Lucini Premium Select Extra-Virgin Olive Oil

Oh, poo.

I mean, oh P-O-O.

It may appear that I have abandoned Project Olive Oil, the olive oil tasting and reviewing project that I so happily dreamed up and announced on Life, Love, and Food months ago.  The first olive oil had been tasted and pronounced a winner, and I was ready to dive into the rest of the tasting project before telling you about it.

But then graduation happened.  I really had no idea how utterly consumed I would feel by the series of tasks that graduation entailed.  It was like riding a rollercoaster, except that there’s no seat belt and the bar they lower onto your lap to keep you safely inside the car feels wobbly and rusty, like the safety inspectors have deliberately ignored it for forty years.  Finishing a PhD is a wonderful, landmark event in a graduate student’s life, but it leaves little time for more important things, like olive oil tastings.

I’m ready for Project Olive Oil now.  Shall we begin?

Today’s extra-virgin olive oil is a keeper.  I first found Lucini Premium Select Extra-Virgin Olive Oil at my Whole Foods store in Evanston, Illinois.  This Italian-made olive oil is delicate, with a deliciously floral-grassy aroma that smells like a summer’s day.  Its flavor is light and fresh, the perfect olive oil with which to dress your green salads.  My friend Shawn Marie and I found it to be a lovely oil for an afternoon snack of fresh bread dipped in oil and vinegar.  If you buy a good balsamic vinegar, this oil will make the vinegar taste even better—ingredient synergy!

I’m on the last drips from my second bottle of Lucini.  I loved the first bottle so much that when I saw it on sale at Whole Foods, I bought a second bottle just in case I couldn’t find it in Texas.  Lucky for me, they sell Lucini at Village Foods, which is as close as I’ve been able to get to a neighborhood Whole Foods store in College Station.  (It’s really not Whole Foods, but it’ll have to do.)  I put Lucini through the battery of olive oil tests that I first described in Introducing Project Olive Oil and it got an A on every test.  What a show-off!

Lucini is an excellent oil for any dish in which one would like the olive oil to contribute richness and delicate flavor without overwhelming the other ingredients.  It’s the sort of oil that gets you excited about eating very simply and close to the earth.  Bread with oil and vinegar, fresh salads, caprese salad: Lucini loves these dishes.  I also tried Lucini in a baked good, Amanda Hesser’s Peach Tart from Cooking for Mr. Latte.  This recipe contains an interesting variation on pastry in which you stir together flour, salt, and sugar inside an 8 x 8 pan.  In a different bowl, you beat together a generous pour of olive oil, milk, and almond extract and then add it to the flour mixture.  Once the flour mixture is moistened, you press it into a crust layer inside the pan, line the crust with sliced peaches and a sugary topping, and bake.  In her recipe, Amanda suggests olive oil or vegetable oil for the crust, but I’d say go for the olive oil and use Lucini!  It was delicious.  The crust was nutty and crumbly, a lovely textural contrast to the sweet fruity peach filling.  I’d love to make the crust again, but be warned about the filling: I found it to be quite sweet, almost too sweet.  However, I gave a couple of slices of peach tart to my friend Daphna, and she said it was great when eaten with fresh blueberries.  Daphna loves those tiny, tart, wild blueberries.

Now I just have to make one very hard decision: is it time to move onto the next oily specimen for Project Olive Oil, or can I buy my third bottle of Lucini?  This decision may keep me awake at night.  Maybe I should buy both to be on the safe side!

A Day’s Journey

It’s been almost a week since my Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) experiment ended.  In that time, I’ve returned to my normal eating habits, and the difference between the two regimes is striking.  What is more striking, though, is the difference in perspectives when one is following a very unusual set of eating habits.  It’s worth taking a moment to ponder that less tangible part of the experience.

The best way I can describe my experience of the SCD is that it feels like one of those visual paradigms, like the image of the young woman that suddenly shifts into an old woman or the image of the faces that’s really a vase…or is it two faces?  When I was following the SCD, it was hard to imagine not following it.  And now that I’m not following it, I can’t believe that I didn’t eat grains, or most sugars, or even fresh milk, for an entire week!  (Minus a few documented exceptions…)  After a day or two of SCD, I felt wholly absorbed by the rules I’d chosen to follow, and though I missed chocolate and bananas and my morning cereal, I didn’t miss them as much as I thought I would.  The diet became easier to follow the longer I did it.  It was bittersweet to see the experiment end, at which point I knew I would return to my grain-eating habits.

