Month: February 2023

What I Cooked Last Week/What I Plan To Cook This Week

On By Cultivate WellnessIn Cooking, Health and wellness, Nutrition, Recipes2 Comments

I got a lot of interest in my meal planning post last week. And it makes sense. There are some weeks when I sit down to plan the menu for the week and I think “What do I even cook?” My mind just goes completely blank. It’s nice to see what other people are doing with their cooking lives and get new ideas.

First things first: how closely did my actual cooking life last week resemble the plan? I give myself an 9/10. The only change was that on Wednesday I made homemade chicken noodle soup out of the leftover roast chicken because my kiddo wasn’t feeling well. (FYI, if your celery is looking anemic and bendy, throw it in some soup instead of tossing it in the garbage or compost). So I punted on the coconut curry until Thursday, which punted the Eat For Equity meal until Friday. Which means on Friday instead of going out or ordering in, we assembled the most amazing shrimp po’ boys topped with coleslaw made with miso dressing and collards with raisins. We were supposed to go out with friends Saturday but that stupid cold that’s going around foiled our plans, so while our daughter was out, we ate Po’ Boy leftovers and watched the Yellowstone prequel 1923. This time we also ate braised butter beans along with it, also from Eat For Equity. And tonight, we are going out, an usual plan for us for Sunday evening. Anyway, maybe I should give myself an 11/10 for cooking an additional meal this week. Here are some photos of the things we ate. As I keep saying, I’m not a professional blogger who curates amazing photos. I’m a real person who doesn’t have the patience to stage a photo, so you’ll see real-life depictions of what food actually looks like.

Coconut Curry Lentils
Oven roasted garlic
Burst tomato pasta with basil and parmesan

This week, I plan on making the following (they are all from the America’s Test Kitchen The Complete Mediterranean Cookbook so I’ll provide similar recipe links. OR you can buy the book or pay to have access to the recipes online):

MONDAY: Roast cod with chermoula (a sauce made with cilantro and other delicious things), and broccolini with garlic and red pepper flakes.

TUESDAY: I’m chaperoning my daughter’s Model United Nations conference and then playing paddle (if you don’t know, definitely watch the video link. It’s such a fun winter sport!) Tuesday late afternoon, so I’ll be pulling out a peanut stew with winter vegetables from the freezer that I ordered from Eat for Equity. The recipe is from Bryant Terry’s Afro Vegan Cookbook. I plan on serving it with toasted sourdough.

WEDNESDAY: Pasta with zucchini and tomatoes and pine nuts, served with a green salad with Marcona almonds and manchego cheese.

THURSDAY: Eat For Equity

FRIDAY: Out

SATURDAY: Eat For Equity

SUNDAY: Crappy Dinner Party (if you don’t know about this yet, read about it here). It’s our turn to host, and I’m thinking maybe my husband can smoke something in our smoker, TBD).

I also plan on making a chopped salad with chickpeas along the way for lunch. Something like this but with my leftover goat cheese instead of feta. As usual, I will also probably eat avocado toast with an easy salad once or twice. Here’s a photo of what my lunches look like most days.

I hope you all have a delicious and healthy week ahead.

My (Obsessive?) Organizing Life

On By Cultivate WellnessIn Health and wellness, self improvement, Uncategorized3 Comments

Sometime in the fall, I got the insatiable urge to start organizing and decluttering my house. Maybe it was the cleaning Tik Toks I’m so fond of (they are so relaxing and satisfying), or the fact that our only child is leaving to go far away to college in the fall, or being irritated constantly that I didn’t know where things were or what we even had. But one day I just decided to make a list on the notes app on my phone of all the spaces in my house I wanted to address. Nothing was too big or too small to make it on the list. Sock drawer? Yes. Pantry? Hell yes. Take everything out of the home office, every paperclip and cord and blank cassette tape (omg) and look through every piece of paper in my personal files? Yuuup.

