Roasted Miso Tofu Salad

For a non meat eater, tofu is a great alternative for high quality, complete plant based protein. This salad is so easy to make, it’s light and delicious. Perfect for lunch.

Ingredients

3.5 oz firm tofu

1/2 tbsp miso

1 garlic clove minced

1/2 tbsp lime juice

Himalayan salt

1 tsp miso

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp lime juice

liquid aminos

1.5 cup salad greens

5 cherry/grape tomatoes

1/2 tbsp parmesan

1. Drain tofu of all access water

3. Mix miso, garlic, lime juice, and Himalayan salt

4. Coat a ramekin with coconut oil, add tofu, coat well with the above mix and bake at 425F for ~12 minutes or until tofu is browned

5. To prepare salad dressing, mix miso, olive oil, lime juice, and 3-4 spritzes of the liquid aminos (may be omitted)

6. Mix salad greens, cherry tomatoes with the salad dressing

7. Top with tofu

8. Sprinkle with Parmesan

Ingredient Highlight: Tofu

Tofu is made from soy milk and is an excellent source of iron and calcium. It is a complete protein of plant origin and as most natural soy products, it seems to have cholesterol lowering properties.  (Source: The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods).

Nutrition Info
Cal: 314 | Fat: 20g | Carb: 21g | Protein: 17g

 

Recipe Card

Lunch Minute Video

Days 66-70, Pancakes, Salmon Dinner, and Babies Know it Best (proper form and technique)

Another week is over. And the end is kind of eh. But let’s start with

Day 66

Upper Body Blow Out gets me every time. Though my upper body strength has tremendously improved over the course of the last 10 weeks, and the results are visible (can’t wait to share them with you), this workout never gets easy. I wish my husband joined me in this one. He just “doesn’t do that stuff”. That stuff being my workouts. He does go to the gym though every now and then when his schedule allows for it.

Meal Details

Pre-workout snack: banana
Breakfast: Sophie’s leftover oatmeal with yogurt and apples (gotta say, she’s a trooper for eating it, I’m not the happiest with the consistency the second day. I’ll try and see if she likes overnight oats next week…)
Snack: Vega chocolate coconut protein bar
Snack: Minnie’s Bake Shop cookies (don’t judge…..)
Lunch: Morningstar chick patty with bread and veganaise
Snack: Coconut milk latter
Snack: almond butter jelly sandwich
Dinner: Penne with roasted red pepper and artichoke puree and shrimp
Snack: Greek yogurt with stevia and strawberries

Yeah, I was starving. I ate over 2,000 calories, which is pretty rare. But the body works in mysterious ways and we need to let it talk to us. Fine, not with the Disneyland cookies, but in general. Some days we eat more, some days we eat less. If the body wants food, don’t deny it, just make that food nutrient dense and healthy.

Days 67-68

I planned a Combat routine originally but decided to do Shock HIIT Plyo on Thursday – which was a great idea until the next day when I could really feel my hip. Not in a good way. So on Friday I just did the stretch routine. But oh do I have so many pictures to share with you.

First off: babies know it best. They do. They instinctively use the right technique. Just observe Sophie on the following picture:
– perfect squat to pick up the weights, not bending from the waist
– shoulders back, straight back
Pure perfection…

Some foodie pics. I love pancakes (I posted the recipe for this one before, search pancake in my blog to find it, it’s the banana coconut pancake). If you make it, you absolutely MUST have the shredded coconut on top. It makes a huge difference. It truly does.

And dinner. So easy, and so yummy. I just put garlic salt on the salmon, maple syrup (it does flow down, but you just gotta keep putting the “marinade” back on – I marinated about 30 minutes before). Bake at 425 for 18 minutes. The asparagus is just 22-25 minutes at 425, simply spray it with olive oil, put garlic, salt, and Parmesan cheese on top (I did not have any…), wrap in aluminum foil and voila. Yumminess.