The SCD was an excuse to dive back into my cooking.  I really loved that.  My life has been pretty topsy-turvy for the last three months.  Normally my cooking is my haven, an activity that nourishes me.  I like the simple, quiet routines of cooking and baking, the smells and the tastes and the textures.  I love my kitchen, whether it’s a great big room in Evanston, Illinois or a cute little nook in College Station, Texas.  Even though I’ve been in Texas for over a month now, I still feel the chaos of my move, and it’s been hard to settle into a cooking rhythm.  The SCD forced me to cook almost every morning and every night, and most days I appreciated the steady rhythm of meal preparation.  There were days when I was utterly delighted by something new and delicious, like the onion rings whose almond flour crumb coating makes an outstanding topping for baked eggs or the mango-buttermilk smoothies that were so sweet they tasted like candy.  These are the kinds of things that one learns by cooking every day, and by being brave in the kitchen.

I felt good while I was following the SCD.  My energy levels were perhaps a little bit more even than they are normally.  Without the glycemic rush of carbohydrates, maybe my body was burning its fuel more slowly and evenly.  The food I ate was incredibly nutritious, rich in both energy and the non-calorie nutrients we all need to be vibrantly healthy—vitamins, minerals, and the like.  I feel confident now that you can cut out grains and still eat very well, as long as you are conscientious about meal-planning and eating a nice variety of different foods.

Speaking of variety, at the beginning of my experiment, I was very excited about trying all sorts of baked goodies made with almond flour.  I’m not sure what happened, but after about five days of SCD, the idea of more almond flour made me feel slightly queasy.  I still ate what I’d already made, like Amanda’s Spice Cookies, and I felt fine, but the idea of making more things with almond flour was more than I could bear.  Perhaps it was my body’s way of telling me it was a little overwhelmed by all the almonds, or maybe I had a touch of the flu.  Whatever it was, in hindsight I am glad I listened to my body and tried to moderate my almond intake.  It never hurts to listen to your body and honor its needs.

It occurs to me that I embarked upon this SCD experiment as a way to raise awareness of the SCD for people like my niece, who does not have good digestion.  Yet once I started the experiment, especially because I was blogging about it every day, it was all me me me, I-ate-this, I-ate-that!  It wasn’t my intention to become a self-absorbed narcissist during my experiment, but perhaps it was necessary in order to really embrace a different diet.  Alicia Silverstone, who has a new vegan cookbook that just came out, did an interview with Vegetarian Times in which she said that the word diet means “a day’s journey.”  “I think that’s so beautiful,” she said.  I do, too.  Because at the end of the day, your diet is your journey.  It reflects what’s important, or not, to you, and everyone has to find the path that’s right for them.

At the very beginning of my SCD experiment, my dear friend Nicole asked me whether I’d be eating meat, given that I would not be eating so many foods that are everyday staples in my diet.  At the time, I was confident that I could follow the SCD for a week without eating meat.  My feelings about vegetarianism are complex, especially when my family is involved, but suffice to say that when I have complete control over what I am eating, I choose vegetarian meals.  It just feels right for me.  But if I were to follow the SCD for a year, or longer, I would strongly consider trying to eat meat every once in a while.  The truth is that meat, when raised well and cooked thoughtfully, is delicious.  There are no vegetarian equivalents for meat that really pass my standards for taste, texture, and wholesomeness.  Some fake meats are quite tasty, and I eat them once in a while, but they are all totally off-limits for an SCD follower.  The SCD has given me a new appreciation for meat, even though I didn’t choose to eat any.  More importantly, I have a new respect for the place that it has in other people’s diets, particularly people like my niece and her mother, who simply do not thrive on a grain-heavy diet the way that I do.

Where do we go from here?  I’m still a vegetarian, and I still have two pounds of almond flour sitting in my freezer.  I like the idea of continuing to push my culinary boundaries by eating one grain-free meal each day.  It’s a goal for me, not a rigid rule that I’ve carved in stone and placed in front of my pantry.  There is a lot to be learned—and cooked and eaten!—in a paradigm in which grains must be replaced with something else.  And there are still lots of recipes in my SCD cookbook that I’d like to try—Rustic Pears, baked with blueberries and walnuts, anyone?  My day’s journey can include a little jog around the grain-free playground.