As a person whose motivation comes when it comes, and if I don’t take advantage of it who knows when it will come back, I leapt on this sudden energy. At least several days a week since I started, I’ve woken up, looked at my list, and gotten a jolt of energy and anticipation over that day’s project. Likely it’ll disappear just as suddenly as it came, but I’m hoping to get as much mileage out of it before that happens. I just completed my 52nd project (!!!) yesterday. I’ve been flabbergasted by how much lighter I feel by doing this. I no longer have the same feelings of being weighed down by my possessions and clutter the way I did before this. There’s also a lot more space mentally, to ponder and think and contemplate. Even though our clutter was mostly contained in drawers and cabinets and closets, I still felt its presence. Hiding it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Here are some things I’ve learned from this project that might help you if you’re thinking of embarking on your own project:

  1. I’m much more organized than I thought I was.
  2. But, I have too much stuff (we all have too much stuff).
  3. You don’t need fancy canisters or bins. The companies selling you fancy canisters and bins want you to think the fancy canisters and bins are the key to lasting happiness, but they aren’t. Start with what you have. Use containers you already own. Shoeboxes work great. You can always fancy it up later. Don’t buy more stuff in order to get rid of more stuff (see how crazy that sounds?)
  4. Start with a small project or two first. It will give you immediate gratification and a jolt of energy, and it’ll hopefully help keep you inspired.
  5. Take photos as you go and send them to people who will cheer you on. My friend Catherine has been my biggest cheerleader. As a person whose love language is words of affirmation, this is a huge motivator for me. If having a cheerleader isn’t what you need, figure out what *will* keep you feeling proud of your progress, and ask for it.
  6. If you need help getting motivated, another trick that works for me is using the “pairing” technique. Save a podcast or an audio book or your favorite music for when you are doing your projects. It’s like a reward.
  7. Have a list of go-to places where you can get rid of the things that no longer serve you. I have made huge use of our local Buy Nothing community on Facebook. Literally you can get rid of opened cereal that you realized you didn’t like. Or a beautiful pair of shoes. Or some twine. It’s amazing what you can keep out of the garbage with this community. I also have donated to a local organization that operates a thrift store to raise money to provide vital funding for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I’ve taken two carfuls of stuff there. I took two large tote bags of books to Half Priced Books. Food goes to our local food shelf (please no expired food).
  8. Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good enough. Those Tik Tok and YouTube videos are compelling, but it’s easy to think that your house also has to be perfect and idyllic for it all to count at the end. It doesn’t.
  9. Get ready to discover some gems you haven’t seen in a while. By clearing out a bunch of jewelry I never wore, I uncovered several pieces that felt new all over again and that I’m excited to wear.
  10. Keep a running list of your projects and check them off as you go along. Periodically go back and admire how far you’ve come.

I plan on embarking on a spring clean of the house as soon as warmer weather arrives. I’ll keep you posted!

What I Plan To Cook This Week

On By Cultivate WellnessIn Cooking, Health and wellness, high cholesterol, Nutrition, Recipes2 Comments

This will be interesting, because many (most?) times my menu plan and what I end up cooking are vastly different. Either I realize not everyone will be home for dinner, or we have so much leftover food it doesn’t make sense to make a new meal, or I get a headache and don’t feel like cooking, or whatever other life stuff pops up. But having a menu plan is good! It helps to make sure I’m buying only the food I need, and keeps me focused on cooking healthy meals vs. falling into the takeout trap.

Here’s what the menu plan looks like for this week. I hope to circle back at the end of the week and report back on what actually happened! Either way, I hope this gives you some inspiration.

MONDAY – Burst cherry tomato pasta with a simple arugula salad (literally lemon juice or rice vinegar and a drizzle of olive oil, sprinkled with s+p) and sourdough bread toasted and dipped in olive oil. If I’m really feeling myself, I’ll roast a head of garlic until it’s soft and spreadable and serve that with the sourdough.

TUESDAY – Roast whole chicken (I buy it cut into pieces), herb new potatoes (I buy the container that you just microwave) and roasted cauliflower with pine nuts and capers. This recipe is from a cookbook and I can’t find it online, but if you google it, similar recipes will pop up. Easy enough to leave out the capers and pine nuts and just roast some cauliflower with the herbs and spices you like.

WEDNESDAY – Lentil crockpot curry served over brown rice. We have, by all accounts, a massive snowstorm coming from Tuesday through Thursday of this week. I imagine school might be cancelled, but even if not, we have appointments on Wednesday so I want to be able to put this in the crock pot and forget about it all day. If we are home we can enjoy the aroma, and if not, we will come home to a delicious and warming meal.

