CARROTS for your HEART

 

So lately I’ve been spending time with one of my best gal friends Anne and she has inspired me to be eating better. I mean, it’s a stretch but we’ll see how it goes. So I kicked soda about two weeks ago.  I had mean insane cravings for Coke and Dr. Pepper since it was my habit to throw one in my purse for lunch at work. Then it got better in week two after we bypassed a few caffeine headaches. It made me crave fruit over sugary desserts. We’ll see if my non-disciplined self can keep it up. ( And there’s no way on God’s green earth that I’d give up coffee so we’ll just take it in baby steps with caffeine).

Anne and I have been meeting at whole foods to take advantage of their hot food/sandwiches/salad bar and sushi for dinner. Ever since going for the first time to the Charleston one, I’ve been obsessed with that store. Heaven forbid I go hungry because my starving self would buy way to much and it ain’t cheap. That’s the downside of eating healthy….realistically you can’t go nuts because it’s just to expensive.

Anyways we like to wander the store and explore the strange items, perchance the 79 dollars-a-pound woodland mushrooms to the fancy pastry flours and coconut whey.

Charley and I have always preferred fresh produce over frozen and canned anyways..but it’s been fun to try new foods that have great benefits that I had never even heard of.

However there were two things that kept being recommended by various friends that were on my NEVER EAT list. Reason being I worked in our college cafeteria for 5 years and you learned to survive to avoid certain things. For instance our salad bar was a constant battle between multiple workers who seemingly had no idea what rotten food looked like. During prep they’d chop all new toppings and fit them right on top of the old ones in the containers. You’d get your plastic wear with sludgy moldy vegetable goo on the bottom mixed in with the good stuff and poured right into the Bar. The desserts: woebegone dry aliens with condensation on the top because they’d been in the refrigerator for a month and a day. Added to my list were two other foods I labeled non-foods.

TOFU: collected in a watery tasteless mass in a bin on the salad bar. I always just assumed it was inedible based on it’s appearance of having wet itself.

KALE: not the edible portion of the salad bar, Our cafeteria used it as homage to 60’s décor. It bordered our salad containers to add color and keep the cooler cleaner. Each night I would wash bits of salad dressing and condiments off of it and put it away for the night. It lasted for weeks…and even when it got old you could shock it from hot to cold water and the color and life would return. Surely this decoration could not be edible!?

It’s been hard to shake my preconceived opinions…but low and behold they’re edible!? not only that, tasty!? I’ve been missing out…not that I’d have known how to cook them without a little help anyways. YES I’m like the kid who finally tried his peas and realized they weren’t so bad to begin with.

So tonight for dinner I pan fried some tofu in a little oil, garlic and red pepper. Threw in some carrots, kale teriyaki sauce and honey whiskey and beef stock and let it get soft >>> Plopped it on some sushi rice and took it’s picture while it got cold and then charley had to microwave it. (his mean wife thwarted him getting a hot dinner because she got all camera happy).  We ate it with the spicy kale salad with lima beans and red onion and mushroom (leftover from whole foods).

oh and I happened to see the heart carrots on pinterest this morning and thought they would be annoyingly lovey-dovey to serve to charley who could care less if I had carved each one into a unicorn.

 

 

Then I took pictures of eggs. because eggs is just eggs and dem good ol eggs. Actually I just wanted to practice with modeling light and moving it all around and keeping the subtle tone instead of overexposing stuff like usual.