It seems fitting to me to end on a note of gratitude.  Matt reminded me of this in an e-mail exchange we had as my week of grain-free eating was ending.  In it he wrote,

“Demonize College Station if you will, but there aren't a whole lot of places in the world you can live grain-free every day.  That's worth contemplating: it's a luxury, though it may not seem like it.”

As usual, he’s right.

The Recipes Inside My Head

The smell of woodsmoke drifted through the open window tonight, carried on the chill of the air gone cold in the absence of the sun’s warmth.  Even in Texas, autumn has arrived.  The trees are still as green as can be, and the afternoon heat was enough to make me reconsider my choice of pants today—a skirt and flip-flops would not have been inappropriate for running errands.  But tonight, cozy purple pajamas, worn while reading “Song of the Open Road,” will be enough to set the stage for a weekend’s slumber.

I have not been sleeping well, probably because writing blog posts late at night leaves me wired and antsy for more.  Today was my final day of following the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.  I survived seven days without cereal, but today at the grocery store, I bought a new box of Nature’s Path Optimum Blueberry Cinnamon cereal.  I am looking forward to breaking the fast by returning to some old habits.

My best cooking today happened when I used the recipes inside my head, that process where I cross-reference my mental databases of the ingredients I have on hand and the ways that I could cook them to create something nourishing and delicious.  This skill was critical for my week of SCD eating.  I can only follow someone else’s recipes for so long before I start feeling boxed in by another person’s tastes.  In fact, strangely enough, when I did follow a recipe today, the result was too salty and unpalatable without an intervention.  But I’m getting ahead of myself here.  Let us begin at the beginning.

This morning I woke up feeling tired and slightly ill, like my body was busy trying to fix itself and forgot to let me get a good night’s sleep.  After a week of almond flour baked goods, eggs, and yogurt parfaits, I wanted something more familiar and comforting.  I decided that since Lydia, my adorable niece, was adding bananas back into her diet this week, I could have a banana in my breakfast this morning.  I made my favorite buttermilk smoothie: equal parts buttermilk and orange juice blended to drinkable smoothness with a banana.  Alongside my smoothie I ate two celery sticks’ worth of ants on a log, which was unexpectedly delightful with the smoothie.  It was a great breakfast, but despite the peanut butter, my belly started demanding food just two hours later.  I, however, was too busy playing on my computer and ignored my belly for another hour.  By then, I’d finally figured out what to make for lunch.

Still in my pajamas but feeling marginally better, I made lunch out of pantry staples: a delicious, Italian-herbed red lentil soup, toasted pecans smooshed into two slices of Organic Valley cheese, and a sweet little dessert of homemade applesauce and a spice cookie.  The soup was wonderfully filling and seasoned nicely, a perfect recipe for a moment when the solitary cook wants a great bowl of soup without making leftovers that will last for a week.  I’m going to share my recipe below, as this is the sort of thing I’ll want to make again because it was easy, delicious, and serves just one or two people.

After a shower and some grocery shopping, I felt fine.  The warm Texas sunshine helped.  So did the soup and the applesauce.  I wanted to make the most of my Saturday evening in the kitchen, so I started a batch of SCD yogurt, made with two cups of 1% milk and two tablespoons of whole milk yogurt.  That batch is now sitting on my kitchen bar, culturing itself until tomorrow evening, at which point I’ll transfer it to the refrigerator.  I also made a batch of Peanut Butter Ice Box Truffles, which taste a lot like my old peanut butter bars, but made with the SCD guidelines in mind.  They were sweeter than I expected them to be, sweet enough to be deserving of the name truffles.  I ate two of them, and a sliced apple, as a post-cooking snack.

For dinner, I wanted to make something more elaborate than my quickie at-home lunch.  I was still craving soup and I had two leeks getting lonely in the fridge, so I decided to dip back into the archives of this site to make Greek Avgolemono Soup, one of my all-time favorites!  To accommodate the SCD rules, I omitted the orzo pasta and used just four cups of homemade vegetable broth.  It was a little strange to eat an old favorite without the pasta that makes it so thick and satisfying, but it was fabulous nonetheless.  To eat alongside the soup, I baked a half batch of Spinach and Cheese Triangles from Everyday Grain-Free Gourmet.  I’d had these scrumptious little bites once before, at Lydia’s third birthday party, and they were amazing.  But my batch tonight was too salty.  I’m not sure what went wrong—maybe my cheeses were saltier than Amanda’s or maybe she omitted one of them?  Maybe she sprinkled some of her magic mama dust on the party food and that’s what made them taste so good?  At any rate, I’m going to use my leftover triangles as a topping for crackers or a sandwich filling—something to help neutralize all that salt!  Yikes.

