Author: offwhiteliving

Gluten free crepes

offwhiteliving

As promised in my last post, here are the picsand the recipe for the Gluten Free Crepes.  I would definitely make these a regular part of my weekend breakfast rotation.  Another option with them is to make extra to use like tortilla wraps for a simpe lunch.  With less carbs than a pancake or tortilla, they are less filling, but have a fair amount of protein to fill you up.

Gluten Free crepes (modified from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone)

2 eggs
1 cup almond milk (plain, low sugar)
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup Bob’s Redmill All Purpose Gluten-Free flour mix

Combine all ingredients in a blender (or use a whisk like I did) and blend until smooth (about 5 seconds in blender).  Set aside and put in fridge for a few minutes to settle.

Meanwhile, heat a 7-10″ lightweight skillet and brush with butter as soon as it’s hot.  When it sizzles, pour about 2 TBSP batter into the pan and immediately swirl it around untl it evenly coats the bottom.

Cook until golden on the bottom, abou 1 minute.  Slide a knife under the edge to loose n crepe and then flip.

Cook the second side for 30 seconds.

Serve with savory or sweet.  I chose savory: Sautee of asparagus, onions, spinach and sea salt/parsley/thyme.  Delicious!

great tips for preparing grains

offwhiteliving

Hi bloggies,

I am prepping for my Grains class at the Davis Food Co-op on Wednesday, and I came across a handy-dandy website about cooking grains.  I must be hungry because the recipes all looked fantastic too.  My next adventure is going to be in toasting grains before cooking with them – an inspiration I just gained from the site.

Also, stay tuned because yesterday I made gluten-free crepes for the FIRST time and they were fabulous.  Easy, light, and less carby than a pancake -love it!  We ate them with sauteed asparagus, onion, and spinach….pics on the way 🙂

move and learn at the same time

offwhiteliving1 Comment

I’m just popping in to share a random but interesting musing I came across recently.  I It’s an observation about the benefits of moving and learning at the same time.  I relate – I prefer to walk and talk things out to learn and prefer walking with friends to chat versus sitting…and it’s not just an exercise thing, it simply ‘feels’ good to my brain.

What do you think?

Click here to learn more

From Yucca to yum in no time

offwhiteliving1 Comment

It’s finals week.  Who has time to eat well, right?  Hmm….. past experience (such as just yesterday when I guzzled a GIANT hot chocolat) tells me that the ol’ brain works better when I’m well feed.

Certainly my stress hormones are raging and I’m craving carbs, but instead of heading to In-N-Out burger like everyone else in Davis (seriously, line was backed up into the parking lot next door today), I whipped up this easy dish:

1 lb yucca root (kind of a waxy tuber w/white flesh)
1 lb yams
1/2 lb brussel sprouts
2 tbsp EVOO
2 tsp: salt, cumin, dried parsley, dried basil

Cut all veggies into 1/2″ cubes.  Mix with EVOO and spices.  Bake for 1 hr @ 400.  Serve with a squeeze of lime, and a bit of chopped avocado.  SOO tasty.

Now if it could only satisfy like hot chocolate.  Seriously you guys, I’m fiending every day for the past few days.  Totally giving into my whims…oh, and the healthy stuff made at home won’t do at all.  I guess this Off White Girl has more growth to attend to, but at least my meals are healthy and I am exercising everday!  Better than my undergrad days of Chinese Take Out  and chicken McNuggets during Finals week!

eating well in busy times

offwhiteliving

This was my table pretty much Friday – Sunday, and sometimes it was worse.  That is just the nature of being a student: balancing teaching, research endeavors, having a life, classes, oh, and then there is the studying……. for those who care I was knee deep in Vitamins this  weekend.  Good times.

So, if I’m going to take care of myself I’ve got to find ways to maximize cooking time.  We do really simple meals when life gets busy: quinoa/rice blends in the rice cooker, frozen turkey burger patties, hardboiled eggs, spinach salads, etc.

For those of you who think you don’t have time to cook healthy, I want to challenge that belief.  You may not have time right now, but somewhere in the week you have a few minutes to devote to your wellness, if you are willing to get creative and try something.

Batch cooking is your tool of insuring healthy food is around when you need it.  Basically I figure out what foods needed to be cooked soon to avoid spoilining and I whipped up enough foods to last a  few meals.  My approach is that if I’m turning on the oven, I’m going to make it worth my while, so on Saturday I baked sweet potatoes, roasted garlic and green peppers, and cooked some phyllo encrusted tilapia for dinner that night.  The whole process took me about 30 minutes (including making a big green salad to last that night and the next day), and I had meal components for 3 days.

Check it out: a view of the oven (you can’t see the fish)  I cooked it all @ 350 for various lengths of time.  I was willing to sacrifice precision for diversity in options:

The sweet potatoes lasted 3 meals, and one was used to make some tasty oatmeal for B-fast one day.  The fish served as the basis for dinner, and the roasted veggies were nice additions to a salad for 2 lunches.  Easy, peasy…..

Happy off white eating!

child’s play

offwhiteliving2 Comments

Oh, to be a kid again.

