Celebrating an all-natural lifestyle

Operation Organization: Snack Chips

Hey guys!

Happy Memorial Day. It’s warm and sunny here in NYC, so I hope anyone who’s local is taking some time to enjoy the weather and soak up a little vitamin D!

Starting tomorrow, my schedule will be shifting–not, I’m afraid, for the better. Between this coming week and the end of July, I’ll be working later than usual–probably till 9:30 or 10:00 pm each night. This has some unpleasant side effects–less time with my friends, later bedtimes (because I’ll have counseling work to do when I get home), and less time to enjoy the long daylight hours. But it’s professionally important, so I’m making the best of it!

The real downside of working later will be having less time to cook. Sad face! Creating nourishing and tasty food is my favorite hobby and one of my only creative outlets; it is also, obviously, a huge part of my work as a blogger. I hope you’ll all bear with me patiently for the next two months as I work my derriere off, forgiving me when creative recipes don’t go up as often as usual. August will afford me more time for fresh and innovative food: that’s a promise!

Working past 8:00 pm means dinner at the desk (or on the go). This, in turn, means that, for the next 6-8 weeks, I’ll be packing all three meals and snacks every single weekday. Ooof! This will require

• Superhuman organization
• Weekend planning
• Efficient leftover usage
• Remembering to freeze excess food
• Keeping a checklist in my head each morning of what I’ll need for the day, so that I pack it all accordingly.

I’ve certainly gone through periods of late working hours like this before, so I know what I need to do: the trick is staying energetic and organized, so that I don’t fall into the habit of squandering money on takeout or the Whole Foods salad bar.

Packing three meals a day also means relying on more prepared foods than I usually do, which is sort of a bummer in that it quashes my love for all things spontaneous and fresh, but absolutely necessary for my schedule (and sanity). In this busy period of time–and whenever I’m away from my apartment more than usual–foods that will keep me going include:

• Nutrient dense salads, packed up the night before work
• Sprouted bread sandwiches, filled with marinated veggies, avocado and greens, hummus, or other veggie-based fillings
• PB and banana on manna bread. A comfort food fave.
• Grain salads–favorite bases for these include quinoa, millet, wheatberries (sprouted or boiled), and brown rice
• Raw collard wraps, with various nut pates and nut cheezes as fillings
• Snack plates of hummus or nut butter and raw veggies
• Kale chips
• Larabars, Wild Bars, and Flying Vegan bars (for more on my top energy bar picks, check out this recent post)
• Homemade raw trail mix
• Lydia’s raw crackers
• Soups and curries — easy to prepare on weekends and easy to freeze for future consumption
• Brown rice sushi rolls from Whole Foods when I’m feeling lazy

Naturally, other foods will make appearances in what I’m eating, but these will be the fundamentals. Stable, quick to prepare, and transportable.

Another food trend I expect in the next two months is increased use of my dehydrator. You all know how I feel about the dehydrator: it’s not an appliance I use often, and if I hadn’t been gifted with one, I wouldn’t have invested in it: since I’m not strict on the 115 degree law (or enzyme theory in general), I’d be content to bake food at a very low temperature in my oven. However, I do have a dehydrator, and it will come in handy in the coming weeks, as I work to prepare foods on the weekend that will remain shelf-stable and snackable.

This weekend, I decided to fire up the dehydrator with my first batch of portable snacks: veggie chips. In spite of the fact that I have almost no memory of eating regular potato chips (I know I did when I was little, but I don’t remember, and didn’t have much sentimental attachment to them), I do love a bit of crunch in my life, and I love it even more when it comes with some vitamins and nutrients. What could be better for this than veggie chips, which are painless to make and lack the sodium and low-quality fat content of conventional chips?

Making veggie chips is truly a cinch. Slice whatever veggies you’re using (eggplant, zucchini, yam, white potato, turnip, carrot, parsnip, etc.) very thinly–I’d say 1/8 inch is ideal–on a mandolin, in a food processor, or by hand. Toss them in a bit of olive oil or coconut oil, salt, pepper, and any spices you like (Italian spices are great; so is cumin or chili powder, especially on sweet potatoes or yams). Next, arrange all veggies on mesh dehydrator sheets (covered with Teflex if you like) and dehydrate for about 5-8 hours, or however long it takes for the chips to dry out and get crunchy. I used zucchini and sweet potato, like so:

After a night in my dehydrator, they were crispy, salty, and ready for munching! I served them as appetizers in a special lunch for my Mom yesterday:

From left to right, that’s leftover tomato tahini kale chips, sweet potato chips, and zucchini chips (which my friend Bitt has also made!).  They were a hit, and I’ve got a ton leftover to pack up for snackage this week. It’s one small item to check off my planning ahead list, and it couldn’t possibly have been easier to accomplish.

Before I sign off for the day, I wanted to share this week’s nutrient dense salad:

That’s chopped sweet potato, massaged kale, white beans, marinated and dehydrated broccoli and fennel, and zucchini dressing.