Now that I’ve reached the end of my SCD experiment, I’m tempted to wax poetic about how it has changed my life in wonderful, mind-blowing ways.  The truth is that it was a fun week of cooking!  It was a lot of work, but I discovered some new recipes and goodies (O Organics frozen mango, anyone?) that may have otherwise stayed hidden in the shadows of the unknown.  I’m going to rest on my thoughts for a little while, long enough to collect them into something coherent and comprehensive.  For now, I leave you with two new recipes, one for my buttermilk smoothie and the other for my red lentil soup.  Both are easy and delicious and could even show up on your table tomorrow without much work.  Happy cooking, friends.  I’ll see you back here soon.

Banana-Buttermilk Smoothie

Adapted from Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread by Crescent Dragonwagon

Serves 1

This smoothie is my favorite way to use up buttermilk that’s left over from baking cornbread.  It’s good enough, though, to buy some buttermilk just to make a smoothie.  It’s sweet but a little tart and very refreshing.  I often have it for a dessert, but it’s healthy enough to drink for breakfast or a snack.

1/2 cup buttermilk (preferably not non-fat)

1/2 cup orange juice

1 banana, frozen or not (as you like)

1)  Place all ingredients in a blender and buzz them to smoothness.  Pour into a glass and enjoy.

Quick Italian-ish Red Lentil Soup

Serves 1-2

One thing that I never mentioned about the Specific Carbohydrate Diet is the guidelines about legumes, specifically beans and lentils.  Many of them are off-limits because of the complex carbohydrates they contain, but red lentils are an exception.

I love red lentils.  Those pretty, coral-shaded discs cook quickly into a thick yellow mush, and you can season them in any manner you like.  Here, I combined them with some classic Italian herbs and a few handfuls of vegetables to make a nice soup.  This soup is a good one to keep in mind if you often crave soup but don’t want to wait an hour to make it and you don’t want a lot of leftovers.  It makes a great weeknight dinner or a quickie weekend lunch.

1/2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 of a medium onion, diced

1 celery stick, diced

1 carrot, ends trimmed, peeled, and diced

2 c. water

1/2 tsp. dried basil

1/4 tsp. dried oregano

1/4 tsp. dried sage

Pinch of red pepper flakes

1/2 c. red lentils, rinsed and picked through to remove any non-lentil debris

1/4 tsp. sea salt, plus more to taste

Freshly ground black pepper, optional

1)  Pour the olive oil in a large sauce pan and heat over medium heat.  Add the vegetables and saute for 5-10 minutes, or until the vegetables have softened and the onion has begun to brown.

2)  Add the water, spices, lentils, and sea salt to the pan.  Stir and bring to a boil.  Turn the heat down to a simmer, cover, and cook for ten minutes.

3)  Check the lentils to see that they’ve turned yellow and softened into mush.  Taste the soup and add salt and/or pepper to taste.  Serve hot.

Friday Night Nesting

On Friday nights I often suffer from what I call the Friday night blues.  It’s a strange syndrome.  I love the weekends and I try to do all my favorite things each weekend, but it’s almost inevitable that the transition from work week to weekend leaves me feeling a little deflated.  I find it hard to switch from the move-move-move pace of a work day to the sloooooooow-doooooown pace that a really good weekend requires.  What I need, I think, is a good set of strategies for how to make that switch easily and without too much fuss.  Friends, how do YOU swap your working self for your relaxing self?

This particular Friday was rather unusual because I spent most of it being professionally social and very little of it reading papers, which is what I do most of the time right now.  On any given day, though, one must fuel up before leaving the house.  Today’s breakfast, if I may be completely honest, was not very good.  I had a package of frozen blueberries in the freezer that I planned to use for muffins (and still do!), and I thought they would be a nice change of pace from all the mango this week.  I made a blueberry-pecan yogurt parfait, which I thought sounded awesome.  I was wrong.

