Cooking – Breakfast – Smoothie

The Best Way to Start your Day!

Breakfast Smoothie - It can be made with frozen fruits or Spinach... of all things!

Saying I never get tried of this breakfast is saying a lot; Now it is not very practical for an on-the-road type of meal ...but easy and quick to do at home.  Having a powerful blender definitely helps!

A Couple of Key Points:

• Adding the 5.4 grams of Spinach actually give you 51% Protein (twice as much as a piece of Steak!!)

• Frozen fruits can be expensive (sticker shock) but they last longer: If you are near a Wegmans they have the best prices and quantity for these items.
• Make sure you have something to tamp-down the mixture with while blending as frozen stuff tends to jam-up. Also, you may need to add more fluid (juice/milk) to the mixture too.

• If you are doing the Vegan/Vegetarian thing full-tilt just make sure you add the ground Flaxseed as you will be needing the Omega-3 fatty acids it has in it; 1 Tablespoon per person.

Ingredients  - Serves Two:

1 1/2 cup of pomegranate (POM) juice
1/2 cup Almond Milk
1 cup of frozen Blueberries
2 Bananas  (These can get ripe quickly; solution- peal and freeze and then use whenever)
1 cup frozen Peaches
1 cup Strawberries
2 tablespoons of ground Flaxseeds

** If using Spinach - I do one or two handfuls with the the Bananas, Blueberries, Flaxseed, juice and "milk"

** Recipe courtesy of Joel Fuhrman MD; Eat to Live

Cooking - Dinner - Whole Wheat Pizza

Who Doesn't Love Pizza?

Chop two Tomatoes, Basil, Garlic, Red Onion and Mushrooms

saute the Onions, Mushroom and Garlic 5-7 minutes

 Toast the whole wheat pitas on 400 degrees for 5 mins depending on how you like your crust

Assemble pizza with Sauce, above mixture, red pepper flakes and top with non-dairy cheese 

Bake at 200 degrees for 30 minutes

Ingredients: Serves two or four (we like two each)

4 large whole wheat pitas

2 cups no-salt/low sodium pasta sauce

2 de-seeded and chopped tomatoes (Tomato seeds have a TON of water in them - It will make your pizza very soggy if you don't remove them before chopping them into smaller pieces)

2 cloves Garlic- crushed and chopped

1/2 cups of any mushrooms you like

1/2 cups chopped red onion

2 tablespoons of fresh or dried Basil

1 cup (or more) of nondairy shredded mozzarella cheese

1/2 cup white wine (optional)

** I like to saute the onions and mushroom for 5 minutes, add the garlic for one minute, deglaze with a splash of white wine (basically once everything is cooked - it helps get all the favor off the bottom of the pan) and let cook off.  Then just add this mixture with the other ingredients to the pizza during assembly.

** Recipe courtesy of Joel Furhman MD; Eat to Live with some french elements added by me 

Cooking - Options: When Things Go Wrong

Truely words to live by when cooking... failure breeds success!

• When things go wrong (link to the entire article By MELISSA CLARK:  NY Times - Published: October 5, 2012)

Excerpt below: 

...It’s the desire for perfection, however unconscious, that causes many otherwise practical cooks to think they must recreate entire meals — amuse-bouches to petits fours — from, say, the Alinea cookbook, when one dish would have sufficed. And perfectionism can breed performance anxiety, a cloud hovering over the kitchen counter. Sometimes I wonder if home cooks put so much pressure on themselves that they become reluctant to have friends over for dinner at all.

If the dish looks funny but tastes fine, the solution is easy: rename it. Over the years, I’ve served my guests “blackened carrot salad” (I added pomegranate molasses too early when roasting the roots), “melting, garlicky green beans” (I forgot about them on the stove and they almost dissolved), “molten fudge brownies” (under baked, that is). Butterscotch pudding that never quite solidified in the fridge was rechristened butterscotch crème Anglaise, and poured over fruit.

• Of course, if the dish has truly failed in that you over salted or -spiced it, or if you’ve overcooked the meat, or if the cake stuck to the bottom of the pan, you need to do a little more than just rename the thing. But it, too, can be saved.

1. Overcooked meat or fish is rejuvenated when it is chopped into small pieces and fried in a crisp potato pancake. Call it rösti for maximum elegance.

2. Over seasoned or overcooked vegetables gain new life from being folded into unseasoned eggs to make a frittata, quiche filling or soufflé.

3. And pretty much any sweet pastry recipe that didn’t quite work out is born anew when it is made into crumbs and layered with cream into trifle."

