Day 12, Friday: In Which I Practice Moderation

On this day I felt like I was still recovering from too much meatiness. Or maybe it's that I was exhausted. I hadn't been sleeping well since I got home from Chicago. Ideally I go to bed at 10:30 and lights out 11:00. That way I am ready for the world's saddest "take me out please?" whine from the world's cutest dog at 7:30 am. Unfortunately I have been staying up till midnight and beyond playing Dots, a game that will rob you of your hopes and dreams by eating up all your time for no real purpose.

My appetite continues to be quite moderate. Look at what I had to eat on this day:

Breakfast: 2 slices of turkey, a quarter of an avocado, quarter of a bell pepper.
Lunch: 4 slices of turkey, a half an avocado, half a bell pepper.
Dinner: 2 bowls bacon and egg salad (usually I have three).

No snack. I highly recommend the turkey/avocado/pepper combination--I liked it so much I had it twice!

As you know, yesterday I didn't eat much either. I am already so excruciatingly thin--can my zero-body-fat self continue to live on such poor provisions?! (Lest you think I have body dysmorphia, this is a joke. I'm not overweight, but I am certainly in no danger of being blown away by a stiff breeze.) At the end of the day I felt better than the day before, but still not quite my old self.

Day 9, Tuesday: In Which Our Heroine Resists the Dread Beast Chocolate Chip Cookie

An amazing thing happened today. I pleasantly surprised myself. Today was my first time back in our car after hubby's road trip. Things I found there: 1. rotten banana peel; 2. used coconut shell/ghee lanterns that had dripped buttery grease all over the floor of the car and, subsequently, my hands; 3. PACKAGE OF HOME MADE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES MADE BY THE HOSTESS AND SENT HOME WITH CHRIS. They were just sitting there. Looking at me. The edges were lightly browned. The middle looked chewy. There were maybe five left in the knob of tin foil. I looked at them. They looked at me. Then I swept them up with the coconut shells and the banana peel and put them in the dumpster.

Okay, let's get down to bizness:

11:30 am: Homemade green juice
2:00 pm: Goat cheese and prosciutto salad
9:00 pm: Fajita-less fajitas
10:00 pm: Apple with almond butter

Okay, so I have so many things to say about the green juice. First of all, full disclosure: these days I find myself actually thinking about what I am going to eat not just from my usual perspectives (will this make me feel good? Is this good for me? Did this have to travel a long way on a truck to get to me? Is this homemade?), but from the added perspective of HOW WILL MY BLOG READERS PERCEIVE THIS MEAL. This is kind of silly, because the only person reading my blog is my sister, and once the Dorothy Lynch salad dressing references dry up I can't promise she'll keep reading. It's also silly because of this: there are a million different diets out there, and a million people willing to raise an eyebrow at mine. The whole point of my Detox is for me to take care of MYSELF, not worry about whether or not I look like a pig or whether or not the vegetarian yoga mafia is coming after me. So it's silly, okay? Very very silly. And yet, when I contemplated my breakfast this morning, I thought of you, Gentle Reader, and how I really had to redeem myself for last night's travesty of a dinner. So I made green juice!

Green juice sounds like a punishment but it is, in fact, an indulgence. Green smoothies make me feel ill, but green juice makes me feel great, when deployed effectively. Effective deployment means not drinking too much of it, drinking it slowly, not using it as a meal replacement. Ineffective deployment means drinking a lot of it very quickly and going out to teach two classes without any protein under my belt. Unfortunate digestive sequelae* and crashing soon follow. Green juice is very potent and my system needs time to absorb it. If you think about it, we didn't evolve with juicers, and our bodies are used to processing celery juice in the context of all the fiber that goes with celery. Or that's my goofy theory anyway. So I drink it slowly.

I first got into green juice because one of my friends was visiting to teach a yoga workshop. She had brought with her a huge plastic quart container of green juice. Being from New Jersey, I'm used to seeing those containers filled with Chinese hot and sour soup. But this one had a kind of electric green liquid in it, and as she walked past me carrying it, I was entranced by the fragrance emanating from it--it smelled like grass, and summer, and my cells cried, "I want that! Gimme that!"