For the parfait, I toasted a handful of pecans in the oven.  While the nuts bronzed themselves, I mixed together about half a cup of whole milk yogurt with the juice of one Texas orange.  The yogurt was layered into a juice glass and topped with a drizzle of Texas honey, a handful of frozen blueberries, and a scattering of toasted pecans.  The orange juice made the yogurt too watery and, strangely, not sweet enough.  The pecans were totally delicious, and the blueberries were spunky, tart, and flavorful, but the parfait just didn’t do it for me.

Apparently the parfait didn’t do it for my belly, either, because I felt vaguely ill after breakfast and fought waves of nausea on and off all day today.  It wasn’t bad enough to warrant going home, but I worried that I might feel worse as the day wore on.

Perhaps greasy Chinese food was not the best choice for lunch, but that’s what I had.  For this meal, I have to take another free pass on my SCD.  Unexpectedly, I went to lunch with two Asian postdocs from the Duke branch of my new lab, and when I suggested, more ironically than not, Ping Buffett (and no, that’s not a typo, “Buffett” really has two t’s, at least according to multiple on-line listings), they agreed to it!  I was hoping for Souper Salad, which even has a gluten-free menu(!), but I learned my lesson the hard way: never joke about Chinese buffets. 

I didn’t even try to find an SCD-friendly meal at the Chinese buffet.  I resorted to my usual eating habits, and I was reminded yet again that it is not easy being a vegetarian while eating out.  My meal was delicious, but I strongly suspect the egg rolls may have had some meat in them.  In these instances, I adopt a don’t ask, don’t tell policy.  I just don’t want to know.

So I ate my deep-fried egg rolls, green beans seasoned with bean curd (quite tasty!), lo mein, and some sort of spicy carrot and potato thing.  For dessert, I ate a few chunks of canned pineapple, and tiny squares of chocolate cake and strawberry cake.  Grand total with tip: $8.05.  Nutritional value?  I plead the 5th.

In hindsight, I suppose I could have backpedaled.  We were having such trouble agreeing on a place for lunch that I didn’t want to rock the boat when they both agreed easily to the same place.  It is hard enough being a bona fide vegetarian in social situations; I cannot imagine what a hassle it is to be on a diet as restrictive as the SCD.  Amanda, bless her heart, just packs big lunches and snacks for Lydia and herself, and off they go on their adventures.  It seems like a lot of work to me, but I’ve never heard Amanda complain about it.  Her attitude is inspiring.

The rest of my afternoon was pleasingly productive.  Two spice cookies fueled me to the end of the work day, but I still wish I’d bought more apples for this week.  Apples and spice cookies belong together.

I arrived home, and my Friday night blues dragged me down.  I was feeling tired, so I lay on the floor for a while, reading EatingWell and contemplating what I could eat as a pre-run snack.  When the idea struck me, I was jolted out of my lethargy: ants on a log!  I LOVE ants on a log, and with a glass of water they are perfect work-out fuel.  I dug my celery and peanut butter out of the fridge and felt utterly delighted that I’d remembered the celery, lonely and unused in the crisper drawer.

I had a great run, discovering an almost full loop of sidewalk that runs from Spring Loop to Tarrow Street to University Drive back to Spring Loop.  There’s even this great downhill section where I can just let go and feel like I’m flying.  I live for downhills.  After my run, I did some yoga stretches and caught up on Ammie’s blog.  Finally, I was hungry enough for dinner, so I unpacked what was intended to be my lunch earlier today until my plans changed: the last of the Tomato Vegetable Soup and a spinach salad with Organic Valley cheese and toasted pecans.  Dinner surprised me: it tasted great, even though it was neither particularly fresh nor something new and exciting.  It was really nice, though, not having to cook tonight.  I’ve done a lot of cooking this week, trying to keep up with my ambitious SCD plans.  I love to cook, but I also love to not cook when dinner is just sitting there, waiting for me.

I don’t really know what the antidote to these Friday night blues is, but tonight I shoo-ed them away by making my home just a little neater and prettier.  After dinner, I put away all the clean dishes, tucked the dirty ones into the dishwasher, and washed the remaining dishes.  I wiped down the counter and admired the open space.  I slid the cooling rack back into its slot in a cabinet next to the stove, and with that, order was restored in my kitchen.  Now I feel like the weekend can begin.

Sure Happy It’s Thursday

Dear readers, tonight I must begin by telling you the truth.  During the work week, I am unable to bond with my kitchen as much as I would like.

