What do my Whole Foods Lunches & Dinners look like?
It seems like the main proteins I usually reach for are eggs or beans. For me, both are easy to digest and aren't extremely concentrated proteins, so they help my body stay in balance.
It seems like the main proteins I usually reach for are eggs or beans. For me, both are easy to digest and aren't extremely concentrated proteins, so they help my body stay in balance.
In the fridge, I’ve always got a pot of beans with sea veggies, and a pot of brown rice (or millet or buckwheat, etc) to use as the base of most of my weekly meals. When I need a quick, nutrient-packed meal, it’s so easy to just mix some of this pre-made beans & grain together in a saucepan, and then warm them up on low heat while I’m washing & chopping some veggies to toss into the pan or steam on the side. During the warmer months, I’ll fix a salad instead of cooking my veggies, as raw veggies are cooling to the body.
Right now (fall), I’ve been loving the yam, winter squash, brussel’s sprouts, green beans, and purple kale I find at my farmer’s market. I usually steam the veggies, layering the chopped root veggies on the bottom of the steamer basket to steam for a few minutes, and then adding the less-dense veggies into the pot. When they’re done, I’ll toss them into a bowl and drizzle them with lemon juice & olive oil. I’ll then eat my warm beans & rice on the side, or I’ll dump them right on top of the veggies. Diced avocado (and possibly ripe tomato) as a garnish on top of everything, is always delicious. And, about once a week, or when I'm feeling like I need some more dense protein, I’ll warm up some leftover meat to have with this, or I’ll sprinkle some raw goat cheddar on top. YUM!
When Don & I make a dinner together, we often opt for the taco format, which is so wonderfully versatile. We’ll start by washing & dicing veggies and then cooking them into either scrambled eggs, or adding them to our pre-made beans. We use organic corn tortillas (I like Mi Rancho and Food For Life sprouted corn tortillas). Whether it’s black bean tacos, grass fed beef tacos, or scrambled egg tacos, we always prepare a big salad to go alongside our meal, and a plateful of chopped cilantro, tomato, homemade kraut, lime & avocado. Yum! Oh! And we usually drizzle Don’s amazing lemon-tahini salad dressing on top of our tacos...Double Yum!
Over the weekend, we baked an organic heritage chicken with red potatoes, carrots, yellow onion, celery, whole cloves of garlic, and rosemary. It was delicious, and we had chicken & veggie leftovers for two more meals! We saved the drippings, and couple of days later, we warmed up this rich stock and pureed it with steamed carrot, green beans & kale for a deeply satisfying soup! We also made stock with the bones, which we then used as a base for a less-rich, butternut squash soup. Awesome resourcefulness, right? Just like our ancestors did...
Stir-steamed seasonal veggies are another staple dish for dinner at our house. I call it a stir-steam because it’s a stir fry with about a cup of water added. This water does 3 wonderful things in a stir fry; it keeps the oil temperature lower so trans fats aren’t formed, it steams the dark leafy greens at the end, and it creates a beautiful sauce in the bottom of the pan with the ground spices, herbs, fat, and soy sauce, which can be ladled onto warm brown rice, quinoa, or millet for a fantastic flavor element! We often use organic shitake or crimini mushrooms in our stir-steams, especially when we want a meat-like richness in our meal, but we want to keep it vegetarian. The stir-steam format is excitingly versatile!
Sometimes, when we're tired of our usual dishes, we’ll flip through the pages of some of our favorite cookbooks like The Moosewood Cookbook, Nourishing Traditions, The Self-Healing Cookbook, or a cookbook by our new favorite Japanese chef Harumi Kurihara. We’ll find a recipe we have most of the ingredients for, and we'll see if we can ad-lib the rest, which is usually a lot of fun, but sometimes the dish turns out less than amazingly delicious. It's nearly always edible, so the food is rarely wasted when we're trying something different. I believe that experimenting in the kitchen is very important to broadening our culinary skills and knowledge.
When Don & I make a dinner together, we often opt for the taco format, which is so wonderfully versatile. We’ll start by washing & dicing veggies and then cooking them into either scrambled eggs, or adding them to our pre-made beans. We use organic corn tortillas (I like Mi Rancho and Food For Life sprouted corn tortillas). Whether it’s black bean tacos, grass fed beef tacos, or scrambled egg tacos, we always prepare a big salad to go alongside our meal, and a plateful of chopped cilantro, tomato, homemade kraut, lime & avocado. Yum! Oh! And we usually drizzle Don’s amazing lemon-tahini salad dressing on top of our tacos...Double Yum!
Over the weekend, we baked an organic heritage chicken with red potatoes, carrots, yellow onion, celery, whole cloves of garlic, and rosemary. It was delicious, and we had chicken & veggie leftovers for two more meals! We saved the drippings, and couple of days later, we warmed up this rich stock and pureed it with steamed carrot, green beans & kale for a deeply satisfying soup! We also made stock with the bones, which we then used as a base for a less-rich, butternut squash soup. Awesome resourcefulness, right? Just like our ancestors did...
Stir-steamed seasonal veggies are another staple dish for dinner at our house. I call it a stir-steam because it’s a stir fry with about a cup of water added. This water does 3 wonderful things in a stir fry; it keeps the oil temperature lower so trans fats aren’t formed, it steams the dark leafy greens at the end, and it creates a beautiful sauce in the bottom of the pan with the ground spices, herbs, fat, and soy sauce, which can be ladled onto warm brown rice, quinoa, or millet for a fantastic flavor element! We often use organic shitake or crimini mushrooms in our stir-steams, especially when we want a meat-like richness in our meal, but we want to keep it vegetarian. The stir-steam format is excitingly versatile!
Sometimes, when we're tired of our usual dishes, we’ll flip through the pages of some of our favorite cookbooks like The Moosewood Cookbook, Nourishing Traditions, The Self-Healing Cookbook, or a cookbook by our new favorite Japanese chef Harumi Kurihara. We’ll find a recipe we have most of the ingredients for, and we'll see if we can ad-lib the rest, which is usually a lot of fun, but sometimes the dish turns out less than amazingly delicious. It's nearly always edible, so the food is rarely wasted when we're trying something different. I believe that experimenting in the kitchen is very important to broadening our culinary skills and knowledge.
About once a week or so, when we don’t feel adventurous in the kitchen or inspired, we’ll get in the car and go eat at one of our favorite, affordable restaurants like Taco Temple, or Taco de Mexico. When we do go out to eat, we don’t worry about how organic or unprocessed everything is. We make fairly healthy decisions in choosing from the menu, and then we simply enjoy our meal....deeply!
