Broiled Blackened Tofu
Spices:
2 ½ t sweet smoked paprika (if all you have is hot paprika, just eliminate the cayenne)
2 t ground cumin
1 t dried oregano
1 t dried thyme
1 t sugar
¼ t salt
¼ t cayenne
A few pinches freshly ground black pepper
3 cloves garlic, minced
Our weekly CSA veggie basket is brimming with greens every week this time of year. We had to find some favorite preparation methods or we were in danger of dreading the basket instead of looking forward to it. We stumbled upon this recipe, and now we HOPE to see collard greens in our basket. Go figure!
Collard greens with rice
• 2 cups vegetable broth
• 1 cup brown* or long-grain white rice
• 1 tablespoon Earth Balance butter
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 cups chopped collard leaves, loosely packed
• pepper
Lentil Burritos
½ package of Trader Joe’s pre-cooked lentils
1 small onion, chopped
1 large green bell pepper, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup (4 oz) shredded soy cheese
1 cup vegetable broth
About 8 small flour tortillas
1 (8-oz) can tomato sauce (with roasted garlic if you can find it)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon taco sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch
Toppings: Tofutti sour cream, guacamole (when avocados are in season)
Continue reading “Meatless Monday: Lentil Burritos (reprise)”
Soyrizo Tacos
Hello, delicious! You won’t believe how easy and non-meaty these meaty-tasting tacos are.
Toppings:
So easy: Sauté the onion until translucent. Add the soyrizo and heat through. We like to sear our tortilla shells by holding them over the burner with tongs for 10-15 seconds per side. Don’t burn your house down, though—cover them in paper towels and warm in the microwave if you don’t want to sear them!
Put the soyrizo mixture in the shells, add sour cream, taco sauce, and any other toppings that suit your fancy, and you’ve got dinner!
(Based loosely on a recipe in The Kind Diet)
I don’t pretend to be a nutritionist, but I am very interested in the human diet. You can exercise as hard as you can every day of the week, but if you eat a crappy diet, you won’t look as good as you want to look, and you won’t be healthy. Fortunately, usually when you exercise regularly, you tend to eat a little better because you don’t want to screw up the hard work you just put in at the gym. But there always seems to be room for improvement.
Eating virtuously is pretty much impossible, especially if you want to have a social life, or any fun at all. And you’ll recall, too, that I don’t believe in all or nothing behavior. So in terms of eating a very good diet, let’s assume that we’re talking about most of the time.
See if this will click for you the way it clicked for me: Think of food as fuel. Our cars need gas to go, and we would never put anything in the gas tank but gas. So why do we clutter our bodies with so many non-energy-producing edible things? They clog up our plumbing and make us feel sluggish, ill, or heavy. Foods that are not fuel are extraneous. They just get in the way of health.
If you don’t already, take an interest in the nutritional content of the foods you eat. When I put carrots on my daughter’s plate, I’ll say, “Oooh, these are good for your eyes, so you can see better at night!” When you know what amazing things different foods do for your body, you might be more interested in consuming them. If Omega 3s are going to help my brain function, protect me from heart attacks and stroke, and keep my menstrual cramps from being very painful, sign me up—how can I not try to find a way to include them in my diet every day?
Which leads to a thoughtful idea: Maybe you can learn to choose your foods according to the nutrients you need, rather than grabbing whatever foods are closest and then wondering (later) about what might be in them.
It’s empowering to be in control of what goes into your body. It’s empowering to know about the foods you are eating, and what they are doing for you. We are not helpless creatures, with no hope but to suffer saggy bellies for the rest of our lives. You have everything you need to run a smoothly operating system. Just don’t look for it in the middle aisles of the grocery store!
Santa Fe Pizza (adapted from Bon Appetit’s fast, easy, fresh cookbook)
*Our favorites are Morningstar Farms and Gardein—any that sound good to you will do!
Preheat oven to 425. Place crust on baking sheet. Sprinkle about half the cheese, chicken cubes, and cumin over crust, leaving a 3/4-inch border. Top liberally with onion, corn, cilantro, remaining cheese, and jalapenos. Bake pizza until crust is crisp and toppings are heated through, about 10-12 minutes. (We like to broil the pizza for 1 minute at this point to melt the soy cheese and brown the crust a tiny bit more.) Top with dollops of Tofutti sour cream, salsa, and avocado when it’s in season!
This is the basic recipe, but feel free to add toppings you think sound good—I’d love to hear what you come up with!
Tortilla Soup
Heat the oil in a 4-quart pot over medium-high heat. Sauté the onions, jalapenos, and poblano pepper in the oil until the onions are translucent, about 5 minutes. Use a little nonstick cooking spray or broth if needed. Add the garlic, red pepper flakes, and salt, and sauté for another minute.
Break up the tomatoes with your fingers and add them to the pot, including the juice. Fill the tomato can with the vegetable broth and add that to the pot. Mix in the cumin. Crush 2 ounces of the chips into crumbs (some bigger pieces are okay) and add those. Cover and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to a simmer, add the beans, corn, and cilantro, and let simmer for 5 more minutes.
Add the lime juice and taste for salt and seasoning. Ladle the soup into bowls, crumble the remaining tortilla chips over the top, and garnish with cilantro. YUM! (Thank you, Isa Chandra Moskowitz—Appetite for Reduction)
It’s nearly time to put a pretty fantastic year to bed. In 2011, I put FaceBook to work for my business. I got t-shirts designed, made, and onto many of your backs. We worked hard, then harder, and made brides-to-be buffer and new mommies slimmer. I learned from you all and I certainly hope you learned a thing or two from me. I feel like I’m giving everything I’ve got to my “ladies,” my trainees, and my workouts, but there is always, always room to grow. So look forward to many new challenges from the Fitness Girl in 2012.
There’s something about the new year, the clean slate, that motivates us to make positive changes. I see it maybe more than a lot of people because of my business, since starting a new workout routine ranks pretty high on the list of all-time-most-cited resolutions. I get it, I really do. It’s more “me” to use every new month—or even week—as a chance to start fresh, but how wonderful it must be to be able to put something you really don’t want to do off for months at a time! I’ll start next year! Really! In 2012 I’ll be ready!
Maybe one of your resolutions this year can be this: Resolve to use each new day—each new hour!—as a jumping-off point for those things you’d really like to see yourself do. Resolve to start now. When you take baby steps—walk just 10 minutes on the treadmill; eat out just one less time a week—your stride gets stronger fast. Soon you’ll be walking 20 minutes and buying new cookbooks. But you can’t rush to the end result. You have to be patient and see those baby steps as part of the entire picture. Without them, you’ll never get to the long strides. The baby steps are all part of the plan. That weight won’t just fall off because you worked out really hard one time. But you’re better off than you were before that one workout.
So we embark on our first fall/winter without eggs in the fridge. As we get more and more committed to eating seasonally, we decided that’s as it should be, since chickens lay fewer eggs in the colder months, when the days are shorter. Rather than add to the stress of the chickens—who have to be tricked into believing the days are longer with artificial light and the like—we decided to just go from almost no eggs to no eggs for a while.
Since Mike and I were just using them in recipes once in a while, we don’t really notice a change. It’s Bella, who loves her egg burritos once a week or so, who must adapt. What’s been so wonderful (once we distracted her with an equally tummy-pleasing meal) is listening to her explain to people that eggs are for warmer months, because in the cold the chickens don’t lay as many eggs. She says it just like that, and it makes sense to her. So although it’s only November yet, it seems like it won’t be too hard to convince her to wait out the season for her burritos.
Now if we could just convince the kids to try cauliflower…
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