Making Love in the Kitchen

What a week it has been. I have been doing my very, very best to abide the rules I wrote myself with my 21 Days To Health, program. My most favourite challenge of course is on day 3 when we must get ourselves to bed early. There are three things I love to bits that help me sleep like a baby.

Sleep mask to block out the light.
Lavender essential oil sprinkled on my pillow
3 capsules of Peaceful Spirit- my most fave bed time supplement in the whole wide world (more on that next week)
I have been loving these things even more as I spent just three nights last weekend on the other side of the country, 3 time zones away in Vancouver and then came back right in the swing of things. And you know what? No jet lag! Not even for one night. It was amazing.
I digress, as today I sit in the audience at TedX Toronto, invited to participate as a delegate, I wanted my brain powered up and ready to rock. And you know what does it? A green juice breakfast and a smoothie brunch.

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My name is Jen and I do not condone the use or consumption of packaged foods.

This is not because I have the “nutritionist” moniker associated with my name. It is just my food philosophy. I believe in eating whole unprocessed foods because I really want to be healthy and quite honestly, packaged foods are gross. The were made in some far off factory from strange ingredients and taste more like the cardboard box they come in than real food (I know this because I was once a university student and managed to somehow get by on lean cuisines and frozen burritos for dinner. I’ve since moved on).

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After the Vegetarian Food Festival last weekend, I was all soyed out. Seriously! Soy was served up in every little shape and size they could dream up. From icing on cupcakes, to dried out beans covered in sugar and cinnamon, they could almost change the name of the event to the Soy Food Festival.

What did I eat the weekend of the event? I kicked it BYOS- Bring Your Own Salad/Smoothie. Now it’s not that I hate soy… Okay, I do. I do hate it and all the ways it functions like plasticine- getting moulded and blended and cooked and baked into all kinds of things. Soy on it’s own, in it’s whole organic form is a-okay though. I will actually eat it, love it and feel okay after.

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Well didn’t we have just the most fun ever at last weekend’s Vegetarian Food Festival? Didn’t we? How can you not have fun when there are grown men running around dressed as giant peas?

I was busy sharing my wares at my booth.

I was most excited about how excited everyone was over our brand new creed, irish moss, tote bags, and sleeping masks (with fabric I designed myself, I might add!)

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We all have those veggies we don’t really like. The ones we know are great for us, but for whatever reason, they just aren’t the ones we would ever reach for when we are staying on our game and desiring a healthy snack.

For me, it’s carrots and celery. I wish to bits that a handful of carrots were a desirable snack for me but they just aren’t. Maybe it’s because they’re so freaking hard and I have wires cemented to the back side of my front and bottom teeth, a souvenir of the years of braces. Every time I bite into one of these shard-of-glass like veggies I am fairly sure they are going to crack off that cemented wire and I will find myself back in the orthodentist’s chair with one of those big plastic speculum type deals stretching my mouth unnaturally far from my face, all while surrounded by twelve year olds.

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What a great week it has been. It started out on Monday when I presented over at The University Of Toronto to their 3rd year Medical Students. They were amazingly receptive, asked great questions and overall- we had loads of fun! I hope they invite me back soon.

Now, moving along. Have been to any of my cooking demos or workshops yet? If you have, you probably saw me giggling like a 14 year old boy about milking the nuts and squeezing the nut sack. It was a natural step for me to get my own custom nut sacks made, which we have appropriately called “My Nut Sack”

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Monkey balls I say! Is it really September tomorrow?

What? What on earth was that??? Oh my, it was the cool fall breeze blowing in.

I am not happy about this my friends. Not happy at all. But I will learn to embrace because fighting against what we cannot change is a massive waste of energy, totally futile and rumour has it, also causes suffering beyond the crap-olla event itself.

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Oh my love sweet lovers! This is exciting. We are coming up on our wildest season of classes yet. So exciting. We have more goods than ever in our shop (soon to be available online), plus you can now come for private shopping experiences with some of our staff nutritionistas. Jen has been busy ordering, stocking and pricing all the goods. That closet above, was once home to my wardrobe- and is now our micro-warehouse.

I love fall time. It means another weekend of Loving at the Veg Fair, another Apple A Day Giveaway and between now and December we’re running nearly 40 classes. That’s a whole lot of love going down in the kitchen.

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$400,000! This is highest price anyone has ever paid for a ginseng root. It was a 300-year-old root that was found in 2007. Some say that ginseng is worth the money. I’ll let you be the judge.

The proper name of ginseng is Panax Ginseng. The word Ginseng is derived from a Chinese term, which means “man root”. Most likely due to its signature appearance that resembles the limbs of a person. Panax shares the same origin as “panacea” meaning “all heal”. Put the all together and you get the “all-heal man root”.

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Please, please, please tell me that you’re not still drinking bottled water?

Water is one of the those questions I get asked after almost every cooking class. Everyone always wants to know what kind of water they should be drinking. My first response is usually that you just need to be drinking it. The second is that you can’t be afraid of bottled water if you’re still drinking juices and sodas that also come in plastic. The plastic has to go, no matter what!

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With all the running around, vacationing, working, and other summer fun happening, many of us are finding it kind of tricky to plan our meals properly. Not having the typical routine set out for us, we often get home from our Summer frolicking h-u-n-g-r-y and not wanting to do much in the way of cooking.

The temptation to turn to foods of convenience may just lure us in. The ultimate in convenience foods- Ramen noodles.

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Now that we’ve defined the dirtiness that is Healthwashing, it’s time we start addressing some of the viscous culprits. Back in May, I received a press release for a brand shiny new cook book by Anna Boiarde, granddaughter and niece to the brothers behind Chef Boyardee (they changed the spelling for phonetic reasons). I thought I should take the PR rep up on her offer and schedule an interview, that they agreed could be filmed. The PR rep claimed to love my website and all my recipes and when I arrived at the downtown hotel for the interview, she went to the trouble of lining up all these Chef Boyardee “foods” beside me.

Anna’s book is truly beautiful and has some really delicious sounding, back to basics style Italian recipes. She claims to shop organic, feed her family well and from our interview, clearly has an appreciation for top quality ingredients.

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Holy tempeh testicles, my fair weather lovers! How is August looking into its last sweet half? I don’t know about you (and feel free to tell me), but I feel like suddenly I have to summer it up to the tittles. And in that spirit, I’ve been spending as many minutes of the day outside as possible. I am not back and ready to rock it on my bicycle just yet (still in accident recovery mode), but walks are sweet, as are evenings on our porch, eating, laughing and just plain old loving the loveliness.

As we do spend many an evening on the porch, with the sites and smells of our neighbourhood wafting over, meat seems to be the scent of choice most often. Even as a non BBQ meat eater (hi cancer, you’re not invited to play with me), I do still get cravings.

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I have a kitchen table! Like my own. In my own home. It’s nice I tell you, it’s nice. After three years of working where I live and living where I work, I have my own little apartment right nearby.

That kitchen table, by the way, was the very same table I had in my very first apartment twelve years ago. It has been in my parents garage since 2003 and we cleaned it up and made it good as new. Want to know the best part about taking this table and now using it again? I don’t have to hear my mom bla, bla, bla at me about storing it in their garage anymore.

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Have you ever wondered why every item in the produce aisle doesn’t carry the “Health Check”? Or perhaps how buying a plastic bottle of water might help women with breast cancer (when the bottle itself is contributing to the high breast cancer rates), or perhaps why women on a diet think that a calorie free, chemical soda might help them lose weight?

Did you know the “Health Check” is absolutely meaningless? Companies pay the Heart and Stroke Foundation to use it on their products, and pay various other groups to use various other claims.

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