From the category archives:

comfort food

Hallloween Pumpkin Pie Smoothie

We are now entering into the shorter days and longer nights of the winter season. Nature is pulling back in, the yang energy of warmer months converts to the more yin energy of the cooler months.

Most animals begin to hunker down and rest… but we human animals… we start speeding up with holiday shopping and enormous amounts of busy fourth quarter preparations. Why do we do that?

Now is the time to be especially mindful of how you can nurture yourself. Can you sleep more? What can you do that brings you joy? What are you eating these days?

For me, cold foods like salads just don’t to cut it for me this time of year. I like to make soups and stews and broths and stir-frys, increasing warmth and comfort.

When we feel un-nurtured, we eat emotionally. And emotional eating coupled with stress is a ticket to everything from lowered immunity, inflammation, bloating, weight gain, increased anxiety, general dissatisfaction, fatigue and meloncholy.

You may want to find some delicious indulgences that will make you feel loved-well and won’t throw your system off by making you crave a whole bag of candy corns (ugh!).

Try this pumpkin pie smoothie recipe (easy) – treat yourself – I’m fairly sure you will love it.

The Holidays are upon us. What Joy can you gift yourself? What minor changes can you make to simplify and slow down for the next 8 weeks?

Sending you warm wishes on Halloween and for the yin season to come!

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Warming Autumn Broccoli Soup

Fresh, organic broccoli soup.

Here’s a simple recipe to warm you up. It’s packed with protein and calcium.

Ingredients

1 head of Broccoli -chopped
2-3 cloves of Garlic – diced loosely
2 TBS Ghee
1 Onion
1-3 cups of vegetable stock (make it at home ahead of time by sautéing onions, celery, carrots and turnips, add water (3-6 cups) bringing water to a boil, and simmering for an hour. Refrigerate and/or freeze. Use as a base for soups like this)
1 cup beans (choose, black-eyed peas, white navy beans, butter beans, etc.)

Directions

In a corning ware dish, add chopped and rinsed broccoli, garlic, 1 – 1/2 TBS ghee, and a tsp or two of filtered water.
Put in oven or toaster oven (my preferred method) on 350˚ until roasted to desired brightness
Meanwhile, sauté or sweat onion in 1/2-1 TBS of ghee until medium soft (smelling great)
Add in beans and cook through till hot
Heat up stock on stove top
Add all ingredients to high speed blender (broccoli + garlic, Onions and beans, and stock) and blend until smooth and creamy
While blending squeeze in 1/3 of lemon, add salt to taste.

Serve with fresh lemon and a sprinkle of Celtic sea salt.

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How do we Soothe Ourselves?

This morning I woke up at 3:30 and could not get back to sleep. My jaw was tense, I felt a general feeling of unease, and so after 30 minutes of tossing and sighing, I just simply got up and started my day. In fact, I’m writing to you now form my meditation spot in an effort to stay focused and clear.

The turning of the seasons naturally hold a lot of change. And recently, all over the world change, movement, and shifting is what’s on the menu. In just one week on the east coast we’ve had an earthquake and a hurricane, and of course we see what’s happening elsewhere around our country and the globe.

This got me thinking about how we soothe ourselves. If we look at children and how they seek soothing through breastfeeding, thumbsucking, pacifiers, temper tantrums (release), we can perhaps reflect on how we choose to (consciously or unconsciously) soothe ourselves. Some are temporary foxes that end up exacerbating our tension and stress, and there are others that really help us leap to the next level. Here are a few that some to mind:

These habits keep us stuck in stress and tension:

Tuning out and getting lost in Television
Watching the news
Drinking, drugs
Eating comfort foods (childhood foods, sugar, heavy foods for grounding like pasta, meats, cheeses)
Caffeine and Coffee (also a drug – “America runs on…”)
Creating drama and arguing with loved ones
Pavlovian attention to smart phones, email, Facebook (this takes us out of the present moment)

Here are a few habits that while sometimes challenging to start, help to ACTUALLY SOOTHE:

Meditation
Yoga, or simple gentle morning/evening stretches
Deep, belly breathing
Qi Gong (this is very slow Thai Chi)
Wandering in nature or for a walk with no particular destination
Cultivating an herbal tea connoisseurship
Dancing
Drinking water (we are approximately 70% water)
Sitting and watching anything that has life force: birds, trees, wind, people
New earth comfort foods (dark leafy greens (life force energy), green drinks like Green Magma barley grass powder (my current favorite), E3live (amazing microalgaes), root vegetables for grounding (sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, burdock root)
Gentle cleansing with foods
Spending quality time with loved ones
Making more love (literally – both physically and emotionally)

The concept here is to be in your body, be present in the moment as much as you can. We are really just very tall children who desperately need some free play. There’s this odd thing going on in our culture which takes us not only out of the present moment – into the future or past – but into a virtual world – a playground of the mind (Facebook, email, etc). This keeps us disconnected from our bodies — our first house.

