It's been a little over a week since we ended the three week Whole Living Detox, and a lot of people have been asking me if there are any lasting effects on our diet or if we've completely fallen off the wagon and returned to our old eating habits. To be honest, it's a little bit of a mix.  The first few days off the detox we fell off the wagon hard...I mean it's Girl Scout Cookie and Cadbury Mini-Egg season after all! But there were a few things that we found ourselves maintaining with relative ease...likely because they were the components of the detox that we also felt made the most different in our lives. So here is a run-down of each detox component and where we stand:

Meat - this is a resounding no...not going to give meat up. We both just love meat too much, but even before the detox we only ate red meat 1-2 times a month so I don't feel too badly about this.  We do eat fish, chicken, turkey and pork relatively often but we try to balance it week by week so that we eat fish at least once a week and one other meat only one-two other times each week with the rest being vegetarian or eggs. One of our favorite new vegetarian meals is the one shown above from the detox...Red Lentil & Sweet Potato Stew. Delish.

Dairy  - we have actually made a change here. When it comes to milk I'm no longer using it at all and Christian is only using it for his coffee in the morning.  Otherwise we use either Soy or Almond milk depending on the situation.  Soy milk steams beautifully for my morning Chai Tea Lattes and almond milk works well for cereal, oatmeal and all other purposes.  The reason we use both is because we are a bit wary of using too much soy...all sorts of research about potential negative hormonal side effects. Let's be clear though...I will never give up cheese completely.  I am being a bit more discerning about when I choose to indulge in it though, so no more automatic cheese on sandwiches or scrambled into my eggs. It has to be a really yummy cheese and worth it.

Coffee - Christian didn't even give this up during the detox, so no change for him here but I did give it up and am fully satisfied with my new Chai Tea Latte morning substitute.  This isn't the powdery, sugary mix that most coffee shops have, but instead it's simply a Black Chai tea back brewed with half hot water and half steamed soy milk.  I add a bit of honey or agave nectar and I have a fabulously decadent tasting morning beverage. I will likely indulge in the occasional latte after working out on the weekends, but for the most part I think my giving up coffee has improved my sleep habits so I'm going to try to stick with it.

Roasted red peppers are one of those ingredients that immediately elevate a dish to gourmet. So sweet, so smoky and so amazingly delicious. The problem is, however, that we like to eat them quite often and the store bought roasted red peppers are quite expensive and usually soaking in oil. So a few years ago we tried our hand at making them at home and haven't turned back since. If you have a gas stove they're incredibly easy to make, much healthier, less expensive, and...bonus...make your house smell incredible.

So let's get started! Place a clean red pepper directly on the flame of a gas stove set to medium-high. Using heat-proof tongs, turn pepper as each side begins to burn and blister until entire pepper is blackened and crisp. Usually about 1-2 minutes per side or about 5-7 minutes in total.  Sometimes you need to use the tongs and hold the pepper over the flame at an angle to get in the crooks if it's a bit more more misshapen.

Once the majority of the pepper is blackened, take the blackened red pepper off the flame and immediately place into  a tightly covered dish (plastic wrap will do if the dish doesn't have a proper lid) or you can simply place the pepper back into your plastic produce bag and tie it closed. This latter option is good for less clean up if you're just doing one pepper.

 

I love this trick for how to finely shred Brussels Sprouts so I thought I would share it.  It's much easier than chopping them with a knife to get them this small and consistent...and kind of fun too!  Perfect for my favorite Kale & Brussels Sprout Salad Recipe.

 

The video's only a little over a minute, so take a quick watch and enjoy.

I was a lucky girl during this holiday season...surrounded by family and good friends and healthy and prosperous enough to live a life that allows me to experiment with cooking and travel.  Maybe not quite full-time yet as I would like, but still, I know that I am indeed a lucky girl.  Another reason I'm lucky is because my family and friends know how much I love to cook so the gifts that I get tend to center around the kitchen.  Some women may hate getting household appliances for a present, but as long as it's for cooking and not cleaning I'm all in!

So this year, I got two items that I wanted to share.  Not because I'm promoting specific brands or getting anything at all from the manufacturers but because they honestly have made my life in the kitchen easier and more comfortable.  Both of which are extremely important!  The first was a gift from my mom and the second a gift from the fabulous hubby...

