Health
New Cookbook + New Veg Life
Although I adore cooking with my iPad and love getting recipes for free from food blogs, sometimes you just want a nice big cookbook to hold and flip through. My New Roots is one of my favorite whole foods blogs, but to be honest I had just been getting her recipes on feedly and hadn’t thought much of it. But when I saw her cookbook at the bookstore and flipped through it I thought dang, this girl gets it. I haven’t even made any recipes yet and I am in love with it. She included soaking times for beans and legumes, how to sprout them, and most importantly, most recipes don’t have nuts or dates in them. Praise the Lord! You have no idea how hard it is to eat (partly) vegetarian and gluten-free when you are allergic to all the good stuff!
Springtime Juice Cleanse & Ten Whole Foods I'm Excited to Eat
I finished the cleanse! It was surprisingly easily. Mostly because I didn't have to think for one second about what to eat for three days: just open the fridge and knock back a bottle. The juices were delicious (although one was more of a shake made of raspberries and was kind of like drinking sludge) and I have made a juice every day since the cleanse ended. Juicing is way easier and pleasant now, for some reason before I cut everything up too much before and it took forever. But it's really not a big deal when you'll got a stock pile of veggie leftovers and surplus apples hanging around. I researched some of the local farms that offer CSA boxes (the best idea I've ever heard of really) and I missed the deadline for the one I wanted, so I'll have to do some more searching. But there are all kinds of farmer's markets and visitable farms around here that I didn't know about until now (as well as a half-built Whole Foods that torments me every day that it isn't finished yet) and I plan on descending on all of them and making off with their shiny, gorgeous, crispy, tasty, produce. Also, going down near the Gulf to get fresh seafood. There aren't words in any language to describe how I feel about good seafood. THERE IS NO GREATER GIFT FOR YOUR STOMACH.
Except of course the silky golden nectar that floats down your gullet when you juice some fresh vegetables and fruit. I had never tried fennel before and it smells licorice-y and WONDERFUL and why did I give up on juicing before? Celery is one of the best smelling veggies you can put near your snoot, and parsley makes juices taste irresistibly fresh. It doesn't take as long as I remember (not even cleaning all the parts in between juice types) and my juicers does a crazy good job. Ah, well. I know now. Soon it will be summer and there will be incredibly fresh, in-season tomatoes and cucumbers all over the place and in my tummbly.
Now that I've gotten back to eating nice things, there are lots of things I'm excited to eat. Eating super healthy is really fun because it's new, and there are all kinds of different and better ways to feed yourself than before. Most of the time, too, health food tastes a million times better. Have you ever had raw honey? Go wrap your lips around that.
Ahem. Ten Whole Foods I'm Excited to Eat:
- Quinoa. It cooks faster than most gluten-free grains (the brown rice I have says cook for 50 minutes? What's going on?!) and actually tastes like something.
- Artichokes. Just don't braise them in a bunch of wine and an overripe lemon that will ruin the entire dish and send you into a severe food rage.
- Butternut Squash. You can just sauté it in coconut oil, add salt, garlic, and curry powder, and you will try to lick the pan but DON'T because it's hot and you'll burn.
- Chickpeas. Canned wild sardines go in most of my salads, and chickpeas taste amazing when covered in sardine olive oil from the can. And some ras el hanout spices. Seriously, so get yourself some of that. It has rose petals in it.
- Blackberries/raspberries. I love love love having berries around to snack on but they go bad quickly so you have to strategically plan your snacking and/or put them in your Hello Kitty lunch box for the next day.
- Cashews. I'm allergic to tree nuts but cashews are actually a seed. Of course every healthy recipe calls for walnuts or almonds or something, but cashews usually do the trick.
- Carrots. Carrot juice is really sweet and you can make your own V8 or apple-carrot-ginger juice (and put a crazy amount of ginger so it literally slaps your tongue in the face).
- Broccoli. It likes to be roasted and thrown in udon noodle soups, but also stinks up the kitchen at work when you reheat it.
- Cucumbers. After a slightly traumatic experience with "raw cucumber soup" from another detox, I had sworn to never eat them again, but juiced cukes are a different matter. I just need some other ingredients to mellow out the cucumber-i-ness.
- Cacao. I keep forgetting to add this magical chocolatey powder into my shakes, but you can make all kinds of not-deadly desserts and snacks with it too.
I've been eating really well for the past week and I feel great! I already feel so wonderful simply because it's spring and everything is alive and happy outside. I went to a little kitchen store across from the Jesuit College and ALL the azaleas were open and crazy! I ended up driving all over town and through the fancy neighborhoods and saw azaleas everywhere. Huge, lush bushes just looming around every corner. I mean these things really look like they could eat you and no one would know where you had gone. The picture below is my favorite hot pink color, but there were also purple, coral, like pink, and white blossoms. They will only be open for a few weeks at most, but they make me so happy.
