#14: Black-Eyed Pea Cakes!

Sc-rumptious!

Black-Eyed Pea Cakes with Adobo Cream (from Cooking Light magazine)

  • ¼ c fat-free sour cream (or Tofutti sour cream)
  • 1 t adobo sauce
  • 1 (15.8 oz.) can no-salt-added black-eyed peas, rinsed and drained
  • ¼ c dry breadcrumbs
  • 1 T finely chopped onion
  • ½ t bottled minced garlic
  • ½ t ground cumin
  • ½ t salt
  • ¼ t black pepper
  • 1 egg, lightly beaten (or egg substitute)
  • 1 egg white, lightly beaten
  • 1 ½ t olive oil
  • ¼ c shredded Monterey Jack cheese (or shredded rice cheese)
  1. Combine sour cream and adobo sauce in a small bowl.
  2. Place beans in a medium bowl; partially mash with a fork. Stir in breadcrumbs and next 7 ingredients (through egg white). With floured hands, divide pea mixture into ½-inch-thick patties.
  3. Heat oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add patties; cook 2 minutes on each side or until golden and thoroughly heated. Remove from pan and top each cake with a sprinkling of cheese. Serve with sour cream sauce.

#12: Clear Your Clutter

It’s time to face your internal clutter.

Maybe some of you are familiar with this New Year’s resolution: Clean out the house and keep it clutter-free. It is hard work to keep the house uncluttered when you’re busy, and even more so when you’re busy and have children. When you work, too, well, it’s almost easier to just give up.

But don’t. When you live in a cluttered home, you hold clutter on the inside, too. In fact, when you visit a person’s home and it’s just stuff everywhere, you can tell a lot about that person. Not that he or she is necessarily dirty or lazy, but that he or she likely has some unresolved issues. It’s true: Clutter is only a surface expression of a deeper issue. When you keep your home organized and clean, your heart and mind are more free and available to the people and things that are important to you.

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#11: Sweet Potatoes–Enchilada Style

Here is a recipe to help you eat what’s in season

Here’s something so yummy and easy that it’s become a winter staple in our house.

Baked Pinto Beans and Sweet Potatoes, Enchilada Style

The following ingredients are for a vegan recipe. If you’d like to add cheese, get 1 cup of cubed Monterey Jack cheese ready, too.

  • A little EV olive oil
  • Your favorite salsa
  • 1 can pinto beans
  • 2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
  • 1 cup crushed tortilla chips
  • A little cilantro for garnish
  1. Preheat oven to 400F. Use a tablespoon or so of oil to grease a 9×13-inch baking dish.
  2. Spread the potatoes and salsa in the dish, cover the dish with foil, and bake for 15 minutes.
  3. Remove the foil, and add the beans and some salt and pepper (and cheese if you like). Sprinkle the tortilla crumbs.
  4. Bake until the sauce is bubbly and the tortilla chips are browned (or cheese is melted), 20 to 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and sprinkle with the cilantro.

Voila! Easy and delicious…and family-friendly!

(Recipe is thanks to Mark Bittman.)

#10: Why We Do Things Even When We Know They’re Not Good For Us

So the kids and I are sitting in the car waiting for Mike to grab a smoothie for Bella, when a car pulls into the parking spot beside us, and Bella notices that the woman is doing something she hasn’t seen before. “Why is that lady doing that?” “What?” “She’s doing that with the fire.” I look, and I see. The woman is smoking. It’s now time to have thatconversation.

I tell Bella it’s something that some people do, not everyone, and that it’s stinky, dirty, gross, bad for you, makes you sick, makes your teeth yucky….to which she responds, staring blankly out the window, “Uh-huh.” It’s then that I realize what she must be thinking: “Then why would some people choose to do it?” That is much harder to explain.

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#9 Being Thankful

Let us give thanks, shall we?

Let us give thanks, shall we? For our childbearing hips, our matronly triceps, our formidable will to shrink our tummies. For the stamina to chase children, work hard, and play harder. For the mental clarity to know the difference between “needs work” and “fine the way it is.” For the mental agility to see what is possible and the lucidity to accept what is futile (and the ability to forgive ourselves for it).

Thank you for the tiny pockets of time that are truly little gifts, fifteen unexpected minutes when we can read or drink some tea out of a mug instead of a to-go cup. Thank you to our babies for the occasional really good naps.

Thank you to the ones who love us, for loving us.

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#8: The (Too) Skinny

How do we stay on the safe side of skinny?

I caught Portia De Rossi (now Degeneres) on Oprah the other day. She was discussing her new memoir, called Unbearable Lightness. Who knew she’d had such a desperate relationship with food not so long ago? Well, okay, we all did, if we watched Ally McBeal, but I didn’t understand that the actresses we rolled our eyes at, saying they were too skinny, actually had serious eating disorders. When Portia hit her lowest point, she was 82 pounds!

It struck me as I listened to her talk how very hard it is, for a lot of people, to watch what they eat and stay mentally healthy about it. Once you’re “watching what you eat,” maybe counting calories, it’s not terribly difficult to see how you might get a little too into it, and start flirting with bulimia, deprivation, or at least obsession. I realize I’m lucky because it isn’t hard for me to be moderate in most things I do. I have pretty fierce willpower, so I can say no to dessert if I want to. But what makes it so much easier is that I usually say yes. I just stop after one cookie instead of eating two or three or a whole box. It sounds so easy, I know.

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#7: Eating in Season

My enthusiasm for discovering where my food comes from lingers on.

