The Stupidly Ridiculously Hard Detox

That's supposed to be good for me.

Sigh.

I know it probably is.

Doesn't make it any easier, though.

My naturopath recommended I do a three week detox while drinking the MediClear Plus protein powder.  I do know detoxes are good. They give your body a break. Even fasting, in moderation, has been proven to be healthy. It gives your body a chance to fully digest things and heal itself.

And so we're doing this thing.

Here's a rundown of what we're giving up:

COFFEE!!!

Dairy (oh my sweet butter how I miss thee already)
(and that includes eggs)

Gluten (BREAD, people, BREAD!)

Sugar. And chocolate. Sniff.

Beef. Pork. Sausage. Bacon. Oh bacon...how were you ever once a sin?

Soy (as stir fry fanatics, do you know how much soy sauce we go through in a month?)

Peanuts. Solid staple of my diet right there, people.

Alcohol (last night's dinner would have gone perfectly with a chilled Pinot Grigio...)

Tomatoes (I can't even have salsa?!)

Corn ( or tortilla chips?!?!?!)

Grapefruit (oh. okay. darn.)

That's the gist of the list.

Yikes.

We started yesterday morning and Matt and I both had headaches all day from the caffeine withdrawal. Or maybe the EVERYTHING withdrawal. Because its the end of day two and I still have a headache...though not a full blown migraine, thankfully.

So, as we go through this journey I thought I would do what I always do...blog about it.  Because recipes that are THIS exclusive are pretty darn hard to find, I thought I'd share them here. That way if you ever want to torture yourself in the future you know where to turn.

Day 1

Woke up and had our first MediClear smoothie. Hmmm. This stuff needs a kick...pomegranate juice or orange juice or something acidic to cover up that protein-y taste.

By nine I was irrepressibly groggy and my non-sweetened herbal tea was NOT cutting it.

I had made Lentil Soup the night before so we would have easy lunches all week. Little did I know Matt would eat half the big batch the first day.

That night for dinner (after a two hour nap because both of us were too headache-y tired to do anything else), I had some chicken legs with thigh meat that still had skin. Heated up some olive oil, patted the chicken dry and salted and peppered the little leggies and let them cook until crispy golden.

For our Mushroom Risotto I sautéed half a yellow onion in olive oil for a few minutes, then added the arborio rice and sautéed that a minute or so. Then I added a cup of chopped onions and twice as much chicken broth as rice (in this case 1 cup rice to two cups broth) and lots of pepper. A few stirs, brought it to bubbling, then put the lid on and put it on low for 20 minutes.

Then we heated the oven to 425, chopped up some carrots, new potatoes, the other half of the yellow onion, and some garlic. Tossed it in olive oil, salt and pepper and let it roast 20 minutes or so while the rice finished.

All in all it looked like a meal we would eat on any night of the week.

Day 1...we conquered you.

What To Do With Those Braising Greens!

Since we've joined our CSA, Jubilee Farms, we've gotten a very large bag of mixed braising greens every week. Sometimes two bags!  What to do with all this! One can only eat so many stir frys!

Last week I went straight to work.

Preheating the oven to 200 degrees, I washed the greens then spread them out on a cookie sheet. 

Then I let them dry to a crisp in the oven for about 2 hours.

Once they were crispy and cool, I put them in a zip lock bag and pounded the heck out of them until they were pretty fine.

The result was I had a huge bag of greens that would have taken 3 stir frys reduced to a small bag! Much more manageable!

A few evenings later we were looking for an easy dinner to make. Pasta and a jar of marinara is always an easy fix, but I wanted to use some of our greens.

I warmed up the marinara (Trader Joe's Organic Marinara) in a small saucepan, then tossed in the entire baggy of braising greens! 

I gave it a few stirs and let it simmer for awhile. 

After the pasta was done cooking we tossed it altogether and topped it with grated Parmesan.

And we each got a half a bag worth of all the good stuff in the braising greens in one dish! Oh, and you couldn't even taste a difference!

This dish can be vegetarian, or you can cook up some chicken in olive oil and garlic to add some protein.

Excuse me, I Charded.

Last night while talking to my mom I told her I was making chard for dinner and she had heard of chard before. Since I'm a big fan of this vegetable I thought I would give y'all a little tour of this heavyweight veggie in terms of nutrition.

