Whole 30 - Day 1

Today we began the Whole 30 challenge. You cut out a lot of foods that seem to be high intolerance foods for many people and eat what is sometimes referred to as a cave man diet. Basically you eat grass fed or wild caught meat, vegetables, fruit, tree nuts and seeds. No sugar, no booze, no dairy, no grains, no legumes. They also say you shouldn't paleo-ize junk foods, but I'm not really doing that part, I'm mostly concerned about the ingredients. I just think determining what is and isn't a junk food is pretty personal. Like they say you can paleo-ize fried chicken, but not pizza. They are also anti baked goods. Great for them! We're using our own sense to determine what works best for us in this plan.

We are doing this for a couple of reasons:

• we both know we have different food intolerances and we want to see how an elimination diet will teach us more about the way certain foods affect our bodies
• we hear it gives you a lot of energy and makes you less sluggish 
• some people claim amazing health benefits around things like acne, joint pain, ibs, depression, headaches, etc. (we'll tell you at the end if we experienced any of that)
• we want to be more intentional about the things we eat

Both of us thought it might be a good idea to blog about our daily menu, any changes we notice in energy or our bodies in general, and recipes we discover. So far I've made almond-hazelnut milk (ridiculously easy!) and learned how to soft boil an egg (hard to believe I had to look this up!).

I also learned about paleo baking (technically this is not whole 30 approved, but all the ingredients are, and I think food should be varied, fun, and delicious!) These blueberry muffins are adapted from a Today's Letters' recipe.

Paleo Bluberry Muffins
(this made 6 good sized muffins)

3/4 c cashews
2 T walnut oil
2 ripe bananas
1 egg
1/2 c almond meal
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t vanilla
1/2 t cinnamon
1/4 t cloves

1/2 t nutmeg

1/2 t ground ginger

1/2 t orange peel 
3/4 t Salt 
1/2 c frozen blueberries

  1. preheat oven to 375° 
  2. grease muffin tins with coconut oil or ghee 
  3. in your food processor, grind the cashews to a fine meal 
  4. add walnut oil, processing until well combined 

  5. add the bananas, processing to a sticky paste 
  6. in a separate bowl, whisk the egg

  7. stir in the cashew / banana mixture and vanilla
  8. stir in remaining dry ingredients

  9. gently fold in blueberries. 
10. spoon batter into greased muffin tins 
11. bake for 15-20 minutes or until done
12. cool completely before storing

  Today's Menu

Breakfast: soft boiled egg and green smoothie (mango, banana, orange slices, ginger, kale, almond milk, almond mush left from creating the almond milk, and parsley). We ate at 9 and I was still functioning at 1:30 (it was a late lunch kind of day).

Lunch: kale salad (with roasted pork, shaved carrots, lemon juice, olive oil, and some chopped, toasted pecans), baked sweet tater half (with olive oil, s/p, cinnamon, cayenne, garlic powder, and toasted pecans), carrot sticks, half an avocado.

Lunch!!

my afternoon Snack: a handful or TJ's salted marcona almonds and a banana

Dinner: sauteed kale (with proscuitto, onions, and cider vinegar) and shepherd's pie (ground beef, onions, carrots, rutabaga, s/p, cloves, and a bit of ghee in the pan + steamed, pureed cauliflower,  rutabaga, garlic, ghee, s/p, and nutmeg)

baked french toast

Adapted from the cookbook Rise and Dine: Savory Secrets from America's Bed & Breakfast Inns, p 235 (the original recipe comes from The Country Caboose in Stevensville, Montana)

1/2 stick butter cut into chunks

1/2 a loaf of challah bread cut in 1" slices

1/2c toasted or spiced pecans
orange zest from one large orange
1/4c brown sugar (optional)

2/3c oj
1/4 c milk
1T cream or half and half
1/2t nutmeg
1/2t vanilla extract
1/4t orange extract

preheat oven to 400 degrees

place the butter evenly throughout the bottom of an oven proof baking dish (we used the dish we cook brownies in)

place the challah slices in a single layer  inside the dish (you can also cut the challah into cubes and fill the bottom of the dish kind of like a bread pudding)

sprinkle pecans, orange zest, and brown sugar (if using) over the bread

whisk together the remaining ingredients and pour evenly over the bread slices.

bake 20-30 minutes. It's ready when the bread is poofy and golden.

let sit 10 minutes before slicing and serving

tastes great with a dollop of maple syrup!

ambrosia salad

i love the stuff, do you?

i was thinking about it while driving today (who knows why) and trying to decide how i could create a version without dairy or added sugar...

must try this soon

1. whip coconut whipped cream (the base of all yummy vegan dessert in our house) with pureed banana for a sauce.
2. stir in orange and grapefruit segments, toasted pecans, unsweetened coconut flakes, and whatever fruit floats your boat. 
3. skip the marshmallows. 

this should work, right?

that's all I've got... not much cooking has been going on in our kitchen lately. maybe soon...