As I move from Skinny Bitch to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, my enthusiasm for discovering where my food comes from lingers on. So far I’m learning a lot about corn, and how pretty much everything non-plant that we eat contains some form of it. Which is interesting since there is very little of nutritional value in corn. Hmm.

What I’m excited about this year that’s new in my life is eating according to the seasons. Since we started taking the vegetable basket at our doorstep once a week, we’ve been sort of forced into it. Not only do we find the challenge of finding recipes for all of these vegetables we’ve never tried (or sometimes even heard of) exciting, but we also love learning about what is growing now—and in our region. In other words, even though you can buy pineapple at the grocery store in the cold winter months, it’s not in season, and therefore our bodies don’t need it. That is what is eye-opening for me. Our bodies are in great harmony with the earth. We sleep when it’s dark and rise when it’s light. Why fight the earth when it comes to eating what it provides? We have to go with it. So if you don’t like leafy greens, the winters will be long for you!

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#5: Nut Burgers!

A high point in our quest for a kinder diet.

If you haven’t already heard me raving about these, hear me now. These nut burgers are fantastic (thank you, Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian!). As Mike said, “I can’t believe how long this recipe has been sitting in our house unmade!!”

Here’s what you’ll need:

  • 1 medium onion
  • 1 cup walnuts, pecans, almonds, cashews—whatever nut tickles your fancy (we use walnuts and they are awesome)
  • 1 cup cooked brown rice or raw rolled oats
  • 2 T ketchup, miso, tomato paste, nut butter, or tahini (we use tahini)
  • 1 t chili powder
  • 1 egg
  • Salt and pepper
  • 2T EV olive oil (or other neutral oil, like grapeseed or corn)

Here’s how you do it:

  1. Chop the onion in a food processor. Add the nuts and rice or oats and pulse to chop, but not too finely. Add the binder (ketchup, etc.), spices, and egg. Process briefly. Add a little liquid (e.g., water, stock, soy sauce, or wine) if necessary; mixture should be moist but not loose.
  2. Let the mixture sit a few minutes if you have the time, then shape it into 4 to 6 patties. Put the oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. When oil is hot, add the burgers to the skillet. Cook for about 5 minutes, more or less undisturbed, then turn. Lower the heat a bit and cook on the other side 3 or 4 more minutes, or until firm.
  3. Serve on buns, with your sauce or fixings of choice! (We use a raspberry chipotle sauce—yum!)

Vary these by substituting up to ½ cup sesame, sunflower, or pumpkin seeds for half of the nuts. Or make it vegan by omitting the egg and adding a ½ sheet of crumbled Nori Chips to the food processor (use miso or nut butter instead of ketchup, and soy sauce for the liquid).

Enjoy!!

#4: New Food Yays and Nays

A couple weeks into a kinder diet: a check-in

There are a bunch of new foods in my life: so which ones get the thumbs up so far? Yay for Vegenaise. It’s pricey, but so worth it. Real mayo is pretty sketchy, but Vegenaise has substance and flavor, and of course, is dairy-free! Big huge thumbs up for Whole Soy yogurt. Mmmmmmmm. Love. And oh my gosh, try Trader Joe’s Cherry Chocolate Chip Soy Ice Cream even if you don’t care at all about dairy. It is deLIcious.

As I dabble in the dairy-free cheese category, I’m not quite so dazzled. First we went through some products that were deceptive—we learned that just because a food says soy-based does NOT mean it contains no dairy (why? really—why?). So then we moved on to rice cheese slices and 100% dairy-free shredded cheese. I’m okay with them, but certainly not wowed. I’m tempted to let those slide in future. Dairy-free milk I can do. I’m loving all the different options: rice, soy and almond. I think I’ll stick to rice milk, though, since it’s one thing that’s NOT soy, and it’s made of such basic ingredients. It also tastes very yummy in my oatmeal.

Now we’ve expanded our “kind diet” to phasing out white sugar products, too. Whole wheat graham crackers: yum. Agave syrup: yum. I think our taste buds learn to wrap themselves around the whole wheat, whole grain, brown rice type flavors, such that the old-school, easy and cheap stuff simply doesn’t hold the same place on the flavor pedestal any longer. There is just such an amazing heartiness to the whole grain flavors. I swear I’m not brainwashed, I’m just really tasting things these days! Stay tuned…

#3: Soy: Good or Bad?

Oy. The soy. Now that I’ve started to bring in a few non-dairy “dairy” products, I’m wondering if it’s possible we’ll be taking in too much soy. What to do? Even the vegan babysitter struggles with this dilemma. Now she tells me.

As usual, our answer in this household is moderation. We have decided to be moderate with our use of soy-based products. So if I use soy milk for my coffee and oatmeal, and have tofurkey and soy cheese on my sandwich, I might skip the soy meat product at dinner and just count on my grains and veggies to fill me up. Something like that. It’s working so far, and I’m enjoying the flavors of the new foods I’m bringing into the house very much. This isn’t just about buying soy milk instead of cow’s milk—it’s not so simple. Soy milk is far from perfect. This is the middle ground between cow’s milk and something like rice milk, which is basically shifting from dairy to grain.

This is good. I can tell already. I feel so amazing about what’s going into my body, and about the fact that animals aren’t having to give up their lives to sustain me. Every time I eat a slice of soy cheese, that’s a little less demand on the livestock industry. A little less need to cut down trees to give that livestock a place to graze. But I might switch to rice cheese next week.