Will the Real Healthy Foodie Please Stand Up?

I am of the opinion that food should be tasty, versatile, healthy and easy to make. I don't want to buy an ingredient at the store only to have to use it all up for one dish, I want to make it last for several different dishes that depart significantly in flavour from the dish I originally used the ingredient in. Not only does this help with creativity, it saves money. Since I'm living off my parents now (and, of course, because we're in "these economic times"), saving money is kind of a necessity.

I can't stand those fussy food blogs that encourage you to follow one million different steps that only add to the presentation of your dish and not the flavour. Sorry, but I refuse to blanch green onions so that I can braid them together and wrap my asparagus in them. Asparagus (or any other vegetable) does not need to be dressed up with dumb crap that you're not going to eat anyway. That's part of the reason I don't consider this a food blog, along with the fact that I seem to complain a whole lot about school and talk way too much about my cat on here. I don't have the patience to make a food blog and, even if I did, I don't think I care enough to give people my recipes. If there's one thing I hate it's giving people my recipes only to have them not follow them. Is that weird? Probably. I'm a weird person.

That is not to say that I don't value presentation. Hell, I won't post a photo of my food if it doesn't look like it could be at least a little bit tasty. However, I'm sure Gordon Ramsay agrees with me that taste should come before anything else.

Another thing that frustrates me is the lack of healthy recipes on food blogs. Don't get me wrong, I love a good cupcake as much as the next guy, but who can eat cupcakes every day and feel good about their body? Not me, though I don't think you have any idea how much I wish I could. Is there any food blogger who is concerned about taste AND nutrition? Because it sure doesn't seem like it. The vast majority of blogs I've come across are baking blogs and the cooking blogs that I have read have so many recipes for carb-laden dishes like pasta and pizza.

The dinners I make usually consist of a lean protein (usually chicken or [shell]fish because cows and pigs are too smart for me to eat) and one or two vegetable dishes. That is the only way I can figure out to limit our carbohydrate intake because GP and I usually have sammiches [sic.] for lunch. I am continually shocked when I go out to dinner and see dishes with no vegetables on the side, or even worse, pasta dishes with bread on the side. Excuse me, but what the hell?! Nobody needs that kind of carb. overload unless she is an elite athlete and from what I hear in the news about obesity most of us are not. Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say here is that if you find a blog (or are the writer of a blog) with lots of healthy ideas for chicken/fish, don't be selfish; share it with the class!

Let Me Count the Ways #3

Top Ten Reasons Why I Love My Life

(In no order)

1. I make an amazing birthday cake. Evidence to the left from my little brother's birthday, which was yesterday.

2. GP does nice things for me, like cleaning the entire kitchen after I made the aforementioned cake (and when the kitchen was a MESS), EVEN THOUGH he wasn't able to come to the birthday dinner because he was working and EVEN THOUGH I told him explicitly not to clean it up because I would when I got home. It was kind of like having a house-elf, but GP is a lot more handsome and independent.

3. I look fabulous in most hats.

4. I'm good at things I don't even like doing, namely yoga.

5. Friskies does NOT like whistling, which makes for endless entertainment. If GP or I whistle, she tries to bite us.

6. I don't have to go to school or work right now. Neat!

7. I have a knack for finding great places to live just at the right time.

8. I've been pretty good about working out. In the past 90 days I have only missed 5 workouts of the 6 per week that GP and I have been doing. All but one of those workouts were yoga. Also, I've been getting stronger and stronger. I can do seven chin-ups now! I must say I've been finding it hard to stay motivated lately. I need a little pick-me-up. Suggestions, anyone?

9. I haven't gotten a sunburn yet this summer. That is good because my skin is very fair and sunburns are painful and do not bode well for future health or skin appearance.

10. I can speak French. That's awesome because I live in a bilingual country and I think everyone living here should be taught more of both languages.

Ripped/Rippled

When I worked out today I felt my muscles shred. Seriously. I didn't know that was actually a thing before; I just thought it was something dumb juice monkeys say but no, I really felt it and it felt great! Last week GP and I took our 54-day photos. We're about 60 percent done and I've noticed definite improvement. Today I saw my arms in the mirror as I was drying my hair and did a double take: "Are those really mine? Holy shit!". Yeah, Kim, those pythons are really yours and those porpoises you call thighs are yours too. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. Sometimes when I sit down I engage my quadriceps on purpose and put my hands on them to feel how firm they've gotten. See for yourself:


An aside: I just noticed an unidentified sticky substance (get your mind out of the gutter) on my arm. Naturally, I licked it off. It was sweet and tasty, just as I thought it would be. GP has been trying to break me of this habit with very little success. It's just my way of embracing that new found and foraged food movement.

