whole30, paleo, pasta, italy

We spent a week in Tuscany, which is probably one of the most divine places I have ever visited. Ever in my life. The scenery is magnificent and tranquil, the people are lovely, and the food. Well. I’ll start by saying I have never tasted such tasty tomatoes in all my life. We ate them every night in front of our apartment watching the sun drop behind the blue hills. With buffalo mozzarella, fresh basil, olives, olive oil and balsamic vinegar? I think I was in heaven. (These weren’t even farmer’s market tomatoes, just the ones from the giant chain grocery store.)

I read many food blogs, food articles and think about food a lot, partly because I have a toddler and as much as I would like to seem like a responsible mother, the truth is that if he is not healthy it has an adverse effect on my life, and I like avoiding adverse effects as much as possible (but I do care about his long-term health, wellness and attitude about food). Our physical health is also important to Husband and I, and for us the best place to start is what we put into our bodies.

So I’ve stumbled upon several crazes that seem to be popular right now: Paleo, whole9/whole30 and juice cleanses.

I love the idea eating mostly vegetables and fruits, grass-fed beef, chickens that run around wild and free, and I know first-hand the benefits of going without sugar (I do this from time to time and feel fantastic), but I can’t shake the feeling when I read about whole9, whole30 and paleo that this is just the Atkins Diet dressed up with new lingo, Grass-fed beef! NOPROCESSEDFOODSNOPROCESSEDFOODS! Kale rules! Farmers markets are the best thing ever! 

Now I like trying new things, and every year for the past few years I’ve gone a month or several months without sugar, without meat and without dairy. I would consider going gluten and grain-free as well, and when I read about whole30 for the first time, I told Husband that I was intrigued. When he found out what was involved, he said that something along the lines of, What about everything in moderation? (Because telling any European that gluten is bad for you is like…well… how do I explain this? Gluten is kind of a big deal in Western Europe.)

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me like this is just a diet craze from the 90s recycled for the 21st Century. No matter how much the Paleo people try to convince me that vegetables make up the bulk of the eating program, I’m going to have to question the legitimacy of anyone who says bacon and other processed meats should be eaten while cutting out chickpeas and lentils. I don’t really care how grass-fed, pastured and organic your sausages are (or your red meat, for that matter), there can be no arguing with the medical facts that point to the connection between red meat and processed meat’s relationship with major diseases.

And honestly, living on juices might be great for our bodies, it might even be the best way for us to absorb vitamins and minerals, but is this the way we were made to live? Food is for our physical health, and everyone should eat in the way that optimises their bodies’ needs, but food is also for community, pleasure and enjoyment. Excessive control and a lack of balance might leave us with a body that lasts for over a 100 years, but would we have done so at an empty table? And what about neglecting our taste buds?

So here’s my spontaneous list of food guidelines for myself, these are the thoughts that go into our meal plan, grocery list and daily eating.

The bulk of our eating is done at home, which allows us to eat, imbibe, enjoy, converse and live at our own pace, according to our ways, and it gives us the freedom to include our children in every form of food preparation from a young age. One of the many unforeseen blessings of living in Geneva is the high cost – and dismal options – of restaurants; it has meant that we naturally fell into eating at home most of the time. Husband and I go out to eat for dates, but I can’t even remember the last time we had a meal out with Small One in tow in Geneva. It’s possible we have never done it in Geneva. (Pictured above: wholewheat bruschetta with pear, fresh pecorino cheese and a drizzle of olive oil. I am quickly becoming addicted to fresh pecorino cheese.)

The vast majority of our food is a balance of vegetables, meats and fish, whole grains, eggs and fruits. Small One gets quite a bit of dairy, and Husband and I consume it whenever we feel like it (usually in the form of cheese when I’m not pregnant and milk when I am pregnant). When I’m not pregnant, I keep our home meat intake very, very low, around one meal per week of red meat and one meal per week of white meat. (Below: the last of our Italian tomatoes, eaten with joy and a smidgen of sadness with fresh buffalo mozzarella from Switzerland.)

We try to keep processed foods away, but we also make exceptions. I use Asian sauces and powdered stock, Small One has crackers and fruit and nut bars, and there’s the chocolate aisle. Thankfully products in Switzerland are well labeled, so we can see what goes into all things we buy.

We make exceptions for special things, special moments and food items that have cultural significance. We happily enjoy our raw hams (when I’m not pregnant), salami, sausages and bacon every now and then, but these instances are rare.

When we are guests at someone’s table, we eat anything put before us, with joy and thankfulness and not dread. Receiving the fruits of someone else’s labor in the form of cooked (or prepared) food is a way of being kind, loving and generous, and no food rule or philosophy trumps basic generosity. I hope every member of our family has this attitude when we sit down to eat in the homes of whomever we may encounter. (I also sincerely hope that no one will ever serve us dog, rat or cat.)

