Posts from — August 2009

This is an adaptation of a Deborah Madison recipe.  I made this with fresh rainbow chard from the farmers’ market – it’s in season now and if you are trying to incorporate more leafy greens into your diet, this is a delicious vehicle!

Chickpeas With Chard & Moroccan Spices

For the greens:  Bring a large pot of water to a boil.  Meanwhile, separate the stems of the chard from the leaves and coarsely chop each, but keep separate.  Add the chard stems to the boiling water and cook for approximately 5 minutes, until just tender.  Add chard leaves to the water and cook an additional 2 minutes.  Drain and set aside.

In a small bowl, combine the garlic, 1/2 t. of salt, dried spices, 1 t. oil, 2 T. of the cilantro and the parsley.  Stir to make a thick paste.

Heat the remaining oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Add the onion and pepper.  Cook for 7 minutes, then stir in the garlic paste, chickpeas and 1/2 c. chicken broth.  When the onion is translucent, add tomatoes, chard, another 1/2 t. salt and the other 1/2 c. broth.  Reduce the heat to low, and simmer for 5 minutes.  Stir in the remaining cilantro and serve.

Serve over brown rice, barley or whole-wheat couscous.  Serves 4, generously.

P.S.  This is even better the next day, when the flavors have come together.  Makes a GREAT lunch!

It’s August, and here in the Northeast U.S., we all know that our beautiful weekends are numbered.  I don’t know about you, but we’re trying to squeeze in as many backyard BBQs as possible . . . evenings on the patio are precious.  Soon we’ll be shoveling again.

This is a menu I’ve made many times, always to raves from the crowd.  It’s virutally all do-ahead, so you can take some time with your guests instead of running around crazy before dinner.

Grilled Lemon Chicken recipe from Gourmet Magazine – FYI, I use ~3 lbs. of boneless, skinless chicken breasts and it works out well.  Also note that you must marinate this chicken overnight, so plan accordingly!

Pair this with the Orzo With Tomatoes, Feta & Green Onions recipe from Bon Appetit.  FYI, if you can get fresh, multicolored cherry tomatoes, they’ll look really pretty in this.  And a note:  I am usually a hater of pasta salads, but this one has so much flavor, it’s worth the chopping.  Trust me – I’ve never had a party where this was served and people didn’t request the recipe.  Never!

Serve this Fig Salad With Greens & Walnuts on the side – be sure to scale up the recipe to however many servings you need – as written, it only serves 3 people.

This article is from today’s Chicago Tribune.   For more information on which fruits and veggies retain the most pesticide residue, see my post from January.

Do you know the Hungry Girl?  She’s Lisa Lillien and she has a great web site and daily email about nutrition and weight loss that you can subscribe to for free (“tips and tricks for hungry chicks!”).  Although I’ve been a subscriber for years, I definitely pick and choose what I take from the Hungry Girl’s emails.  She gives lots of good advice about counting calories and food awareness, and she highlights new diet-friendly foods and all the time, but a lot of those foods have loads of artificial ingredients, which I try to avoid.

The fabulous Hungry Girl also often gives up the 411 on nutritional information for restaurants and “fast casual” places – she is correct that knowledge is power when it comes to taking charge of your waistline and your health.  A lot of places have made this information available on-line (try Googling “Bruegger’s nutrition information” or “Panera nutrition information,” etc.), but many places have been loathe to disclose.

Well, because so many cities and states are requiring restaurants to post their nutritional data, more information is becoming available every day . . . including (finally) info. on Friendly’s, a place that I actually eat sometimes with my daughter.  There is this Honey BBQ Chicken Supermelt sandwich that I dream about, and, well, after checking the stats just now, I don’t think I’ll ever order it again.  Even I, a dyed-in-the-wool calorie-counter and health-conscious consumer, never anticipated the disaster that is that sandwich . . . . check it all out for yourself here, (scroll down to the second reader question) and also find info. on food at the Cheesecake Factory, Olive Garden, IHOP, T.G.I. Fridays & Applebee’s – places I know for sure some of you eat.  ‘Fess up.

Next time you’re going to one of these places, take a peek at their nutrition info. before you leave, and try to choose something that’ll fit into your daily budget for fat and calories.  Even if you’re not counting calories, etc., you can think about how you’ve been eating in a given week – if there’s been a lot of junk or rich food and not a lot of greens and fiber, you might want to try easing up a bit at, say, Friendly’s.  And if you want to damn-it-all and enjoy that Supermelt, well, you know what you’ll have to do to make up for it afterwards. 

Belly up!

Tried it mixed with a huge tomato, which I cubed.  Although it was better (lending credibility to my too-much-pesto-hypothesis), I still wasn’t a huge fan.  Don’t know what I’m going to do with all these remaining leftovers!

I’m usually tired when I arrive at the gym in the morning.  And if I’m not tired, I’m often bored – I am there an awful lot, and even though I have strategies to beat machine-boredom, it happens.  But more often than not, once I get in the building I can motivate myself to exercise hard, despite my boredom and/or fatigue.  So what’s my “secret?”   Music.  Nothing psyches me up more than a high-energy workout mix.  Music will inspire you, and research shows that music can distract you from fatigue so that you can exercise longer and harder.