Here's my favorite green juice recipe: (I use a Breville, one of the numerous fantastic kitchen appliances I have from when my hubby worked at Williams Sonoma. We live in a teeny tiny apartment but man, we have the kitchen appliances of an EMPEROR.)

- Head of romaine lettuce
- Three stalks celery
- Half a cucumber
- Two large handfuls of kale
- A lemon
- Half a head of fennel OR a green apple

The fennel is pretty sweet. (I didn't use the green apple today because I wanted to save it for snack time--as you know I've been relying on green apple and almond butter a LOT during this Detox for snacks.) The lemon gives this a wonderful flavor. So that was breakfast. I didn't have to teach on this day so I didn't bother having anything else, but when I do have to teach I'll supplement the green juice with a handful of cashews or an egg.

I can't remember what I had in addition to goat cheese and prosciutto on the salad, but it was probably cucumber and scallion, my go-to salad ingredients. 'Twas tasty. Hubby liked it too.

Okay, I understand that this picture makes fajita-less fajitas look like a big bowl of featureless glop, but they are one of my favorite dinners currently. They work on the same principle as bunless burgers and bagel-less bagels and lox--just leave out the tasteless bread-y meal component. This meal comes together insanely quickly. I get some Trader Joe's organic chicken tenders, or even better, skinless boneless chicken thighs. Put them on a cookie sheet. Cover them with salsa and salt and garlic powder to taste. Whack 'em in the convection oven on broil, 400 degrees. While that's cooking, I slice up half an onion and a bell pepper, put some olive oil, cumin, garlic, chile powder, salt, etc. in a pan and cook 'em up slowly. When the onion and pepper are soft, I dump in an entire package of sliced mushrooms. While THAT cooks down, I make guacamole. I can't stand store-bought guacamole. Here's how I make it: a whole avocado from a reliable source. (Ashley Market has reliable avocados. They're always ripe but not rotten.) Two medium garlic cloves chopped very finely. Two limes. Plenty of salt. Mush together. By that time, the chicken is done, the veggies are done, BAM. I arrange all three meal components in a bowl. I add a dollop of goat milk yogurt instead of sour cream. Some other time I'll regale you with a tiresome list of all my dairy issues and how I get around them.

Apple with almond butter is becoming my go-to snack on this detox. It was not at all very prominent the first time I did the Detox. The first time around, I ate a lot of cheese sticks. Which really screwed up my train schedule (see asterisk).

*Do I really have to spell out what I mean by "unfortunate digestive sequelae"? Lemme put it this way. People have three types of digestive problems. 1. The trains come too frequently. 2. The trains come too infrequently. 3. They alternate too frequently and too infrequently. I don't spend a lot of time loitering on platforms. Capiche?

Day 8, Monday: In Which I Set Forth Principles of Salad

What I ate on this day:

Breakfast: I went for the sliced turkey and yellow pepper again. Super good.
Lunch: Sirloin cheeseburger with fixin's.
Dinner: Bacon and eggs.

The cheeseburger falls under the same principle as the bagel with lox, cream cheese, etc. The flavor is not in the bagel! Similarly, in a cheeseburger, the flavor is not in the bun! The flavor is in the stuff WITH the burger--pickle, tomato, onion, whatever condiments you like. I'm oddly becoming more of a mayonnaise fan, but anything other than homemade mayonnaise is pretty unhealthy and also doesn't taste that good. Mayonnaise is easy to make at home, and I learned how to make mayonnaise from a real French woman in her kitchen in France, but most of the time I am not in the mood to make a mayonnaise. Ketchup is fabulous but it is full. of. sugar! So check out this picture of how I had my burger. On a plate with an array of burger-related veggies and a little mustard. Makes a nice looking plate, in my opinion. Instead of eating with my hands I used a knife and fork and cut up my food and inserted it daintily into my maw. Yummo!

