Morning Marinade and a thought for the day......

Before going to work this morning, I quickly marinated some chicken;

Chicken breast, cilantro, garlic, cumin seed , lime juice and yogurt.

Cover and refrigerate. For dinner you can put it on skewers and grill, or just get a skillet nice and hot and prepare that way. The chicken will be moist and tasty either way

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life, you will have been all of these" George Washington Carver

Cream of Mushroom Soup

Home made cream of mushroom soup.

Saute half a large yellow onion in butter until translucent. Add 3 cloves of chopped garlic. Next add a package of sliced bella mushrooms (about 1.5 cup). Dash of salt and pepper. Saute until mushrooms are soft. An extra pat of butter might be needed. Add a heavy splash of red wine. In a sauce pan, I reduced about1.5 cup of bone broth to about half and added that too. Let it reduce a bit more and then add about a 1/3 of a cup of heavy cream. Mix well and cook together for a minute or two. Transfer to blender and puree.

I saved some of the  cream of mushroom/onion goodness to spoon over my burger.

 
And lastly a very simple meal of rotisserie chicken with a cucumber salad.

Coming up my thoughts on fruit and "carbs".

Happy Monday everyone

Primal Bento Box and New Site

I wish I had one of those nice Bento boxes to show you...but the other morning, I looked at my to go container and just thought "Primal Bento" for some reason.
A bit of fresh cod, left over chicken with tzatziki and a bit of guacamole.
Oh the joy of eating this type of breakfast at work. NOT. I hadn't had the disgusted looks in a while, but I think I could have sold tickets to this show. If they only knew how good it tasted.

This is how I prepared the cod loin.

Pour some evoo in a skillet and keep the heat low. Let the oil warm a bit and add the piece of cod loin. Now with the heat so low, it will take a good 8 minutes or so per side (if not more). Once flipped and the second side almost done, add a small teaspoon of tomato paste. Let that warm a bit and mixt it with the evoo and juices from the fish. Now add a tablespoon of a dry white wine. Gently break the fish apart into large "flakes" and gently fold everything together. Super tasty. 

As I had mentioned a few days ago, Feel Good Eating is moving on up.
http://www.feelgoodeating.com/

Take a look. It is not ready yet, and I'm still learning wordpress and all its capabilities, but let me know your initial thoughts if you have an extra minute. Is the layout ok? The colors? Suggestions? Advice?
Some of my last posts are not up there yet.

Make it a great day and SMILE a lot.

Parents, Food and Flavors

When I was young, I was lucky that my dad and mom introduced me to many different cultures. They enjoy good food and as kids always had my sister and I try everything they ate. I will admit that when you're seven, chocolate butter on toasted bread is a lot more appealing then raw herring with onions for breakfast. But...at least I tried. When my son recently tried some monk fish liver, I was happy to realize that I'm carrying on the tradition. Even though he didn't care for it, he had a second morsel to make sure.
So, I was a Dutch kid, my grandma was French and I lived in Italy. My wonderful parents were/are also cursed with a "wanderlust" that had us travel quite a bit. I was fortunate to travel all over Europe, Africa and the Middle East. During those formative years, my parents really immersed me in the "flavors" of those different cultures. From food, to music and the languages. One of my favorite memories of those times, was my dad waking me up late at night or early morning on vacation, and venturing out to the local market. He loved trying to talk to the vendors (eventhough he only knew a few words in some those languages) and buying and sampling their food. I'm convinced that my love for people was cultivated on those late nights and early mornings. What I've been hit with lately, is that all those different wonderful "food flavors" I was exposed to, really formed my palate also. My parents taught me to have no fear trying to communicate with people, even if you suck at speaking their language. Even though they never spoke of these things and showed by example, it was their way of being spiritual. To connect with people from all cultures and all walks of life. My dad could talk to everyone and my mom could connect with anyone......they make quite the team.

Lately when I've been cooking, I'm using ingredients and flavors from all over the world and combining them to make some pretty tasty fare. Here's an example of cultures coming together. Chicken with a miso, tahini and garlic glaze. 

In Japanese cuisine, sesame seeds are used in abundance, but tahini is not part of that mix. Tahini is the way the Middle East incorporates sesame seed in their cooking. Europe and the Middle East love their garlic, yet the Japanese traditionally use no garlic. Guess what? Miso's amazing flavor pairs well with a bit of garlic, add the tahini and you got a flavor explosion. I used a similar concoction for the salad dressing.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm moving Feel Good Eating to wordpress and to celebrate, I will put a few very very unique recipes (never posted before and including the miso, tahini and gralic chicken) together in a free e-book.

Wishing everyone a wonderful and relaxing weekend. Be nice and maybe try making a dish with ingredients  you've never attempted to combine before.

Breakfast and Change

I just love bacon and eggs!!!! And a few slivers of drunken goat cheese. Good breakfast enjoyed outside on my front porch in the fresh air. I was up at 4 am. Did a little meditation then went for a work out. Followed by a 15 minute power nap, then breakfast and off to work.

Big changes coming to Feel Good Eating. Thanks to my wonderful friend Steve, Feel Good Eating is going to wordpress and hopefully will soon have the look of a respectable blog.

It's been overdue, thanks for hanging with me this long and I will let you know shortly about the change.

Make it a great day

Rant with a pinch of Hope

Ok, I don't do these type of posts often, my last rant was about Vitamin water a long time ago. Yet this news really caught my eye;

This is the inside of the new PopTart store in New York City

A poptart store/restaurant!!!! Come on now! This is a new trend, M&M and Hershey's have a large retail store now also. Wow, I just can't wait to make poptart sushi

Holy Hell!

