Tap Into Your Inner Healthy Chef!

There is a healthy restaurant nearby that is all the rage right now. Rage? Rave? Which is it?

I don't know.

At any rate, I haven't been there too much (to everyone's surprise) because the truth is, I want to try my hand at making that wonderful food myself--and should be making for myself.

My loving, wonderful girlfriend who is currently enrolled at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition right now (think it's cool to have something like that in common as a part of your relationship? You're darn right, it is!) suggested we try something she ate whilst dining at said restaurant. I said, you're right! Who needs to go there, when we can create it here at home together!

So in a way, this post is about her being the perfect impetus for things that are good and healthy in my life--she often gets me unstuck when I feel it, or helps me see things I need to do for more health and happiness.

What was my part in this wonderful dinner we shared together? The sauce. I had one suggestion to make it delish and it ended up being a perfect, fiber-filled dinner for a warm summer night. The ingredients were a combo of all we had in the house, things we had collected for another recipe that never got prepared. Try this yourself! Don't worry about having everything we had---just use what you have.

Just make sure there is TONS of color on your plate!

We just winged it (often creating the best results) and this is what we got:

Brenda's Creation (with Dillan's sauce suggestion): 

1) to do what we did, you need:

The Meal:

• 1 bunch of fresh kale, chopped
• 1 bunch of fresh red chard, chopped
• a few carrots, shredded
• a handful of raisins
• several summer squash and green zucchini
• roasted, salted pumpkin seeds
• raw sunflower seeds
• 2 Tbs of olive oil 
• cooked brown rice (we soaked ours for 8 hours during the day, not knowing what we'd make for dinner. It cooked in about 20 mins instead of 40-45 when we were ready to eat it later.)

The Sauce:

       whisk together equal parts:

• Miso paste
• thai curry paste (or curry powder, we recommend the thai one, though. It had added ingredients that made for some lovely flavor)
• Coconut Manna (I used this in another recent recipe Easiest Breakfast in the Freakin' World. It's a combo of coconut oil AND coconut flesh, retains all the essential amazing nutrients that a coconut offers)

 2) to eat it, you need to do this (remember to make MORE for leftovers for easier meal prep during the week):

• chop or slice the squash and zucchini and saute it in a pan (blog post coming soon about ideal cooking tools/materials) for your desired texture
• add the chopped greens and cover the pan. The steam will wilt these suckers down.
• on a plate, add about a cup of brown rice, the saute mixture, a clump of shredded carrots, a sprinkle of raisins and both kinds of seeds.
• top with the Sauce or mix it in with your rice
• we added some nutritional yeast to it---this tastes a bit like cheese and is super high in B vitamins!! a great addition to veggie meals if you're trying to eat less meat (like I am)

Please POST COMMENTS with your results!!!!