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Meat Free Mondays Movement

My friend Carolina sent me an email with a newsletter from GOOP, Gwenyth Paltrow’s site to promote wellness… in her own words: “Goop is a newsletter that will usually come once a week. I will be sharing recipes, my personal travel notes, the advice that I get and follow, and so much more. GOOP is constantly evolving”. my friend Carolina subscribes to it and shared it with me.

This week’s GOOP newsletter highlights Meat Free Mondays – a movement created in the UK back in 2006 to promote vegetarianism as a way to contribute to the health of the environment and the planet . Sir Paul McCartney and his daughters Stella and Mary are the founders of this movement and actively promote it around the world.

Meat Free Mondays now has a US following with its own website called Meatless Mondays… and KarmaFree Cooking wants to join in the action too. I have always seen this blog as a vehicle to educate that a vegetarian lifestyle if not difficult to follow and that incorporating more recipes like these into your regular rotation you’ll be able lead a healthier lifestyle.

This is a recommendation I always make to my non-vegetarian friends. Just incoporate in a conscious way more vegetable-based main courses into your recipe rotation. Change your mentality that your dinner plate in centered a piece of animal protein… that’s just not necessary.

That’s what Meatless Mondays is trying to carry out, to share with all environmentally-concerned people that going veggie once a week is not so difficult after all and it has an exponential positive effect on the environment too. If you are into recycling, maybe even driving a hybrid car… why not giving Meatless Mondays a try?? You will not regret it…

Thanks Gwenyth, Sir Paul and Carolina fr bringing this to my attention. I’ll try to do my part to help spread the word…

Tags: meatless mondays

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Categories MY EDITORIAL

Healthier lifestyle changes for 2010

3 Feb

Now that we’re in February and the Xmas season in Puerto Rico is over… now I can start thinking about my new year’s resolutions. This year I have included as part of my resolutions:

To exercise more – that’s why Santa left me at my sister’s house the P90X exercise program that I started last week… and to do more hatha yoga , which is a different kind of psycho-physic exercises to which I attribute a lot of my health benefits in my life…
To eat one big Green Salad a day – I have been lazier about this one in the first few weeks of the year…

My belief is you can’t create a huge list of resolutions that you might be overwhelmed in keeping. If it’s too many changes in a short amount of time, something will have to give. I found myself saying this over and over again the last few weeks – to friends and acquaintances who all are seeking better health, more fitness but sometimes lack the self-discipline to achieve long-lasting changes. That was the inspiration for this series…

About 5 years ago I gave my friend Ana Yolanda a Xmas gift… when she asked me she wanted to be thin like me, I told her she needed to make small changes in her regular lifestyle that will bring her and her family health on a long term basis. Her ways of Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers have worked on the short term to lose some weight, but nothing proved to provide her with any long-term results. Her experience with my Xmas gift… well, I think it had more to do with her attachment to certain foods and certain habits.

What I am about to share is something I have experienced first-hand… This is not necessarily scientifically proven, but these are changes I implemented in my own life and I have seen results – results of a healthier, slimmer and more energetic me. I will share with you what I wrote to Ana as a Xmas present and I have given to many other friends when they seek my advice on how now I am healthier and in better shape than I was when I was in college.

There are some words of wisdom:

We can’t expect different results

by always doing the same things the same way.

The moral of the story:

To get different results,

we MUST make some behavioral changes

– we must do things in a different way.

When I returned from living in NYC, I was still the same 5’ tall I am now, but I was wearing a size 8. I have not always been like that, but since I adopted a healthier lifestyle I have really seen a difference in my health and what my regular normal weight is. Now I regularly wear a size 0 and XS clothes.

I want to inspire you to make some lasting changes in your lifestyle and for them to stay with you for the rest of your life – so you can in turn educate your children the same way and create a generation of healthier and more active kids. I do not pretend you turn into a full-fledged vegetarian if that’s not your choice. But I do ask you to ADOPT ONE MONTHLY CHANGE. Only one. I have heard that if you implement a change for 15 days straight, it becomes a habit. That’s my goal – for you to adopt 11 healthier habits into your lifestyle during this year.

I would like for you to forget about weighing yourself… Your new gauge will be how fit you feel, if you have more energy, how many less colds you have gotten in the year compared to before, if you happen to have to buy yourself new clothes because the ones you have feel somewhat looser…

I know I should have shared this with you back in January, but heck… the idea came just now and I do not want to wait until next year’s resolutions to share:

ELIMINATE SOFT DRINKS

To me, it’s necessary to eliminate all soft drinks from your diet because they have no nutritional value whatsoever. You need to ingest foods/drinks that will provide some sort of health benefit.

Why?

You need to drink plenty of water to alleviate any constipation, a great cause of many ailments
Soft drinks have no nutritional value
The sodium in sodas only make us retain water
The chemicals in soft-drinks adversely affect our kidney function

So instead of drinking a soft drink, you’ll now drink:

Water

In every fast-food out there you can order your combo or sandwich with a bottle of water.
Try at least to drink 6 glasses of 8oz of water… it’s not optimal, but it’s a start.