When we visit or holiday in another country, we enter into their food culture to discover, learn and enjoy. Fact, Italians eat pasta. To go to Italy and skip pasta seems bizarre and snobby to me (unless there is a medically-necessitated reason to do so, obviously no one with a gluten intolerance/allergy or Coelic disease should ever eat regular pasta). I am not really a pasta person, and I am especially not a fan of white flours in general, but in Italy every day I ate pasta. White pasta. Sometimes I had it twice a day. And it was magnificent, the tastiest pasta I’ve ever eaten (with Husband’s homemade ravioli coming a close second). Do I still believe that refined flours aren’t of any benefit to the human body? Yes, I do. Will I be harmed by consuming refined flours for a week while on holiday in Tuscany? Maybe, I’m not sure. Was it worth it and would I do it again? Hello, yes. Every. Single. Time. (And don’t get me started on the ricotta and fig gelato at this place.)

And I ate and enjoyed the pasta for so much more than just the eating pleasure, I did it to get myself a little bit more immersed into Tuscan life and culture. The cream-slathered chicken alfredo you can find at popular U.S. Italian chain restaurants? It’s nothing like the saffron cream sauced that gently laced my pear and pecorino ravioli or like the sharp wild-boar sauce with pappardelle.  To enter into and enjoy the Tuscan table was to enter into Tuscan life and maybe even touch a small piece of the Tuscan heart accessible only with a fork, knife and tastebuds. 

bus, boat, lake, longing

Small One sounds like a broken record these days.

Bus, bus, bus. 

Lake, lake, lake. 

Boat, boat, boat. 

He recently discovered Lake Geneva. I don’t know what it is he loves about it – the wide expanse of water perhaps, the boats skimming the top, the ducks and swans splashing about – maybe it’s all just a lovely sign that summer is coming and we can enjoy the water again. Whatever the reason, he is obsessed with it and has an uncanny and GPS-like way of being able to tell where the lake is even when he cannot see it (he will almost always point in the correct direction). There’s a boat ferry that is part of the Geneva transport network, and you can take it from different points of the lake and city to another, so we’ve done that for several weekends in a row.

A few days ago Small One also found out that he can see Lake Geneva from his bedroom if he stands on the window sill or from our sixth floor, kitchen balcony if I take him outside. Yesterday he stood on his window sill staring and pointing at the lake while I sat on his table just underneath him to keep him from falling. And guess who has been carrying a toddler to the balcony a few times daily for the past few days?

Lake, lake, lake, he says, boat, boat, boat. Bus, bus, bus. (Because if we catch the right time, we can see buses, the lake and boats At The Same Time From The Balcony!)

There are few days now that I don’t buy a 3.50 CHF bus ticket to take a bus almost from our house to the end of the line, stay on the bus and take it right back to our place. Some parents go to museums. Others go to zoos and parks. Small One and I take the bus.

I can’t read his mind, but to put it simply, the greatest longings of his heart right now seem to be to ride buses (sitting on a seat, thankyouverymuch and not in the stroller), to go to the lake and to ride on a boat.

And the truth is that no amount of bus-riding, lake-visiting, boat-hopping satisfies him, when we come home after a morning on the bus and at the lake, he says boat, boat, boat, lake, lake, lake. He wants more. And tomorrow morning he will wake up and we will go through this routine again. He doesn’t throw tantrums for these things, he doesn’t even whine for them, he merely communicates it to me like it’s obvious. Bus, bus, bus, boat, boat, boat, lake, lake, lake. 

As always, Small One teaches me more about longings than philosophers and prophets, and in him I see the most basic of truths - no amount of desire-satisfaction meets our real desires because our need is for what is infinite, what is eternal, we were created for it, made in the image of it, and we will not rest until our quest for the things, experiences and love that know no end are met.

growing up, refrigerators, dinner, easter

You would think taking care of a child is the most common way in which I am made to feel like a grown up. You would be wrong. It’s the moment when I realize we have no thermometer or paracetamol, and my mother’s medical cabinet is a plane ride away. When a lemon freezes to the back of our refrigerator because the temperature is off because it hasn’t been defrosted in….five years, that’s a moment when I feel like a grown up.

Just to clarify, a frozen lemon in the back of our fridge for the past two years doesn’t make me feel like a grown up. That I am now the one who has to deal with the frozen lemon, this is what makes me feel like a grown up.

Tomorrow is the big showdown. I’m defrosting a fridge for the first time in my life. I vaguely remember it happening in our home, but that’s the extent to which I was uninvolved in our household maintenance. It’s a hazy memory, but I clearly never offered to help, nor did I ask any questions about how it was done. So after this post is done, the Internet will find me googling “how to defrost a fridge.”

