Breathing through it all

Happy Monday! I hope that everyone had a good weekend. It went quickly for me and was a lot more hectic than planned, hence the title breathing through it all!

I had my yoga teacher training this past weekend.  It meets once a month and is usually two, ten-hour days of yoga study, history, practice, philosophy, learning to teach with assists and adjustments, and an immersion in self discovery and abundance of amazing people.  As you may imagine these are full weekends and while exhilarating they leave me feeling quite exhausted.  This weekend had a twist however, a very sick dog.

I was up all night on Friday with Othello who was not a happy camper.  He usually likes to be a crazy pug and looks something like this:

I was concerned about leaving him along all day on Saturday and as luck would have it my parents and close friends who could help me out weren’t available.  I decided I would have to come home at lunch and if things weren’t good I was going to take him to the vet.  Well guess what….things weren’t good!  We hopped into the car and off to the vet we went.  Two hours later I found out he had a bacterial infection.  There are a couple of ways he could have gotten it; either from eating something that only dogs would eat or as an overgrowth of this naturally occurring bacteria.  I may be guilty of feeding him people food from time to time (i.e. a lot!) and something like that could have aggravated his system.  I actually hadn’t been feeling well all week and I am wondering about a cantaloupe as the culprit.  Ever since I stopped eating it I felt fine.  Hmmmm….  I am happy to report

I am happy to report Othello is doing much better and after a night of this:

He is back to he spunky self!

Sadly I don’t have any new recipes to share.  As I have mentioned before I am a rather new cook and I don’t do well at following recipes.  I tend to start out with a recipe and then make my own modifications.   Sometimes that turns out well, but I have yet to really develop a cooking intuition and last week the cooking goods and I were not too aligned.  I had a craving for root vegetable or zucchini pancakes and tried on three different occasions to make them.  Each one?  FAIL!

Attempt 1:Starting out with zucchini, parsnips, sweet potatoes, garbanzo flour, baking powder (I should have used baking soda),

olive oil, flax meal, and salt.

 

Using my awesome new mandoline!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fail #1

Attempt #2:  No pictures, but this time I attempted to use zucchini and red beets.

Attempt #3: Starting out with zucchini, parsnips, quinoa flour, baking soda, olive oil, flax meal, dulse flakes, thyme,and salt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I will spare you the aftermath.  Perhaps zucchini is too watery?  On the last attempt I really tried to pat the water out of the zucchini, but I don’t think it worked.  I think I will survive without zucchini pancakes.  Besides I have my eye on some other yummy recipes!

Enjoy your day and I leave you with a learning from the weekend courtesy of Laurel Hodory, my yoga mentor:

How you treat yourself and the things you say to yourself are a reflection of how you lead your life and the manner in which you appear to the world.

This is an excellent reminder to carry yourself with compassion both on the mat and as you step off the mat, bringing your practice out into the world.

A Yummy Spirit Sandwich

This is just a quick post to encourage you to stop on over at the blog of a good friend of mine.  She has some great thoughts on food, body image, healthy eating, the politics of food, and really listening to our bodies.  Here is a link to the site, Spirit Sandwich.  I’ve known Sarah since 5th grade (18 years?) when we developed a friendship centered around a love of The X-files, David Duchovny, Weathers Originals, Chinese food, and spending time chatting up others in the new AOL chat rooms.  Sarah is an amazing women who has overcome a lot of inner struggle and is at last truly living the life she deserves.

Spicy Spring

I have been experimenting a lot with of new recipes and have come up with a few tasty new delights as well as my fair share of failures.  Real cooking is fairly new to me as most of my previous experience in the kitchen was spent eating sandwiches, boring salads, using the microwave, or pretty much avoiding eating or any relationship with food by ingesting lots of “fake foods” (sugar-free jello, yogurts, light products, diet soda AKA the devil,etc.)  Cooking from scratch using whole foods has become an enjoyable and incredibly stress reliving activity for me.  As I’ve mentioned before food is slowly becoming a welcome aspect of my life rather than the enemy that I will do anything to avoid.

Over the weekend I made a delicious Coconut Curry Kale Stew that was way too yummy to keep to myself.  I brought it over to my parents house and made them dinner using this accompanied by raw hummus, a big salad, and a minor salvaged recipe failure of pitas turned pita crackers.

Coconut Curry Kale Stew

Print me!

Serves 4-6

• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t chili powder
• 1/2 t cumin
• 1/4 t nutmeg
• 1 t curry
• 4 cups vegetable broth
• One 14 oz. can light coconut milk
• One 14 oz. can diced organic fire-roasted tomatoes (I used Trader Joe’s)
• One 14 oz. can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed (Alternatively 3/4 cup dried beans and kombu)
• 2 cups organic kale, de-stemmed and sliced into pieces
• salt and pepper to taste

I wanted to really cook from scratch so I started out using dried garbanzo beans that I let soak overnight.  I used 3/4 cup of dried beans so I double the amount of water to 1 1/2 cups.

In the morning I added the beans to a stove pot along with a 3 inch piece of kombu.  Kombu is a sea vegetable that contains glutamic acid which helps to tenderize and breakdown the indigestible sugars in beans.  It also is a great source of trace minerals!  You can get kombu in the Asian section of almost any grocery store.

Bring the beans to a boil and then reduce to a simmer, cooking for about 1.5 -2 hours or until the beans can be easily mashed on the roof of your mouth.   1 1/2 cups of cooked beans is equal to one 14 ounce can of store-bought beans.

 

 

Now onto the actual soup!  Place all ingredients, except kale into a medium stockpot.  Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 20-30 minutes.  It is a good idea to buy spices in bulk.  Look at all those fabulous spices!

