Week of Wining & Dining and Rule #44

It's hard to fail a rule telling you to drink a glass of wine with dinner every night. Sometimes we were even overachievers...



This next week, Rule #44: Pay more, eat less will be more of a challenge. My biggest food obstacle is overeating. This week we will really REALLY focus on the delciousness involved in every bite of food. Got to make it count! We will pay more and hopefully make up for it within our food budget by eating less.

Give Me Another One, Just Like the Other One & Rule #43

Our rule to regard nontraditional food with skepticism was so similar to many of the others we have done...basically eat food....not food-like substances that food scientists have created. We are getting so good at these types of rules that it has just sort of become our everyday diet (just like we originally hoped!).

We love the bulk section at Winco because you can get healthy things for super cheap.



The lesson is that you must read the ingredients (or notice their unnatural color!) because some things are definitely more food scientist creations than actual food, despite what the large sign might suggest...

Next week's rule is amazing! Rule #43: Have a glass of wine with dinner. YES PLEASE! This is a rule that Ryan and I will be able to stand behind one hundred and fifty percent!

Turning Japanese & Rule #42

We stuck with the traditional Japanese diet almost all week with only a few exceptions. Every morning we ate miso soup or rice and egg. For lunch and dinners we had tofu, rice, noodles, veggies, soy sauce, miso, ginger, fruit, fish, fish and more fish. The only time we strayed from this diet was when we ate outside of our house. On Saturday night we celebrated my birthday and my mother cooked us some french food (there is no better birthday present than a home cooked meal by your mother--especially if your mother is as good of cook as mine!).

The hardest part about this week was avoiding white flour (aka bread!). A traditional Japanese diet only consists of maybe rice flour or buckwheat flour (no wonder Japanese are so skinny--bread is something I eat way too much of). Japanese also do not eat very many sweets (a daily battle I struggle with). I felt like my meals filled me up more quickly because they were so full of protein. Also, Japanese only traditionally eat until they are 80% full--this was hard for me to stick to. Overall, I felt extremely healthy this week!

Here are just a few pictures of some of the meals we had (I did not capture nearly all of them and Ryan is currently in the kitchen cooking our last Japanese meal of the week--a veggie tofu stir-fry that smells amazing).

We obviously had to try out some traditional Japanese beer.



Japanese noodles and veggies.



Salmon and miso green beans.


Had to go out for sushi (we have all of the materials to make our own but we have still not gotten around to it).


My friend Susie trying to protect herself from the crazy boys taking sake bombs.


Next week we are moving on to Rule #42: Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism. Basically this rule boils down to avoid foods created by food scientists.

Supplements-Be-Gone and Rule #41

We managed the whole week without any supplements. This is what we said goodbye to:



Ryan accidentally bought orange juice fortified with calcium but that was are only real mishap. The good news is that I did not get sick (gasp!). I was pretty sure I was going to be sick more due to the psycho-somatic reasons than anything else. Whenever I was craving a vitamin I picked up a piece of fruit instead. I'm still not too sure about this rule because I believe you should be eating foods that provide you with all the vitamins you need; however, what if you are not aware of the things your body needs? Is it better to be safe and take vitamins than sorry later? Also, can you really get too many vitamins? SO many questions I haven't had time to find the answers!

In other news we celebrated a wonderful mother's day with my favorite mother in the whole entire world. Ryan made a spinach gruyere strata and I made sour cream coffee cake with strawberries and strudel. We had a wonderful day!

The next week we will be on the mouthful that is Rule #41: Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. We went shopping tonight and loaded up on groceries for Japanese food. We will also be researching traditional Japanese breakfasts and other eating habits. Let me know if you have any ideas!

Some junk, Some Adventure & Rule #40

I had a lot of grand plans...such as making homemade donuts. We were having burgers for dinner, however, and I thought onion rings would be a good start to cooking homemade junk food. And by the time I finished with the onion rings I could not bear to look at, much less EAT, anything cooked in that amount of oil. So beer-battered onion rings were our homemade junk food this week and they were delicious. It was my first time making them. Ryan whipped up a spicy creamy sauce and I was in heaven. Even though they were onion rings they tasted healthier because I made them--less grease and less salt. At the same time, making this meal myself made me realize how unhealthy they were--they were fried in a huge pot of oil....so that meant that I ate less, or at least didn't want to make the donuts for dessert that I intended on cooking.






In other news my wonderful life partner cooked an amazing Asian meal. Please see the pictures below of the tofu stir fry, citrus sesame salad, and noodle crab cakes and you will understand why I am marrying this guy.




Next week we will be following Rule #40: Be the kind of person who takes supplements--then skip the supplements. AAAHHHHHHHHHHHH! I don't care if it's mental or what but I rely on my supplements like none other. My prediction is that I will get sick without them. The challenge will be trying to eat healthy enough foods that I won't need the supplements. I am guessing there will be a lot of fish in my future this week.

In happier news here is the most beautiful orange I have ever seen:


PS. I can't end this post without mentioning that I went food trippin' this past week with Erin. I don't know if you have ever heard about this but it is seriously weird. You dissolve this berry (in pill form) and swish it around your mouth. It then blocks off certain taste buds so that you experience food entirely differently--most food became sweet. Tonic water tasted like soda! Lemons tasted like lemonade! I was peer pressured into this but I was happy I tried it. Luckily, the effect only lasts an hour and then your taste buds return to normal. I highly recommend this activity!