I can’t say I’m a fan of all the responsibilities of Real Life Adulthood; I don’t keep my shoes polished, I don’t iron my clothes, and we have a cleaning lady who comes once a week to clean our small flat for two hours because yes, managing to clean regularly also seems a bit out of reach. But Small One and I do our laundry once a week, I keep the dishes washed, Husband’s shirts are ironed most of the time, and we have a medical kit in our flat, in our car and one for travel.

My favourite grown up responsibility though is creating traditions for our family, and our family feast days are a few of my year’s highlights.

I think of our food in three categories: every-day food, special food and feast food. Every-day food is what we eat almost daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner; special food we eat once a week for Sunday dinners and when we have guests; feast food is for our feast days. So far we have three major family feast days – Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. I live in proportion to our life situation, so when I’m in the first trimester of a pregnancy and caring for a toddler and feeling incredibly unwell, our Christmas feast is not so feast like, but it’s doable. Right now I do most of the food preparation for all three of those days, but I hope that as Small One and his siblings get older, they will be more and more involved with food preparation and cooking.

I loved our Easter 2013 feast food – the dishes complemented each other, the food was beautiful and tasted fantastic, but the best part was sitting around the table with my family and enjoying the time together in the shadow of the wonderful Easter truths we remember year after year.

(Recipes are below the photos.)

• Rhubarb and Aperol Spritz   (from delicious. magazine)   I made the rhubarb syrup three days before Sunday. Chop 400 grams of rhubarb and combine with 50 grams super fine white sugar (caster sugar, we called it in Australia) and 100 ml of apple juice, put the mixture on the stove, bring to a boil then simmer for 15 minutes. The recipe then says to strain out all the rhubarb so you’re left with the liquid then return to the stove to reduce it further into a syrupy consistency. I skipped the last reduction, and it was fine. To assemble the cocktail: one part rhubarb syrup to two parts aperol and top with chilled Proseco. 

• Asparagus with Mustard Vinaigrette and Capers (from Simple Bites)  I followed the recipe carefully for the dressing (so click on the link to see it), but I roasted the asparagus with some olive oil drizzled on the top. It was easier for me to have all of the dishes go into the oven, and we love roasting asparagus.

• Fennel Salad with Tarragon and Pomegranates   (from Ottolenghi: The Cookbook) it was my first recipe to try from this cookbook, and I am certain it will not be the last. This was probably one of my favourite dishes just because it was different from anything else I’ve ever made or eaten. It’s a simple salad, comes together in minutes and other than getting seeds out of a pomegranate without making a giant mess, it’s easy. The salad is made of finely sliced fennel (I used one bulb), sliced feta (100 grams) and a handful of tarragon, leaves picked. Toss the fennel and tarragon with a dressing made of the juice of one lemon, a bit of olive oil, two teaspoons of sumac and a generous pinch of sea salt. Layer this with the feta and pomegranates, and you’re done. A tasty, crunchy, sweet, savoury salad that goes perfectly with roasted lamb.

• Roasted, Whipped Sweet Potatoes with Browned Butter  (from Simple Bites) I followed this recipe closely so head over there for the details. I made this five days in advance and put it in the freezer covered with cling wrap. I took it out Saturday night, and let it thaw on a kitchen counter for 24 hours, then put it in the oven 15 minutes before dinner to warm up. It was perfect.

• Roasted Fingerling Potatoes with Lemon  (from Simple Bites)    This is another simple recipe; I have no idea what Fingerling potatoes or Meyer lemon are, and I doubt we have them in Switzerland, but our small New potatoes and lemons worked just fine here.

• Roasted Leg of Lamb with Rosemary    I’ve adapted the marinade slightly here – for a 2 kilo/5 lb leg of lamb I combined: 1/4 cup of honey, 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar, 2 tsp lemon zest, 2 Tbsp chopped rosemary, 3 crushed garlic cloves, 2 Tbsp Dijon mustard, 1 tsp sea salt and black pepper. I marinaded the lamb for 24 hours, then roasted it at 350F/170 C for two hours, and it was perfect. I should have mixed a bit of water into the pan about half way through because I didn’t end up with much gravy as the marinade burned at the bottom of the pan, but other than that it was great, and honestly it didn’t need gravy.