And my very own warrior stretching workout. Generating my own chi energy (which is difficult with Sophie around, though I would not have it any other way). This was a much needed workout. Sometimes you have to give your body a rest day, especially when it’s screaming for it. And mine was. I used to be scared of taking rest days. It felt like a setback, that I was lazy, or something. It’s not true. Our bodies need rest. Even a week off is not a setback. Unless that week turns into a slide with continuous bad nutrition choices, in which case, you might fall off track. But a conscious rest week, nah-hah. It’s smart to do.

Quick stats for these two days (no meal details – you saw the highlights above, but you’ll see I’m a bit low on calories….)

Days 79 & 80

This post is going to be short. I did a HIIT Power workout Saturday morning and all the good stuff pretty much ends there. We had a BBQ that evening for my brother-in-law’s birthday. I’m not even going to type all we ate (my neat handwriting in my calendar serves as a reminder). The next day I felt terrible. Sluggish and moody. I was not the most pleasant person to be around. Funny how when you watch how you eat (for the most part), sugar can kick you into such a low and nasty gear. And if that wasn’t enough, my husband brought me chocolate…. And (promise, this is the last negative thing 😛 ) Sophie slept until 10:30 am and by that time I was 1) too hungry to work out 2) the day would have been pushed out way too much. But all this was only motivation to be better in the following days. Not in this post though. If you read this far, you are amazing and I thank you.

Pancake Thursdays

I love pancakes. And I love to experiment in the kitchen. So a few weeks ago I fused the two together. The result was…

funky, weird, culinary curiosity, I’m glad I made it once but won’t make it again…

I signed up for a farm fresh food and vegetable home delivery service and they’ve been sending beets. In general, I like beets. In salads. But like I said, I like to experiment with food and I decided to make beet pancakes. The recipe is not mine, I found it at this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/health/beet-and-chia-pancakes.html?_r=0 so I don’t want to take credit for the recipe but I definitely want to take credit for making it and eating it. Interestingly enough, Sophie liked it. Well, when it was fresh. An hour later, it wasn’t great. I served it with my usual Stevia flavored Greek yogurt dressing.

Ingredients

– 2 medium beets
– 1 1/2 whole wheat pastry flour
– 1 cup all purpose flour
– 2 teaspoons baking powder
– 1 teaspoon baking soda
– 1 tablespoon sugar
– 2 eggs
– 1 teaspoon vanilla
– 1 1/2 cup buttermilk
– 3 tablespoon chia seed

Procedure

Cut away the green stems from the beets, scrub and place in the oven at 425 degrees Fahrenheit in a baking dish with about an inch water for about an hour. Once cooled down, puree half a cup worth.
Sift together the dry ingredients.In a separate bowl, mix wet ingredients and beets.
Mix all together.
Heat pancake pan, spray with a little bit of oil, and make pancakes the same way you usually do.

Enjoy 🙂

And let me know what you thought. No really. Make it and let me know.

Day 24

I don’t plan my rest days, because I either take one when my body tells me to or when we need to leave early. And oh did my body tell me I needed to take it easier. When I looked at my calendar and the workout I had planned (Combat 45 – Power Kata), all I could think was “no way, not today”. But I won’t lie, unless I’m time restricted or sick, I don’t like rest days AT ALL. So I just reached for my foam rolling/stretch routine with one of my favorite virtual trainers: Tony Horton. This was my “workout view” – I have, hands down, the best workout partner ever!!

And here are my daily stats:

I did not eat as much as I should have though. I do have to tell you about this new app I downloaded. It’s called “MyNetDiary” – there is a free and a pro version. The pro version also track vitamins (which is why I decided to buy it) and, like MyFitnessPal, it has a bar code scanner. So give me a couple days of using it and I will post a review on it. But here’s a screen shot from yesterday, I love how it talks to me:

It does want me to eat more though than MyFitnessPal and what I have been eating (without losing weight, so I’ll have to look into the why of it).