Mediterranean Feast

I was craving a falafel all day... used to eat them for lunch when Beccy and I would wander around Freiburg. Unfortunately, we discovered a few years back that garbanzo beans don't agree with me, so I said goodbye to a lot of delicious food. Today I decided lentils would solve my problems! This was SOOOO good! 

Lentil Falafel

2.5c lentils (mix of red and french)

4 c broth

cook 25 minutes, let cool 15-20 minutes

***

bunch of parsley, chopped

1T coriander

1T cumin

1t cardamom

1t cloves

.5t cinnamon

.5t chili powder

1/2 onion chopped

head of garlic (peeled and chopped)

1/4-1/2c olive oil

blend everything together in a food processor until the consistency is like playdough. 

season as desired. 

using a cookie scooper (what are those things called?), scoop balls of mixture, flatten to patties with hands, coat in panko bread crumbs. 

place on an oiled cookie sheet. Bake at 400* 20-25 minutes, flipping once.

makes 45-50 small patties (we used 3 to 4 patties per pita)

You can freeze any mixture or patties you don't want to cook for use later

We served these with pita (store bought because I didn't think up dinner early enough for homemade), baba ghanoush from the mediterranean bakery (has anyone ever made it? is it difficult?), tomatoes, thinly sliced cukes and carrots, lettuce, and feta sauce inspired by the olive bar at the English Market in Cork. Look for that recipe below!

Feta Sauce

a wedge of feta

a small head of garlic

a bunch of basil

olive oil

toss it all in the food processor and blend, adding oil, until it's beautifully green and the consistency of yogurt. 

Sorry the pictures don't do it justice... there's only so much I can do with the iphone :-/

Stars in Still Water, Jonsi

Put your clothes now out to dry
It's early morning
The day is unfolding, ever so softly

I will always be, oh, aloud within
It's a never ending song that I sing alone
I am, awake, the only one awake

I see the sun, break out, it slows, no clouds
No crows, no one out, too - Only that you

Don't stop in still water
Don't stop in still water

Now the sun's in your eyes
It dries away your tears
As you and I are the only ones
To move in search of other feet

I will always be, oh, aloud within
It's a never ending song that I sing alone
I am, awake, the only one awake

I see the sun, glow fade, it's late, in shades
Letting the past start, good - Only that you

Dew stars in still water
Don't stop in still water

Don't you know that fires
Eat all the lost sorrows in the morning

I should say that I'm not really sure what this song is about, but I love it. Seems like a nice place to begin on a Monday morning.

Toast and Grape Juice

A friend of mine lost her dad to cancer last week. I know that's not really the best way to begin any sort of post, but at least it tells you, invisible reader, that this post will in some way be about death. My friend's dad died of liver cancer, same as my dad. Different kind of liver cancer, but liver cancer. Because her dad got sick before my dad did (he'd been sick for about six years by the time he passed last week), we have had this sort of tandem-like movement over the last few years.

Somewhere in the space between writing a post about living bread and my friend's dad dying, I was reminded of an event I shared with my dad about a month before he died. During the last two months of his life, we saw him go down a pretty steep decline, and even though I'd been preparing for the inevitability of his passing for quite some time, I don't know that I was ready for the reality of it once it arrived--at least, not the INEVITABILITY of it. That's really a story for another time, though; tonight I want to talk about the last and only time I served my dad communion.

As he got sicker and sicker, my dad's appetite slacked off more and more. As my mom tried to find different ways of getting enough protein into him, he lost his taste for one food after another. Toward the end he primarily ate yogurt, popsicles, toast, and grape juice. I've no idea why those foods, but that's where he was. So, anyway, I was in the kitchen of their house, and he kind of hobbled into the room and headed for his favorite recliner. I helped him sit down and cover up with a blanket, and he asked me if I might make him some toast and get him some juice.

