Monday, August 25, 2008

I Feel Boring and Tired, and Newly Inspired

I haven't prepared any food worthy of note in quite a while. I was on vacation and then when I got back, I was tired, busy and lazy. Last week, many of our dinners were extracted from a box. Sad, but true. It's also been tomato season, so I've been very happy to munch on garden tomatoes, sometimes several times a day. I just eat them solo, or slice them up and put them into some yummy bread for a sandwich. There's only a short window of opportunity each year to do this, and I usually take full advantage of this. The result of this type of binging often results in canker sores from all the acid.
I'm wondering if my tomato frenzy could currently be causing a different issue: tiredness. I just came from eating at a macrobiotic restaurant in Greenwich Village while I'm in NYC on a business trip. My meal was fantastic: seitan cutlets in a mushroom gravy with brown rice, a yam salad, and some steamed veggies, including kale and kombucha squash. Everything was delicious, but I was most excited about the kombucha squash. It looked like acorn squash, but tasted sweeter, and it was steamed instead of baked. I must try this at home.
So, anyway, I was reading about macrobiotic diets a little, and one of the things omitted from this kind of diet are nightshade vegetables (ex. green peppers, potatoes, eggplant and tomatoes). I already knew some people had a hard time digesting these foods. They are called "nightshade" because they do their growing at night, and contain toxins that are meant to keep bugs away. The minimal research I've done so far includes mixed opinions, and it looks like particular storage and preparation may help reduce the potentially negative effects of the nightshades.
Either way, it caused me to give pause and think about my diet. I've allowed a lot of dairy to creep back in, for one. Last week, while eating from boxes, we had white pasta a couple of times. Then, my tomato binge along with some other random things I've been eating while traveling. While I think, any of these things are fine in moderation, I also think I've overdone it with a mix of not great things over the last couple of weeks. So, I plan to clean up my act a bit and do some more investigating of this macrobiotic diet. There were so many tasty things on the menu tonight I was having a difficult time choosing just one dish.
http://www.souen.net/

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