You know those people who go on those re-donk-you-lus cleanses that essentially sound like they’re spending a week, crash course style living the way you’ve been living for the last five years, only to go back at the end of it and start eating like the slothy fatty McFatter standard North American processed diet full of wheat, cheese, booze and sugar?
Wait a second! You’re not one of them too are you?
Here’s the thing most people have to learn about detox. It’s not a diet. A detox should not be a crash anything. It’s not something you can do twice a year where for 1 week you drink epsom salts, consume only lemonade and enema your poopershnickle out the hooha. The best of the best way to detox is to make 80% of what most people would consider a cleanse, your everyday way of living. Make sense?
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It all started with my friend, Ashley. You could, in fact, call her my gluten-free muse! You see, Ashley follows a gluten-free and vegan lifestyle (which, as Meghan Telpner is fond of saying, has cured an incurable disease – Crohn’s). And when you are vegan and gluten-free, you can have some challenges around finding versions of your former favourite foods. One of these for Ashley, was bread. She could find breads she could eat at our amazing local health food stores, but they were often expensive. Or full of things like ‘potato starch’. And when you started out eating lovely unrefined whole grains, why would you want to switch over to white bread substitutes?
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I was offered a task. It’s one of those tasks that make me want to cartwheel over the kind of tasks that have become part of my job.
My long lost lover, fellow nutritionista, long distance pen pal, around the world adventurer, and momma friend Gabriela, the wordstress and recipe mistress behind the blog The Picky Foodie, emailed me asking if I would play in her cookie games.
Her desire was to for 10 of her food loving/ baking friends from around the fair globe to take her basic cookie recipe and make it our own.
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I love kale chips as much as the next nutritionista and (kale chip lover). Hence my desire to continue creating new and ever more awesome town kale chip recipes that cause me to eat entire heads of kale in single sittings followed by the need to drink about 9 litres of water. And let me tell you- eating a full head of kale in one sitting followed by that much water- well, let’s just say that things will be moving and grooving in the colon cleansing department.
So if you just met me this past weekend at the veg festival welcome, and you have some catching up to do.
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Everyone loves home baked cookies. And they really don’t take much time at all.
You mix the dry. Chop a little chocolate. Throw a couple blobs of cookie dough on a parchment lined cookie sheet. And just like that, fresh home baked cookies are served!
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A few weeks ago, we posed the question on Twitter asking what everyone’s fave comfort food was that they wish could be healthified. It sounded a lot like what I have created here for you.
Why do we all love mac and cheese? The answer is simple. We were raised on it. It was the go to convenience food of our childhood and likely landed itself as a staple in our cupboards when we first moved out on our own.
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Do I really even have to answer that? Really? Do I?
No. Because it’s obvious. The berries!
A standard breakfast, so commonly a go-to, is granola and yogurt (or your fave nut milk), and a splash of berries. Why not turn that equation upside down and inside out? Make the berries the main attraction!
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How are you enjoying your last day off before we go back to school?
Wait a second? Are you going back to school?
I am, my own school and my face will likely still be smudged with chocolate from today’s cooking demo at Toronto Harbourfront’s Hot and Spicy Food Festival.
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When I took the bus to school in high school, I had to pass through the Yonge/Eglinton Subway station. Inside was a Cinnabon. For those of you who live outside the 30 countries where thay are now located, or managed to avoid shopping malls your whole life (and for that I would envy you), Cinnabon is the sweetest smelling cinnamon bun bakery there ever was. They are steamy hot, oooey, gooey, chewy and dripping in the sweetest icing.
And passing through the building, smelling these at 3:30pm on a daily basis was torture. To my cravings and to my bum size. According to online sources, one Cinnabon contains 800 calories.
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s I may have mentioned before, we don’t have running water up here so we always do our very best to make our food using as few pots and pans as possible. This lends a whole new level of creativity to the cooking process. We like to use up what we have leftover and then build upon to make the best ever dinner there ever was.
This pasta is one of my absolute favourite go-to dinners or lunches.
I always stress the importance in my classes of using up the ingredients that you have on hand- the best whatever to use being the one in your fridge, on your shelf, in your freezer etc. You picking up what I’m putting down.
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Sometimes in life, we just need a blueberry muffin.
Or maybe it’s scrambled eggs and toast, a warm cup of milk (hemp of course), mac and cheese (with squash maybe), or perhaps a slice of the best cheeseless cheese cake there ever was.
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According to Wikepedia a quiche is defined as follows:
A quiche is an oven-baked dish made with eggs and milk or cream in a pastry crust. Usually, the pastry shell is blind-baked before the other ingredients are added. Other ingredients such as cooked chopped meat, vegetables, or cheese are often added to the egg mixture before the quiche is baked. Quiche is generally an open pie (i.e. it does not include a pastry covering), but may include an arrangement of tomato slices or pastry off-cuts for a decorative finish. Quiche may be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, depending on local customs and personal tastes.
Some of you just weren’t buying my last attempt at a quiche- or what I was calling a quin-iche which was really quinoa mixed with some egg and cooked veggies and baked in a muffin cup. Whatever to all you hatas!!!
But you got me thinking. And you got me thinking as to why I was so resistant to the idea of a real quiche (as defined above). Now lets leave out the cream and cooked meat bits for a moment and I will tell you a brief story with a diarrhea ending.
As many of you know, I have never really taken cooking lessons before I started teaching them (Don’t tell my Marilyn Denis producer that okay?) I took about 12 hours of cooking classes while in nutrition school- but that was more along the lines of making beet kvas and how to sprout rye to run it through a meat grinder to bake into sprouted buns on a ceramic tile that faced the north with the wind blowing from the south and to be eaten while balancing on one foot staring at the sun. Basically- we learned very traditional cooking but that still didn’t help me to know what I should eat for breakfast.
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Now isn’t this just the most brilliant thing I have come up with since last Friday’s chocolate covered kale chips.
For Passover last week, my momma made a great big beautiful dinner. The main event however was a turkey and I’m not a huge turkey lover. I am well trained in going to other’s homes for dinner and my approach is always to make something super-powered delicious and that can be enjoyed by other guests too of course. So I made these!
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I was really excited to make these. The original recipe is by the delightful queen of clean, green, simple and brilliant recipes, Elana Amsterdam of Elana’s Pantry, who I had the pleasure of interviewing last Spring. Her recipes always inspire!
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I swear to my mismatched stripey socks that if I see another root vegetable recipe or some creative concoction of squash I am going to throw my spatula out the window and light my aprons on fire. I done with winter cooking. Done I say. DONE! Are you listening???
It is time to bring in some spring. I am ready for the first harvests. I want some new kale, I want some wild leeks, I want Spring earth mother lovers. Spring.
This is where my man would look at me and say, “Why stress over what you can’t change”. Or even more annoying, when I am pouting like a school girl who’s knee highs won’t stay up, he’ll say “Use this as an exercise”. Well I won’t goodness darnnit. I won’t.
So to soothe my soul because the boob-like shape of buttrnut squash no longer amuses me the way it did when it was fresh and new back in the fall, I decided to make one last ditch ever to find some love in my heart for this cancer fighting, immune boosting, fibre-tastic fruit that everyone thinks is a vegetable and turn it into something we all know and love.
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