egg cups to go: the next twist

egg cups with tomato & bacon

ingredients

• grape tomatoes
• 2tbsp olive oil
• 1tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 6 large eggs, separated
• 1/3 c coconut milk
• 6 pieces bacon (i used three slices and cut them in two)
• a few slices of red onion
• small spinach leafs

filling the muffin tray cups

method

toss the tomatoes in oil and balsamic vinegar. add sea salt and pepper. roast in a 300 degree oven for 20 minutes. set aside once done.

fry the bacon.  set aside.

whisk the egg whites, add coconut milk and whisk further to fully incorporate.

place one piece of bacon, 2 or 3 roasted tomatoes, red onion and spinach in each cup of a silicon muffin tin. evenly divide the egg white mixture among the cups and top each with an egg yolk.

bake in a 350 degree oven for 20 – 25 minutes.

these are great for a quick breakfast or as a take along on a work day.

 

getting down with food: tips for eating well

During busy days, hectic seasons and stressful times it is easy to experience difficulties in your relationship with food.  Sound familiar?

I, for one,  have a couple of tensions in my foodways which are perpetually challenging to me.  If I don’t take time to plan and prepare for these times, I quickly fall into eating patterns which only put further stress on my body and mind.   It is easy to find myself convenience eating, creating imbalances in my body and setting the stage for disease.

To stay on track, reminders are always helpful.  Terry Walters, of Clean Food (if you haven’t checked out this cook book, you need to) has a beautiful summary of what we need to remain mindful of with respect to foods and eating.

1. Chew, Chew, Chew! The more you chew, the slower you eat, the more digestive enzymes you secrete, the less stress on your digestive organs, the more nutrients you absorb from your food, the more easily you eliminate. . .
2. Practice Good Habits Take the time to sit down when you eat so you have more energy for proper digestion and nutrient absorption.  We also need to eat regular meals to fuel our metabolism and daily activities.  The more we practice good habits, the more automatic they become and the better an example we set for our children and others.
3. Stop Eating Three Hours Before Bedtime Digestion is directly linked to movement and exercise.  When we sleep, everything slows down – including our digestive functions.  If you go to sleep with food in your belly, your mind may sleep, but your body works overtime all night long.  Over the long term, this regimen make the body weak, out of balance and less able to maintain good health.
4. Don’t Buy It If You Don’t Want To Eat It It’s much easier to have strength and willpower once (in the grocery store) than every time you open up your pantry!  Do yourself a favour – fill your kitchen with nourishing foods so that you can’t help but make a healthy choice.  This includes what you stock for your children – why are you willing to feed them the health-leeching products you no longer wish for yourself?
5. Colour + Taste = Balance A balanced diet includes a full spectrum of colour and all five tastes:  sweet, bitter, salty, sour, pungent.  Go for variety and start adding tastes and colours that have been missing from your palette.  Make sure to put extra emphasis on green – the colour of healing.
6. Listen To and Honour Your Body At the end of the day, as you rummage through the kitchen looking for the perfect snack to fill that elusive need, ask yourself, “Am I hungry or thirsty, or do I need connection, touch, an emotional outlet, some pampering or sleep?”  Answer these questions instead of reaching for the snack and discover how to truly nourish and nurture your inner self.  Sometimes a massage, a foot bath, a tub soak, time alone with a journal or early to bed will do the trick; other times a bite of chocolate is simply the only answer!
7. Change Slowly Go easy on your body, your lifestyle and even your sense of taste.  Too big a jump from processed to unprocessed foods can bring uncomfortable side effects.  Changes made too quickly can add stress to the body and are more likely to backfire.  Gradual changes allow your body and your life to adapt more easily and are more likely to be long lasting.
8. Make Peace with Your Food and Your Choices Ultimately, life is just a series of choices – one at a time.  Every choice nourishes some part of us – whether physical or emotional.  The goal is to accurately identify the need and then nourish it as best as possible.  The more ways we have to nourish ourselves, the less we use (and misuse) food, and the happier and healthier we can be.
9. Let Go It’s just food, after all.  It will be there later.  What you see isn’t always what you get, and we can’t make good choices unless we have good information.  But overemphasis on food and diet isn’t healthy either.  Don’t let the food control you.  Put it in a healthy place, and nourish yourself lavishly with all that life has to offer.

These are wise words, great signposts  for healthy eating.  Food is sometimes more complicated in our lives than it needs to be, our relationship to it dogged and slavish.  Food isn’t calories, nutritional values, or numbers on a weight scale.  It is nourishment, family connection, cultural identity.  We engage in a life sustaining relationship with our food and need to treat this relationship with honesty, integrity and respect.

I like to be reminded of this essential, vital, joyous relationship when I allow mindlessness to take over my life.

hungry: a book review

Crystal Renn is not only a fashion model, she is a young, vibrant, self assured woman who has learned, through personal challenges, to become the director of her life.

