out to use in the deviled eggs anyway.

On Friday night we needed another quick go-to meal, after all the grocery store running and late start.  While John worked on the mayo, I worked on making our meal.  I defrosted some tilapia filets and marinated them in sesame oil, diced garlic and dried Italian spice mix (oregano, rosemary, basil, marjoram, thyme) while the oven preheated.

I topped them with red bell pepper and banana pepper, and cooked them 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  Meanwhile I steamed some broccoli with a pat of butter and a couple of teaspoons of water and some diced garlic.  Done!

For the game I made Asian Broccoli Slaw.  I was running low on broccoli (after using some for our meal above), so I supplemented it with some shredded green cabbage.  I'd cheated and bought pre-shredded red cabbage to use.

I think coconut aminos may be one of my new best friends...  John used them to marinate some steak that he brought for the tailgate, and declared himself a fan.

Other than the slaw noted above, I also made some deviled eggs. We've been eating hard boiled eggs all week, so I just grabbed a few of those.  The egg yolks and "mayo" were combined with compliant mustard, celery, paprika, salt, pepper and dried dill, and a dash of vinegar, to make the filling for the deviled eggs.  I missed the dill taste of the pickle relish I normally include, but that was just how it was going to be since I didn't have any compliant pickles.  I used celery (for the crunch), dried dill and vinegar (for the taste) in an attempt to close the gap.  They were close, but not *quite* as good as my normal version.  Sigh.  I knew I should've bought the Bubbies Dills at Eats.

Still... Overall?  Good eats.

It's Sunday - big cooking day again to get ready for the coming week!  I have to think carefully about what I'm going to do next week, since I head back out of town to TX on Saturday morning through October 5...!

WLC - what's for dinner? Sunday & Monday

Monday, September 17, 2012

I wanted to do a catch-up post showing what we had for dinner for the last two nights. I have to say, I'm very lucky to be married to a man that likes to cook!

Here is the meal we enjoyed on Sunday evening.  John made a version of this on Friday night, and it was so good we both agreed that an encore was in order!

This meal is pretty simple and inexpensive, and helps solve a problem we had, which is using up the last of our harvested tomatoes (which we had a ton of).  Ingredients:

- 3 - 4 yellow & red tomatoes
- 1/2 onion
- 1 sweet red pepper
- 1 can Great Northern beans
- 1 can red beans
- Carrots
- Garlic
- Celery
- 1 cup vegetable broth
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp chili powder

We combined the leftovers from Friday night, which he'd used black beans in (instead of red), so you see a few of those also.  YUM!

On Sunday I made some roasted chickpeas to have around for snacking.  John said he "wasn't crazy about them," but also noted that he "kept going back for more."  :)

And tonight, John had seen a recipe for poached eggs over asparagus that he wanted to try.  I had just picked up sliced baby portobello mushrooms at the store and suggested we add them as a side (it seemed like the meal needed something earthy with it), and it was a perfect match.  The only disappointment was the end of the meal, when a plate full of egg yolk went to waste...  :(

I suggested using it as salad dressing, which would probably have been good, but since we were at the end of the meal I guess it wouldn't have kept too well for another meal on another day.

The dogs were very happy to get their "lickins," though!  :)

John mentioned that while he still feels hungry all day long, he feels pretty good.  For me, I don't feel much different at all; this is sort of how I eat 80%+ of the time anyway, so it wasn't a huge shift.  It was tough going back in the office where there is a break room full of off-limits food, and a bunch of leftovers from the Startup Weekend we hosted, and half-and-half for coffee...  But I drank two cups of totally plain black coffee today, and it wasn't too bad.  And snuck a bag of salted almonds from the break room late in the day which meet "the rules" but still felt like an indulgence compared to the raw ones I normally nosh on!

We went to the box this morning, and did our stretching together this evening.  The dogs seem to think that when we are on the floor it is all about them, and much hilarity ensued, but we managed to get our stretches in, in between.

It's fun rallying together for the Challenge!

Slowcooker Mung Dhal Vegetable Soup

Saturday, September 15, 2012

I made Slowcooker Mung Dhal Vegetable Soup today, too, planning to take it for lunches in the coming week.  I added the spinach (which is optional in the recipe) to give it a bit more body.  Haven't tasted it yet, but it smells amazing.

Remind me to tell you about my utter homemade mayo FAIL sometime...

Whole Life Challenge Evening Meal # 1

I'm interested to see how creative everyone can get with the food guidelines on the Whole Life Challenge.  As John and I make our meals I will try to take & post pics, if for nothing else than my own future reference.

Today's meal was actually very similar to one of our "standard" meals.  I think the fact that I am a pescetarian lends itself nicely to the challenge; we've already been thinking creatively for many years, finding different ways to make vegetables and beans into new and fulfilling creations.

I only eat fish about 1-2 times a week and I don't plan to change that during the challenge. Since I am a "hybrid" vegetarian, I plan to follow a hybrid version of the rules.  I want to compete in a fair way, and not "take a pass" on anything, but I also think that as someone who is living on primarily vegetables, I may need additional nutrition items occasionally.  As such, on days that I am eating only vegetarian foods, I will follow the Challenge's vegetarian guidelines and allow the option of the "additional items for vegetarians" of quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, and wild rice.  On days that I am eating fish, I will not.  I noticed that they recently added tempeh, miso, and natto as allowed items for vegetarians (note to self, what the hell is natto?  research later) but I almost never eat those normally, so probably won't on the challenge either.

Anyway, onward!  Here's "what's for dinner" on the Whole Life Challenge for night 1.  Sorry the pic of John's meal is a bit blurry - I was in a hurry to get the shot and get out of his way... He was hungry! :)

My meal - a tuna steak, grilled veggies and carrot and turnip slaw:

John's meal - a ribeye and the same sides:

Here's a pic of the carrot and turnip slaw - I'm posting it so that I can put the image in on the recipe in my Pinterest WLC board - right now it just has the very boring picture of a napkin and silverware from the recipe page.

Hummus

This weekend is probably going to involve a lot of cooking and kitchen time to get ready to handle our first week of the Whole Life Challenge.

John made Hummus today, using a recipe from Vegetarian Times Low-Fat & Fast.  It is soooo tasty!

Hummus

Ingredients

Two 15-oz cans garbanzo beans (chickpeas), rinsed and drained
1/4 c fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
2 tbsp water
1 tbsp olive or sesame oil
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Combine all ingredients in a food processor or blender.  Process until smooth, scraping sides of bowl as necessary.  If a thinner dip is desired, add more water.  Serve with raw vegetables.


Makes 2 1/2 cups; 10 servings

Per serving:
116 calories, 4g protein; 4g fat, 20g carbohydrates; 0 cholestorol; 252mg sodium, 4g fiber

Whole Life Challenge

The Whole Life Challenge started today - John and I are both participating.  We had our first trial workout this morning (we'll do another on November 11th to compare the results).  We had our measurements taken, and the competition begins!

I've spent a lot of time in the past week getting ready - selecting items that meet the "food rules" at the grocery store, thinking of recipes and getting our fridge and pantry ready to support the program.

Here are pics of the pantry, frige and counter:

I'm excited about the challenge.  I'm interested to see what kind of results are possible by devoting 2 months to "clean living," being active, and working on mobility/stretching. 

We took some "before" pictures this morning, but you won't get to see them unless there is a remarkable "after" to compare them to in November...!