Juices – preferably natural. I try to buy fruits when they’re in season and make the juice myself… but I know we are always pressed for time so when I buy prepared juices…

Read the labels to avoid purchasing juices with added sugars
Some brands to try:
- Lotus Pineapple Juice – from a container, not the can
- Tropicana Orange Juice
- Caribik Sun Passion Fruit Juice
- Simply Orange or Simply Lime
- Mott’s regular and Natural Apple Juices
- Martinelli’s Unfiltered Apple Juice
- Apple & Eve’s juice boxes – for those who have kids and needs portion control. I love the Fruit Punch and Berry varieties.

Also, when I go to parties, they usually have these juices as mixers for drinks, so I usually order a glass of Orange Juice, Grapefruit or Pink Grapefruit Juice or Cranberry Juice instead of the typical soda. And Simply Lime with crushed mint leaves and added fresh lime juice tastes just like a mojito…

Tags: food, lifestyle change, soft drinks, vegetarian

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Categories Lifestyle Changes 2010, MY EDITORIAL

Surprise!!!!

9 Jan

I love it when I get a nice surprise when I cut up fruit… a perfectly ripe avocado, a luscious pulpy mango, a gorgeous passion fruit. God knows that fruits and vegetables might look pretty on the outside sometimes, but they can be a gamble.

And this week… the surprise was a papaya without seeds to clean – YEAH!!!

Tags: papaya

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Categories MY EDITORIAL

Be wary of pretty Passion Fruits…

5 Dec

When you go to the market, you usually seek out the prettiest produce you can find… however that principle does not apply to passion fruits.

The thing is that when a passion fruit’s outside skin is pretty and smooth – the passion fruit is still unripe. But when the fruit gets all wrinkled and “old-looking” that’s when it is on point. Something very similar also happens with sweet ripe plantains.

Photo by omheart on Flickr

The passion fruits we have here in Puerto Rico are yellow, quite different from the ones I usually see in the media or internet. Just like any fruit, they’re usually sweet but they have a tart undertone. But if you get a tarty one, you can sweeten it very quickly adding some brown sugar or honey. The pulp inside is laced with lots of small black seeds that you can eat together with the pulp. No need to strain them at all…

Just take your crinkly and ugly-looking passion fruit, cut it in half and scoop out the pulp. You can eat the pulp right from the shell, or use the pulp alone in juices and desserts. I personally like a lot to make my own Passion fruit Yogurt.

Tags: passion fruit

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Categories basics, MY EDITORIAL, Puerto Rican delicacies

Incredible India… Kebabs

1 Dec

To my former knowledge, kebabs were some sort of brochette or food skewered by either a metal or wooden stick. You see them in Middle Eastern restaurants… shish kebabs being the most popular. I always order a kebab in my favorite Middle Eastern restaurant which is a brochette of vegetables. But in India… kebabs are something different. Particularly vegetarian kebabs…

Kebabs are patties of mixed vegetables and grains served with a variety of sauces or chutneys. You could see our first kebab experience in ZEST, a fine dining restaurant at the DLF Emporio Mall in Delhi.

We celebrated Annie Mariel’s birthday in the nicest restaurant we could find in Varanasi, The Great Kebab Factory. They offered us a vegetarian prix fixe dinner that included a series of kebabs for appetizer, main course and dessert accompanied by a selection of breads.

Here’s what we had for dinner…

The meal started with a salad… which was kind of nice, because we didn’t see a lot of salads in any of our menus… this one had, tomatoes, cucumbers and watermelon with a pineapple dressing. The Latin in me did not taste the pineapple a lot… but it was somewhat there.

Subz Galouti Kebab – their signature kebab, made with yam and green vegetables

Paneer Tikka – a piece of the traditional paneer cheese seasoned with Indian spices…

Makai Matar ki Seehk – A mixture of corn, green peas, lentils and Indian spices… this was my favorite one by far.

Kale Chane ki Tikki – this was another kebab supposedly stuffed with cheese. I never saw or tasted the cheese…

Subz ke Tinke – this was a skewer of fresh vegetables… and we thought we would never see a skewer here. How wrong we were.

The food was accompanied by various choices of naan, our favorite one the garlic one. It tasted just like Italian garlic bread, which was a nice break from the Indian spices taste.

Also, a selection of sauces and chutneys were provided for us to mix with our kebabs – tomato, cilantro, peanut and my favorite, tamarind. The sweetness and tanginess of the tamarind helped me offset the spiciness of most of the kebabs.

We did not get to choose our desserts; they just bring you a frozen dessert which tasted a lot like corn with cinnamon ice cream and 3 other choices of typical Indian desserts. One was a sweetened rice dish with cinnamon, cardamom and raisins, which tasted very similar to an Arroz con Dulce. The other two I was not able to decipher much… and the tastes were not that thrilling either.