Dinner was supposed to be a little something FANTASTIC that I make called "Bacon and Egg Salad". No, it's not a variation on egg salad. It's a salad with eggs and bacon in it. This sounds pretty run of the mill, and indeed, some may say it is. But I say that making a salad is an overlooked art. The thing is, it's not enough for me to roughly chop up whatever is in my fridge and throw it ice-cold on a plate with some sugar-free dressing from a bottle. Oh no. Or rather, sure it's enough to get the vegetables into my body, but if I want to actually SAVOR the meal, I make an effort to follow these principles:

1. I really think about the ingredients. Will the flavors be harmonious? Am I putting in two things that really don't go together? Personally, I don't care for the taste of tuna with tomato. Not sure why. I find those two foods unpleasant together. In fact, I am not a fan of raw tomato in a salad at all. Similarly, I wouldn't be happy with, say, goat cheese and tuna. I like tuna in the classic Nicoise (PRONOUNCED NEE-SWA-Z!), but not with tomato. You have your own preferences, I'm sure. Respect them.

2. Along the same lines, at any given moment I have about six crunchy salad-appropriate veggies in my fridge. Say I have celery, cucumber, yellow pepper, fennel (great in green juice but more about that later), scallion, and carrots. I've been known to chop up a little of each of these, throw them on some lettuce, add a bunch of savory other stuff (bacon, chicken, egg, goat cheese, avocado, toasted pine nuts, whatever), whisk up some dressing and throw it all together. We are invariably disappointed with these salads. There are too many competing flavors and textures. It's actually better to use fewer ingredients and just use more of each one. Then you've got cuisine instead of food.

3. Cut harder vegetables into smaller pieces (like pea-sized), and softer ingredients into larger pieces. If I cut up a little chunk of goat cheese into a million tiny pieces it blends with the salad dressing and creates a mucus-y coating. Texturally nasty and also you miss the taste of the goat cheese. Larger chunks means actual flavor. Similarly, don't cut an avocado into small pieces. Keep avocado either in slices (I don't really do this but I like it when I go to a restaurant and that's how they have the avocado) or cut into chunks. Cucumber is not rock hard but not soft either, so it should be somewhere in-betweeny. Celery should be very small, like pea-sized, because it is pretty flavorless and quite hard, and in my salads, I either don't use carrots or I shred them. Carrots coins ruin a salad, in my opinion. And I should know. Carrot coins were a big feature of the Dorothy-Lynch-salad-dressing-salads of my youth.

4. Use room temperature vegetables. I can't imagine that cold food was a big feature of life at the dawn of humanity. Probably we didn't start eating cold food for several hundred thousand years. Ideally, I spend the 30 minutes before my meal harvesting beautiful vegetables from my warm, abundant garden in the south of France, wearing a muslin peasant blouse and a big straw hat, placing the veggies in a large straw basket, with my well-behaved dog hovering nearby, no mud or stress or bugs, etc. But usually, when I'm not at my country house (joke. I don't have a country house. I'm a yoga teacher for God's sake!) I pull the stuff right out of the fridge. So I wash it in warm water, and if I'm using bacon and egg, like I do for bacon and egg salad, I don't let them cool before I add them, so that the hot food cooks the cold off the raw veggies.

5. I MAKE MY OWN DRESSING. I cannot emphasize this enough. This is essential to my enjoyment of a salad. Why, why oh why get it from a bottle when you can pour a third cup of olive oil into a mug, squeeze in a lemon, few drops of vinegar, generously salt (maybe a little garlic powder), and you've got something fabulous?

Okay, so here's what I put in bacon and egg salad:
- Bag or two of salad
- Six to eight strips of bacon chopped
- Three hard-boiled eggs
- Entire avocado
- Plenty of scallions
- Plenty of cucumber
- Enough pine nuts to coat the bottom of an omelette pan, where I toast them and then add them warm to the salad
- Sometimes peas

This is a salad that eats like a MEAL, people! It's fantastically satisfying. But last night, my hubby and I got home late. We were exhausted. Hubby had very kindly already prepared the bacon and eggs. So we just ate that: bacon and eggs. No salad. (Sad trombone.)

Day 7, Sunday: In Which Our Heroine Feels Glum

On this day I was feeling kind of glum. My foot was bothering me, my husband was out of town, and I had a fight with the dog over taking a bath. (She REALLY wanted me to. I refused. She insisted. We both said things we regret.) Is it a coincidence that this glumness corresponded with the aftermath of a sugar binge? Who knows. I also worked a lot, and kind of forgot to eat.

Breakfast: Turkey burger with kale. If I've had a dietary indiscretion the night before, good ol' TB with greens settles my stomach. But I was in a hurry so I only ate half.

