Compassion for chocolate chip cookies

Friday night D was already fixing dinner when I got home. It was a simple meal because we'd spent a while eating bread (Acme Bread's Whole Wheat Walnut) and some delicious cheeses from Say Cheese (my favorite cheese place because all the employees look like ex-sailors-- beefy, tattooed, grizzled.)

Part of being a yogi is showing compassion-- to other things, people, animals, and most importantly to yourself. So I have to show compassion to myself for eating part of a chocolate chip cookie at work yesterday as well as all the cheese and bread for dinner. Most macros I know (and even the cookbook authors I read) have all said that giving up cheese was the hardest thing for them. (That and sugar.) It seems to be the last thing to go. I don't mind eating it now and then because I know how it will make me feel and how to deal with that later. (Miso soup)


Tonight we are headed to Manzanita, a local macrobiotic restaurant in the East Bay. We had soup (kabocha squash, quinoa, yam, and miso), steamed kale with a parsley sauce, brown rice, the most amazing beans (garbanzos with onions but somehow flavored in the most delicious way), roasted veggies (carrots, cauliflower, broccoli with fresh herbs like dill), and a salad. Plus I got a cookie.

Welcome back dinner

I have been wanting lately to keep a food log of what I eat. I'm having a hard time avoiding all the sugary treats at work so at least I could keep this log as a way of reminding myself of how I will feel if I eat the pure sugary goodness.

So new and improved food log starting this week.

This is Tuesday's dinner. Pretty simple but turned out quite well. Broccoli and carrots.


This is the other half of Tuesday's dinner. Beans and rice. The rice was made a few days ago and the beans were from a can. Canned beans are ok if you need the time, but look for ones that are cooked without salt. (There's one brand, Eden I think, that uses kombu instead.)


This is Wednesday's dinner. Or actually prep for Wednesday's dinner. I forgot to take an actual picture of it. Marinated tofu with soba noodles.


And with king trumpet mushrooms. I eventually added kale and broccoli to this as well. (It needed some green.) The trumpet mushrooms were amazing though. Got them from the farmer's market and they tasted like fennel. Even smelled like it. I've had trumpet mushrooms before and never thought that. These were obviously unique. It made the dish delicious.

And tonight (Thursday) is takeout. Siam Lotus at least has brown rice so I can put up with salty and sugary goodness. Golden veggie curry (squash, potatoes, green beans, tofu, and carrots in a curried coconut milk).

Sugar in everything

If you weren't convinced already that you should be eating more home-cooked meals this list of packaged products that contain the most sugar will convince you. I tend to not eat packaged foods, even the vegan ones (other than the occasional Lara bar- which have all of two or three ingredients) so I'm not really surprised that there is so much sugar in all of these other things. The problem is this list doesn't really show the most surprising sugar containing foods. Like in bread, pasta, salsa, soy sauce, chips, crackers, salty foods. I expect to find sugar in granola. Maybe I'm the only one but from having made it myself I know you have to coat the oats in something to make them stick. I think we all expect that a milk shake is full of sugar (full of a day's worth of calories?-- maybe unexpected.) I think it's good that this article is trying to raise awareness of the hidden sugars in our diets but I think there's a simpler solution than memorizing the worst offenders from a list. READ THE INGREDIENTS LABEL! Every food item includes one. Read it. Even if it takes you more time in the store. Even if you think you know everything in that product already. Even if you have read the label before (ingredients can change!) If you find something on the list you can't pronounce don't buy it. If it has sugar as the first or second ingredient (and it's not ice cream or cake) don't buy it. That's a pretty simple rule of thumb to live by while shopping for prepared foods. Read the label. If you can't pronounce, don't buy. If it has sugar and shouldn't, don't buy. Easy, right? And then start making more home-cooked meals. Your body, brain, and psyche will thank you for it.

The height of summer

I always consider peaches to be the height of summer. They are such a perishable fruit that it's unlikely that you will be eating them much after July. Unlike apples which you see year-round (even though they should seasonably be in the fall and winter at most) you never see anyone eating a peach in the middle of January. (Or if you do it's because it was canned at the height of summer.) Summer is a great time for peaches because they are provide a lot of moisture for those of us in dry climates. They are also good in the summer because you can eat their juiciness outside and let it drip all over the ground.