Doing the juice cleanse in spring was a great idea. I felt so optimistic and renewed about the weather that it just made sense to change my routine as well. Winter can be wonderful because you just want to stay home in your cozy bed fort, but spring makes you energized and want to go out into the world. And that includes going out and doing things for yourself. It's much easier to make a positive change in your life when you feel positive, especially since in the next month or so it will be so miserably hot outside, no one will want to do anything. But for now I'm going to enjoy our brief spring (and look forward to my London trip in three weeks!) and get out and about as much as I can!
Ich trinke Saft: Juice Cleansing and German
A few posts ago I said that one of my goals was to detox every season. Spring has officially sprung here in South Louisiana (and I will soon do a post of all the absolutely gorgeous azaleas that are blooming right now) and the weather is perfect and I am exploding with sunshine and happiness. I remember reading in an alkaline diet cookbook that the best time to do a detox is when the seasons (and your body) are in transition, so seeing as it was 45 degrees yesterday morning and 70 in the afternoon, I think it's about time to spring clean my body.
The other day I watched Hungry for Change (let's hear it for Amazon Prime), a documentary about the traps of the diet industry and processed foods. There were lots of familiar faces; I recognized the man from Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead and Dr. Junger who developed the Clean program. I kind of jumped into that program without knowing what I was doing so I ended up quitting it early, but when I was doing it right I felt amazing. I lost about 15 pounds of water weight in two and a half weeks, and my skin looked great. Anyway, I was already familiar with a lot of the things that they talked about in the documentary but there were also some mind-blowing moments that reminded me I need to get on better track with eating healthy (double doozies are no longer my friends). I eat way healthier than I used to but lately I've been bingeing on Reese's for no good reason. What convinced me the most was that they were all promoting juice cleanses; I have a juicer but it's a lot of trouble to use more than casually. Then I remembered that I had seen some ready-made cleanse packages online that were super expensive, but when I looked again and figured in the work, expense, and time that juicing for three whole days would take, I figured I couldn't put a price on my health.
So I've decided to start the Urban Remedy Signature Cleanse, which looks delicious (and the site looks legit: anyone who is that thorough and that design-minded gets my vote). I'll start with a three-day one and I'm sure it will be crazy helpful, even if I might have to be a hermit for the weekend. This weekend is the perfect time for a cleanse; it's unreasonably beautiful outside and I will probably want to spend lots of time just wandering outside the convent in town leering at their azalea bushes (and maybe go poke around that herbalist's shop). I also found a juice bar nearby that I'm dying to try out. My kit should come in the mail tomorrow and there will definitely be a post-cleanse post next week; I'll be sure to take pictures, write down how I'm feeling, and let you know how the juices taste. I'm excited!
And if you're wondering what the deal is with the title, it's that I found this awesome language app called Duolingo, and I started learning German. Learning a new language wasn't one of my goals for this year but I've always always wanted to learn German so I went for it. Duolingo is completely free, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to use. There's an adorable owl coach (above!) that reminds you to practice every day based on how fast you want to progress (and you can change his outfits too). You can use on your computer or other device and you only have to practice a little every day. It also has French, which I desperately need to improve, and I'm sure I'll have to read a few more languages for design history/traveling around Europe. If I learned anything on my Europe trip in college it's that central Europeans probably speak German. The "Holy Roman Empire" left quite a legacy; we visited Hungary, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Austria and Germany, and if German wasn't their first language it was one of their secondary ones. Not so in France, where the Frenchiness is VERY FRENCH and if you don't speak French then good day to you, sir.
All kinds of new things happening for spring! I love spring. ❤
The Year of Eve
I got in. I got into the Royal College of Art. I'm going to live in London for two years and study history of design. Please excuse me while I scream loudly in another room because LITERALLY ALL MY DREAMS HAVE COME TRUE! There has never been any person in the history of the universe that is as happy as I am right now. I have my victory song picked out and I plan on blowing out my speakers with it later on. And yes, it is Daft Punk.
Now that my happy happy news is out and about, I feel great: partly because I have a great near future ahead of me, and partly because I promised myself that this would be The Year of Eve. The Year of Eve is meant to be the exact opposite of The Three Years After College When I Did Nothing and Complained About My Life To Anyone Who Would Listen. At some point this past October I realized that no one was going to jump-start my life except me, and I started volunteering at the art museum and began the RCA application. Now I have a part time job at the museum and a two year MA program to look forward to. It's amazing what you can do if you start small with baby steps, and have some kind of plan in place for yourself (and a Plan B). This January I did what everyone does (and then throws away); I made a resolution list. Well, it's more of a poster. And now looking at the word poster I think I will turn it into one...