Yes, you read that correctly. This is similar to the concept of Body as Temple, but different in that I hope this metaphor helps you connect more deeply back to your Self. Our first house is our body. We literally inhabit it. And yet we forget how to care for it properly. Or rather, we weren’t given the maintenance manual that many ancients had. We tossed that information out around the time of the industrial revolution.

Here’s the thing, as you come back into your body and remember/ relearn how to listen to what it has to tell you, how to care for it, how to love and appreciate it NOW, you will find that life is completely different. When you know how to soothe yourself in a deep and intuitive way, you will actually become soothed.

I know that when I wake up early with tension and stress that I actually need to spend some time soothing myself. This morning, I understood that something was creating tension, something in my body or mind was overstimulated. I decided to soothe myself. I did some yoga, some meditation and deep breathing, drank my green barley grass, cultivated a state of gratitude for choosing those things, and then this topic came to me. I try to keep my posts short and sweet, but apparently this one needed some space to breathe.

So, the questions I have for you are:

Where do you need to breathe space into your life?
Where do you need to breathe? (what is weighing down on you?)
What is your default soothing mechanism?
What is one new soothing habit would you like to cultivate?

Email me back or post to the blog, I’d really like to know.

Personally, I am recommitting to meditation. I’d like to show up and sit every morning for 10 minutes or so. I do guided meditations – which are easier for me, they allow me to shut off my brain chatter. I’m a much better person with daily meditation practice, more intuitive, connected, less reactive to stress, in general – more happy.

Off to enjoy my morning tea…

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Rawkos! A travel food.

Happy Labor Day weekend! It’s time to celebrate all the toil and sweat you’ve put into you’re year.

Here’s a fantastic recipe that will keep you in the summer mode. This is a popular favorite from my Seasonal Cleanses (Join me in September for a healthy kick-start)–It’s great food to travel with and requires NO COOKING. Rejoice the Rawko! It’s like a taco but it’s raw – not raw meat – raw foods (means no cooking, more enzymes, more energy).

Wraps

Bunch of collard greens*, rinsed and de-stemmed – leaving 2 halves (depends on how many people are eating– figure 2-3 wraps per person)
Pat those dry

Sweet Cucumber Salsa

1 apple – peeled, cored, diced
1 cucumber – peeled, seeded, diced
1 medium sweet yellow onion – diced
parsley and/or cilantro – washed and diced
a few pinches of Celtic sea salt (this is a high mineral salt- very good for you)
Fresh squeezed lemon
Add all ingredients together, then add in salt and lemon – make sure it really gets on that onion! Toss, let sit.

Rawko “meat”

First, let me say, I am not anti-meat, I am pro sustainably-raised, grass-pastured meat*. I am pro health for our bodies, and health for the planet. So why the non-meat tacos – er- rawkos? Because they are delicious. Because raw foods pack an amazing amount of energy and vitality, and because everyone loves new and exciting foods that make them feel good with no negative repercussions. So here you go:

1 -2 cups of raw organic walnuts (again, depending on how many people you are feeding)
2-6 TBS of gluten free tamari (go easy on this — it can get real salty quick)
Add to a high speed blender or food processor and blend it up

Making Rawkos

Lay your collard wrap on a flat surface
Spread 1-2 tsp of the rawko “meat” onto the wrap length-wise
Add some salsa (this offsets the heavy flavor of the walnuts nicely)
Here, I added some sunflower sprouts for some more green and texture
Roll up and enjoy.

You can pre-roll these and eat them on a car ride — or pack the ingredients separately and take to work, beach, or party.

*When I travel I also make an organic turkey and goat cheese wrap that you can eat in the car. Just add shaved onions and apple. Divine.

Let me know what you think. Happy Labor Day Weekend.

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Mid-Summer Bean Salad

Fresh, filling, delicious and energizing. Seasonal eating is at it’s peak right now. And we have a good harvest season ahead of us. Beans are great for stabilizing blood sugar, supplying protein, energy and fiber. They help reduce cholesterol, support the kidneys, heart, and promote good gut health.

Mid-Summer Bean Salad

1-2 cups organic white navy beans (or beans of your choice) cooked (or canned if you’re pressed for time or if cooking beans is a dark mystery)

1 fresh summer onion – these are no in the markets, they have long green shoots growing out of their tops

1-2 cups fresh green beans (this time of year they are sweet and crisp)

handful of chopped fresh herbs – Use what you love, dill, parsley, cilantro, sage, thyme, basil, mint – whatevs.