In honor of our summer of peaches, which are by far the best ever here in California, I thought I'd share the Peach Rosemary Sorbet that I made last week, courtesy of the Millennium cookbook. It was quite simple to make if you have a blender and an ice cream maker. Even without an ice cream maker, you can put the liquid in a pan and freeze it by stirring occasionally.

Peach Rosemary Sorbet

4 large ripe peaches (about 2 pounds)
1/2 cup of water
1/2 of fructose
1 Tablespoon of fresh rosemary (minced)
pinch of salt

Blend everything together and freeze. It was a huge hit at the 4th of July potluck I attended, even though everyone was skeptical at first. The combination doesn't sound like it would work but it's really amazingly delicious.

The new miracle fruit

There's a new miracle fruit on the block. And it's actually called "miracle" fruit. It's a tiny berry from West Africa that causes your taste buds to become confused. For about an hour after eating it sour things will taste sweet and sweet things will taste cloyingly sweet. Someone in NY has started having "food tripping" parties where everyone eats the berries and then tastes all kinds of foods- hot sauce, lemon wedges, goat cheese. Check out this article in the NY Times.

It's Called Variety

The reason I haven't posted in a while is because I was at a yoga retreat (the Kundalini Yoga Summer Solstice Celebration). Retreat, festival, space camp... all would be good descriptions for the camping out under the stars, meditating for three days straight, and raving with crazy old and young Sikhs that I did in New Mexico last week. It was all wonderful and I can't wait to go back next year. In fact, it's hard to believe I have to wait a whole year before I can go back. Sigh.

But besides for improving my meditating and bhangra dancing skills (that's right, baby! I'm a bhangra queen now!) I also got a chance to eat a lot of food. By "a lot" I mean, a large quantity, not a large variety. Every day we were served the same thing for breakfast and dinner. Lunches varied and could be quite interesting, in an Indian vegetarian kind of way. (Why is it always Saag Paneer? What's wrong with a good chana masala, I ask you?) Breakfast was probably the meal most complained about though after a while I kind of enjoyed it. Potato and celery soup, curried, with bananas. And yes, you were encouraged to put the bananas in the soup. Don't ask me why, but this actually made the soup taste better. I was kind of grooving on this by the last day. I don't usually eat bananas, especially ones flown in from Ecuador, but since we were in New Mexico and it was hot, some tropical fruit seemed appropriate. Tropical fruit is designed to cool you off, much like spicy food, and therefore best to eat in hot, humid climates. But I swear there was a freaking mutiny on the last day in the line for the "kid's" food, which was oatmeal. I think I saw more adults in that line than kids.

Every night for dinner we were served "kitchari", essentially mung beans and rice, cooked to a mushy softness. It's old people food. You could loose all your teeth and still be able to eat kitchari. This dinner was also served with cooked carrots (my dad's favorite- yuck!) and cooked beets. A lovely pretty contrasting color scheme to the greenish brown of the rice and beans. Oh, and let us not forget: the lettuce! Iceberg lettuce, about half a head per person usually. I never thought iceberg lettuce had any value but the one time I tried to eat this without the lettuce I realized it did. Roughage really does help the medicine go down!

Sweet Tooth Gene

I now have an excuse for not being able to control myself around sweets. Apparently researchers have found a sweet tooth gene that makes the people who have it consume more sugar. I have been struggling with this problem my whole life. I'm sure there are some environmental factors (ice cream after dinner as a child, chocolate for presents) but it's kind of nice to know that I'm struggling against myself. The real answer of course is that I should be eating the low-sugar macro sweets instead of the freaking cupcakes that someone handed me yesterday! (I just have such a weakness for cupcakes, even non-vegan ones.) Macro sweets tend to have a slower acting sugar than the straight white crack that we use in everything else. Brown rice syrup is broken down slower in your body than cane sugar. So you don't get the big up (and resultant crash) with a macro treat that you usually do with regular sugar stuff. But that doesn't stop me from eating it, even knowing that I will feel a bit ill later. I'm getting a reputation as a bad vegan, but I feel like it's an addiction. I seriously can't control myself. Sigh.