Anyway, I made a list of really reasonable things to do this year/every month/every season. It worked out pretty well for me last year since I did go to London, watched Star Trek Into Darkness and started a (failed) blog. This year I decided I was tired of sitting around waiting for thing to happen to me, and instead I want to go out into the world and do all the things. But I didn't want to set myself up for failure, so I made two really big goals and a lot of smaller ones (so I felt like I accomplished something):
1) Four detoxes. I read somewhere that you should detox your body every season to flush out all the toxins. This time I won't try to be hardcore and jump into the Clean program cold turkey.
2) Twelve books. Reading one book per month doesn't sound like much, but I can never find ones that I like. I do have a Goodreads account, and it's good for keeping track of what you want to read (you can even scan barcodes of books to save to your little bookshelf on your phone--we are living in the future).
3) Lose 50lbs. I am almost halfway there. I've lost 22 pounds running so far and even though it's been rough lately with all the Reese's eggs peeping at you around corners at CVS, I think I can reach my goal well before the end of the year.
4) Natural beauty. In 2008 my friend brought me to a Sephora for the first time, and since then I have built up a rat hoard of luxury beauty products. But most of them are full of chemicals and they're CRAZY expensive, so I've decided that when I run out of something this year, it will be replaced with a natural version (or something I make myself from Henry Happened: that woman is a genius).
5) Mint. I. Need. To. Stay. On. BUDGET.
6) New City. It was either London or Houston and I think we know who won.
7) 5K. I haven't run a race yet (I was in England when my running group ran theirs) but I can run for five miles nonstop, which I think is pretty impressive for someone who prayed for death when I had to run a lap in P.E. Also, half-marathon training really shows you how having a plan makes reaching your goal not scary.
8) Thank You Notes. Nothing is better than receiving a hand-written letter in the mail, unless it's a cute little thank you card saying how awesome you are for that thing you did.
9) Buy from Etsy. There are lots of really unique handmade shops on there, and since I am unbearably picky I can usually find something there when I can't in regular stores.
10) Draw from books. A while back I got some super cute How to Draw books for animals, dresses, plants, and people. I just like to draw cute things and make my planner happy.
11) (how stupid is it that I have eleven things and not ten) Green/Aveda tea. I must have been tired at this point in the poster process. Basically I need to buy my yearly bottle of Aveda tea (the best tea you will ever drink in your life) and drink less English Breakfast.
So I've done pretty well so far; there are still some tiny things I can do that I haven't gotten around to. I might even make some new goals for myself this year. Although I don't think I can top moving to England and studying in the coolest program ever. In the best city. At the most amazing museum.
AAH! ❤❤❤
I think I run now
I christen this post, a running post.
I'm weirdly embarrassed when people give me encouragement for my current half marathon training, because they might be confused if I tell them I was inspired by Sandra Bullock's thighs in Gravity. If you've seen the movie, you'll remember the scene where she gets into the little cruiser thing and rips off her space suit and just kind of floats there, and you really can't focus on anything except how huge her legs are and the fact that she could probably beat down anyone who looked at her wrong. I could write a whole other blog post about her badass character (and I probably will) but really I was surprised because I always thought of Bullock as thin and wispy. But something about that role in particular just screamed, if you got off your booty you could be scary too. And that is ultimately my goal in life; to be so envied that I am literally terrifying. But in a good way.
So, after that I decided to finally join a gym and start working out. Years of run/walking in the miserable Louisiana heat in middle and high school P.E. had put me off running, so I avoided the treadmills like the plague. But then I thought it might be a good idea in case I moved somewhere that a gym would be either too expensive or too much trouble, and I could just run outside without having to pay for it. I downloaded Runkeeper (which is amazing) and did one of their Beginner to 5K training plans, and in several weeks I could run for 15 minutes instead of 30 seconds. I had been going to Anytime Fitness, and the manager mentioned that she and some other girls were starting a running group to train for a half marathon. I wasn't sure about the race itself, but I thought I might enjoy running with other people so I started the Hal Higdon Novice 1 plan. Right now I'm at the end of Week 5, and for the past two weeks I've actually been able to run five miles without stopping. It may be super slow running, but I did it! I still can't believe this is my life.
Until recently I've been the kind of person that puts any kind of decision off for later, and makes lots of excuses when I'm scared to do something. But now that I've been eating healthy and exercising I feel like I can do anything. I'm going to use this blog to track myself (and make sure I don't fall into too deep of a workout slump). In the past year or so I have completely changed the way I eat and cook, and I want to share what I've learned with others that might want to do the same. It can be really scary to try and eat "healthy" when there are 500 million food theories and opinions flying around; no two diets agree with each other about what you should or shouldn't eat and real food is so expensive it's unreal. But trust me, once you find what works for you, you'll feel better, think better, and most likely look better.
Look forward to more training updates, food shopping hauls, travel doings, movie rambles, and things. Awesome things.
Eve <3
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