I got a lot of great toys as a kid: Cabbage Patch kids, Barbies galore, and even a pound puppy.  After years of begging I finally even got a Charlie McCarthy doll, which I ended up thinking was really creepy and never once played with it.  Mom still has it, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks it’s creepy because my cat, Madeline, won’t go on the bed when Charlie’s on it.  Ha!

But one thing I always wanted and NEVER got was an Easy Bake Oven.  Oh, how I fantisied about having control over baking my own treats, in my own room and eating them at my own pace (read: as fast as I could).  Maybe mom and dad had the insight that this was NOT the ideal toy for a girl who spent all over her allowence on candy ($3/week and it all went to Skittles, York Peppermint Patties and Brach’s Candy in bulk).

I can recall the commercials – happy, thin girls playing with the oven, baking, laughing smelling delicious aromas of tasty treats….a sugar junkie’s fantasy.

Today I came across this interesting article about food marketing to kids: not just direct marketing from food companies, but toy companies as well.  Turns out most companies get a big fat “F” for their efforts to promote healthy behaviors with kids.  It saddens me that one company isn’t stepping up to the plate and creating a brand promise around healthy foods.  I know its all about the almighty dollar, but there has got to be one company with money in the bank who is willing to just do the right thing and not worrk about making so much cash.  Just one…. It might even turn out to be the cash cow of the century as moms and dads struggle to find creative ways to get junior fired up about healthy eats without sounding like a naggy parent.

Now that I think even deeper another toy fav of mine was my Barbie McDonald’s.  I loved putting Barbie’s trays to gether with fries, a Big Mac, and a coke (or in my mind a milkshake, of course).  It never occurred to me that Barbie couldn’t possibly maintain her impossible figure by eating at Micky D’s everyday, so she never cooked at home in my Barbieland – she put on a hot outfit, picked up Ken and the girls and headed to the Golden Arches.  Well, that is one creative marketing scheme by Matel.  Too bad I didn’t like McDonalds – they did not gain a valuable customer from my Barbie adventures, but I’m sure they gained some kind of brand identity or maybe my friends who came over to play in Barbieland were reminded of their McDonald’s love and asked their mom’s to go there at the next outing into town…who knows..

…and that is the issue.  Who know’s what the long term exposure to junk food marketing, direct or indirect, does to our moldable young minds.  What happens to us later in life?  How does making Chuck-E-Cheeze pizza at home in your plastic oven influence your relationship to Pizza?  I could totally see a perfect storm brewing from this combination:  kids eager to be ‘cool’, to have fun and to fit in making associations between ‘junk food’ toys and the good life.  Translation later: they find themselves drawn to certain foods/brands because those neural pathways that gave them the ‘feel good’ response to these toys as kids, still gives them a little kick as an adult.  Maybe they don’t even know why, or that it’s happening.

Hmm….this one certainly gives me some good food for thought!

What’s one cookie?

offwhiteliving2 Comments

What’s one cookie?

This is a question with potentially loaded answers, depending on who you ask?  For me, one cookie is usually synonymous with the term “gateway”…gateway to more cookies, that is.  The ‘just one’ policy doesn’t always work for me.

But let’s say it did.  What about the advice we (I), sometimes give about making small dietary changes, such as not eating one cookie?

Well, look at what was written about it recently in the NY times, as a response to a recent set of statements made by Michelle Obama about encouraging adolescents to make small changes, like walking to school and giving up one cookie, for instance.

I agree with the experts in that our bodies do adapt to small fluctuations in caloric intake, both less and more calories.  That is clever adaptation.  So, sometimes small changes DON’T mean big results, but I think there is more to that story  too…

There are two issues her:  What size is the cookie we are talking about? And what kind of power can can exist underneath the decision to make a small  change.

First the cookie:

If we’re talking about 1 small oreo or one girl scout cookie, that’s only about 70 calories, and proabably NOT going to make much difference in your weight any time soon.  But if not eating one cookie stops you from spiralling into a cookie/carb binge, that cookie is worth a helluva lot more than just its own calories.

But let’s be real, many of us either eat more than one ore we get a “giant cookie”, which has a heck of a lot more calories than just a run of the meal cookie.  For instance, look at this blog to see how many befuddled gals were shocked and surprsied to see that their cookies contained between 500-700 calories.  For funzies I check the caloric content of a large cookie at an AM/PM mini-mart when getting gas.  500 calories.  Naturally the serving size was 1/2 a cookie, but again, let’s be real!

So, in that case, refraining from one cookie, or one latte (saw an article stating that in 1989 our coffe drinks had 120 Kcal and now its about 350  calories…..whoa mamma!), or one supersized whatever, then we might actually see a difference.  My secret: I do notice  a difference when I lay off the store bought hot chocolate drinks . Not just in my weight, but my digestion which helps my body feel leaner all around.

Okay, now the real issue: the power of change.  Did you know there are 5 stages of change?   We don’t go from idea to action overnight, and that is a natural course of change (so quite beating yourself up if you wake up every Monday saying ‘today’s the day to start the diet’ and then are back to your old habits by Tuesday).   So when a person decides they are going to experience whatever discomfort and effort needed to reduce their habit by one cookie, that has powerful impacts on the brain!  You just developed a new neural connection in your brain that says you no longer eat a cookie after dinner (or whenever).  You just told yourself you can do something new and it’s okay.  You lived through not having that cookie.  What other changes can this bring about?  As the original article stated, this is the power of small changes – they lead to BIG changes and the confidence that once can change at all.