An now for my always positive look at life.....(there's always an other side to things)

Maybe, just maybe our eating habits ARE slowly changing. For companies to invest like this in extremely expensive retail operations that basically serve as advertising billboards, basically tells me that they are finding new ways of pushing product. Which most likely means sales are off. Which for our children is a good thing...I could of course be very wrong.

The Tao and a Tasty Treat

"Let the world unfold without always attempting to figure it all out. Let relationships just be, for example, since everything is going to stretch out in divine order. Don't try so hard to make something work...simply allow. don't always toil at trying to understand your mate, your children, your parents, your boss, or anyone else, because the TAO is working at all times.When expectations are shattered, practice alowing that to be the way it is. RELAX, let go, allow, and recognize that some of your desires are about how you think your world SHOULD be, rather than how it IS in that moment. Become an astute observer, judge less and listen more. Take time to open your mind to the fascinating mystery and uncertainty that we all experience."

Thank you Dr. Wayne Dyer, for the above passage. Early mornings are a good time to read. They can set the tone for your day. And sometimes, when you wake up already "stressing" about the day ahead of you, reading something that appeals to you (self help books, poetry, the bible, affirmations) will make everything "line up" a bit better for you. Try it sometime.

a tasty treat from yesterday afternoon;

Chorizo chicken sausage sauteed in butter with sliced fresh fig. Served over 2 thin slices of pao de queijo and 2 little slices of drunken goat cheese.

Truly Simple Meal

Anyone can do this. Please give it a try sometime and let me know what you thought.

In a large skillet heat up 2 slices of bacon cut up in bite size pieces. When bacon (bacon cut from the butcher works better than packaged bacon, as the pieces are a bit thicker) pieces are showing first signs of browning, add a 1/4 of yellow onion (sliced). When onion is starting to get translucent add 2 small or 1 large clove of chopped garlic. Stir together. Next add about 6-8 ounces of ground lamb. Stir well and watch closely so you don't over cook the lamb. When close to done add about 1/2 teaspoon of tomato paste. Again stir together. Next add 1 tablespoon of heavy cream. Heat for just another minute and serve.

I kept a close eye this time on how much of everything I was using so that you could try it. Again don't overcook the meat. So the last step of adding the tomato paste and heavy cream is all within about 90 seconds before taking pan off the stove.

A really satisfying dish.

I had a little side of cucumber salad with it. Drizzled with evoo, fresh ground pepper and a dash of sea salt.

 

What are some of your "truly simple meals"?

Motivation

Just a few positive notes I wanted to share today. And hopefully, it will motivate and inspire you to keep making the choices that empower and make you FEEL GOOD.

I found a large index card yesterday when I was cleaning up a bit and it read as follows;

"Realise that the hardest step in achieving anything, is making a true commitment, a true decision. Carrying out your commitment is often much easier then the decision itself. Don't labor forever over the question of HOW or IF you can do it" 

Thanks to wonderful google I found out that I copied this from a Anthony Robbins book years ago  (mid 90's I'm guessing). It's a book called Awaken the Giant Within.

I have read a lot of "self help" books over the years, and ultimately they pretty much all spell out the same thing with different angles. What ever self help/personal growth book you might be reading at the moment, I urge you to apply it to your life. We all have fallen guilty of reading to much of the same material and gathering more and more information. From what we eat, to what exercise modality, to what were supposed to think.....yet....we just intellectually masturbate with those ideas and while we're keeping our thoughts busy with those issues....very little action is taken.

Do any of you remember when I first started this blog almost 4 years ago and I tried to help one of my best friends to loose weight? I helped her to the point of cooking her daily meals for her and hand delivering them.
At that time, she was just "carrying out the commitment" to eat my way, but a "true decision" was never made. And so, it was only a matter of 1 month that she stopped her commitment and the weight she was desperately trying to loose, never came off and even worse, started accumulating even more. Well, 3 months ago she finally made a TRUE DECISION, and with the help of a very good MD, she decided it was time. She has lost 37 pounds so far, and there is no stopping her now. She is finally going to get what she has wanted so bad for so long. Because she made a "TRUE COMMITMENT".

Yesterday's post over at Zeroing In On Health had a sentence that really caught my attention

 "Consider that the average adult loses roughly 300 billion cells to old age every day and must replace them. Our bodies are literally manufactured out of the food we consume".

Read that a few times and tell me you would still want to eat that donut. If you have made yourself a true commitment, a sentence like the one above has so much meaning, that it will only reinforce what you've committed yourself to. If you haven't made that true commitment, you can, and we all have, read sentences like this all day long. They pique your interest, but you don't utilise or integrate them in your belief system.

I challenge you to make a TRUE COMMITMENT today. I promise you that if you do, you will be amazed with the change it will bring.

And.....back to some food ;-)

Lately I have been experimenting with a post workout meal. I'm not sure if you can really call it post work out, as I eat it about an hour after a morning workout. I used to fast till about 1-2 pmn after a 7 am work out, but for the past 2 weeks, I have been eating about 1/2 cup of full fat greek yogurt. I add a heaping tablespoon of turmeric to it.  (I also add some scallion, fresh ground pepper and sea salt)
Turmeric is one of nature's inflammation fighters.
I've notice 2 things from this little "n=1 thinkering" (hat tip to BRENT).
I seem to have a bit more "volume" in my muscles and my next meal of the day is very "energizing". I have a feeling the "carbs" in the yogurt swell my muscles a bit and the probiotics in the yogurt must have some effect on that next meal. Don't know how much longer I will continue this, as I like to keep it random, but wanted to share my experience.

A little plug for my beautiful town....
Just in case you're curious (our area has been economically hard hit because of  perceptions and a continuous media onslaught) our beaches and Gulf waters are free and clear of any oil or tar balls.

Make it a great day and remember to smile!