Extra virgin olive oil – 1-4 TBS depending on who big your salad is

Generous squeeze of lemon

A few pinches of Celtic sea salt (high mineralized salt)

Additions:

Cucumber – peeled, seeded, chopped

Goat cheese – crumbled

Apple – peeled, seeded, chopped

Directions:

1. rinse beans if canned

2. in large mixing bowl add olive oil, lemon and pinch of salt, and chopperd herbs

3. wash chop, prepare all other ingredients

4. add to bowl and toss

5. add more oil , lemon, salt to taste

6. for best results let marinate for 20 min to an hour to let flavors mingle and the lemon and salt to turn the onion

7. enjoy it alone, as a side, with eggs, or over a bed of mixed greens

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What food or habit is keeping you stuck? – let’s do some blog coaching!

This is the stuff that shows up in our everyday life and although we may find it comforting/delicious/deserving - it is sabotaging our best efforts to break out of “what we don’t want anymore” and keeping us from liberating ourselves into a “life that we love.”

Sometimes it can creep up on us. For instance, it might magically dawn on us 3 months into a pad thai binge, that perhaps this might not be the best thing for our ultimate goal ( ahem. purely hypothetical of course).

What food or habit is keeping you stuck?

I invite you to think seriously on this one for a minute. It’s most probably something you do or consume everyday. You may find it in your ‘comfort food’ moments. Or maybe it’s lurking on your to-do list. It could be a behavior that triggers stuck-ness, like working late too often, facebooking all day, sitting in front of the computer, eating a pound of cashews, or finishing off of your kid’s lunches.

Here are a few hints for identifying that lurking Stuckiteer (new term, made it up):

1. you probably do it, eat it, drink it, or think about it daily

2. you probably love it. a lot.

3. you probably know what it is before finishing this list

4. you are probably right now saying, “hey, no way, not that! But I love that!”

“Great. So now what do I do?”

I’m glad you asked. If you’re feeling any resistance or annoyance that’s a really good sign that you’re on the right track. So now, you wait. Okay, well, you observe.

This is where we enter into Awareness. Awareness is observation without judgement, shame or guilt. It is about being an impartial observer and identifying what is holding you back or throwing you off course. When you can see your ‘blind spots’ more clearly, you are in deeper awareness. And when you are in greater awareness, you are in your power. You now have the ability to shift, make changes, choose something. Your Stuckiteer is no longer running the show. You are.

Post your responses to these questions below and let’s coach it up:

1. First Step: Awareness – what is your stuckiteer?

2. Second Step: Are you ready to shift?

Ask yourself if you are ready to make a shift. Are you really ready to release the sticky stuckness?

3. List the benefits of releasing habits and liberating yourself.

4. List the benefits of staying stuck.

Post your responses below and we will have a blogged-out free stuckiteer power coaching sesison!

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Almost Spring-time Easy Broccoli Soup

On the east coast we’ve had a little winter Revisit. However, Spring is just around the corner! Try this super easy Broccoli soup to get your green on and warm up at the same time. As we go into Spring, we can follow mother nature and eat lots of greens. Greens have low caloric density and tons of nutrients and fiber.

Here’s a recipe form my 4 week cleanse. This is a soup you can indulge in and still shed your winter weight.

Almost Spring-time Easy Broccoli Soup

All measurements are estimates, play around and use your instincts.

You’ll need:

baking dish

high speed blender or food processor

toaster oven or oven

Ingredients:

2 broccoli heads and most of the stem – washed and roughly chopped
4-6 cloves of garlic – whole
3 TBS olive oil
1 cup of vegetable stock (or water)
salt to taste
1/2 tsp onion powder
Eden Shake to taste and for garnish

Directions:

Wash and roughly chop broccoli. Trim the woody part of the stem, use the rest
Add broccoli florets, stems, and peeled garlic to a baking dish with water still on them
Coat with olive oil
Add some salt
Roast in toaster oven (or oven if you prefer) on 250º for about 30 minutes– we do this on low because of the olive oil. Olive oil can become damaged in high heat and create free radicals in our bodies, so when heating be gentle and use low heat
Remove from oven and transfer to blender or food processor
Add in vegetable stock or water, salt to taste, and onion powder
Blend until smooth.
Garnish with Eden shake or parsley — or just eat as is. As much as you like.

Enjoy!

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Reason #3 Sugar is Messing with You [Video Post]

Reason #3 covers an area that may come as a surprise to you but is extremely common.

What resonates with you?
Are you a chips or a chocolate lover?
Is it bread or sweet honey buns?
What are your triggers?
Where is sugar lurking?
What are you going to do about it?

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Reason #2 Sugar is Messing with You [Video Post]

Reason #2 explores something you may not expect! Post your experiences below…

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3 Ways Sugar is Messing with You [Video Post]

Sugar lurks in lots of places besides cupcakes, chocolate and soda. Find out how sugar could be effecting your health and sanity in sneaky and surprising ways.

Stay tuned for 3 short installments of
3 Ways Sugar is Messing with You

REASON #1