I sautéed onions and garlic in coconut oil for a few minutes before I added my "meat." I warmed up and browned the meat for a little while before adding ketchup, coconut sugar, and worcestershire sauce to the mix. I used about a cup of taco "meat", a tablespoon of coconut sugar, two tablespoons of worcestershire sauce, and 1/2 cup of ketchup. It is certainly not the healthiest option but it absolutely satisfied my craving in a more healthy and vegan way. I would have used tomato paste instead of ketchup but at the time I was out. I ate the sloppy joes open-faced on gluten free bread!
After my taco fiesta with Emma last night, I had a ton of food left over - there was no way we were going to be capable of eating all of that ourselves! I was craving sloppy joes so I decided to convert my leftover taco meat into a sloppy joe meal, and once again it was delicious.
I sautéed onions and garlic in coconut oil for a few minutes before I added my "meat." I warmed up and browned the meat for a little while before adding ketchup, coconut sugar, and worcestershire sauce to the mix. I used about a cup of taco "meat", a tablespoon of coconut sugar, two tablespoons of worcestershire sauce, and 1/2 cup of ketchup. It is certainly not the healthiest option but it absolutely satisfied my craving in a more healthy and vegan way. I would have used tomato paste instead of ketchup but at the time I was out. I ate the sloppy joes open-faced on gluten free bread!
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I was feeling a little homesick today so I decided to make something that reminded me of home - Mexican food. It's not a beauty detox friendly recipe, but it is Vegan and absolutely delicious. I decided to make tacos ... from scratch (tortillas and all, which was a terrible idea). To make the taco meat, I used Kimberly Snyder's soaked walnut taco meat from the Raw Taco Salad Recipe - walnuts soaked for 6 hours, cumin, coriander, and tamari. I made guacamole with avocado, lime, fresh cilantro, tomatoes, red onions, and cayenne pepper. The tortilla was amaranth flour (gluten free) and salt with water, but tortillas are much more challenging to make than I ever realized. I ended up with "tortilla fritters," most of them ended up being tiny pieces but I managed to make four or so that somewhat resembled a tostada shell for me to pile the ingredients on. I set up a spread worthy of a king with chopped raw onions, lettuce, tomatoes, guacamole, "meat," and my tortillas to share with my friend Emma. It was absolutely delicious and definitely something I will make again.
We're starting to get into my favorite season - the time of leaves changing and pumpkin spice everything and most importantly, HALLOWEEN. In order to celebrate the season, I decided to try making my own vegan pumpkin pie for my friend Emma. I didn't follow a recipe, I kind of just put everything together and added things until it tasted the way I liked it. I used puréed pumpkin, nutmeg, cinnamon, soaked cashews, agave syrup and a dash of salt to make the pumpkin filling. I ended up adding oats to the mixture because I thought the pumpkin tasted too pumpkin-y. For the crust base, I food processed almonds into a fine chop and blended in oats with cinnamon, agave, a splash of salt and water. The recipe is flexible - next time I may use unsweetened coconut in the crust instead of almonds. I baked the crust first in the oven just to make it a little firm, and then I put the filling on top and baked it just a tad to heat it up. Emma ended up loving it!
I am happy to have completed my second Kimberly Snyder challenge! (after the Glowing Green Soup). It helps me feel more connected with the community and keeps me involved and constantly thinking about how to incorporate more Beauty Detox friendly concepts into my every day life. I have already made habit drinking a glass of lemon water right when I wake up in the morning, and my Glowing Green Smoothie is a breakfast must every day. I've already seen and felt my body slimming down - I can't wait until I can start incorporating exercise again! Cooking is like therapy for me, I do it to procrastinate my homework, but it also is becoming my outlet of creativity - And there's nothing like sharing a home cooked meal with a friend. Tonight I spent a portion of the afternoon on campus trying to write this philosophy paper (it's killing me!) and decided to invite a friend over for dinner. He was going out to a party so I wanted to make sure he had enough carbs in him to keep him energized through the night. I decided to make a recipe from My Eclectic Kitchen - Vegan and Gluten-Free Quinoa Meatballs! (Thanks to @yvonne_deliciously_vegan #myeclectickitchen) The recipe was very similar to the veggie burgers I made from Kimberly Snyder's website, but with a few differences. I didn't have any peppers so there are things that I had to leave out of the mix, but I was definitely happy with the result. I grilled the mixture on the stove top in some coconut oil but found that I wanted the meatballs cooked through a little bit more so I put them in the oven to bake for a little while. Next time, I also want to add Tamari to the meatball mix to add a little bit more flavor. I made homemade marinara like sauce from Finding Vegan - The Best Marinara Sauce. I made a much smaller portion than the recipe calls for and I didn't have tomato paste, so once I finished cooking the ingredients together I threw them in the blender with some almond milk to make a creamy tomato sauce. It worked great all together with the meatballs on top of Quinoa pasta. I've been having a hard time sleeping well for the past few weeks. Ever since I got my wisdom teeth removed, my body has been functioning with all sorts of drugs and medications in it (clindamycin, penicillin, hydrocodone, ibuprofen, etc.) and I've been feeling very lethargic, heavy, lazy, and tired during the days. At night I would wake up at least two or three times, unable to fall back to sleep, sometimes for an hour, and I would wake up in the morning feeling unrested. My teeth are finally starting to feel better. I have no pain in the right side at all and the left side is slowly easing - I have a check-up appointment tomorrow and hopefully