Oils, LA, and Rule #39

I am late writing this because I went to LA for the weekend. My sister goes to school there and is studying to be an opera singer. I was fortunate enough to get to see her junior recital. It was so good that she made me cry and if you know me I am not the crying type.

As for eating traditionally stoned ground oils I can say that I didn't cook with anything that wasn't traditionally stoned ground; however, I sadly had no time to really cook this past week, much less experiment with different oils. This will have to come at a later date. On the bright side my sister was able to show me the wide range of cuisines that Portland lacks....sure, we have Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, etc. but it does not compare to the authenticity that I experienced in L.A. We went to a Chinese restaurant where nobody spoke English and the cooks made their own noodles. They cut them into the soup. We then went to a Polish restaurant thanks to my Aunt and Uncle. I got a spicy sausage and some of the best cabbage soup I have ever had. We had good Thai thanks to Andy and his parents. We also had good Indian....Indian that actually served Indian food opposed to what Americans think that Indian food should be. I was in heaven. I know my sister is going to kill me for not posting pictures yet but they are coming Lily...! Ryan and I finally had time to cook our first meal in what seems like a long-time tonight. I love this weeks rule #39: Eat all the junkfood you want as long as you cook it yourself. Awesome!

The Dread of the White Bread and Rule #38

We attempted to be extra prepared this week by starting it out with the best smell in the whole wide world: home baked bread. We got a new bread machine as an early wedding present (thank you!). We missed R2D2 (our old bread machine that was the cutest bread machine ever and had the best quirks) but this new bread machine makes bread a whole lot faster.





Ryan broke down towards the end of the week when we went out to dinner at a place with amazing burgers. The restaurant didn't have whole wheat buns and Ryan's craving for the burger got the best of him (I am guilty as well because I took a bite). For the most part, however, we ate whole grains.

Next week will be Rule 38: Favor the kinds of oils that have traditionally been stone-ground. After doing a handy-dandy google search I have learned that this includes olive oil, peanut oil, sesame oil, and palm fruit oil (not sure what this last one is....?). We might try to find some palm fruit oil to spice things up.

In other news, we ended up buying something off our own wedding registry because Ryan got so excited he could not wait! This is a problem because we are such cooks that we hardly had anything to register for in the first place. BUT I am glad we ended up doing this because life just got a whole lot simpler. We ended up buying glass jars to store all the foods we buy in bulk (think flours, sugars, etc.). This was a necessity because storing all our bulks in plastic bags was the biggest nightmare if one of them developed a whole (think flours, sugars, etc. all over the floor!). Here is a wedding present to ourselves!:




HOORAY! Hopefully this trend will not continue because (a) we cannot afford presents to ourselves and (b) getting gifts from others is fun because then we can think of all the special people in our lives every time we use them!

My Milk Stayed White & Rule #37

Well, my milk stayed kind of white this week...except when I made smoothies for breakfast and blended my smoothies with berries.



But I did not have any artificial coloring, which I think was the point of this rule. This upcoming week Rule #37 we will have to pay attention to color again because: The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead. Aside from the occasionally baguette we have stopped eating white bread already. When I bake I also try to incorporate whole wheat flour. Sometimes this doesn't work out so well (ie dutch babies) but every once in a while we get an extra nice surprise (ie gingerbread cake).

Sweetened with Sunshine & Rule #36

We avoided unnatural sugar this week. After researching we found that there are lots of differing opinions when it comes to the term "natural." We defined this term by clarifying that the sugar we ate didn't contain any additives (such as coloring). We pretty much stuck to sugars that are naturally found in fruits and vegetables. Here are a few of our favorite naturally sweet things we ate this week:

My sweet fiance sweetening his whole grain waffle with some maple syrup!


Tangerines


Sweet Potatoes


Carmelized Onions (we have these at least once a week)


Honey


Next week we will be following rule #36: Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk. This rule is straight forward and will be easy for us because we have not had this type of cereal since we began this food challenge.

In other news Ryan and I signed our catering contract this week for the wedding. Because food is so important to us we went with a small catering company called Phresh that uses local and organic products. The owner said that he will often go to farmer's markets the morning before they cook to purchase their food. I'm not giving away all of the surprises of the wedding but I can promise that we are having some atypical wedding food (the caterers worked with us to create a special menu of things they have never cooked before!). The tasting was amazing and Ryan and I are so excited!!!

Pizza Redemption & Rule #35

We survived our hardest week in a while: No pre-added salt or sugar. This was an exceptionally hard week because multiple people wanted to take us out to dinner and how do you eat at a restaurant without consuming food that has salt and sugar not pre-added? WELL, we figured it out: SUSHI! We went sushi crazy and had some delicious meals. Also, my aunt and uncle were in town from California and we spent time with them and my mom's cooking (I watched her add the salt and sugar to some things). I felt super healthy this week. Snacking was focused on healthy things. Not eating cheese (lots of pre-added salt) was one of the hardest parts of this week. We managed to cook a pizza at my mom's with a white sauce and no cheese that was amazing! Yay for pizza redemption from the sardine episode.....(shudder).

This upcoming week is rule #35: Eat sweet foods as you find them in nature. All I can say is thank goodness this rule isn't happening over Easter weekend (aka jelly bean coma day). Here come's a week of no unnatural sugar. Also, Pollan specifies no juice even if it is from a natural source due to the quick absorption of sugars and the lack of feeling "full" due to the lack of fiber.