Food: dinner

First let me show you what I cooked for Star and Adam last Sunday

the usual suspects: red sauced pork

bok choy. According to Star, I made the most delicious sautéed bok choy in the world, and I don’t even know my secret! 😉

pork short ribs and chinese yam soup

sauteed mushrooms with pork and chili

I instead made myself a macrobiotic meal: chopped lettuce, tomato, tofu, butternut squash, brown rice and miso paste

and a soup made with daikon, arame and parsley.

Dinners during the week:

#1

brown rice, sautéed bok choy with mushrooms and shiitake.

#2: A daikon, arame, bok choy soup

with sauteed tomato, tofu, mushroom and green onions

brown rice with aduki beans

#3: macrobiotic plate: tomato, celery, butternut squash, tofu, brown rice with aduki

and steamed daikon greens with eggplant in a tahini/miso sauce

#4: brown rice with aduki

sauteed celery, bok choy, mushroom and yuba (tofu skin)

arame with daikon cooked in tamari

#5: Macrobiotic plate

#6

stir-fry couscous with celery and smoked tofu, seasoned with S+P and curry powder

sauteed bok choy with mushrooms

My sautéed method: heat sesame oil, add the vegetables, cook for 1-2 min, add shoyo, mirin and pinch of sugar. Add some water if needed, cook for another 1-2 min and serve. Sometimes I would top some roasted sesame seeds as well. A true asian flavor! 🙂

Q: Do you use sautéed method? What’s your favorite sautéed dish?

Petit Macro day 1

I started the petit macro 10 days plan!!! 😆

This is a very simple macrobiotic meal that you can have almost any time of year.

soft cooked brown rice

miso soup with daikon and onion

blanched collard greens with toasted white sesame seeds

book pic

I was lazy and didn’t feel like making lunch according to the plan, so I had leftovers.

After a yoga class in the evening I made proper dinner: Spiral Rice Pasta with Salad and Soy Meat

It was way more delicious that I expected!!!! 😯 You have to try it!!!

Spiral Rice Pasta with Salad and Soy Meat adapted from Mayumi’s Kitchen

Ingredients for one:

• 40 g TVP
• 1 tbsp shoyo
• 1 tbsp mirin
• 1.5 tbsp kuzu powder
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/8 cup water
• 1 cup (55g) dry spiral rice pasta
• 1 oz. diced onion
• 1 oz. diced carrot
• 1 oz. diced celery
• sea salt and pepper to taste
• 1 bunch of collard greens chopped and boiled

Method:

1. Hydrated TVP with water for 15 min, discharge the liquid.  Add shoyo and mirin and soak for 10 min. Squeeze out excess liquid, reserving it and mix with kuzu powder.
2. Heat 1 tbsp of the oil and dry the TVP until nicely browned. Add 1/8 cup water plus shoyo and mirin liquid from step 1. Cook until it absorbs all the liquid. Set aside.
3. Cook the pasta and collard greens.
4. Heat 1 tbsp of oil and saute the veggies, seasoned with S+P.
5. Mix the pasta, the veggies and the soy meat and serve.

The menu has no snack options, so I had copious amount of brown rice with pickles!

I love macrobiotic meals!!! Everything tastes good, comforting and calming. The only downside is that the amount indicated for one is too little food for me. I had extra 2-3 cups of brown rice along the day.

I think the biggest changes from the way I used to eat is to cut on dairy, eat more brown rice, snack little and almost no fruit. I’ll see how all these make me feel 🙂

A random question: How many times per month do you eat meat (fish/chicken/beef/pork)?

Tour to my fancy gym & 2 macrobiotic meals

Yesterday I had a very productive day… one that I haven’t had for a long time! 😀 It was intense but short… just 6 hours was enough to make my day 🙂

3 hours in the morning at Caribous

and 3 hours in the afternoon in another Caribou 😉

I always worked at home but lately I found working at cafes with all the noises actually helpful to concentrate on my thing 😉

By 5.30PM I was done with work so I went to the gym. All right… I’ve been going quite often since I joined… but yesterday I went to parts that I haven’t visited yet: the shower, the pool and the steaming room 😆 to confirm that it is really a fancy gym 😉

Take a look:

Da da!!! Let me introduce you the stationary swimming pool

1 pool per person. This is the quit water

and there are two buttons and a speed regulator

one button makes water coming out from sides

the other one makes waves, which is actually the one used for swimming. Basically it works like a stationary treadmill, you swim against the waves.

It looks like easy… but it is not! 👿 It kept hitting me to the walls! It’s hard to find the right spot to swim at so the waves work perfectly against you. If you deviate a little from the course, the wave throw you to the sides. I “struggled” for 30 min and called it a nice debut. I might try it one more time.. but so far I’m not convinced that it really works.

and then I went to the steaming room

it felt soooo good!!! 😆 I should definitely go there more often. All my pores were opened and clean after just 10 min 😀

Free clean towels are provided

the shower

Free body soap, shampoo, conditioner and body scrub 😀

the cardio area

and the weight area

Oh…. I started making meals from the macrobiotic book and LOVE it!!!

First I made a stir-fry rice

Ingredients: broccoli, mushrooms, onions, tofu and egg (the original recipe calls for tempeh and no egg)

brown rice

seasonings: rice vinegar, sesame oil, soy sauce and S+P

An easy, filling and delicious meal made in <15 min

For dinner steamed veggies (kale, okra and Brussels sprouts), roasted kabocha topped in a mushroom sauce

a closer look

the sauce was amazingly good!!! I’ll post about the recipe tomorrow, hopefully with the full review of the book 😉

Q1: Do you like working at cafes?

Q2: What do you usually order at cafes? I’ve tried a couple of tea with cinnamon, quite interesting 🙂

Alert: check out Thanks & Giving that Krista is organizing. What a great cause! 😀