 

The more I blog & talk about SavoryGirl the more I hear people assuming that I must have an amazing kitchen to do as much cooking and entertaining as I do.  Ha ha, I wish!  The reality is that I live in a tiny 1 bedroom apartment in San Francisco with a tiny and not very cooking friendly kitchen so I thought I would show you around my kitchen and provide some thoughts on how to make fabulously healthy & gourmet meals regardless of the kitchen you have.  Really,  if a small kitchen is set up properly it can be your best friend and you can stop cursing it's compact size...lots of famous chef's got their start in very difficult tiny kitchens after all!  The high-level points on the video are below, but it's short and sweet so click above to watch. 

I'm sick of crying like a baby every time I chop onions, aren't you?  I mean, I have tried every trick in the book.  Partially freezing the onion first, keeping the root intact, holding a piece of bread in my mouth to absorb the gas that the onion's now broken cells are emitting, etc...  And to be perfectly honest, I am an efficient and effective onion chopper so I do it pretty quickly too!  But despite my knife skills I am extremely sensitive to the gas that onions emit so I am crying like a baby within a few cuts....like mascara running down my face crying.  And that just sets me up to chop a finger off since I can't see what I'm doing despite my good knife skills!

So I say, enough is enough!  And poor Christian shouldn't have to be the designated onion chopper in our family all the time. So despite how ridiculous it makes me look, I have been chopping onions happily for the past month wearing my swimming goggles.  Ridiculous? A bit.  Effective and time-saving?  Absolutely.    

...stays together.  Isn't that the way the saying goes?  No?  Huh.  Well, that's how we feel in our house at least.  And honestly, it's one of the main ways that we are able to crank out so many delicious home-cooked meals while both being extremely busy working professionals.  So my SavoryGirl tip for today is two-fold.
First, if you haven't yet found your partner in life when you're thinking about who to settle down with make sure it is someone who has similar life goals to you.  Now this may sound obvious, but I can't tell you how many people I have watched be upset when their husband is content eating fast food for dinner but the wife wants to spend time/money/energy on home cooked meals and then ends up bitter because she feels under-appreciated (or vice versa).

My weekly menus are one of the key elements to living what I refer to as a SavoryGirl life...meaning they afford me a way to keep my passion for cooking and trying new recipes front and center in my otherwise busy life.  Over the years, I have developed a few philosophies that I try to develop my menus by...they’re not hard and fast rules just guiding principles that align with what is important to me personally and allow this system to work best for us:

• Balance meat, fish and vegetarian meals throughout the week with a slightly heavier emphasis on the latter two
• Seasonal menus...so for the most part you won’t see corn on the cob in the winter, for example. To be fair...I do eat bananas and pineapple all year round even though those are never in season here really
  • Keep in mind that I live in CA, so what’s in season for me (strawberries in the winter!) may not be in season for you...when that is the case I encourage you to choose frozen or canned alternatives.
• Leftovers! I’m a huge believer in leftovers so they are regularly incorporated into the menus.
  • Remember that we’re only a family of 2, so if you also want to incorporate leftovers you may have to double or triple the original recipe
  • If you don’t love leftovers as much as we do and want to skip that, feel free to dig back in the archives to find a substitute recipe...or add a “DIY night or a recipe of your own (and please share!)
• “DIY” Nights - on some nights there won’t be a detailed recipe to go along with the dinner and instead it will indicate “DIY” in parentheses, which means “Do It Yourself” or in other words, wing it! Experiment and create your own recipe for that dinner...these are often quick and easy dinners at my house or things that I have made a million times and can do on autopilot.
• Eating Out - I also build in nights to eat out...because trying new restaurants is is just as important and fun to me as trying new recipes and cooking...especially when you live in a great food city like San Francisco!
  • Of course, you don’t have to eat out on the same night as I am so feel free to rearrange the menu to fit your schedule or pick an archived recipe to skip the eat out night all together.

One last word of advice...use short-cuts and your support system often! I am extremely fortunate that my husband, Christian, has a more flexible schedule than I do and is always extremely willing to help out. It wasn’t always that way, but we’ve learned and compromised over the past 10 years to foster the things that are important to us...one of which is regularly home cooked yummy meals that we can sit down and enjoy together at the end of a long day. So Christian is my best sous chef and dishwasher...find yours whether it’s a friend, roommate, spouse or kid...it’s worth it and it can help develop an interest in cooking in others while you chat it up and spend some good quality kitchen time together.