Meal Details:

Pre-workout snack: Banana
Breakfast: scrambled eggs (1 whole egg three egg whites) with dry toast and a cup of home squeezed orange juice
Snack: chocolate fudge P90X bar
Lunch: Lean Cuisine Tortilla Crusted Fish (boo on the processed food but I like this one….)
Snack: Coconut milk latte
Snack: ShaleologyDinner: baked tilapia with roasted rosemary red potatoes and steamed veggies

Recipe

Preheat oven to 450F.

Cut up two medium sized red potatoes into small cubes (I did about an inch). Toss with rosemary, olive oil, and salt, place in the oven, set timer to 15 minutes.

Prepare fish – make sure it’s less than an inch thick. Simply put salt on both sides, spray with olive oil, pour lemon juice on it and add some garlic on top. Add a little water to the pan.

Start steaming the vegetables – the timing of this depends on how you like your veggies, I personally steamed these in my rice cooker/steamer for 22 minutes.

When 15 mins are up, take the potatoes out to add a bit of water, the return to the oven, adding the fish. Bake for another 15-20 minutes (not longer, because the fish will have a rubbery taste).

Enjoy 🙂

Pancake Thursdays

Thursdays are pancake days at our house. I try to feed a varied diet to Sophie (and all my family, but I personally could eat eggs every single day for breakfast without getting bored with them). Today’s feature is:

Coconut-banana pancakes

Ingredients

1/4 c all natural coconut butter (I like the Artisana brand)
1.5 c coconut milk (I use the So Delicious brand)
1/2 c coconut flour
1/2 c whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 c all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1.5 tbsp packed brown sugar
1 ripe banana

Procedure

Mix the coconut butter and coconut milk until smooth. Add the banana (you can mash it prior, I usually just let the standing mixer do this). Mix dry ingredients with a fork and add to the wet mixture.
Put a dab of coconut oil in the frying pan (or pancake pan, whatever you use) and prepare pancakes.
Serve with Greek yogurt topping – I usually mix about 1 c Greek yogurt with 1/4 c coconut yogurt and 4-6 drops of coconut flavored stevia. This adds protein and no sugar (just skip the maple syrup!!)

This yumminess is less around 100 calories with ~12g carbs, ~4g fat, ~2g protein.

I usually make smaller pancakes to make sure they bake through thoroughly. After adding the batter to the pan, I cover the pan for about a minute, then flip the pancakes and push them down, cover again to make fluffly. After a couple minutes, I flip them again, this time not covering the pan. I know this may look tedious, but it works for me. If you have your own way making the pancakes, do it your way – and maybe share with me too, so I can learn new ways. I’m a constant learner. Let me know what you think!

Enjoy 🙂

Day 18

What a great day!! I felt amazing. My workouts were awesome, I love Les Mills Combat – Combat 30. It’s thirty minutes long, and definitely gets the heart pumping. In the last track before the cool down, there is a one minute long jab session, and I don’t mean jab-pause-pause-jab, I mean jab-jab-jab-jab-jab. Rach says “this is going to chisel your shoulders” and I think to myself “it’d better because it’s killing me”. It is tough. But honestly, I expect great results from this hybrid. And Core Attack is also a killer routine, only 17 minutes long (I only did 15 minutes this time, cause, ahm… I had to go to the bathroom, does this ever happen to you?) Anyways. It works the ab muscles from all angles and works the back too. It’s all part of the core.

My nutrition was spot on as well. I had 106g of protein, while keeping carbs and fat within my limits too. People tend to want to not eat so much carbs and fat, but that’s a mistake. See – protein sparing basically means that if there is enough energy gained from carbs and fat, the body will use the amino acids to build proteins which it uses to build muscle and repair tissue (among other things). When we do a low-carb and/or low-fat diet for long, the body starts eating away protein and muscle (in laymans terms, the process is not this simple, but the result is….) so it’s important to eat enough of all three macronutrients.

Meal Details:

Pre-workout snack: Banana
Breakfast: Coconut banana pancakes with Greek yogurt topping
Lunch: Cottage cheese pasta with shrimp
Snack: Coconut milk latter
Snack: Shakeology
Dinner: Tilapia prepared with lemon juice, a bit of mayo and tomatoes, brown rice and salad
Snack: Almond butter and jelly sandwich
Snack: Dark chocolate

Aaaand here’s a pic of our dinner, I want to post is an inspiration I hope it will inspire you.

