When the Mood Strikes

Just a quick post (yes, I said quick, believe it or not) to share a recipe and some photos of the fruits of my labor during a recent Indian kick in my kitchen.

It all started with black lentils. Over the winter holidays I discovered black lentils at the West Side Market in Cleveland. I'd never seen them before, and being intrigued and curious as usual, I went home with a bag. They've been burning a hole in my kitchen cabinet ever since, until yesterday when I decided to get them out for some much needed vegetarian protein. At least once a week I get a craving for some fabulous non-meat protein source, usually beans or lentils or tofu. My body doesn't love meat anymore, it loves fiber. Therefore...it was lentil time.

After perusing some black lentil recipes on-line, I decided to just boil the little buggers up and toss them with some sauteed Swiss chard and cauliflower. It wasn't until later, as I was perusing my DVD collection for something to entertain myself for the five minutes it takes me to eat alone in my living room, that I saw the case for the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Instantly, no joke, I heard the soundtrack playing in the back of my mind and remembered driving around Athens, Ohio on a hot, sweaty summer day with the windows down, playing "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. and "Jai Ho," as loud as my car speakers would handle. That is a fond memory for me, and suddenly my black lentils turned from plain to generously, lovingly spiced with coriander, cumin, mace, allspice, cardamom, and turmeric. Add that to a pot of boiling potatoes, drained and tossed into curry powder that had been warming in olive oil and my house soon smelled like Mumbai. Okay, not really, because I've never been there and while I'd love to think that all of India constantly smells of curry and cinnamon, I know I am wrong in that fantasy.

Dancing gleefully to the Slumdog Millionaire Soundtrack this evening, I took my pseudo-Indian feast from last night and turned it into something only about a thousand times better tonight. Being a fairly strict locavore, my body, mind and soul have been longing, pining, almost painfully missing fresh fruits and vegetables. One can only eat exclusively apples and turnips for so long. Therefore, I decided to cheat today. I think we all deserve a little cheat now and then. I stopped into Kroger in Marietta after work and picked up an organic, fair-trade mango, a bag of organic carrots, a box of organic mint, a bag of sweet, crunchy red grapes, and a bottle of Major Grey's Mango Chutney. I was going to India tonight in my little duplex set deep in Southeast Ohio, mark my words.

What became of these contraband items was a salad I'd readily make again. In fact, if I wasn't stuffed to my brim, I'd make another right now. I impressed myself with the flavor combination, and I only wish I had an army to cook for, so that I could share it with loved ones and friends. It was simple, healthy, and most of all, bursting with bright, zesty flavors that were reminiscent of spring, heat, humidity, summer, passion and fondness. Enjoy.

Queen Honeybea's
Mad Love for Lentils Salad
Serves 4

Ingredients:

A large bag of mixed salad greens (probably two good handfuls per serving)
A handful of micro greens per serving
2 large carrots, shredded
1 red onion, finely slivered
4 tomatoes, cut into eighths
A handful of red, seedless grapes per serving, halved
1/2 cup golden raisins, divided into 4 servings
2 large, ripe fair trade, organic mangoes, peeled and chunked
1/4 cup chopped fresh mint leaves, divided into 4 servings
2 cups cooked brown basmati rice (1 cup uncooked)
1 TBS. olive oil
1 TBS. rice wine vinegar
pinch of salt
4 cups prepared lentils of your choice (mine were black, cooked with spiced sauteed chard and cauliflower)
One recipe of prepared chutney-yogurt dressing (recipe follows)
A dollop of mango chutney per serving
Ground cinnamon
4 large whole-wheat pitas, warmed in the oven

To make said deliciousness:

On four plates, divide the salad greens equally for a good serving of salad per person. Top each serving evenly with micro greens, carrots, onion, tomatoes, grapes, raisins, mango chunks and mint leaves.

Toss the hot, cooked basmati rice with the 1 TBS. olive oil, rice wine vinegar and salt. Place 1/4 cup scoop of rice on each salad, then top with the dollop of mango chutney.

Beside the rice, bed down 1 cup of warm prepared lentils. Top with the chutney-yogurt dressing and sprinkle with ground cinnamon. Serve each salad with a warm pita.

To make delicious, nutritious chutney-yogurt dressing:

1 cup low-fat plain, organic yogurt
1/2 cup Major Grey's Mango Chutney
2 TBS. extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup rice vinegar

Whisk all this yumminess together until you have a well melded dressing that's thin enough to pour over the salad. If it's too thick, add more vinegar.


Just in case you need some extra inspiration. This has been on repeat in my house.

100 Miles or More: Part Three

Losing is the hardest part. We carry weight in so many different bags and baskets, slung over our shoulders and strapped up by our hips. Baggage is distinctly human, and we all carry our share. I found myself carrying the weight of the world that summer, on my body, in my soul and with every ounce of mental strength I had left. The forward progress I’d made during and shortly after my first steps through Lent had come to a halt, as my feet were planting into slowly hardening concrete under the weight of stress, heart-breaking pain, and heavy emotional casualty. As I was losing myself in the depths of despair, in the daily paranoia my life had become, I had lost the drive, the focus I’d been able to harness so well just months before.

What had changed was that the rock of my life then, that to which I’d been anchoring myself for almost four years of commitment and devotion, was slowly deteriorating. As I watched my partner spiral further and further into a dark, difficult abyss from which I wondered if emergence was even possible, I felt myself consumed with trying to hold dearly with white knuckles and clenched fingers to the life we'd built. It wasn’t working. I was holding onto weight alright—emotional, mental and physical and before I knew it I was sinking and drowning with lies, pain and loss stuffed like rocks into my pockets.