Recently I became ready to make a change in my diet too: no more tea with honey/half and half at my breaks.  Frankly, pre and post vegan clease I’d been abusing the habit.  I was trying to trick myself that half and half, not having any casein (presumably), would be okay, but I didn’t feel good and I was kind of obsessing on it.  IT became my new version of hot chocolate. I’m sensing a theme here: warm sweetened drinks are kind of like cookies for me, I just can’t have one……  It felt good to make that change, and since then I’ve also developed a mindful eating practice and have reduced 1-2 meals/day by about 15%, realizing that I was simply eating too much.  I am trying to enjoy the feeling of hunger when I approach a meal, and learning that it’s okay to be hungry for a little while –  I don’t need to feed every physical urge.

So see, small changes can be very powerful!!!!

Uncategorized

Emptiness

offwhiteliving

Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.

– Lao Tzu

This week I experienced emptiness.  True, physical emptiness.  It was grand (well, it was grand after it was miserable).  My emptiness occurred out of pure accident.  Food poisoning (PC term: Food born pathogen), left my husband and I in, eerr… a rather precarious state for about 36 hours.  I’ll spare you the details, except for the  glorious feeling that I had once the trauma was over.

Physical emptiness feels enlightening to me.  In part, this is because I really rarely allow myself to feel it.  Hunger is uncomfortable for me, so I’m always rushing to fill its need.  Yet here I was, able to survive on little but tropical fruit (the only thing I wanted) and bubbly orange water and ice for nearly 2 days.  Once I felt better, I felt truly refreshed – like I’d been ‘reset’ by some divine force of nature.  It was refershing to allow my body to NOT have food it it and to allow my mind to NOT think about food.

Physical emptiness is also enlightening because it creates internal space.  Not just physical space, but emotional space.  Lying on my back, with little energy to do more than watch HBO movies and sleep, I could think in a way I’ve not given myself permission to do in a long time.  I could think without boundaries, expectations, deadlines or pressure. I allowed my mind to be idle.  I wish that I could tell you I devoted some of my illness time to deep meditation or even journaling, but I didn’t.  In a way, this is my journal entry of all those feeling that fed my spiring during my hiaitus from life.

You all have heard me say, in one form or another, that my relationship with food often mirrors my relationship with life.  Of late, I’ve been cramming it in – food and life.  Going too fast, expecting too much.  Not allowing space for emptiness or freedom from the ties that bind.  So nature found its own way to set me right again.  It dawned on me that it had been a long time since I simply thought about doing creative things just for the sake of them, or since I just took a walk for a reason other than to boost my cardiovascular health or that I allowed myself to rest, to just be.  Why do I forget how essential these elements to life really are?

So, I’m going to thank my period of emptiness for helping me resent my mind and body, and for reminding me of how far off the mark  I tend to get.  Happily, I found myself eating much less today and appreciating what I did eat for what it was -a nourishment to my body and spirit instead of something to soothe my worrisome soul that has been overworked and under played for the last 8 weeks (School!).

We live in a time where emptiness only comes when we get ill or we deliberately seek it out through fasts or cleanses.  How lucky are we?  Fortunate yes, but also I think we miss out on something really powerful that only happens when we do go without, even for a short while.

“Souper” soup, step by step

offwhiteliving

Yesterday I came home dog tired, wet and cold.  The rain hit me unexpectedly so I was soaked when I  walked through the door after a long day.  I wanted comfort food and I wanted something warm.  Something that would help me relax, but I didn’t have a ton of time.  I could have fired up some pasta but most of you know I’m not a big pasta eater (too much carb, and even the off-white pasta’s are a calorie dense option that I rarely choose).

Soup.  Yes, that is what I wanted.  Warm, creamy, dreamy soup……..
Being the on the fly cook that I am, a quick survey of available ingredients helped me land on a butternut squash white bean soup chock full o-veggies.  The squash helps give a creamy texture sans actual cream, and the beans add protein, texture and density.

Here’s what I did:

First, I chopped an onion, 1/2 bunch of celery and mandolined a carrot.  If you chop a lot , spend the $15 to get a mandolin.  Saves your time, but watch your knucles!

Next, I added these veggies to a medium stock pan with 2 tbsp EVOO, and sauteed for 5 min on med heat.  For a no-brainer flavor  I added salt, an organic veggie spice mix, and 1 veggie boullion cube.  Stir it all in for about 3 min.  Let the moisture from the veggies dissolve the boullion.

Now you’re ready for the main event: one can of white beans + 1 can organic butternut squash.  Pumpkin works too, as does fresh squash, pureed.

Add about 2 cups water, and chop up 2 cups of either beet greens (What I used  – got them off the beets I popped in the oven at the same time), spinach, or kale.

Serve warm.  I added in about 4 oz shredded chicken and enjoyed thoroughly.  Mmmm….