Lessons in Balance

Begin with Good and End with Better

There you have it, plain and pretty simple. Start off with a good product and there's very little that needs to be done to make it a great one. My apologies to the Photoshop expert who brightened Penelope Cruz's skin and cinched in her waist a tad but that must have been accomplished between three sips of coffee, max.

The same applies to turning a basically healthy meal into one that will deliver maximum taste appeal and pack the biggest nutritional punch. Chances are you'll end up with something you like. I'm looking for a cuisine that's basically vegetarian using locally grown and organic foods, as much as possible. I want my food to taste good, look good and do good. My search is on!

I found 11 helpful links to refer to while making healthy substitutions:

1. 5 Ways to Create Healthy Recipes. Techniques from the Mayo Clinic to reduce fat, calories and sodium from favorite recipes.
2. 12 Foods You Should Buy Organic. Some foods absorb pesticides more readily than others and these 12 should be organic choices. A list of the least contaminated is also included.
3. Cooking Light Magazine is filled with recipes and articles regarding food makeovers. If you're counting calories, fat grams or cholesterol, most of the recipes list all of that data. Lots of meat dishes too.
4. Healthy Recipe Doctor, WebMD. Along with makeover recipes, they do a Taste Test Tuesday feature and review the latest health-claiming food products.
5. Make Your Favorite Recipe Heart Healthier, Methodist Medical Center.I like the first tip: Change one ingredient at a time. 
6. Build a Natural Foods Pantry from my all time favorite food website, 101 Cookbooks. You'll just have to see it to believe it.
7. Nutrition and Healthy Eating, a comprehensive list of nutrition and healthy cooking articles from the Mayo Clinic.
8. Vegetarian Starter Kit. If you're considering a change to a plant based cuisine, Vegetarian Times offers a 16-page booklet in PDF format.
9. FoodFit.com Recipe Makeover. Send in your favorite recipe for a makeover.
10. Cook's Illustrated. Scroll through the list of recipes for well tested foods in all categories, inspiration at its very best.
11. CalorieKing - Low Fat Recipes and Low Carb Recipes, already retooled for you.

Just by looking at a few of these, I can see a recurring theme: eat real food as simply as possible.

It looks like another lesson for another day.

Photo via Damn Cool Pics

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In Support of Home Cooking

Have you ever heard the phrase, "to a hammer, everything is a nail"? Well in a similar way for me, "to a yoga teacher, every lesson is about yoga".

As I leaf through The Sacred Kitchen, I've started making lists of recipes to try, food to buy, things to clean, and stuff to toss or rearrange. I remember the passion and fun I once had for cooking and think of how my food choices have changed, my body lighter and stronger. Gone are the days when I planned for three but was prepared for unexpected guests. These days, I cook for one and eat when I'm hungry and unless I'm having dinner guests, I usually don't shop with a list or menu in mind.

But just as I will often use a yoga prop for a novel approach to a pose, I've decided to go back to using meal plans and shopping lists in my search for a Centered Cuisine, one that's healthy and delicious. When fitness writer Stefan Pinto wrote an article titled 10 Healthy Poor Man's Food for When You Have Nothing to Eat, I got a kick out of it because it lists the organic staples in my kitchen:

1. peanut butter
2. oatmeal
3. brown rice
4. chickpeas (garbanzo beans)
5. tuna
6. black beans
7. lentils
8. corn
9. frozen spinach
10. sweet potatoes

It's a great list of basic foods which will make it easy for me to stay Centered. I looked through a few of my favorite cookbooks and websites yesterday, wrote up a few menus, made a shopping list, and traipsed through Island Naturals in Kailua-Kona with a plan for once.

It was one of the biggest shopping hauls I've made in a long time.

Three bags, spent and down for the count.

I rolled them up and put them back in the case, ready for my next trip. Hopefully, not until the weekend.

Do you have a Top 10 List of your own?

Stepping into a Sacred Kitchen

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

-R.D. Laing

I spend a fair amount of time here at my kitchen sink. I love the colors of the bottles as they reflect light changes from morning to night, and the rafus palm leaves oscillating in the breezeway. It's a calm setting, highly beneficial to preparing food. As I read in The Sacred Kitchen:

A centered person is one whose thoughts are focused, not scattered; someone who resides in a place of peace within, rather than bobbing in the choppy waters of ill health and emotional volatility. Just as a centered individual makes the best friend, student, or parent, such an individual also makes the best cook. We can shift our lives "closer to the center" just by being aware of the great benefits of centeredness. Making the diet more centered is perhaps the greatest consideration in creating a sacred kitchen.

Undeniably, the current food buzzwords are safety and obesity. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 76 million cases of foodborne disease occur each year in the U.S.(1) and the latest obesity statistics show that it continues to rise as overall, 26.1% of adults are considered to be obese. In 2008, Mississippi recorded the highest percentage at 32.8%.(2)

According to the headlines, fast food is to blame for our nation's climbing obesity scores and government agencies are at fault for not monitoring our food sources more carefully. What we may be failing to notice are our own basic attitudes about food. Somewhere along the way certain foods turned evil, filled with calories, fat and toxins. So we opted for low-fat, non-fat, natural and fortified. We also voted for "fast and cheap food" with our buying habits and the food industry complied. We lost our respect for food and allow it to be mass produced, soaked in preservatives and zapped by microwaves before we let it enter our bodies, often unconsciously.

Deepak Chopra, M.D., says in Creating Health: Beyond Prevention, Toward Perfection:

People who do not feel sufficient respect for eating are showing no awareness of the flow of organizing power that it represents. Eating indiscriminately or eating unconsciously, eating on the run, habitually overeating or not eating at all - these are all violations of natural law, that is, of the biological processes that must work in their preordained channels in order for food to be converted into us.

I'm guilty. Even though I may be centered and at peace as I stand before my kitchen window preparing my meal, I eat unconsciously or eat as I'm doing other things. This week, I want to:

1. Re-read The Sacred Kitchen.


2. Cook some of the "10 Healthy Poor Man's Foods for When You Have Nothing to Eat". The article was written by my friend Stefan Pinto and the 10 foods happen to already be in my sacred kitchen. I'll add local fruits and veggies for perfection.


3. Turn my eating space back into a Centered Dining Experience (my laptop is now the centerpiece).
   

I would love to see self-responsibility become another buzzword when we speak about Food. While collectively, we continue with efforts to insure the safety of our foods and take steps (literally) to decrease the nation's obesity ratios, individually we can move "closer to the center" by noticing our food and our attitudes toward eating.

Care to join me? You may subscribe to Lessons In Balance or check-in every so often. Please feel free to comment, I'd love your feedback and ideas.

Sources:
(1) Department of Health & Human Services, CDC
(2) WebMD: How Fat is Your State?