Recipe

To make the fish, simply thaw it, pre-heat the oven to 450 degrees, put salt on the fish (both sides), spread a thin layer of mayo, bit of lemon juice, tomatoes on top, spray with olive oil, add a bit of water to the pan and bake for 15 minutes (make sure the fish is not more than half an inch to cook through – overcooking it will make it have a rubbery texture and no flavor).

Enjoy 🙂

Recipe Highlight of the Week

I promised I’d be sharing recipes with you from my meal plan, so here we go. I had to modify this soup as some of the ingredients decided to rot 😛 but I think it even turned out better than it would have with the original recipe. And super bonus: Sophie loved it. Which is huge, because she’s been really picky her lunches/dinners. Oh, and it’s really hard to make a soup like this appealing and picture-worthy (for me, completely impossible), so no picture. If you do wanna see what it looks like, you can check out my picture food diary (https://www.evernote.com/pub/apple21hun/momofbalancefooddiary, we had this for dinner on January 13th)

Yellow Split Pea Soup with Yam

Ingredients:
1/2 yellow onion (diced)
1 small leek (mostly the white parts) (chopped)
3 stalks celery (chopped)
1c yellow split pea
1 medium carrot (sliced)
1 yam (1/4inch cubes)
4c veggie broth
1tsp dry thyme
garlic salt

Procedure:
Heat olive oil and saute the onion, leek and celery until translucent. Add the split pea, carrot, yam and thyme, mix well for about a minute. Add veggie broth, boil, turn heat to low-medium, cover, and cook for about 45 minutes (until peas are soft and smushy). I added the garlic salt about half way through. If too much of the liquid cooks off, just add some water, then puree in blender.

Enjoy 🙂

Ten Days of Healthy Swaps – Day 2

Trade your traditional beef burger to a wild caught salmon burger as a healthier option

Red meet has been getting a bad rep for a while, and there is a good reason for it. But first things first.

Fat. Dietary fat is not a bad thing, if the right type of fat is consumed in the right amount. Saturated fat (the one found in meat, no matter how lean it is) is a naturally occurring fat that’s solid at room temperature. The problem with saturated fat, is that it’s been linked to heart disease. Consume too much of it, blood cholesterol levels rise leading to the narrowing of arteries due to too much plague, preventing arteries from expanding as normal, which puts too much strain on the heart, causing high blood pressure, increasing our chances of a heart attack.

So what can you do? You have a couple options. If you must have your beef, go with the leanest parts (such as the top round, eye of round, round tip). Or better yet, trade your beef for wild caught salmon.

Wild salmon is better, because it is natural. Farmed salmon, in a lot of cases, has artificial color added and eats whatever it’s fed. Which is not always healthy.
Other great benefits of salmon over beef include:
– higher protein content
– Omega-3: Omega-3 improves vision, reduces high blood pressure (the exact opposite of what consuming too much red meat does), regulates heart rate, improves learning and behavior, makes us smarter (your OBGYN will hopefully make sure your prenatal vitamins have DHA & EPA Omega-3’s to get your child off the a great start), and makes skin smoother
Who wouldn’t want these, right?

RECIPE

I won’t leave you hanging though, here’s the recipe for the above pictured salmon burger.

Ingredients
4 oz wild caught salmon filet, finely diced
1 celery stalk, finely diced
1/4 of a smaller red onion, finely diced
1/2 tsp (or less, if you’re not a fan) of crushed garlic –
1/2 tbsp barbecue sauce (you may use a whole tbsp 😛 )
garlic salt to taste
pepper to taste

Procedure
Heat a half tbsp on olive oil in a non-stick skillet. Saute celery, onion until translucent, adding garlic about half-way through to avoid it getting bitter. After onion mixture has cooled down a bit, mix it with the rest of the ingredients, forming a patty (if it doesn’t want to take the shape of a patty, which for me happens 90% of the time, just use one of those one egg frying pans, does the trick every time). Grill the patty, cooking it thoroughly – about 6 minutes on each side. Serve on a whole wheat bun with a spring mix, mashed avocados and tomatoes.