this is all over with soon enough. I'm no longer taking any medication (thank goodness) so I can focus on eating healthy and mental wellness to make myself feel better. As a former athlete and having always been an active person, not having worked out for the past two weeks has been difficult. When I got my wisdom teeth out, I didn't have the energy or the pain tolerance to get myself to the gym and it's been a cycle of feeling unwell. Last night, I finally felt well enough to try some exercise so I decided to do some yoga at home with Bob Harper's Yoga for the Warrior video. I realized instantly how out of shape I was - I had never had that much trouble with yoga before in my life. Right now I'm weak and my breathing isn't steady and I'm nowhere close to flexible. Despite all of this, I couldn't be any happier that I started this last night. I feel this way because last night, I had one of the best nights of sleep I've ever gotten. I did the workout right before bed, changed into my pajamas and got to sleep. I didn't wake up a single time during the night and I slept so heavily that I don't remember my dreams. When my alarm went off this morning, I was so disoriented that I couldn't think clearly enough to find my phone to turn it off. It was the perfect nights sleep, and I completely attribute it to doing the yoga before bed. If possible, I would like to make a habit of doing yoga before bed every night. Today, I feel much happier, more positive, more awake and just better overall. This also helped me realize how out of shape I was, but also gave me the motivation to start getting back into the gym. With my strength right now, I don't think I could do the Kayla Itsines workouts, so I will spend this week building myself and my strength so that next week I can start again. I am so thankful that I finally realized my ability to get back into fitness, now that I've got a bit of a hand on nutrition. I watched a great video this morning from MindBodyGreen that was posted in the Beauty Detox Foods Facebook Group. It was three doctors with different eating philosophies debating the best ways to eat, called Sugar, Gluten, Paleo, Vegan: 3 Doctors Debate the Best Way to Eat (link above also). It was very interesting to see what arguments they make for each way of eating. What it really boils down to is they recommend eating things as close to the Earth as you can get - eat real foods, like things that come from nature. They also burst a common misconception that fats are bad for us - even some saturated fats are good for us (namely the natural ones, like coconut oil). Fats are necessary, and the fact that the term fat is used both for nutrition and as a way to describe an overweight person is inconvenient because the two are not equivalent.
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I'm currently in the process of clearing out my fridge to make it more Beauty Detox friendly. I have food left over from before that I don't want to waste (I'm a college kid, everything is about saving money) so I am trying to use it up so I can purchase only BD foods from now on. The foods that I have left over aren't necessarily unhealthy, but they are not vegan or vegetarian. I have chicken, eggs and some cheese that I need to get rid of but I don't really want to waste it, so I will incorporate it in small portions in my meals. Some of the dishes that I made this weekend are: baked oats, brown rice stir-fry, and apple-banana cakes. I have seen a lot of fitness and nutrition Instagrams make posts about baking oats in the oven. I used to make oatmeal a lot for breakfast and its a great thing that I can keep at work, but I was intrigued as to why baked oats have become so popular. So, I decided to try it out. I found a general recipe online, but I substituted all of the unhealthy ingredients for healthier ones. My oats had:
These were baked in the oven at 350 degrees for 30-45 minutes - and they were delicious. I don't want to make them a consistent part of my diet (egg is not vegan), but this is a good, healthier sweet treat if I'm craving cinnamon rolls or something similar (and I always crave cinnamon rolls). I was feeling a little sad this weekend - being in a long-distance relationship gets to me sometimes, but most of the time experimenting with food can make me feel better. I decided to put together apple-banana cakes. Initially, I wanted to just mush together a banana and very thinly sliced apples with some cinnamon and see if they would cook together like a pancake. It turns out that they don't hold like pancakes do (there is no binding ingredient) but they do make some delicious mush. The last pancake I added some amaranth flour to and it held slightly better than the first two. Finally, today started Kimberly Snyder's Avocado Remix Challenge. I started off simple by adding it to my stir-fry recipe, but it turned out to be incredibly delicious. My stir-fry was brown rice with red onion, yellow squash, garlic, an egg, and some grilled chicken. I know it wasn't beauty detox at all, but the rest of my recipes will be! The avocado added to the stir-fry added a delicious creaminess and tied all of the ingredients together. I won't post the Avocado Challenge daily here (follow my instagram @fightforthefitlife to see it daily), but rather I will do a post at the end of the week summarizing my Avocado Remix Challenge experience. I can't wait to see what this week has to offer! I love that Kimberly Snyder posts weekly challenges for her followers, and they make great blogging assignments. I went through all of her blog posts and made a list of all of the assignments so I can get caught up and always have some kind of challenge or goal to accomplish. This recipe for Glowing Green Soup was the first assignment, so I it is the first one that I tried. When I printed out the recipe initially, the zucchini and tomatoes were covered so I couldn't see them on the list. Therefore, they were not included in my soup. I made this recipe on a gloomy, rainy day so I thought soup would be the perfect option. To be honest, I did not really enjoy the taste of the soup, which could be due to the fact that I had the missing ingredients. I don't know if I will try this recipe again. |