Losing weight has been a mastering of the mind for me. It has taken great focus, and dedication in order to relearn how to live, eat and move so that my body would match my desire to live. From June of 2009 to February of 2010, I probably lost all of ten pounds. I spent those eight months entirely focused on the health and well being of someone else. Two someone elses, in fact. I hadn’t a moment's reprieve to even remember that I had recently embarked on a weight loss journey myself. I was on a road that I believed would lead to a happier, healthier life, but for the moment I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, twiddling my thumbs on the edge of that lonely byway. Recently, I heard a piece of Buddhist wisdom that I found particularly relevant for this period in my life: “Roads are made for journeys, not destinations.”

My road from two hundred and eighty-seven pounds to one hundred and eighty-five pounds has certainly been journey, rather than destination focused. So many things factored in my ability and desire to lose weight, and each changed my path in such a way that I never could’ve mapped the course by which I traveled. This has been the greatest lesson. Life happens, it always has and it always will. We can try as we might to control, organize and plan our steps, but life will always happen. What we can do, and what I did, is make decisions that will make the journey more bearable and to trust in the power of pursuing our own happiness.

In July of 2009, my Mother was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. Therein lay a fork in my road, and this was one of the first places where my path began to change. Unsure of this diagnosis and without significant guidance from her doctor, my Mother was understandably bewildered as to how she would have to change her life in order to reach a point of good health again. Seeing my mother confused and perhaps a little afraid of the unknown drove me to a place where I had to sit down and learn about how food works, period. And it was not until I began slowly learning on my own, did I realize how little I knew, or rather, how little we all know.

After implementing a couple of diet changes for my Mother, I decided that as I was living with my parents at the time, I’d implement those changes to my own diet to help support and motivate her. Helping my Mother with this not only ended up significantly helping me, but it also gave me a distraction from the pieces of my life that were falling apart right in front of my eyes. This is where "dieting" became "changing my diet permanently." It was essential that my Mom be able to lose a little bit of weight, and to eat foods that were easier for a Type II Diabetic's body to process, in order for her to effectively reverse her diagnosis and be a healthier adult. What was our first lesson? That bread isn't the enemy, but that it likes to be paired with protein. What became our new favorite lunch? Brugger's whole-wheat bagels with peanut butter. That was the first step.

Helping my Mother with her diagnosis helped me to begin learning about how food is processed, and what we can eat that makes our bodies function and feel better. During that summer, we switched to whole-wheat and multi-grain breads almost one hundred percent of the time. We cut out dessert except for very special occasions, and the desserts we did eat if we were having a craving became a serving size of organic animal cookies, or a serving size of graham crackers. We always made sure our carbohydrates were balanced with lean protein. Arnold's Sandwich Thins became another staple, piled high with fibrous vegetables like shredded carrots, slices of cucumber, slivers of red peppers and micro green sprouts, lean turkey and just a slathering of light mayo. We became addicts for Kashi's Original Seven-Grain crackers, organic breakfast cereals with at least 6 grams of fiber, and the abundance of local fruits us lucky Clevelanders get to enjoy mid-July. Blueberries found their way atop bowls of Fiber One, raspberries and raw almonds made their way into tossed salads dressed lightly with olive-oil and vinegar based dressings, and we stopped eating yogurts that contained more than 10 grams of sugar per serving. We went Greek with our dairy, eating plain, 2% fat Greek yogurt with diced peaches and honey. We became vitamin guzzling, anti-oxidant rich, fiber consuming machines...and implementing these small changes a couple of times per week helped us both feel better and lose a little weight over those eight months.

By the time February of 2010 rolled around, I was reaching a breaking point. While my Mother and I had made some really great progress with our eating habits, I was not exercising regularly and still following my old routine of food consumption the majority of the time. My relationship was and had been essentially over in my heart. Because of how I had to handle and deal with that aspect of my life, I found myself under even more undue stress and anxiety within my family relationships. My body was on the brink of getting to a place where it could feel better, but I hadn't been able to push it over that hump. The train was spouting coal dust and puttering "I think I can," repeatedly as it chugged up that hill, but something had to change in order for it to reach the top. Fuel needed to be added to that fire, it needed to be stoked and I was the only one holding that heavy, iron rod.

On Fat Tuesday of that year, I stepped on the scale in the familiar green bathroom at the home of two people I used to know and love as my own family. The bobbing needle pointed two hundred and forty-five pounds at me. That was the last time I'd weigh myself on that scale, or set foot in that green bathroom. It was the last time I'd face the walls that were shaded with horrible memories from the hot summer before. Two days later, I broke. I ended the relationship I imagined would last forever. I took the reins of my life back, staring down the dark road before me, unsure of what would await at dawn. When morning finally broke, I found that I had a whole lot of time to focus on myself. I gave up dessert for Lent again to re inspire the ball I'd began to roll one year earlier. I began walking one and a half miles in the park every week day. I picked up a copy of Michael Pollan's book Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, and read it cover to cover in two hours. I picked myself up, put one foot in front of the other, and never looked back.


November 2009


December 2009


February 2010

And a special thanks to Anna Zimmerman for always taking photos of me. I'd have no way of sharing pictures with the world if you hadn't been snapping them for me.