With that, I’m off to get some editing, reading, and more logistical planning done before the week begins. I’ll be back soon. In the meantime, wish me luck!!

xo

What’s in a Name?

Happy weekend!

Those were some absolutely stellar responses to my post on reconciling veganism with intuitive eating! For those of you who commented early on, go back and check out some of the conversations that emerged in the comments section: really rad stuff.

Yesterday, my sweet friend Angela tweeted me to ask how my name is pronounced — like “Gina” or like “Jenna?” She was making a how-to video on her vegan overnight oats (which you should all watch) and she’d pronounced my name like “Gina.” The back and forth sent off a flurry of tweets from surprised readers; apparantly, most of you have thought of me as a “Gina” all this time! Well, I hate to break it to you, dear readers, but my name is most definitely pronounced like “Jenna.” I know the spelling is misleading–the only other Gena I know who’s pronounced like “Jenna” is Gena Rowlands–but there it is!

For the record, it’s short for Eugenia. Unfortunately. (Thanks, Mom and Dad.)

However you’d like to think of me–as a Gena, a Gina, a Jenna, or even Eugenia–I hope you think of me when you see food like this:

That’s zucchini pasta served over mixed greens with bell pepper, half an avocado, red pepper marinara sauce, and leftover roast kabocha squash. In other words, heaven on a placemat.

I’d forgotten how much I love to mush avocado into my zucchini pasta and marinara sauce–it makes the bowl so much creamier and rich. Yum! I think that signature meals like this are probably easier to remember than my short, yet confusing name, no?

I hope you’re enjoying a great start to the long weekend, friends. This is my last respite before a very busy two months descend, so I’m trying to prepare for the road ahead and get a little R&R in, too. I’ll be back soon–in the meantime, happy Memorial Day weekend!

xo

Reconciling Veganism with Intuitive Eating

Happy almost Friday! I knew you’d get a kick out of the kale chips; I just so happen to have munched on some with my lunch.

About a month ago, my client and fellow blogger Sarah posed a particularly insightful question to me, which I wanted to share with the rest of you. She wrote,

My next question is about cognitive dissonance. Since reading Intuitive Eating, I have thought a lot about this idea that food is neither good nor bad (i.e. Make peace with food: food is not the enemy, and there is no “bad” food). I agree, but I struggle with this concept as a vegan. My reasons for being vegan range from the environment to animal rights to health, and to me…it is impossible to remove the label of “good” and “bad” entirely from foods when my food choices are related my ethics. Just to be clear, on a conscious level I don’t feel that I am denying myself pleasure by eating a vegan diet.

However, food has a ton of meaning as a vegan. Just as someone could say to someone who is overly concerned with fashion that “clothes are just clothes,” I would say that clothes are so much more – they represent class, wealth or poverty, oppression of others (in sweat shops), etc. Maybe that makes me a bit of a drag, but I think that I am having a hard time letting go of the meaning – and, consequently, the obsession – of food, when it is so intertwined with my ethics…Do you have any advice on this (i.e. how I can remove value judgments from food whilst still being true to my ethics by being a vegan)?

I thought that this was a brilliant question. It was also a hard question, and I spent a few days mulling over my answer. Before I share it with you, I should note that while there are many things about Intuitive Eating that I like, I don’t agree with it in its entirety. I take some lessons from it, and leave others behind. Like any approach, it can be taken to an extreme, and can breed its own pressures toward orthodoxy.

Here’s what I responded to Sarah, along with some subsequent thoughts:

To me (and I think to the authors of Intuitive Eating), the meaning of “bad” with regard to food is not so much environmental or health-related, but way of describing of that food’s psychological impact. So, once upon a time, “bad” foods were foods that made me feel bad. They were foods that made me feel guilty and self-loathing; most of all, they were foods that made me feel dirty. (To this day, I have trouble using the expression “clean” with regard to eating or food, simply because the converse is “dirty,” and I never like to think of food that way.)

Getting beyond this way of thinking took time. In essence, I had to come to terms with the fact that there is simply no food that I can or will eat that will make me a bad person. I mean this sincerely: even if I were to walk to McDonald’s right now and eat a big Mac, I don’t think I’d suddenly be a bad human being—a gluttonous or dirty or uncontrollable one. It would be unlike me, given my preferences and ways of thinking, and if I were to do it again, and again, and again, it would be a “bad” habit in the sense that I would be perpetuating a contradiction between the way I behave and the way I think and feel. I don’t like hypocrisy, and I don’t court it. But a single meal, a single moment? It wouldn’t make me question my own value. I would regret it and not repeat it, but it would not make me turn on myself.

No single meal will lessen my perception of my self worth. Two weeks ago, I was at a very important work dinner, and there were no vegan options. So when I asked, the waiter brought me a vegetable terrine that was supposed to be vegan. After a few hungry bites, I realized it had butter in it. So what did I do? I ate the other things on my plate, and told the waiter politely that I was fairly sure that butter had been in the dish, and that he should never let the kitchen serve it as a vegan option. He said he wouldn’t.