As I was toasting the bread, I thought about a story my church history professor told us as she was explaining her understanding of the incarnation. The way she told her story, a few years after relocating to Richmond to begin teaching at seminary, she relocated her parents to Richmond as well. Within a few weeks of the move her father suffered a massive stroke. While sitting next to her father in the hospital room, my professor was thinking of what it meant for Christ to have taken on the "form" of flesh, to have assumed the pattern of what it means to be an embodied human being in addition to having his own physical form, and she had the sudden understanding that if God in Christ has taken on the pattern and form of humanity, he resides in our flesh as well as in his own. I guess it makes sense that it is during these pregnant moments that we get some clarity of our understanding of God and the world, and our relation to both; but during that moment and those shortly after, when I helped my dad sip his grape juice, and served him dry toast, I understood communion in a way that I never did before, and I don't know when in the future I will share communion with people and not think back to that moment with him.

To add to my professor's experience: it became clear to me at some point that not only does Christ share our flesh, but that the spirit of God is shared among us--all of us. In those moments of breaking bread and drinking wine, if we allow ourselves to look at one another, and to see the indwelling divinity we share, we become tapped into that divinity, transcending our own self and space and time while remaining exactly who and where and when we are. There may be something metaphysical about it, I don't know, but I do know that in that moment of being open to my dad, of seeing him as he was dying, I was able to see him as I never had before. The bread and grape juice became something more; we became something more. Ordinary food, ordinary room, ordinary people, sharing an extraordinary experience.

Getting back into it

I baked bread tonight for the first time in a long time. Correction: tonight I kneaded bread tonight for the first time in a long time. A couple of years ago, I was baking bread almost daily - it was part of my routine, and I managed to work it in basically anywhere. Gosh, I don't even know when or how the routine started to change, but bread baking slowly slipped out of the scene. I've tried to get back into it a few times, and have done so with some regularity here and there, but I found that if I started using a food processor, instead of kneading by hand, I could work faster. But tonight, as I was mulling over the details of a final project I've got due for a class, I went downstairs and started baking bread. Just a simple whole wheat bread--easy to do if you've got a few hours for the rising, no need for a food processor. It was when I was kneading the bread that I remembered why I love baking bread so much. I like to eat it, sure, but the part I really love is that experience of kneading the bread--of taking a mush of flour, yeast, salt, water, and oil, and seeing it firm up. As I kneaded, the goopy mess started to get a bit of...umpf...to it, and as I felt the warmth of it beneath my hands, I started to think about it as a living thing.

I know I've been in seminary too long when I start to think about the living bread I'm kneading into a ball, but the more I think about the power of sharing a meal with someone, the more powerful I realize it is to share a meal with someone. I read a book last week called Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, and was struck by one passage:

"Jesus literally ate his way through the Gospels. And, as remembered over and over again in the Gospels, they killed him because of the way he ate; that is, because he ate and drank with sinners. Apart from the many table tales, the Gospels also remember that Jesus spoke in table metaphors. When he wasn't at a banquet he was telling a story about a banquet. When he wasn't teaching that bread can be a vehicle of God's presence, he was talking about bread as a way to discipleship for those who wished to live as his body in the world."

Since I last posted on this blog, life has kind of been on high speed. I said goodbye to my dad, who died in June, and to my grandpa a month before him. We got married, and are talking kids. In the fall, I started working with LGBTQ youth, and have found a certain fire in my belly over the lack of care given to these youth. We have also planted a garden, and I'm learning how to ask for help, and to trust and forgive myself more (ever a process). Our church started a Supper Church service, where we gathered together to make a meal and worship around the table. I guess I say all of that because in a lot of ways for me, it keeps coming back to food. I could rant all day about the need for more active conversations in the church about the needs of LGBTQ people, or racism, or poverty, but there is something that happens if you can actually sit down at a table with someone whom you perceive as different--break bread with them, talk to them, give yourself the opportunity to really see them.

In thinking about my "living bread" moment earlier this evening, I think about this thing which is so very simple, and still relatively inexpensive to make. And yet, when shared (and especially when shared between people who allow themselves to be present to the act of sharing), it has the potential to be so rich and so full and, dare I say it, so alive.