 

 

 

While this is cooking prepare the kale by washing, de-stemming, and slicing into strips.

 

 

 

 

Don’t forget to have some fun while doing so by playing with the kitchen help!  (He looks scruffy because he just had a bath and refuses to get dried off.  He eats the towel!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now add the kale in a cook for an additional 10 minutes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve!

I’m back!

It has been quite a while since my last post, but as Spring has finally sprung it is time for an update!

I have been spending the past few weeks doing something called the Elimination Diet.  This isn’t a typically weight loss, get strong, lose fat, etc type of diet, as I don’t need those in my life, but rather a healing diet for unresolved food sensitivities and intolerance.  I’ve struggled with food sensitivities my whole life, some pre-eating disorder and some as a result of years of the abuse.  Unlike food allergies, there isn’t any type of blood test to identify them for sure.  There are some experimental blood tests, but none of these are accepted as accurate by traditional medicine or covered by health insurance.  Thus, with the support of family, friends, and professionals the Elimination Diet has been the way to go for me.

A traditional Elimination Diet starts out with only being able to eat lamb, rice, and pears.  I didn’t want to go this route and with a lot of research I came across this method.  I modified it a bit as well and also kept in all type of nuts since I know those aren’t part of my problem.  The results of the diet thus far have been amazing! I haven’t had a stomach ache or associated type of problem since I started it, my energy is higher, my skin is improved, I’m actually getting hungry, my yoga practice  has improved dramatically, I am off Prilosec and heartburn free and an old running injury is no longer hurting!

While the physical results have been more than exciting, I have seen a huge shift in my view of food as the enemy to viewing food as a tool for healing.  I’m having fun cooking new recipes and not worried about how much I’m eating, instead focusing on how I feel.  I am at the point in the diet where I am starting to add some types of foods back in such as the more reactive types of vegetables such as  eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes, as well as all types of beans.  I could also be adding soy and animal protein back in but as of right now I am not planning on it.  I am pretty sure soy is a culprit and I love not eating animals.  I may add fish in as something that I can eat when I am out, but I don’t want it at home.

In a couple of weeks I really will start to test things by adding the major allergens back in: oats, gluten, yeast, dairy, eggs, and corn.  I am pretty sure that gluten is going to be an issue and I might leave that out as well for now.  It is possible that over time some of the sensitivities may resolve themselves, but right now I want to focus on healing.

I want to share an amazing cookie recipe I made this past weekend.  I know it has chocolate in it, but I’ve kept that in too in moderations as long as it is vegan.  I found the recipe online here but changed a few things around.  Enjoy!

ALMOND BUTTER CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Vegan, soy, corn, and gluten free

Yields 16 cookies

1/3 cup packed pitted medjool dates

1/2 large banana

1/4 cup hot water

1/4 cup flax oil

1/4 cup agave nectar

1/4 cup ground flax seeds

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 cup almond butter (I used raw crunchy)

1 cup quinoa flour (Ancient Harvest brand)

1/2 cup almond meal

3/4 teaspoon baking soda (Make sure it is gluten-free.  If is doesn’t say it is then it probably isn’t!)

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

1 large vegan chocolate bar, ground

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease a cookies sheet with flax oil.

Place the pitted dates, banana, and water in a blender and soak for 5 minutes.  Add flax oil and agave nectar and blend until smooth, about 1 minute.

Transfer date-oil mixture to a medium-sized mixing bowl and add ground flax-seed and vanilla; beat or stir until combined.  Add almond butter and beat again.

Sprinkle the quinoa, almond meal, baking soda, and salt over the almond butter mixture, beat again until well combined.

Drop dough by large spoonful onto the cookies sheet and press each down to flatten.  Bake for 10-12 minutes.  Remove with a thin spatula to cool.  The cookies are fragile when hot, but hold together after cooling.  Make sure to save some dough for eating as it is very tasty too!

 

Life is laughing

Life has been a bit chaotic as of late, laughing at me as I wait for the punch line.  I was in a yoga class the other day with my mentor, Laurel Hodory and towards the end of class she shared a beautiful poem that I continually find myself returning to and want to share:

Each Note

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.
I’ll show you how it’s enough.

Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.
Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes!

Sing loud!

–Rumi

 

Welcome!

Yoga.  Food.  Life.  A triangle, inexorably linked.  This blog will chronicle the three.

I returned yesterday from the Yoga Journal conference in San Francisco, which was an INCREDIBLE few days full of transformations, both physical and mental.  In a manner very fitting to me the conference began with a full day intensive with Baron Baptiste, a master of Power Yoga and culminated in a full day workshop about the Yoga of Food with Darshana Weill, a holistic health coach and counselor.  I returned back to Columbus motivated and excited about fully embracing and deepening a few aspects of my life and ultimately decided to create this blog.

Yoga.  I came to yoga a couple of years ago as another form of physical activity, but over the past year have come to discover that it holds so much more and that the asana, or physical practice, is just one component, and is greatly magnified in our western culture.  Yoga has brought so much to me on a very personal level and my ultimate goal is to teach others how to discover this gift.  I am beginning a yoga teacher training with Laurel Hodory at the end of January and will be fully certified as a 200 RYT by the end of 2011.

Food.  A generally silent, but still huge focus of my life.  If you have come to know me over the past year you may not be aware of this fact, but if you already knew me then you may remember this.  Since I stopped writing the blog last March a lot has happened and changed, some setbacks, but most that has occured has been postive and my life is a world of difference from back then.  This new blog is going to focus on how yoga helps me to learn to listen to my body and continue working towards a healthier relationship with food and to escape from the mind game it can become.

Life.  Everything in between.