DAY NINE and DAY TEN
I thought I would try doing a video blog (vlog?) for Day Nine but that turned out to be more of a chore than I’d imagined. I will persevere and make it happen, perhaps for tomorrow if I can manage it. Keep your fingers crossed for me!
Yesterday was a bit off in the run-down of recipes. As a rule, I would make a juice for breakfast, a solid meal for lunch, and then a soup or smoothie for dinner. I decided not to do that yesterday. I made the Kale, Pineapple and Chia Seed smoothie for breakfast, but only soaked the seeds for about an hour (as apposed to the “few hours” that the book recommends). Come lunch time I pulled out the solid meal recipe I had pre-selected for that day and found I didn’t really want to make it after all. The recipe was for the Vegetable Nori Rolls with Nut “Rice” and included about a dozen different ingredients, all of them meant to be cut into mini-sticks. Realizing I wasn’t up for all that, I opted to make a recipe I already knew and loved. I call it Apples and Cabbage, but I’m sure there are other titles for it. Just because one your old favorite recipes isn't featured in the Clean book doesn’t mean it can’t work within the diet or be adapted to work. Open your mind and be prepared to expand the horizons of your palette.
APPLES AND CABBAGES:
2 T butter
1 medium red onion, cut in half and sliced
1 medium head of red cabbage, cored and sliced
2 green apples, peeled, cored and cut into half-inch chunks
2 T red wine vinegar
2 T brown sugar
Pinch of clove
Half a cup of water
In a large skillet over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the onions and cook for about five minutes, or until just tender. Then add the rest of the ingredients, stir to combine and cover. Cook for ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove the lid and cook for five minutes more, or just until liquid has evaporated. Serve over brown rice. Enjoy!
Granted, the diet doesn’t allow for butter or sugar, but it’s easy enough to substitute olive oil and agave nectar, respectively. I don’t feel it altered the flavor in a bad way. Be sure to peel the apples if they’re not organic. (All of the pesticides get absorbed into the skin of the fruit and you don’t want to ingest that junk.) Also, this recipe serves four; I simply cut all the ingredients in half so I could have leftovers today. To me this recipe is near-perfect because it’s so easy to prepare and has such great flavor that it’s even delicious served cold. Unlike the fussy nori rolls, this dish is more rustic so you don’t have to be very precious about how you cut up the veggies. A simple way to inject more flavor into any dish that’s bedded on rice is to cook the rice in stock. I chose low-sodium chicken stock this time, but vegetable works equally well. Brown rice always smells amazing when you cook it, even in plain water. Adding the stock produces that wonderfully home-y soup smell. If any of you decide to try this recipe, definitely let me know. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.
After that, the quality of my kitchen time degraded some more. Instead of making a separate liquid meal for dinner, I just drank my breakfast leftovers. As it happens, that tasted better as a leftover. I think the pineapple may have been too sharp when it was very fresh that morning. My taste buds were sure glad it mellowed out by the evening. I don’t know about you guys, but fresh pineapple hurts my tongue after a little while. I can never eat more than a few pieces in one sitting. I know that it’s supposed to be very cleansing, though, so I’m toughing it out for this detox.
I will do my best to post a video or something more visually engaging tomorrow. Meanwhile, I hope you all are taking advantage of the respite from the heat these last two days. Go out and soak up a little vitamin D!