This is Swiss chard. Red stalks, big dark green leaves packed with Vitamins K, A and C.


below is Rainbow Chard...and yes those colors are all real and natural!

To make it you can saute, steam, or blanch it (there's probably more ways, those are just the ones I've done). Previously I rolled it up, cut it in ribbons and steamed it with garlic and orzo...but I couldn't find the recipe last night and almost drove myself crazy looking for it.

So instead I tried out a new recipe from the Alton Brown cookbook I got for Christmas, which has onions, LOTS of garlic, which after you cook for awhile you add a paste of butter and flour and toast it all, then add crushed tomatos, chicken broth and whisk till the sauce becomes creamy goodness. Throw in whole wheat pasta (boiled in the water the chard was blanched in to get extra minerals and goodness) and the chopped up chard. Topped with parmesan or feta (the parm was better) it was pretty darn good! I think I may add a few of my own tweaks, but Matt ate 4 servings so it couldn't be that bad!

mmmm...we're both having it again for lunch today too...


and did I mention this entire meal costs about $6 or $7?

Here is Alton Brown's recipe from his book, I'm Just Here For the Food (with my own tweaking)

Chard with Garlic and Tomato

Ingredients

2 Tbl butter, softened

2 Tbl flour

2 Tbl olive oil

1/2 cup diced onion (or couple of shallots)

8 cloves garlic, sliced thin (if you use a garlic press that's just fine too, don't freak out)

1/4 tsp red pepper flakes (more if you're of the daring sort)

2 cups canned crushed tomatoes (or you can use fresh tomatoes, dropped in boiling water, skinned and seeded. Then crushed. Crushing is the fun part.)

1 cup chicken stock

16 oz dry bowtie pasta (or penne, or whatever is left in your cupboard)

1 bunch Swiss or rainbow chard, trimmed and chopped

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese (I know the pics show feta...but that wasn't a homerun...)

1 tsp fresh rosemary, chopped fine (or dried, I guess. sigh)

salt & freshly ground pepper

Directions

1. Bring a big pot of water to a rolling boil. Have another bowl with ice cold water in it ready. You're going to blanch the chard first.

2.  Drop the chard in the boiling water, blanch for 3 minutes, then remove with a slotted spoon or pasta server to the cold water bowl and submerge to stop the cooking. Once its cooled, strain it and let it dry out a bit.

3.  Keep that water boiling, and notice that its greenish colored now? All those nice nutrients are still floating around in there. Add a bunch of salt, and add the pasta. Cook until al dente.

Note: People like their pasta at different consistencies. I have a tendency to forget about the pasta unless I set a timer, so if the cooking time says 10-12 minutes, I'll set a timer for 9 minutes. When it goes off, I'll keep testing the pasta every minute or so until its the texture I like.

4. While the pasta is cooking, blend the butter and flour in a small bowl until a smooth paste is formed.

5. Head the olive oil in the sauté pan over medium heat.  Add the onion and red pepper flakes, and sauté until the onions turn golden - about 7-10 minutes. In the last minute or so add the garlic (the directions say add when you add the onions, but I find my garlic burns by the time the onions are done). 

Oh, check on your pasta. It might be done now.

6. Drop the head to medium-low, whisk in the flour and butter mixture and cook for 5 minutes.

7. Add those tomatoes and keep whisking for 2-3 minutes. 

8. Add the chicken stock and whisk until the sauce is smooth and creamy. 

9. Throw in that cooked pasta and the chard, season with salt and pepper and stir until heated through.

10.  Top off with the Parmesan and rosemary. 

This dinner is also easy to add chicken too. Just cook the chicken before tossing it in at the end with the pasta and chard. 

To further impress upon you the goodness of chard, here's a link to a chart showing how much good stuff it has...
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=16

Thus endeth my acolade of chard.

What the Kale?

So far on our no-spend month we've spent about $90 on groceries and have kept up chipping away at that debt.

Having our CSA veggies and fruit pre-paid is nice and we've got an abundance of kale at the moment. Here's a typical conversation between Matt and I in the evening.

Me: So...what do you want for dinner?

Matt: Oh, I don't know.

Me: That's helpful.

Matt: How 'bout chicken?

Me: Thank you for being specific...we have a lot of kale too...