Was I a “bad” person for digging in before I realized? Should I have thrown it up, or obsessed over it? Some vegans might have, but I didn’t. It was a few bites of buttery vegetables — butter that I didn’t intend to eat, and which I didn’t purchase with my own money. I did the responsible thing in telling the wait staff not to serve it to other vegans, and I moved on. I wish the dish had been vegan, because I would have enjoyed it in its entirety! But the food wasn’t “bad” in the sense that it could single-handedly make me feel bad about myself. It simply wasn’t what I wanted, or would choose.

I think it can be helpful to draw a distinction between choice and obligation. I titled my blog, in part, to suggest this: I find that eating raw foods (whether habitually, or once in a while), vegan foods, organic foods, and local foods are all exercises of free will and choice. If we are lucky, we have options of things to eat, and the power to make an impact with our spending as consumer. We get to consider what makes our bodies feel good, and we get to choose which foods we believe are worthy of fiscal support. I don’t purchase meat for a confluence of reasons: I don’t like it, I don’t think it’s environmentally friendly, I don’t think it’s compassionate, and I don’t think it’s good for my health. I choose not to eat it because I don’t need or want to, and because I believe my money as a consumer is better spent on other things.

This is a choice I make, not because I think that meat (or other animal products) could single-handedly make “bad,” but because I have the option of living without it, and that option feels superior to me than living with it. The avoidance isn’t to stave off guilt or self-hatred, nor is it a superstitious, quasi-religious fear of “dirty” food. It’s a choice, born of being informed, empowered, and lucky enough to have dining options I prefer.

In the end, I think my main point is this: saying that you will categorically avoid a certain food can in some ways mimic the self-limitation and restriction and good/bad thinking of disordered eating. But it is not necessarily the same. Whether or not it is the same depends entirely on one’s mentality, and not on the avoidance itself. What’s ultimately important is whether or not you are making a choice that is wholehearted and based upon deep personal conviction (and pleasure, too). If you’re avoiding a food or groups of foods because of paranoia, self-loathing, or fear of guilt, then perhaps you should reevaluate the avoidance. But if you’re doing it because it feels right to you – both in terms of health and in terms of ethics – then I’d say you ought to applaud yourself for being proactive and conscious, rather than worry that you’re being un-intuitive.

Human beings are instinctual creatures, which is why the idea of eating intuitively is so appealing. But we are also thinking creatures, and we have the power to make distinctions between things we do and don’t want based on our beliefs. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it’s an exertion of our own capacity for rational thinking and measured decision making.

After I wrote this, it occurred to me that this reasoning can definitely be applied to ethical positions that aren’t vegan. For example, I have friends who are omnivores, but who take a tough stance about eating local and organic, which means that they’re frequently excluding  certain foods from their diets at certain times of the year. Would they be “bad” people for occasionally eating conventional produce, or GMO crops, or for eating out of season? No—they’d only be eating in a way that’s out of harmony with their ideals. And they’d probably choose differently at the next meal.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this. How do you settle the “cognitive dissonance” between avoiding moral terminology when it comes to food, and making food choices that are sometimes specialized or exclusive?

With that “food for thought” (he he), I wish you all a great afternoon!

xo

(Top image (c) selfmadescholar.com)

Tomato Tahini Kale Chips

Wow! I’m so glad that you’re as into salad dressings (and the nutrient dense salads they help to create) as I am. I’ve spent the week using my tomato tahini dressing up in various ways, and enjoying them all!

One of my favorite applications so far is to use the dressing as a marinade for kale chips. Most rawcurious eaters (and many non-curious ones, too!) have experimented with kale chips before. I was actually late to jump on the kale chip bandwagon, when I played around with Averie’s kale chips in Florida. Now that I’ve discovered them, I’ve prepared them in various ways: raw and cooked, dressed up and plain. It had never occurred to me to use tahini on my kale chips, but on Monday, as I dove into a bowl of massaged raw kale and tomato tahini dressing at lunchtime, I thought “why not?” Luckily, I had some kale that was about to lose its freshness in the fridge, and plenty of dressing.

The “recipe”? Easy. Wash, chop, and spin a very small bunch of curly kale (or half a bunch of large kale). Make sure it’s quite dry. Then, cover it in 1/4 cup tomato tahini dressing and massage it with your hands till its evenly coated. Load it onto a dehydrator tray, and dehydrate it for 8 hours or so. When it’s done, it should look like this (sorry for the blurry photo!):

And they’ll smell nice and tangy.

The finished product:

I’ve found some kale chip recipes to be very heavy; others are far too plain (namely, the ones that only involve oil and sea salt). These are a perfect in between: decidedly flavorful, but not overly heavy or salty. Yum! If you don’t have a dehydrator, never fear: you can stick them in an oven that’s on low (about 200 or 250) for an hour or two. Test them, and if they need more time, put them back in the oven till crispy!

There’s nothing I love more than recipes that can double up in applications: dressings that can be marinades; soups that can be dips; raw “rice” that can be a stuffing or a salad topper–you get the idea!

Hope you try the dressing–and these chips–very soon! I can’t wait to hear what you think I’ll be back soon!

xo

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