There was (and still is a little tiny bit) an identity chrisis sort-of-thing that happened when I realized that I wasn't actually that good of a cook. Like, not only could I no longer figure out anything to make, but I realized that a lot of the things I used to make took basically no skill and I was/am complete rubbísh when it comes to knowing what to do with spices.
For example, before I could whip up an openface Swedish rye bread sandwich with sliced pears, creamy blue cheese, and lingonberry sauce on top. Most people, including my former self, would have thought of this creation as pretty healthy and sort of upscale. Cue the: "Oohhh, Erika, this is soooo good; you're suuuuch a good cook!". But the truth is that it takes no more skill to make than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wonderbread. Take away my fancy bread, my blue cheese, and my jam preserves and all I'm servin' is a pear on a plate. Reality check!
And my one and only spice trick was to use nutmeg on unexpected foods. This is still a good trick by the way, but I need more than one trick pony now. I need a whole stable of trick ponies. (ONLY figuratively of course. I have tried having an actual stable full of actual ponies that we tried to train to do tricks but we all know how that worked out in the end.) Did you know that nutmeg tastes really good with cinnamon and also on kale? Now you have a trick pony too. It is also on lamb and ground beef but that's sort of irrelevant now, isn't it.
Anyway, after coming back to Denmark with lots of ideas about what I was *not* going to be eating, and some lists and diagrams of what I should be eating I atempted to construct some "meals". Poor Johnny ate some seriously dry and underspiced piles of mixed (i.e. random) vegetables those first couple of weeks. Sweet man that he is, he cleaned up his plate and told me that he loved me anyway but I had to eat that food too and it was not inspiring me to be a vegan for the rest of my life. Filling yes; Satisfying, no.
Thank god for Pinterest and the more experienced vegans who had so kindly pinned lots and lots of beautifully food-styled vegan recipes for me to peruse and re-pin. At time of writing I have 656 pins on my "Whole Foods Plant Based Recipes" board and 114 pins on my "Healthy and Healthy-ish Desserts" board. A lot of those pins are duplicats. For example, I pinned like 7 recipes for broccoli soup so I could compare recipes and come up with what I thought I would like and for the foods and spices I have access to. BUT, there are still a lot of good recipes and good inspiration (some of the recipes aren't vegan as written) there that should last for a good long while. It was a really good way to get started.
Before I get into the sharing of recipes portion of this, let me lay out the ground rules of how I am trying to eat: After seeing Forks over Knives and reading The Engine 2 Diet (which relates back to the film), I read the book Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. After the film I realized I needed to go vegan, but after reading Eat to Live I realized that I needed to do a LOT more than just stop eating animal products. What Eat to Live recomended totally made sense and I realized that while a bit "extreme" (actually it's not extreme, it's the typical western diet that's extreme) it was totally the way to go. And I figured that if other people can do it and be happy for continuing to do it, then certainly I could do it and continue to do it too.
Vegetables as the foundation! If you look at the serving recomendations (which are based on a percentage of total caloric intake), the whole grains and white potato group is listed as 20% or less of calories. Yep, you can eat basically no grains or potatoes at all and be eating properly. That's a long way from having grains, white and whole, at the base of the pyramid!
Above nuts/seeds/avocados and whole grains/white potatoes should be a dotted line because really, you don't need anything in the top two levels to survive. But the option is there. Apparently the benefits of eating less animal protein follows step in step down to about 5-10% of calories and then the data is a bit too sketchy to difinitively say with 100% certainty that 0% is better than 5% but really, go big or go home. I want to do it all the way and stop relying (read: hoping, praying) that I can still use eggs as a binder in baked goods. Just bite the bullet and get some new vegan recipes already. Am I right?
In addition to the food pyramid, Eat to Live gives a a score sheet of sorts for different foods. One of the main ideas of the book is that Health is a pruduct of what you eat, in particular to how many nutrients you eat compared to how many calories you consume. Health = Nutrients / Calories. White bread has very few nutrients and a lot of calories so it gets a very low score. Kale on the other hand has tons of nutrients but is very low in calories so it gets a very high score. Here's a brief breakdown:
100 Green Leafy Vegetables: kale, spinach, mustard greens, collard greens, swiss chard, (I would guess nettles go here too)
95 Other Green Vegetables: broccoli, asparagus,cabbage, cok choy, cabbage, green beens, peas, snap peas
50 (yeah, only 50!) Other Nutrient Dense Vegetables: mushrooms (not actually a vegetable but whatever), eggplant, zucchini, artichokes, onions, garlic, radishes
45 Fruits: blueberries, strawberries, apples, oranges, lemons, banana, etc.
40 Beans and Lentils: Black beans, navy, kidney, pinto, chickpeas, lentils (all types), lima beans, etc.
30 Nuts, Seeds, and Avocados: walnuts, almonds, pistachios, cashews, flax seeds, chia seeds, hemp seeds, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, avocados
25 Colorful Starchy Vegetables: Sweet potatoes, pumpkin, turnips
20 Whole Grains and White Potatoes: oats; buckwheat; quinoa; brown rice, wild rice, wheat; rhy; whole grain products: bread, pasta, etc; white potatoes
1 Refined oil: olive oil, canola oil, saflower oil etc.
0 Refined Sugars: honey, sucrose (table sugar), maple syrup, agave nectar
This list is only with regard to nutrient / calorie content and does not take into account factors like the effect of the food on blood glucose, the fact that animal protein is pro-cancer, or the form of the fat (i.e. unsaturated versus saturated). So within the list above there are some foods that are clearly not as healful as others in the same nutrient group. I italicized the foods that I have access to here in Denmark and that I plan to emphasize incorporating into my diet. Sadly, it's dificult to get my hands on most of the leafy greens (althogh there is a bit more variety in the autumn) but fortunately spinach (frozen and fresh) are widely available year round and kale is available frozen year round. At the other end of the spectrum, I have easy access to whole grain pastas and breads but will be making and effort to incorporate some of the healthier whole grains and eat as many of my grains in the form of actual whole grains instead of as ground into flour as possible.
My new motto is:
This is also taped to my fridge:
THIS IS WHAT YOU EAT:
4 pieces of fruit
50 grams (1.8 oz) of nuts (/seeds)
1 cup (cooked) beans (/lentils)
0.5 kg (1 pound) raw vegetables
0.5 kg (1 pound) cooked vegetables
It's not written on my refrigerator (maybe it should be?) that in that kilo of vegetables should be a big ol' plate of spinach or kale and hopefully a serving of cruciferous veg (kale [double duty!], broccoli, brussels sprouts, or cabbage) as well.
Obviously I am welcome to eat more of those things, and I am also welcome to eat colorful starchy veg (like sweet potatoes) and whole grains AS LONG AS I don't eat so much of them that there isn't room for a minimum of what is listed on that little sign. And since those are the fun things to eat, I don't really need to remember to eat enough of them, so they're not on the list.
So there you have it, this is what I am trying to base my cooking around from now on. Lots of green and leafy vegetables, mushrooms, beans and lentils, and (actual) whole grains. Let's get cooking!
No comments:
Post a Comment