Enjoy 🙂

Ten Days of Healthy Swaps – Day 1

Who doesn’t love pancakes for breakfast? Sophie and I have pancakes at least once a week. It’s good for her, it’s good for me. Or is it? A lot depends on the topping. We recently have decided to try layering our pancakes with fruit and yogurt topping, instead of maple syrup. It tastes amazing, and here are some additional benefits:

Four tbsp of a typical maple syrup is 200 calories. You know what makes up those 200 calories? Pure sugar. 53g of pure sugar. (The multiplier is 4 in case of carbs).
Breakfast should be about empowering you. It should give you a boost in the morning. With so much sugar, the only thing you get is a quick boost followed by a crash soon after. You know what stays though? Fat does. Excess glucose (a simple carb, one form of sugar) is stored as body fat. And that’s something most of us are trying to minimize. So drop that maple syrup.

Instead, try plain Greek yogurt flavored with liquid stevia (any flavor, I like vanilla, and you need a surprisingly small amount).
Four tbsp of a typical Greek yogurt is 47 calories, over half (~25) of those calories comes from protein (10 from carbs, 9 from fat). Much better composition, isn’t it? Protein repairs and replaces bones & muscles and can help burn excess calories. Now we’re talking.(In case you’ve opted out of dairy products, coconut or almond milk yogurt are way better options than maple syrup as well. While these barely contain protein, if any, both are considered healthy fat and contain fiber.)

RECIPE

So now the recipe for that yumminess above (gluten free version below).

Ingredients
3/4c all purpose flour
1/2c coconut flour
1.5tbsp packed brown sugar
1tsp baking powder
dash of salt
1/4c natural almond butter (choose one that contains only almonds, no additives)
1 1/2c almond milk

Procedure
Mix dry ingredients with a fork. Mix almond butter and almond milk until smooth. Mix everything together. The trick for these pancakes is to make them smaller than regular ones. I usually use medium heat, drop about 1.5tbsp mixture into pan, cover the pan, after about a minute, I flip the pancakes, cover, about 2 minutes later I flip again, not covering this time, and I let them cook through.
Cooking time depends on your pan.

GLUTEN FREE VERSION:

Ingredients
1/2c gluten free flour
1/2c coconut flour
1.5tbsp packed brown sugar
1tsp baking powder
dash of salt
1/4c natural almond butter (choose one that contains only almonds, no additives)
1 1/2c almond milk

Procedure
Mix dry ingredients with a fork. Mix almond butter and almond milk until smooth. Mix everything together. The trick for these pancakes is to make them smaller than regular ones. I usually use medium heat, drop about 1.5tbsp mixture into pan, cover the pan, after about a minute, I flip the pancakes, cover, about 2 minutes later I flip again, not covering this time, and I let them cook through.
Cooking time depends on your pan.

Enjoy 🙂

Potato, Leek and Mushroom Soup

This soup is awesome. It really is. It’s just like a vegan chicken soup for the soul. And the best part? Sophie loves it. Sure, first time around, she didn’t even want to put the spoon in her mouth, so we had to trick her and give her some with a straw, and it worked (don’t believe me? I have proof 😛 http://instagram.com/p/gdlB3tqR5X/). Since then, spoon is fine as well.

The recipe:

2tbsp olive oil
Heat in medium stock pot1 large leek trimmed, cleaned, and chopped coarsley
1 cup white mushrooms
Add to pot, let soften until mushrooms start to release liquid
Add the following:
1lb red potatoes, peeled and chopped
4c vegetable stock
1c water
1tsp dry ginger
Salt and pepper to taste
Bring to boil over high heat, cover and reduce heat to medium, cook until potatoes are soft (~15-20 minutes). Transfer to food processor/blender, and puree the soup. Garnish with parsley and enjoy.