I do the best I can, which in my case means that I cook up a storm on the weekends.  During the week, I cook enough to tide myself over until the weekend.  Almost all of my meals are home-cooked, which is a fact of which I am very proud, but you can imagine how much cooking it takes to do that, especially considering that I eat lunch at work every day.  Now add onto that all the things I would like to do each day, and the kitchen time gets crunched into tiny windows in the early morning and late evening.  I really love the late evening hours in the kitchen: the day’s work is done, I’m fed and relaxed, and the house is calm and quiet.  If I’m in the kitchen, I’m probably working on a recipe I’ve wanted to try for weeks.  I’m happy in the midnight kitchen—it’s nice in there, late at night.

I hope you will understand, then, why today’s meals will seem eerily similar to yesterday’s meals.  It’s a typical Thursday event, and it serves to get me really excited about cooking some new dishes on Friday and beyond.

This morning I let myself sleep a little later than normal because a computer snafu kept me up later than I wanted on Wednesday night.  At 8 AM, my alarm sounded its wake-up call.  With sand still in my eyes, I shuffled out to the kitchen to make my new favorite breakfast: a baked egg topped with seasoned almond flour “crumbs” and a mango smoothie.  I brewed a cup of Earl Grey tea (which, by the way, has really grown on me in the last few months!) and added one of Amanda’s Spice Cookies as a breakfast dessert.  It’s hard to go wrong with a breakfast that contains fruit and nuts.

However, I really should have had something stronger than tea at breakfast because I dragged my grogginess around with me all day.  It was just one of those days when I should have been reading papers, and I did do a little reading, but altogether it was not my most productive day.  I’m trying to learn to accept that some days are going to be like that, just like some days are incredibly productive and I get more done than I had even planned.  In the end, I hope, it all balances out.

The weather here in College Station, Texas, was astonishing today: hot, humid, and 40 mph winds, in anticipation of a big rainstorm!  Those winds don’t mess around: I was almost carried away trying to walk from the bus stop to my building this morning!  Some time after 1 PM, I scurried over to “my” cafeteria for lunch, where I read Kath Eats Real Food while dining on an awesome meal: more Tomato Vegetable Soup (just one more bowl to finish tomorrow!), Organic Valley cheese with toasted walnuts, and the rest of my frozen organic mango stirred into some honeyed ricotta cheese.  Ricotta cheese is not a type of cheese that strict followers of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet are encouraged to eat, but I had a few spoonfuls left over from making my famous Mocha Ricotta Muffins for our first journal club.  (Journal club—it’s an excuse for scientists to talk about other people’s data.  I love journal club, especially when it involves chocolate.)  I also love ricotta cheese, and it was sublime with chunks of sweet, silky mango.

Apparently my sweet tooth was in charge at lunch today, because I also had half of a spice cookie.  Consider yourself warned: they might be addictive!

The afternoon creeped by, and I still wanted a coffee, but I resisted the urge, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to have milk or cream if I did take the time to walk to Starbucks.  (I’m not much of a Starbucks fan, but I think it’s the closest coffee bar to Texas A & M’s campus.)  Instead, I made baby step-sized progress on my many little projects and then nibbled on my afternoon snack: two pieces of Organic Valley cheese and one and a half spice cookies.  More cheese and nuts, please!  A fresh apple would have been a lovely addition to this snack, but my kitchen is all out…I’ve been kicking myself all week for not buying more organic apples when I went grocery shopping at HEB last weekend.

Have I mentioned that my new lab is split in two locations right now?  I’m part of what I call the Texas Branch, but there’s also a Duke Branch, and tonight the two branches were united!  My boss and his wife had us over for dinner and drinks (or was it the other way around?), and this evening I had to take my free pass on SCD so that I could eat with everyone else.  We had a Tex-Mex dinner, complete with lots of crispy corn chips and guacamole.  I got tipsy on a glass of white wine, which happened quickly and easily on my empty stomach.  In fact, I’m a little drunk right now, but I hope you don’t mind.  I don’t like to drink and blog, but since I never built up a tolerance to alcohol in college or graduate school, one glass is all it takes.  Actually, half a glass is all it takes.  You can probably guess that I’m a cheap date!

Fortunately, I didn’t trip over any furniture or make out with any inappropriate men, so overall I’d say it was a good night.  With Friday less than an hour away, I’m looking forward to celebrating my week of SCD cooking with some new recipes and some much-needed rest and relaxation.  Good night, dear readers.  I’ll meet you back here same time tomorrow.