On Sunday GP and I went to Bright Angel Park. I'd never been there before. How flattered I was when he told me it was his first date place of choice and he's taken many a lucky lady there (sarcasm). Regardless, it was beautiful and we had a lovely time hanging out on the river. Look how cute we are:
There was a really cool suspension bridge, on which I made GP feel unsafe by bouncing up and down. After the park we went to Whipple Tree Junction where GP had never been. We saw Golda's mum and had a nice chat with her and then bought some fudge for GP's dad, whose entire mouth is full of sweet teeth. (Un)fortunately we forgot to give GP's dad the fudge and had to eat it ourselves. Damn. A great day all told.

Pretty Pictures of Things We Ate

Today marks the beginning of "recovery" week in P90X. GP says the name is misleading and it's only a recovery week because there is no weight lifting. I'm just happy I don't have to do pull ups. I measured my waist today and discovered to my great delight that I have lost 1.5 inches. This hasn't really even been all that hard! I mean, sure, not eating carbohydrates has really cramped my style, but other than that I have been cheating on the diet a little bit and still seeing results. I think if there's one area I have to kick it up a notch in, it's that one. There's no point in doing this if I'm not going whole hog. So I might keep doing the "fat shredder" diet for another week. Maybe I won't because I love eating starchy things. Who knows.

GP and I will be taking pictures of our bodies next week because we'll have finished one month of P90X by then. I can't wait to compare my photos.

Here are some pictures of a hippie-ish meal I made on the weekend:





I call it hippie-ish because it's one of those meals that looks atrocious but tastes really really good. The pink crap is beets with some dill and goat cheese and the greeny-brown squares are tofu baked in the pesto I had leftover from another meal. It went down easy-- I love the piss outta beets. Speaking of piss, beets are also entertaining in that way.

Lastly, GP and I went to a really nice show last night at the Duncan Garage, where we saw the perennially delightful Chelsea-Lyne Heins, who opened for Martin Kerr. It was a lovely intimate show with great music, cookies, and even some Spice Girls. I don't know what more anyone could want!

How's this for a bold blogging move?

I'm posting my P90X "before" pictures with the relative assurance that the only person who really reads this is GP and possibly Sarah. However, I did put a link to yesterday's post on my Facebook. Oh well, most of my friends have seen me in a swimsuit anyway. And fuck, I was already skinny before I started this program, so nobody can be an asshole to me.

Behold:

What's for dinner?

A delightful pesto of spring greens, parmesan, sage, pine nuts and garlic artfully plopped onto perfectly grilled and succulent local chicken (see below), accompanied by garlicky sauteed bok choy and mushrooms. Sounds good to me. You can see the end result of this delicious creation at the end of this post.
I love dinner. I also love breakfast and lunch. And I love sharing these meals with people. Since moving in with GP I've been doing most of the cooking. I don't mind this at all. Sometimes I don't feel like cooking and we don't really eat dinner, but that's only happened maybe twice. God forbid I ever have children and I don't feel like cooking dinner: Future teacher: "Suzie, what did you have for dinner last night?" Future child: "Nothing, Mummy didn't feel like it and Daddy was at the office." How utterly depressing. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Anyway, what I was going to say was that I like eating and I like eating with people and I like eating with GP because it means I can cook more food more often. I have to admit I haven't been as adventurous as I'd hoped to be once I was cooking for two instead of one, but I am a work in progress after all.

Being a vegetarian is another thing I've had to struggle with of late because of this damned P90X. The diet plan is a bit confusing because it basically says to vegetarians "You're vegetarian, you know how to do this stuff already, so just adjust the meat recipes to be vegetarian". That's a lot easier said that done when I don't feel like eating tofu and "mock" meat has sooo many chemicals and is expensive. I miss my legumes. Alas, I don't feel like I can eat them because they have too many carbs and I don't want to have to do all that tedious math to figure out how much lentils I can have. So I guess it's back to meat for the time being.

I feel pretty crappy about this decision. It's not like I'd ever eat pork or beef, but even just going back to eating chicken and fish regularly is really not what I want to do. At the same time I don't want to have to rely on SO MANY soy products and fake food to get me through. I want the best of all worlds: I don't want to have to make animals suffer so I can get high quality protein, but I also don't want to have to do the mind-numbing calculations necessary to include legumes, which I'm not really sure I can do anyway even if I did do the calculations because they're simply too high in carbs, and I don't want to have to consume soy and chemicals all day long!! So I guess I just have to go the road of least resistance: find dead animals to eat that haven't been treated badly before they died. I foresee a lot of wild salmon in my future.