Matt: Stir fry?

Me: Sounds okay to me. Its been two whole days since we had that.
(just kidding...kinda)

Joking aside we're blessed to have access to so much produce every week and are glad we signed up...since it forces us to eat our veggies.

I was not a veggie eater as a kid.

I liked three vegetables: corn, carrots and potatoes.

Basically anything that was sweet or starchy and you could smother in butter.

But then, Julia Child smothers a whole variety of vegetables in butter and they all taste good too...braised turnips anyone?

As I got older I realized I needed to be a bit more adult and eat salads...so I smothered them in ranch dressing and choked them down.

Then I discovered what baby spinach looked like...and that I actually liked it. And then Matt brought home mushrooms one day (which I never liked since they were usually tasteless and slimy), and after a quick saute in olive oil with salt and pepper I found I was in love with mushrooms.

Our affair with veggies got progressively worse (better?) from there.

During the summer months (used to be year round but we're trying to eat with the seasons now) we would glut ourselves on zucchini and squash.

I bought an eggplant because it looked pretty and figured out how to make it taste pretty too.

I even began using *gasp* onions and tomatoes. The former I love the flavor but hate the crunch so I chop them up into itty bitty pieces. Tomatoes are the opposite...its just the flavor that I can't stand. So I mask it with curry or Italian herbs or anything else.

One time at a farmer's market I was walking with my Mom and a friend. As we passed a display of those gorgeous heritage tomatoes in a rainbow of colors, my friend tried a sample. Her face lit up and she handed it to my mom, who mmmmed as well. They handed it to me.

I don't like tomatoes.

But these are heritage tomatoes!

They still taste like tomatoes.

If you don't like these I'll actually believe you!

Just to prove to my friend I loved her I tried the tomato. And almost gagged.

I just. don't. like. tomatoes.

But I still cook with them and currently have a three foot high robust tomato in the backyard waiting for it to bloom so I can make some marinara.

Kale, admittedly, isn't my favorite vegetable.

But throw some olive oil in a sauté pan, when its medium-hot throw some garlic in. After that's smelling like heaven throw in some torn up kale, stir it around and let it wilt. Top with some salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice and its actually edible.

For more ways on how to stretch your grocery dollars, read my article on Frugal Fine Dining.

Florets Polonaise

Last week in our CSA box we got some Romanesca cauliflower.

Having no idea what to do with this odd-looking vegetable I browsed through one of my cookbooks and found a recipe that looked...interesting. Interesting enough to be worth a try.
FYI, this recipe was taken from Organic Kitchen, a cookbook from my dear friend Heatherly who, incidentally, is getting married this weekend--congrats!


Back to the recipe. I kinda cocked an eye at the ingredients which included lemon rind, hardboiled eggs and breadcrumbs...could be good, could be...interesting...
It was delicious. And easy, to boot! That's always a good thing for a side dish. So here is the recipe, if you care to liven up your boring old steamed carrots and broccoli (and Romanesca cauliflower).


Florets Polonaise
Ingredients


1 1/4 pounds mixed vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, Romanesca cauliflower, carrots, etc. (anything you can steam, basically)


2-4 Tablespoons butter or extra virgin olive oil (depending on your taste preference and addiction to butter)
finely grated rind of 1/2 lemon (or a dash of lemon juice, like I used)
1 large garlic clove (don't be afraid to use 2...it keeps away those pesky Twilight vampires)
1/2 cup breadcrumbs, lightly baked or broiled until crisp (come on, it takes, like, 30 seconds in the broiler)
2 eggs, hardboiled (stay with me here)
sea salt and ground black pepper


Directions
1. Trim the veggies and break/cut into equal sizes. Steam whatever way you want to. In a steamer on the stove, in the microwave, in your shower like Kramer on Seinfield...
2. While the veggies are cooking, mix together the lemon rind (or juice), garlic, seasoning and breadcrumbs.
3. Toss the steamed veggies in butter or oil and transfer to a serving dish (or a bowl...we keep it classy here)
4. Sprinkle the lemon/garlic mix over the veggies and stir to coat them with yumminess.
5. Finely chop the hardboiled eggs and sprinkle on top.
6. Serve it all nice and warm. I pretty much ate this for dinner last night. By itself.
Bon Apetit!