Plan for Delight

In my old, old age (almost 28, people!), I think I am finally learning that nothing will ever be perfect.  I have learned to snatch delight from the chaos of life, and most days, that’s good enough for me.

I do, however, have moments when I feel perfectly delighted, like the universe just winked at me.  This morning was filled with those moments.  It was one of those rare instances when all of my food plans outshine any hopes I had for them and I feel like a complete genius.

Behold, the breakfast menu!

* Mango smoothie, made with about one cup of frozen mango (thawed overnight), half a cup of buttermilk, and a splash of water.  Whirl in blender, sip, and realize that the mango is SO SWEET that there’s no need for a shot of honey.  I’m seriously impressed with Albertson’s organic store brand—I’ve had nothing but delicious food from O Organics.  Later I wondered if the frozen mango had added sugar, but there was just one ingredient in that package: mango!   (Note that the buttermilk is not an approved SCD food, but it is a cultured dairy product and contains live bacteria.  It’s also left over from making cornbread a few weeks ago, so I get a free pass on the buttermilk.  SCD-approved options could include yogurt, nut milk, or pure coconut milk.)

* Coffee with half a teaspoon of honey and two tablespoons of coconut milk.  I’ve been missing milk in my coffee, but the coconut milk today totally hit the spot!  The coconut flavor was subtle and complemented my nutty flavored coffee.

* A baked egg topped with almond flour “bread crumbs” left over from the onion ring project.  I don’t want to brag too loudly here, but this egg dish was amazing.  It was so good that I had to e-mail my sister-in-law to tell her about it, even though I’m pretty sure she’s following along at home.  (She may be my only reader who actually owns Everyday Grain-Free Gourmet, so she knows exactly what I’m talking about when I refer to recipes from my SCD cookbook.)  The almond flour mixture becomes toasty-crisp inside the oven, while the egg underneath bakes into softly yielding perfection.  Eaten together, it’s the best combination of textures and flavors.  The baked egg is definitely on my list of things to make later this week—it’s repeat-worthy.

In addition to my amazing breakfast, I woke up in the mood to get things done, which is always a great feeling, no matter which day it is.

Lunch was not that exciting and I’m slightly ashamed that I have to tell you about it.  Because it was boring.  More leftover Tomato Vegetable Soup, leftover pumpkin-ricotta pasta, and few bites of grain-free granola.  The pasta was wheat pasta and it is most definitely not a food that one is encouraged to eat while following the SCD.  I get a free pass on this one, however, because it was a leftover and I’m trying to clean out the fridge.  Interestingly, I noticed that after lunch I felt fuller than I have after most meals this week.  I’m hypothesizing that the wheat might have something to do with this…

I’m afraid my afternoon snack was also boring.  It was boring because it was also a rerun: a flourless peanut butter brownie and a few more bites of granola.  These endless leftovers are, in my opinion, the most difficult thing about being a home cook for a household of one.  It’s amazing how much more variety you can have if there’s just one extra person around to eat all that food!  May I confess that part of my joy when Matt visits is his enthusiasm in eating my food?  Because that means that I don’t have to eat all those leftovers!  He has an excellent appetite.

Dinner was (oh, my cheeks are flaming with embarrassment here!) another almond crust pizza and a simple spinach salad dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and fresh lemon juice.  Oh, belly, I’m sorry to put you through so many repeats today!  At least we had breakfast to delight us.

But I’m about to redeem myself.  For the first time in four nights, I had dessert after dinner: Amanda’s Spice Cookies, adapted from the recipe for Ginger Cookies in Everyday Grain-Free Gourmet.  These cookies are chewy and sophisticated, rich with almonds and winter holiday spices.  Amanda had made them for Lydia’s birthday party last month, in the shape of trains and hearts, and they were absolutely adorable.  Amanda, renegade cook that she is, made them with coconut oil instead of butter, so that’s what I did too.  The coconut oil lends a subtle, unusual flavor that I find rather tasty.  I think these cookies would be delicious made with butter too, so I plan to try that variation in the future.  I’m such a tease, dear reader, because I’m not going to give you the recipe now.  The truth is, it’s a work in progress for me because I just made the cookies for the first time tonight and I like to get to know a recipe a little bit better before adding it to this site.  You are more than welcome, however, to find yourself a copy of Everyday Grain-Free Gourmet and test-drive the Ginger Cookies in your own kitchen.  By the way, Amanda wrote in her recipe notes that she thought the cloves were too much in the original recipe.  I took her advice and cut the cloves from 1/2 tsp. to 1/8 tsp. and thought that was just right.