Do you suffer from premature blog ejaculation?

I just have one more thought for now:

I think people who are not involved in religion need to have other ways of punishing/torturing/disciplining themselves, which is the only reason I can think of that my boyfriend (henceforth known as GP) and I are doing P90X. For the uninitiated (lucky...), P90X is an insane DVD series aimed at sculpting your body into a lean mean muscle machine. It is 3 months long and includes a strict diet that participants must follow by rote if they want to see any success at all. (GP had 2 very strong screwdrivers last night, not that I'm keeping track of who's falling off the bandwagon faster or nothin'). In the first month of this diet participants (read: pathetic flabby underlings) are allotted a million servings of protein, very few servings of fruits and veggies and basically one serving of carbohydrates per day.

In the spirit of low-carb living, I'm making vegetarian (vegan, maybe?) wontons for dinner tonight. I know, wonton wrappers are made of carbs, but fuck. I'm already pretty skinny and I haven't eaten carbs yet today, so given that there are 5g of carbs per one wrapper, I can safely feel good about gorging on these tasty morsels tonight. I tried and tried to find an intriguing, easy, tasty, healthy, protein-rich recipe for vegetarian wontons but unfortunately the internets let me down. Thank goodness that the human mind (mine especially) is infinitely inventive. For posterity, here is my wonton recipe:

For the filling:
350g extra firm tofu, pressed
1/3 cup soy sauce (or more, or less, to taste)
1 Tbsp. fresh finely grated ginger
4 small cloves of garlic, (or three big ones, or whatever), finely grated
about 1/3 of a red onion, finely grated (or use 1/4 of a white onion if that's what you have)
a handful of minced water chestnuts

To wrap them up:
one package of wonton wrappers (the small variety)
egg wash

To cook them in:
2.5 litres (2.5 quarts) broth/stock/flavoured water

To eat them with:
Assorted delicious veggies of your choosing

Put the above in a Cuisinart, except for the chestnuts. If you don't have a food processor you should beg/borrow/steal one from someone. Seriously, this is a lot easier with a food processor. You could try doing it in a blender, but it might all get stuck at the bottom and not want to move around unless you have one of those super duper fancy humongous two-blade deals. And if you can't do that, then you're on your own on that front. You're smart, you can figure something out. (If anyone ever reads this and finds a way to do this without using a Cuisinart or a blender, please let me know!)

Anyway, when you're done processing it, it should resemble a sticky kind of cookie dough. Or at least something suitable for sticking in a wonton wrapper. Taste it. You should like the taste. If you don't, add more of a flavour you like until it's palatable. Mix in the chestnuts after taking the tofu-mix out of the processor.

I don't know what you can use as a sticking-together agent for the wrappers besides egg wash, but if you're vegan you're probably crafty and have figured this out already. Read on!

IMPORTANT (ha, almost wrote "impotent") NOTE: Filling these little puppies takes a while. I thought it would quick and easy, and it certainly was easy, but quick it was not. It took me the better part of an hour to wrap up all my filling using 3 sheets short of a 260g package of wrappers. Anyway, lay the wonton wrappers on the counter with one corner pointing to you and place about 3/4 of a teaspoon (or half, or something, I don't know, you'll figure it out) of filling in the middle. Don't put too much filling in there or they'll explode. Wet two sides of the wonton with egg wash and fold the dry sides onto the wet, to form a triangle. Then fold the opposing points into the middle to form a tortellini-type shape.

To cook the wontons, bring around 2.5 litres of your preferred broth (I use Better Than Bouillon because they make a delicious vegetarian "stock") to a gentle simmer. Avoid a more vigorous simmer because that will break the delicate little wonton skins. At this point you will want to talk like Rachael Ray and say things like "Drop the kids into the hot tub". Avoid that; it'll make your wontons taste bad. Leave the wontons in the "hot tub" (ugh) for around 3 minutes, then remove them to the bowl(s) in which they will be served. Dump your choice veggies (I used bok choy, water chesnuts, baby corn, and carrots) into the broth, reserving the less robust veggies (bok choy) for a shorter cooking time. I simmered the veg. for around 5-6 minutes, or until the carrots were al dente. All you have to do when you've cooked the veggies is ladle the soup into the bowls over the wontons and season the broth with soy sauce and slurp it all up greedily. I can't wait to have leftovers today.

Oh! And I froze the rest of the wontons because there were so many. Good for when I am lazy and/or sick.