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 4, Thursday: In Which We Enter My Dietary Wheelhouse

Gah! Did a bunch of Dorothy-Lynch related research last night after posting and I'm horrified to find that it's still around! People like it 'cause it's fat-free! The fat was the only thing it had going for it...

Anyway, on to the heart of the matter. The reason why you're here and I'm here. The big reveal.... What did I eat on this day?

Breakfast: Now. We are really getting into my wheelhouse. The very heart of my preferred way to eat. This is why I laugh at anyone who insists we're all meant to be vegetarian. NOTHING. And I mean NOTHING. Makes me feel like a bigger CHAMPION. Than eating the following for breakfast:

TURKEY BURGER WITH RAINBOW CHARD. 

I know, I know, it's not really breakfast food, so I'm sort of breaking my own rule. But I imagine the turkey burger is kind of a patty (like breakfast sausage!) and I remind myself of the spinach in Eggs Florentine, and somehow I've managed to convince myself that this is breakfast food. It helps that the chard and the burger are both pretty bland. The first time I tried this I was 23 years old. A woman I worked with said she had taken to eating a TB for breakfast and felt great. I was skeptical--I knew this woman to be truly, tragically mentally ill, and it didn't help that she, in fact, had a history of anorexia. But I tried it. And even then I was BLOWN AWAY by how INCREDIBLY alert, clear-headed, steady, and upbeat I felt, leaving for the subway in the morning with a turkey burger under my belt. Then, caught up in the hurly-burly of my twenties in the big city, I forgot about it. I did some disastrous flirting with vegetarianism and green smoothies for breakfast before I finally returned to my true home, TB.

Here, a word about green smoothies. Everyone in yogaland talks about green smoothies. "Green smoothies are so tasty and nutritious!" "Green smoothies are so easy to whip up in my [vitamix, magic bullet, dishwasher--insert appliance here]!" "Green smoothies are cuter than puppies!" "Green smoothies cured my cancer!" Not actually joking about that last one. I enjoy green smoothies. But every time I made them for breakfast (and I tried 'em a bunch of different ways), I would get sick to my stomach immediately and unfortunate digestive sequelae within 20 minutes. Screw that! Sticking to my TB.

Lunch: smoked salmon, purple onion, a bit of goat cheese, tomato, lemon, salt. Here in New Jersey we are all obsessed with bagels. And for very good reason! When I was growing up in Kansas, a bagel was a frozen item about three inches in diameter. Then I moved to the Tri-state area and learned how majestic a bagel really can be. Toasted, with a schmear of cream cheese, accompanied by a large orange juice--heavenly! And SUGARY.

When I moved to New Jersey and started hanging out with Jewish people, I was introduced to the concept of bagels and lox. Oh, how I pity my young midwestern self, growing up without bagels and lox! It's not just the bagels and lox that makes bagels and lox so fabulous. It's the cream cheese, the capers, the red onion, the tomato that go WITH the bagel and lox. I don't do so well with cow milk dairy, so back when I was eating bagels I would substitute soft goat cheese (this is a pretty good substitution if you get bland goat cheese). Now as a Paleo eater, I've realized that when you have so many accoutrements to the bagel, you can ELIMINATE the bagel. Or at least I can, and still be happy.

Dinner: with mah gals, takeout from Arturo's, which is the best restaurant in South Orange/Maplewood, in my opinion. Sauteed kale and salads with tomatoes, prosciutto (pronounced "prushoot" in New Jersey), mozzarella (pronounced "mootsarelle"), etc. My dining companions also shared a pizza. I avoided the pizza, and then at the end of the night, the hostess invited me to take home the remaining salads. "What, is everyone done with the salads?" I asked. "I'm not taking them home. I'll eat the rest right now!"

Late night snack: apple and almond butter. Dumb idea. Should have gone to bed. One thing I realized on the Sugar Detox is that I'm not hungry late at night because I'm hungry. I'm hungry because I'm TIRED. So if I eat a snack, I end up staying up late. Then I oversleep the next morning.

Otherwise, happy with my day.