As a young teen she was scouted for a large modeling agency, dropping her bodyweight to under a hundred pounds on her 5’9” frame in order to secure a modeling job.

Hungry:  A Young Model’s Story of Appetite, Ambition and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves is her story.  From her moderate childhood obsessions to the development of full blown anorexia to a more balanced and aware young adulthood, Renn shares her changing relationship with food and explores its complex connection to her self esteem, self image and self acceptance.  She incorporates in her story, the social and cultural context within which bodyweight exists in the modeling world, in North American society, and in the lives of young women.

Crystal Renn’s achievement is in walking away from a modeling career which required her to maintain an unhealthy body size and kept her hungry and unhappy.   Wisely, she quickly realized what she wanted more was to be happy and healthy.  The journey to this goal demanded that she listen to her body, treat it with love, caring and respect regardless of its size, and learn to become comfortable in her own skin.  Once she found the joy in being full-out Crystal Renn and not a shadow of herself, her modeling career took hold – a statement to her tenacity, self-confidence and intelligence.

The book, I think, is a decent little read for anyone struggling with body image in an image-obsessed world.  It might also be the book to hand to a teenage daughter.  Crystal Renn’s modeling as a luscious, camera-loving, healthy bodied young woman was first brought to my attention by my oldest daughter who would be 2 years younger than Renn and I’ll be handing the book along to her.

Renn attempts to place dieting within a context; she cites research studies, blogs and books which may be of use to the reader.  So not only is this a memoir, a peek inside the world of high fashion and modeling, it is also a bit of a primer and advice coloumn.

The underlying promise of dieting – a promise as powerful as any industrial-strength foundation garment – is that once we reach our goal weight, our lives will be perfect.  That’s the fairy-tale ending glimmering after the credits of a weight-loss reality show.  It’s the story written in invisible ink in the margins of the exercise stories in too many women’s magazines.  Eating well isn’t about offering our bodies nourishing food – it’s about getting skinnier.  Exercise isn’t about becoming stronger, managing stress, or supporting heart health – it’s about getting skinnier.  Getting skinnier means that life will start playing in Technicolor to the accompaniment of a glorious orchestra.

Criticizing Renn’s size 12 beauty as not-plus-enough or too-large-for-fashion misses the point that she is expressing in the book, despite the problems with an industry which can label a size 10 or 12 woman as plus size.  It is time, she says, to accept diversity in body size and weight – of our self and of those around us – and for the fashion industry to do the same.

Women are clamoring to see bodies like their own represented and celebrated…It’s essential to see that size is only one of the battlefronts… Diversity helps us all.  And thin people are not the enemy.  When we gripe at other women for being too thin as well as too fat, we allow ourselves to be distracted from the real issue.  We have to change the culture by rewarding and applauding diversity in all its forms, not by vilifying individual women.

Renn has come by some valuable lessons very early in life and I’m glad she’s sharing her story.

The solution is to accept that the only person you have to please is yourself.  Indulge your instincts, wear what you love, and embrace your own natural size…Confidence is what ultimately makes us attractive, no matter what we look like.

pumpkin as a main course: currying f(l)avour

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, then be crowded on a velvet cushion.  – Henry David Thoreau

shrimp & pumpkin curry on the table

The pumpkin hummus was really just an afterthought to the Shrimp & Pumpkin Curry I wanted to make for supper Wednesday.  With some shrimp in the freezer, all I needed was to stop on my way home at the local farm stand to pick up a couple of small pumpkins.   (Okay, I picked up a half dozen fresh baked blueberry scones too — I am delightfully weak in the flesh).

Shrimp & Pumpkin Curry

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 tsp mustard seeds (I doubled this and used black mustard seeds)
• pinch of cumin seeds
• 10 curry leaves
• an inch or so of fresh ginger root, cut into strips]
• 2 green chilies (I substituted some kicky dried peppers from the garden of Louis Wilson, formerly known as a UPEI professor)
• 2 onions, sliced
• 150g peeled pumpkin flesh, thinly sliced
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1 2/3c coconut milk (light is good)
• 500g raw shrimp, peeled
• 1 tsp white vinegar

before adding shrimp

Add mustard and cumin seeds to hot oil in large fry pan.  When the seeds start to pop, add curry leaves, ginger, chilies and onions.  Cook over low heat for 10 minutes, until the onions are golden.

happy happy leftovers

Add the pumpkin and turmeric and a bit of salt.  Mix well and heat for a minute.  Pour in the coconut milk and 3/4c water.  Bring to a boil, stirring constantly.

Add the shrimp, cook for 5 more minutes.  Add vinegar and mix well.

Serve hot.

I put this yumfest over brown basmati rice.  It was jazzy on my jargon muscle.