I could distill my boring principles for eating well into the following short statements:
1. Eat a decent breakfast.
2. Do not eat anything else until lunch.
3. Eat a decent lunch.
4. Do not eat anything else until dinner.
5. Eat a decent dinner.
6. Do not eat anything else until breakfast.
7. Don’t drink sugared beverages and drink lots of water.
Folks, I have to tell you that this salad, made from items I had on hand and in some cases was trying to use up, is so seriously delicious that I’ve eaten it for my past three lunches straight. Today I used up the last of the dressing and thus the run has come to an end at least for now, but I plan to keep it in rotation for the future. It has (mostly) healthful ingredients and is a true one-dish meal, with lots of vegetables and good protein from peanuts. If you care about such things, it’s also vegetarian. In fact, it’s actually vegan except for the dressing. Here’s what’s in it:
A good example of strong, sharp flavors, a lovely main-dish salad made from items I had on hand. Yes, I work from home and so could take the time to assemble this on the spot, but it could easily be adapted to taking to work: all the non-lettuce, non-crouton items mixed with the dressing, with the lettuce in one baggie and the croutons in another, all tucked inside a lidded plastic bowl that could wait inside the fridge until lunchtime and then be mixed together. This is sort of halfway between a Greek salad and a salade Niçoise. I was watching a Greek cooking show last night and realized that I could put something very similar together:
The remainder of a small head of Napa cabbage, washed and chopped
Part of a red pepper, sliced
A few shreds of red onion
Chopped peanuts
Peanut/lime dressing (scroll down on this website page to get to the dressing recipe)
Some leftover baked salmon from the night before
Lots of vegetables and protein from the peanuts and salmon
Filling and delicious!
I said in a recent post that I was planning to scale back on my regular what’s-going-on-with-my-life posts and invest my time in projects that I hope will actually make a difference to my readers. One such is a set of videos on various topics concerning healthy eating. I also said that I might start some once-in-awhile posts about “what I ate today.” This is the first of those. They won’t be on any kind of regular schedule; they’ll just show up when I think a specific meal is particularly good and easy to make. (I remembered as I was writing this that I did include a picture and recipe for a lunchtime salad several years ago in connection with a memoir by the chef Nora Pouillon. Scroll down to the bottom of that post for that material.)
For years I’ve had a very basic hummus recipe–chickpeas from a can, lemon juice, tahini, garlic, olive oil and salt, all dumped into the food processor and whirled until pulverized. It was fine as an occasional lunch item, sometimes spread on a flour tortilla with some veggies and rolled up to make a wrap. I would also make it for occasions when I thought I absolutely had to serve some kind of appetizer, say if people were coming over to watch the Super Bowl. But it wasn’t something I ever got too excited about it. I liked it, but it wasn’t an obsession.
I have posted about Mireille Giuliano before, notably in reviewing her first book, French Women Don’t Get Fat. I truly love that book and re-read it periodically. To me, it’s a sound, common-sense set of principles for getting and staying slim no matter what your nationality, and I ignore the ideas that are just kind of silly. Sorry, Mireille, but very few people who live in America visit France often enough to buy their prunes there. (Of course, that’s assuming that you buy them at all . . . ) And we don’t go mushroom hunting much around here. Nor do we have blueberry bushes in the back yard to supply us with those little nutritional powerhouses. Nor do we divide our time between New York City and Provence, where there are excellent farmers’ markets year-round. (I always wonder whether or not Mireille ever goes into a regular supermarket. Probably not!) I ran into an interesting article in the UK newspaper The Guardian (but now I can’t find it) in which some Frenchwomen were interviewed about how they view their weight, and they said that Mireille’s book was a big, fat (sorry) pain in the neck because it perpetrated the myth of always-thin French women. But, and this is a very important but, those interviewees weren’t really following the FWDGF principles. Instead, they were making a practice of overindulging at restaurants, because it’s supposedly frowned upon not to eat a lot when you’re out on the town, and then starving themselves the rest of the time. Not, not, not what Mireille says to do! She would say, in her charming French accent, “Who cares what’s considered cool or not cool? You eat the way you want to, and if people don’t like it, tant pis!” (Or, as my mother used to say, “If they don’t like it, they can lump it!”) So there it is.
I’ve been saying for some time now that one key to healthy eating patterns is the following:
Don’t eat in the evening.
Sounds pretty simple, but there are actually quite a few moving parts involved in this brief statement, most of them running counter to the way we eat in our modern American culture. Here’s the way it can go for a
Hope I’m not sounding like a broken record here, but I wanted to share some recent experiences with sugar intake that might save some of you from needlessly depriving yourselves of grain products. Many if not most people who think that going gluten-free is going to make them healthier are buying into a false premise. This is not to say, and I want to emphasize this point, that there isn’t real gluten intolerance, with the most extreme of course being full-blown celiac disease. But most of us need to cut out sugar, not gluten.
I just finished lunch a little while ago. a totally scrumptious bowlful of lentil-and-vegetable-and sausage salad with my homemade creamy Italian dressing. I enjoyed every bite. And now, if I’m wise, I’ll consider myself to be off the eating bandwagon until dinner, at which time there will be another good meal, perhaps some spinach lasagna with whole-wheat pasta. Or we might go out, it being Friday night and all.