Yesterday on the way home from work, (by the way, five people showed up for the presentation on diabetes and one woman said she learned more at this meeting than any she's ever attended), I started thinking about making a smoothie. Then I started thinking about almond milk. Then I realized almond milk comes in a carton. Then it hit me: almond milk in a box is a...dun dun dun...processed food! Ahh! No! How can this be happening?!
I spent the better half of yesterday afternoon by the pool perusing google for "what is a processed food?" I mean really? I'm a health educator. Get it together. Do you really need an article from huffington post to tell you what a processed food is? I think not. The good news: almond milk is so easy to make, I am fully prepared to take on the task. The bad news: we just bought a six pack of unsweetened unorganic vanilla almond milk from Costco. Oopsies.
The best news of the week though is that we survived our first sober Friday. Neither of us even metioned alcohol, cocktails, wanting a cocktail or even admitted to thinking about cocktails. I had nearly convinced myself (secretly of course) that a cocktail wouldn't be so bad if I just had a salad, all the while reading my new book "Live Raw" by Mimi Kirk. Ay ay ay. Let it go. Let it go.
We have some really nice organic wild rice so I decided it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to steam it with some onion and garlic. That's not a processed food right? I mean when it comes down to it, aren't almonds a processed food? I'm not the one that crawled up into the tree, picked them, deshelled them, rinsed them, bagged them, shipped them, etc. This could borderline make me crazy, so I am doing my best. And by the way I feel and by what the scale is reflecting, I am doing a good job!
Back to dinner. As you can see above, we have some beautiful rainbow chard, kale, onion, etc. etc. While the rice was steaming (it took extra long because I kept the heat reeeeeeally low - - justify, justify) I rinsed the rainbow chard, chopped up the stems, sliced each leaf down the middle, put half on top of the other, rolled it burrito style and sliced away. I threw the ends of the chard in with the rice and it was absolutely beautiful. I then de-stemmed the kale and ripped it up into small pieces.
Here's the fun part: I had no idea what I was going to do next so I got a large bowl and threw the kale and the rainbow chard in it. I squeezed lemon over it...sprinkled some salad sprinkle on it...okay now what...I have some apple cider vinegar in here, threw that on top of it, oh! cayenne peppers in vinegar from my dad's girlfriend, chopped two of those up and threw that in there, and of course, added a couple dashes of ground cayenne pepper, just for good measure. The rice was just about done so I turned off the heat and put half of the vegetable mixture over the rice to steam it just a bit. I put the other half of the vegetable mixture in my bowl and scooped just a bit of the rice and vegetable medley. Holy heat wave. It was so delicious. Rumil had mostly rice, I had mostly vegetables, and in this household, that's what we consider a win win.
We had some strawberries for dessert and a couple nibbles of this amazing raw chocolate that my raw foodie chef friend made and sent to me. The one on the bottom right tastes like flipping cookie dough. For real. Amai Health, people. Get your fix on! It's so rich you only need a nibble.
http://www.superstevia.com/amai.html *She is also the one that makes Super Stevia and Brackers.
It's Saturday morning now, and someone is making bacon. I don't even eat bacon but the smell gets me sometimes. Today is techinically our day off, but I am going to do my very best to stay the course as much as possible...we're heading to my sister's to garden and then having dinner with friends (albeit very healthy friends) in Manhattan Beach, but I know the red wine will ensue. If we can prevent it from being a purple haze, we''ll be golden. We'll see how it goes!
No comments:
Post a Comment