Lunch: remaining TB and kale, plus half an avocado with lemon, and half a yellow pepper.

Dinner: green apple with almond butter (salted, natch). I could have used the awesome Trader Joe's sirloin burger I had in my fridge to make a little something fabulous I like to call "Cheeseburger Salad". I thought about having that for dinner. And I thought about how good and conscientious I would look to you, dear Reader. Then I got home and was too tired. And basically ended up having snack for dinner.

High marks for staying inside the bounds of the detox today. Low marks for eating like a stray cat.

Day 5, Friday: In Which I Cook Cow Black and Blue

Breakfast: Two hardboiled eggs. Are you as tired of reading that breakfast as I am of eating it? Here's the thing about hard-boiled eggs. They are not quick (takes about ten minutes), but they are easy. Pot of water on the stove, put in the eggs, you go jump in the shower while they cook. I actually really love hardboiled eggs, but I eat them a bit too much (in my experience, eating the same stuff all the time creates a sensitivity to it), plus I don't doll them up. Yes, this is again in violation of my own precepts about eating CUISINE, not food. Know what makes a hardboiled egg cuisine? This is the best, the best way to eat a hardboiled egg--PUT PESTO ON IT. Homemade pesto. More on that later. I'm sure the pesto hardboiled eggs will make it onto my detox before the end. They're epic. Really.

Lunch: Turkey burger with kale. I find myself feeling a little embarrassed to tell you guys about my turkey burger lunch. I am afraid you will find it...sad. Regardless, that's what I wanted to eat, so that's what I ate! And it was AWESOME. When I make TB with rainbow chard I can just put it into the pan and the TB and the chard get done at about the same time. The kale takes longer, so I take the turkey burger out and just wait for the kale to cook a little more. I'd rather have a lukewarm TB than al dente kale. I also had a half an avocado prepared in my favorite way: sliced, tons of lemon juice, liberal salt. Avocados are fabulously fatty. I remember reading somewhere several years ago that our bodies digest vegetables better when they are eaten with fat. No wonder so many cultures around the world combine fat with vegetables! So the great thing about eating an avocado with lemon is that the oil and vegetable are all in one--add lemon and viola! insta-salad.

Dinner: hoo-boy, this was a doozy. My husband is away this weekend (at summer camp. Really.) so just to spite him I had a steak (his favorite), and entire bag of baby spinach sauteed (which, as you might expect, cooked down to about a cup), and a yellow bell pepper. Sorry for the lurid quality of this photo. It's a shame--it makes that steak look crappy when it was FANTASTIC. Here's how I like my steak cooked: black and blue. Have you heard of that designation? It means charred on the outside and rare on the inside. Even though everyone in the restaurant business knows what it means, it can be hard to find a restaurant that actually cooks it that way. So really, the best steak I've ever had is at my house.

This brings me to another one of my personal dietary precepts: I like my plate to be one-third protein, one-third cooked vegetable, one-third raw vegetable. Chinese Medicine takes the premise that too much raw food puts a burden on your metabolism. According to this perspective, if you already have a weak metabolism, a raw diet is really not so good. Many of my yoga colleagues urge their students to eat raw. I think this is a lousy idea, a. because of what I just mentioned, and b. because I believe that if you're not a nutritionist you should avoid giving advice about nutrition. Just like if you're not a surgeon you should avoid performing surgery.

Late-night Indiscretion: I didn't fall off the wagon, but I ate this final item later than I wanted to. Probably not a good idea to have a milkshake before bed. And that's pretty much what I had. But it was a SUGAR DETOX milkshake! Wanna know what was in it? A frozen green-tipped banana. Probably 3 tablespoons of unsweetned cocoa powder. Handful of icecubes. Slug of coconut water. Tablespoonish of almond butter. SALT. Salt is THE. KEY. to a good smoothie, in my opinion. Just think about how many processed foods have oodles of salt in them! What makes a Snickers bar so freaking good is not just the sugar. It's the salt! So I salt my smoothies. With very fancy, high end Himalayan salt my dad brought me back from Europe. Mmmmm! Note: would I think this was good if I hadn't been sugar detoxing for the last few days? Probably not. So if you try it at home, don't think I'm crazy if it tastes like crapola to you. Just remind yourself that I'm not a nutritionist. Or a chef.