THURSDAY – We order meals every week from a local organization called Eat For Equity. We get two main dishes, two sides, two salads/soup/bread, and one dessert. It’s an amazing organization and the food is so yummy. I always say, it’s the food I would make if I had just a little more energy to make my dinners really special. They deliver every Thursday to our house. We usually eat E4E for dinner Thursday, and then throughout the weekend either as another dinner or as our lunches. We are so lucky to have this option! As a backup (because we are expecting 1-2 feet of snow overnight Wednesday and into Thursday), I am also planning to make a Greek white bean soup from a Mediterranean cookbook I have. Here’s a comparable recipe.

FRIDAY – We usually eat out or order in on Fridays. Sometimes we have an Eat for Equity meal, which I suspect will be the case this week because we have dinner out both Saturday and Sunday.

SATURDAY – We are going out with friends Saturday for dinner! For lunch, we will probably eat some of our E4E meals and if I feel motivated, I will make a salad of some sort.

SUNDAY – We will be going to a pasta dinner out. I’m excited because we get to pick our type of pasta plus all the add-ins. I’m not just saying this, but I love a pasta with tons of veggies in it, so I expect this will be really yummy.

If you’re wondering what I do for lunch during the week, mostly I eat leftovers, avocado toast, or Dr. Praeger’s California Veggie burger with raw sauerkraut. Once a week, I generally treat myself to a salad from Crisp & Green.

Please comment below with what you are cooking this week, if you’d like. I always like trying new recipes.

What I Cooked This Week

On By Cultivate WellnessIn CookingLeave a comment

Hi. It’s been a while. Bloggers who explain their long absences annoy me, so I’ll just start writing instead.

It was Valentine’s Day this week, and after 21 years of marriage and a husband who really doesn’t want more things, I decided instead to make a heart healthy Mediterranean inspired dinner. It consisted of this roasted salmon, this marinated lentils and butternut squash, this broccolini, a quick caprese salad (throw in baby tomatoes, mozzarella pearls, fresh basil, and season with olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette. Toss with s+p), and this apple crumble with a bit of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. I like HD because there are minimal, real ingredients (the vanilla contains only cream, skim milk, egg yolk, sugar, vanilla). Pictured here is everything besides the apple crumble. It took me several hours of cooking on and off to make this. A true labor of love.

My husband’s cholesterol is *high* recently thanks to genetics, and mine isn’t ideal either, so we have been more focused than ever on eating more heart healthy dishes. How can you, a nutritionist who loves to eat healthy, have *high* cholesterol, you might ask. Well first of all, there was a whole pandemic that upended everything. We were not immune to comfort eating (and drinking), high levels of stress, and all the things. Also, sometimes it’s just what happens. You can eat almost all the right things and still have high cholesterol.

One way to address high cholesterol through your diet is to read up on the Mediterranean Diet (when I say “diet” in this sense, it’s a way of eating and not a calorie restriction plan). Full of whole foods, lots of fruits and veggies, whole grains, moderate amounts of lean meats and fish, tons of herbs and spices, and healthy fats like olive oil and avocados, the Med diet is recommended and prescribed by doctors and nutritionists the world over for its heart healthy benefits. And there’s a saying that what’s good for the heart is also good for the brain, so if you have Alzheimer’s or dementia concerns, this diet is also probably a really good one to look into.

There’s a website called Oldways that has tons of free resources, including the Med Diet pyramid. There are also cookbooks galore out there. I just treated myself to this one by America’s Test Kitchen. I can’t wait to start making some recipes this weekend. I like American’s Test Kitchen because they explain to you the “why’s” behind everything.

If you’re looking to make some quick and simple Med inspired meals, you do not need to cook all day. Two nights ago for dinner I whipped up a very quick marinated white bean salad to serve over grilled sourdough. We had a Zoom meeting to attend at dinnertime so it was a pretty minimal meal that we ate in front of the computer. Into two cans of rinsed cannellini beans, I threw in some red wine vinegar and olive oil to taste. Chopped some marinated cherry peppers and threw those in, minced some garlic and parsley, and sprinkled some dried oregano. Seasoned with s+p and called it a day. It was so delicious (although I think five cloves of garlic was probably a bit much 🤣). It took all of 5-10 minutes to make.

This weekend I plan to make a chopped salad with garbanzo beans as well as an asparagus, red bell pepper, and goat cheese salad. Inflation is doing a number on all of our grocery purchases, but because I rarely buy meat I’m able to offset a little bit on cost. I’ll circle back next week with those recipes if they are any good!

Until then…