It turns out that even some serious athletes use music as a source of inspiration to aid their performance in both training and competition.  The British tennis player, Barry Cowen, listened to a personal stereo system during his match with Pete Sampras at Wimbledon in 2001.  And Cowen later partly attributed his excellent performance to the inspirational music he was listening to during the change of ends. Ethiopia’s Haile Gebreselassie set an indoor world record for 2,000 metres while his favorite song was playing in the Birmingham arena. He later suggested that the music gave him a rhythm that matched the required pace of the run. And in a longitudinal study of Russian weightlifters, participants found that their training quality, volume and intensity improved substantially when music accompanied weightlifting sessions.

There are all sorts of things mere mortals like us can do to harness the motivational power of music in our workouts.  I often do intervals to songs – if I’m on the bike, I’ll cycle at 70 RPM as a base, and then rev it up to 80+ during each chorus.  Or if you have songs of differing beats per minute (BPM) in your mix, you can do longer intervals – speed it up for the high BPM songs, slow it down for the lower.  If you’re in the treadmill, do hills for the slow songs, and then bring your incline down to 1 or 2 and run or speed walk for the fast songs.  If you want to get really fancy, iTunes will show you the BPM of your downloaded music, and you can make a mix tailored to your gym activity – you can make up a classic warm up, high intensity, then cool-down mix.

I suppose you want suggestions?  I have eclectic music taste, and although I’d rarely listen to it outside the gym, I have a lot of cotton-candy pop, hip-hop and house music in my workout mixes.  If you’re interested, I’ll see if I can make some of my workout mixes public on iTunes. 

Another tip – for variety, I also listen to the PodRunner/PodRunner: Intervals mixes – they’re organized by BPM, but a warning:  they’re geared more toward the high BPM activities (running, for instance).   You can download these directly from the site, but if you do have an iPod, you can subscribe to the PodRunner podcasts on iTunes and you will have a continuous stream of new material. 

For even more ideas, take a peek at this Boston Globe article from last April – I can attest to the fact that the majority of these’ll get your heart pumpin’ and your fitness level up.

Go for it!

This just in from Reuter’s Health – so if you were choking down green tea in an effort to stave off the big C, you can stop.  But if you drink it ’cause it tastes great and makes you feel good, keep it up . . . .

I think it was my sister-in-law who turned me on to green salads with fruit in them.  Until I’d had her spinach salad with strawberries, I’d always been a salad-traditionalist of sorts – salads were savory, and for me, eaten after my main course (unless, of course, a salad was my main course, which it often is).

But there is something interesting and tempting about a salad loaded with both greens and fruit, and maybe some nuts and dried fruits too, with a slightly sweet dressing.  For me, they’re always slightly unexpected, but enjoyable.

I tried this on Saturday night, and we liked it.  It incorporates fresh figs, which we “discovered” last summer.  I ate dried figs as a kid, but as a grownup I hadn’t regularly eaten fresh figs, and certainly never cooked with them.  If they are ripe, they can be very tasty.  If they aren’t (they’ll be very firm), they won’t be.  And sometimes they’re really mushy and over-ripe, in which case they’re awful.  So see if you can man-handle your figs a bit before you commit to a basket.  I also try to find organic ones, and then I just wash them and slice them with the peel intact.

Green Salad With Figs, Grapes & Pine Nuts

Dressing

*To toast your pine nuts, put them into a small, dry skillet and stir them constantly over low heat – they’ll toast quickly, so watch them!  Let them cool before you add them to your salad.

For dressing:  combine all ingredients in a large bowl and whisk to combine (or use an old spaghetti sauce jar – add all ingredients and shake vigorously – this is my fool-proof method).  This makes about twice as much dressing as you will need for the salad – so you can either halve the recipe, or keep the leftovers in the fridge for about a week).

For salad:  toss all ingredients in a large bowl, dress with prepared dressing to taste.

Serves 4 as a side-salad.

Some tips:  Pine nuts are expensive, and because of their high oil content, they spoil more quickly than your other nuts.  Trader Joe’s has great prices on nuts generally, and also on dried fruits.  Buy a large bag of nuts and use what you need – keep the rest in the refrigerator and they won’t go rancid as quickly.

Turned on by sweet dressings?  Newman’s Own makes a good light raspberry walnut vinaigrette that is a staple at our house – try tossing it with mixed greens, crumbled blue cheese, dried cranberries and then topping it with a sliced grilled chicken breast (here again, TJ’s can be a time-saver – their already-grilled chicken breasts are pretty darn good (no weird texture) and don’t have any crazy sauces on them.  The balsamic ones are my favorite, but lemon-pepper and plain grilled are great, too.  Voila!  If you used bagged salad greens and the pre-cooked chicken, you now have a healthy and summery main-course in less time than it takes to order take-out!