Savior Recipes

• Rescue the Vegetables Soufflé

• Save the Day Rösti

• Oops Trifle Parfaits 

Food Prep - Equipment & Supplies You Might Need

Going Vegan or Vegetarian Properly Requires a lot a Prep Time: 

There - I said it...and I do mean a lot... but once you get into the swing of things it's really not that bad; and this is coming from someone who typically travels for work during the week and HATED walking into a grocery store before this lifestyle!  Now I just see it all as one big adventure, even on the road (Homewood Suites Kitchenettes are the best), and would love to hear your thoughts on this as well as on any experiences you might have in doing something similar.

• The first couple of weeks/months at this was the hardest, at least for me, as I basically had to learn how to prep food and cook from scratch all at once. What got me through it was trying to stay focused on the end result of how much healthier we would be, how much we were learning about food and the power it has on the body!

More Information: Mark and I tried doing a vegetarian diet before about thirteen years ago for three or four months. We ate a lot of the store-ready vegetarian foods, you know the ones anyone can find in the stores prepackaged....and as a result we actually gained weight!!

• The approach we used this time was more demanding; 1 lbs/.5 kg of raw vegetable per day (Think "Nutrients") and strictly limit the amount of processed food, salt and oil used when creating each meal. In other words... buy fresh produce weekly and understand exactly what is going in your food.

OK - Here is what got us started:

Good Reference Materials/ Books:  Try not to burn them, set them on fire or drown in water like I did (smile). My two favorites are 1,000 Vegan Recipes and of course my go-to handbook Eat To Live

PS - ipads/Nooks and the like are great electronic references too ...Just try not to drop a can of Tomatoes on then from the shelf above your counter (Luckily it just hit the edge - close call!)

Food Processing Equipment: I like the VitaMix ($$$), Cuisinart and Kitchen Aid Blender ($$): Hey, holidays gifts could be right around the corner!

Knives for chopping/slicing and dicing, Pots and Pans:  If you have a small kitchen like I do (4'10 by 14'), walls work great for things like this and racks will be essential for organization.

• Remember knives will have to be sharpened frequently for best results  - Please watch/tuck your fingers when chopping! In hindsight, while I still have all my fingers, I wish I could have taken a food preparation class from a Community College. Rather, due to my schedule, I just picked things up off watching the Cooking Channel via DRV/recordings. I still might try to take a class this Spring if I can fit it into my schedule??

Foodstuffs: Think about adding a drawer just for fresh veggies and be prepared to double/triple the spices you have now.

Hint- Use a brown paper bag to store/save mushrooms and try to keep fresh herbs (Dill, Parsley and Cilantro) in their own water jars in the Frig. so they last longer.



Can a Number Transform Your Life?

So why '120OverEighty' you ask?

As you probably know 120/80 is the ideal blood pressure (BP) number for healthy adults. Along those lines, I wanted to start a blog that was more encompassing then only food, my current passion, or exercise, or stress management etc... and create one for fostering activities/habits we can all do to have a positive impact on our health. Diet of course isn't the whole story when it comes to our health but it is a great place to start. Other things like lack of exercise, sleep deprivation, disease, family history, medication and stress of course play key roles too.

Day 414:

In looking back to August 2011 when this journey started, I knew I was overweight at 238 lbs/108 kg (Body Mass index of 28 - see pics below) and that my doctor was for the first time talking with me about my blood pressure numbers (127/93 - Stage 1 hypertension).  Around the same time I was also struggling with the most basic elements of life from getting up out of bed in the morning, sitting behind the wheel of the car or even bending over and picking something up. However, it was my husband Mark's doctor visit last year that brought everything to the forefront when he was told that if he didn't lose weight he had to get on high blood pressure medicine - we knew we needed a change.

After reading some articles on diets we decided our food choices were horrible and decided to become Vegans: No meat, dairy, poultry or fish. We also decided to cut out salt and the majority of processed foods too and focus on nutrients first... Think crash course in "food detox".

• For us, the most influential factor in this decisions was a book by Dr. Joel Fuhrman called Eat to Live  (ISBN number 978-0-316-12091-3). I highly recommend this book to anyone curious about this topic with the disclaimer that everyone should check with your own physician before changing your own dietary intake levels.

Below is a chart on my own weight loss that I tracked on our Nintendo Wii; each dot represents me weighing in from August 22, 2011 to today.   Dr. Fuhrman's main theory is the more nutrients you eat, the less you will want to eat other foods and your body will naturally return to a healthy Body Mass Index (BMI) between 20 and 21. That is exactly what has happened to me as you can see below.

• They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words:

Summer 2011

BMI was 28 - Weight 238 lbs/108 kg

Fall 2012

BMI is now 21.5 - Weight 181/82 kg

Next up on the agenda - Starting to workout again and managing stress better!