What I Eat - Day Twenty-Seven

I gave a talk last week, and the participants asked me what book(s) I recommend.  This is it!  I love this book because it gives you all the information you need to improve your diet in a sustainable way.  It tells you how to soak beans, choose groceries, cook amaranth, plan menus, stock your pantry, etc.   Also, it is filled with recipes that have different flavour combinations based on ingredients you can easily find at the grocery store.  My patients love this book too!   If you`re in the North Bay area, you`re welcome to stop by my office and pick up a copy, but it is also finally available for individual sale and on amazon.ca!  

Breakfast - Rice cakes, Sunflower Seed Butter, and Apple Butter. 

If you`ve been following this blog, you`ll notice it`s unusual for me to have breakfast without fruits or veggies.  I wasn`t feeling it this morning, so I didn`t :)

Lunch - Simple Tomato Pasta

Ingredients 
-one red onion, diced
-bag of frozen organic spinach
-jar of strained crushed tomatoes (finally available in a jar!)
-handful of fresh oregano leaves, ripped up by hand
-sea salt
-rice noodles (pictured below, available at Independent)

Instructions
-fry onion in a bit of grapeseed oil (I used my ceramic frying pan) until it starts to brown
-add tomato, spinach, and oregano
-leave to simmer, adding salt and pepper to taste
-boil water, remove from heat, and leave noodles in it to soak until soft

I used the rice stick noodles with this recipe because I didn`t want anything to interfere with the flavour of the fresh oregano red sauce.  Also, I knew they would make better leftovers if I mixed them with the sauce soon after they were cooked (see previous entry on rice pasta, Day Fourteen).  This dish was really simple and flavourful! 

Dinner - Curried Vegetables on Red Rice

Thanks to Tobel, a guest chef I`ve featured before, for making this absolutely delicious curry!   He made me realize I`d gotten a little too used to making coconut curries with spices I was familiar with, and it was nice to break out of the mold. 

Ingredients
-three tbsp Patak`s curry paste
-one can of tomato paste
-one can of stewed tomatoes
-sweet potato, chopped
-cauliflower, chopped
-carrot, chopped
-celery, chopped
-red onion, chopped
-bell pepper, chopped
-chickpeas, cooked
-cilantro, chopped
-red rice, cooked

Patak's states on their website "Unfortunately there’s been a recent change in the law defining what Gluten Free means so we can no longer say that our products are Gluten Free. We haven’t changed any of our manufacturing processes or safegard procedures and if we know that an ingredient we have used does contain Gluten we will state this on the label."  The ingredients of the curry paste are: "Water, spices (contains mustard), vegetable oil, concentrated tomato purée, salt, corn flour, acetic acid, sugar, tamarind, garlic powder, citric acid, lactic acid."

Instructions:
Combine curry paste, chopped sweet potatoes, tomato paste, and stewed tomatoes in a pan and cook part way through.  Chop the rest of the vegetables (Tobel used two bowls of chopped veggies!), add them to the pan with the chickpeas, cook them through, and then leave the pan to simmer until you're ready to serve on the red rice topped with the cilantro.