Mmmmmmmmm!

[felicula]

This week I tried some new recipes from my Ontario Greenhouse Vegetables cookbook, as well as one from the Joy of Cooking.

Yesterday were summer greek salad sandwiches, a medley of tomato, seedless cucumber, roasted peppers, onion, feta cheese, olive oil, and oregano stuffed into pitas.

I'd planned teriyaki chicken paired with Japanese cucumber salad for today. Yesterday afternoon I set the chicken to marinate. Today, I prepared the cucumber salad, stuck that in the fridge, and cooked the chicken.

I am sooooooooo glad that I decided to pair the two. The sweetness, chill temperature, and crunchiness of the cucumbers was a perfect contrast to the warm, succulently salty teriyaki chicken. Wow. Just... Wow. I will undoubtedly make that pair again. So simple, yet such a delight to the senses. I've decided that someday I need to get a set of Japanese style tableware to compliment the meal. Mmmmmmmmmmm.

***grins wide***

I'm beginning to get into the kinds of recipes I'd love to share with my mom. Simple, relatively healthy, delicious, an alternative to a lot of "normal" family meals.

Besides, I couldn't picture myself at Aidan's age saying, as he said yesterday, "Feta cheese! Yummy! I like feta cheese!"

It is such a challenge to me to try to steer away from foods with highly processed flours or the icky family of hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated fats. So many tasty things I've grown up with having and making meals of contain a lot of that stuff. I've begun the adventure of switching to brown rice, and trying to tone down dramatically on how much bread and pasta I eat. I'm trying to go gung-ho on vegetables. A nice varied salad is all well and good, but it certainly lessens the monotony to experiment with these veggie-centric dishes.

The tricky part is trying to have enough of the kinds of vegetables I need while not having too much leftover, spoiling before we get to them. It is definitely worth it though. I'm starting to feel a bit more energetic despite the heat. Meat-and-potatoes sorts of meals, while hearty, aren't what my body needs. I've been a sugar and starch addict for soooo long.

I can't say I don't like the stuff. I love bread and thick, starchy soups, potatoes and beans, cookies and cakes and puddings. It's just that I have loads of trouble saying no to second and third helpings of them sometimes. And pop. Damn but that stuff can put a lot of sugar into a body fast.

Perhaps there are ways yet to work my way out of this sugar and starch addiction.

Comments

[hbbtrbbtbcnbt.livejournal.com]

Amen, sister :)

I'm in the same position, but am having a rather interesting problem. While I'm trying to get healthier, lowerer sugar and lower fat/starch, I've got Matt and the boys who are trying desperately to put some weight on. It's really hard to cook for both of these :)

Little things I've been doing is using 1% milk, and using parmesan cheese rather than other, fattier cheeses. At one point, I kept pop out of my house, and it was good. I need to get back to that, pronto.

I wish I liked more veggies. It's not the flavor that bothers me, as much as the textures. One can only have so much V8 before the tomato acid blow torches the stomache :/

[dawnstar.livejournal.com]

I've found that the whole "Strive for Five" thing that Wegmans promotes is a good thing. (Five servings of fruits and veggies every day.) If I eat that many, it means I'm not eating stuff that's bad for me.

If you don't like many veggies, try eating more fruits. Sure, there's more sugar in fruits than in veggies but it's GOOD sugar, not bad sugar. :)

I'm on a mission to lose 30-40 pounds by my wedding. So maybe the three of us can band together on this "being more healthy" thing.

[hbbtrbbtbcnbt.livejournal.com]

That could definately be a good thing.....weight loss works better with comradere and accountability :)

[shimmer720.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should try that too. I could stand to lose at least 10 lbs., though getting back down to 150 (pre-Tyler) would be absolutely wonderful. I think I'd be a lot happier that way. It certainly isn't going to happen before the legal ceremony, but it should before the big wedding.

[cheshire23.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to do some of the same sorts of stuff, though some of my problems are with WHEN and HOW I eat rather than what. I have this bad habit of random-eating on the run and/or using candy to stay awake at work when I just can't stomach any more coffee (which is the only drinkable high-caffeine-content thing that I like at all). So I'm trying to get back to my rule of "beverages only at the desk, no food." :)

[phoenixsong]

Not sure how much help this will be, but I've seen a lot of neat stuff on steelchefs. And I get the feeling most of them are big on the homemade, natural foods thing.