‘Tis past my bedtime again, and dirty dishes await me in the kitchen.  We’ve just completed day four of this week of grain-free eating (well, almost grain-free) and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of new recipes to try.  Such is life: there is never enough time for everything I want to do, so I quietly dial back my expectations and continue to bask in those tiny moments of sheer delight.  Really, it’s the best I can do.

The Grind

Tuesday is such a grind.  Monday feels new and shiny to me, a refreshing return to routine, but Tuesday looms large, imposing.  The only way to get through Tuesday is to get back to work.  Once I’m back to work, and really working, Tuesday isn’t so bad.  Sometimes it feels good to work hard.

This morning I wasn’t in the mood for a sit-down breakfast, which is highly unusual for me.  Instead, I made a smoothie and wondered how long a liquid breakfast would tide me over before lunch.  It was rich with coconut milk and whole milk yogurt, so I gambled that together, me and my smoothie might make it until lunch.  Indeed, we did!  Into a blender I dumped a few soaked dried apricots, a heaping quarter cup of thawed raspberries, the juice from two oranges, half a tablespoon of honey, a quarter cup of coconut milk, and half a cup of yogurt.  I whirled it around, poured it into a glass, and proceeded with my wake-up routine of checking my e-mail and seeing who has posted something new on their blog.  Unfortunately, without coffee or tea this morning, I wasn’t quite as perky as I like to be by the time I walk out the door.  (The smoothie, by the way, had a nice flavor but it was a little gritty from all the raspberry seeds.  Next up: a mango smoothie!)

I was amazed that I didn’t start to feel hungry until about 11:30 AM.  Often the late morning is a very productive time of day for me, so I like to work until I get really hungry, at which point I break for lunch.  Around 12:30 PM, I wandered over to the lunchroom in the library building and ate my bagged lunch: another serving of Tomato Vegetable Soup, two pieces of Organic Valley cheese, a few cucumber slices, and a couple bites of grain-free granola.  I washed it all down with sips of water and went back to work feeling satisfied but not stuffed.  Excellent.

Lunch, though, didn’t hold off my hunger as long as usual.  I may have also been a little bit bored—it was not the most exciting day ever at work—so I brought out the afternoon goodies: a flourless peanut butter brownie and the rest of my little stash of grain-free granola.  Today I decided that I like the grain-free granola best by itself—plain yogurt overwhelms the more delicate fruit and nut flavors.

My snack was tasty but I still felt nibbly, probably because I was bored.  I also wished that I’d had some fruit, but alas—I’m all out of fresh fruit right now.

I arrived home just after 6 and had errands on my agenda for the evening.  I didn’t want to rush through my grocery shopping, so I had another snack—this time a piece of Organic Valley cheese eaten with a few toasted walnuts.  This combination is one of my absolute favorites, so good that I’ve already filed it away in this site’s archives.  I also juiced another Texas orange so I’d have a little sweet something to drink with my cheese and nuts.  I might need to buy another bag of oranges!

After a peaceful shopping trip during which I procured fresh and frozen mango, I cobbled dinner together out of leftovers and a fresh spinach salad.  The leftovers were coconut-pumpkin soup and onion rings (freshly baked but made from last night’s onion ring preps).  To eat with my soup and onion rings, I tossed a few handfuls of fresh baby spinach with extra-virgin olive oil and fresh lemon juice.  Easy peasy.

Now it is getting late and I’m feeling sad that I can’t have a piece of chocolate.  It’s funny the things I crave most while I’m following the SCD plan: I’m unfazed by the grain-free diet, but I miss chocolate and fresh milk.  Fortunately, I’ve got a mango smoothie to look forward to tomorrow, so that takes the sting out of my sadness.  If Lydia were here, I think she’d tell me that mango beats chocolate any day.  Or maybe she’d try to bargain so she can have both!  That child is a crafty one—I hope she learns to always be proud of her intelligence.

It occurs to me that these daily posts have a certain meandering quality to them, which I can only attribute to the fact that it’s almost my bedtime.  Sweet dreams, dear reader, and may your slumber be perfectly refreshing.