• Chocolate Beet Molten Cakes    (from Simple Bites)   Beets are one of my favourite veggies, and chocolate is one of my… well, one of my favourites, so cheers to anyone who can bring these two together. Promise when I say that you cannot taste the beets in this at all; the only way you would be able to tell is if you don’t puree them finely enough, but even then you wouldn’t be able to taste it. Head over to Simple Bites for the recipe. I made the following adaptations: I used white flour instead of rice flour, and I reduced the quantity of sugar quite a bit because the dark chocolate I used had a bit more sweetness to it than I expected. My only regret is that I left it in a bit too long – I should have pulled it out when I first checked on them and the centre was soft and gooey while the edges were done. But it was still a fabulous treat that I will definitely be making again. (And I made the batter the night before, left it in the fridge and spooned it into the greased ramekins on Sunday afternoon to let it thaw out a bit and soften. We baked them right before our first round of Settles in Catan.)

drinking, spinach, toddlers

In the middle of difficult times, I’m thankful for little things that make life a little bit easier and sweeter, and when the thing that makes life easier and sweeter also happens to be healthy, well. You know. I’m extra thankful.

Small One’s sugar intake is extremely limited, but I regularly ask him if he would like a treat. These treats include chopped strawberries and bananas, an apple and banana compote, dried apricot and mango bars with ground cashews and almonds – all things with no added sugars, only the natural fruit sugars – but he has no idea. To him it’s a “tweat.” At first it was something special that he got excited about. He still gets excited now, but he also knows enough to ask for it. This morning – after a difficult episode involving correction, misunderstanding, a missing coat, finally making it out the door and onto his beloved “Bus bus bus,” we were sitting in a optical clinic waiting for contact lenses. He looked up at me with forlorn eyes and said, “Tweat,” long story short we ended up at McDonalds for a Happy Meal and some sort of a burger for me.

There is always a time for Great Unhealthiness and treats, I think, and we both left happy.

Just so we’re clear, McDonalds isn’t what I was referring to by the little things that make life easier, sweeter and healthier. That was just a tangent to say that sometimes it’s good for me to let go a and enjoy a Happy Meal. (And he does get sugary treats in Very Special Times, and situations when other kids have them or when I’m in a desperate moment and need a happy toddler, like when I was on my back having contractions monitored for 40 minutes in the doctor’s office.)

Small One only gets water and milk to drink, but when he is sick, he gets watered down apple juice or warm water with a bit of raw honey in it. He hasn’t forgotten those drinks from February, and still periodically asks for “dooce dooce haaaaneeee haaaaaneeee,” which I do not give him.

Until I remembered the spinach smoothies I used to make for myself when I was pregnant with Small One. I loved them, Husband loved them, would our little son like them as well?

He’s a huge fan. And now gets ridiculously excited whenever I pull the blender and spinach out and starts saying “dooce dooce dooce.”

This is probably stating the Very Obvious, but I’ll do it anyway. There is no way to lose with this smoothie – greens are one thing Small One won’t eat wilted, sauteed or raw, and this drink is mostly spinach. And it’s packed with fruits and vitamins. And he can help make it. And it takes five minutes to make. Maybe.

No losers.

Here’s the recipe for the smoothie I made for us yesterday. He and I were both sniffling and coughing, so I added garlic cloves, more ginger than normal and a tablespoon of raw honey because all three of those have immunity-building properties. I was definitely not a fan of the garlic in the smoothie and not a real fan of this smoothie in general, but Small One downed one glass, asked for another and had another glass of it this morning. So now I know how to get him to take raw garlic and spinach. (It is worth mentioning that while drinking his second glass, he stopped in the middle to say, “Hot hot” and looked a bit disturbed; my guess is it was a particularly garlicky or gingery sip and a bit spicy. But I just gave him plain water to drink with it as well, and he kept going.)

• Toddler-Friendly, Immunity-Building Spinach Smoothie    fill 3/4ths of a blender with washed spinach leaves and add your fruit of choice (see photo above for the vague spinach to blender ratio). We added frozen berries – it makes the smoothie cold, gives it an icy texture without adding ice – and a banana. I think I added two cups of water, enough so that the blender was 1/4th – 1/3rd full of water, and to finish I put in two cloves of garlic, a generous piece of ginger and a tablespoon of honey. Then blend, blend, blend until it’s all completely pureed and chopped and mixed.  
• It just so happened that what our grocery store had on hand was baby spinach, which is a bit extravagant for a smoothie. I’ve made this smoothie with English spinach – the huge, ugly-thick-leaves kind – and it was more than fine. Just make sure to blend very, very well and have a good amount of fruit.
• This smoothie tastes a LOT better without garlic and with only a tiny bit of ginger, but if you’re into the garlic thing for immunity reasons, this is probably more painless way of taking it in.

margins, breathing, pasta

 I’ve lost count of the number of times in the past month that I found myself fighting back tears and holding hot words in my throat than longed for angry release. The combination of pregnancy hormones, difficult life circumstances, the unknown future, general exhaustion and the Demands of Caring for a Toddler is undoing me one little moment at a time.

Small One is hungry, and I’ve just started thinking about dinner. He needs something to do, but my mind is on the laundry or ironing. We’re out and suddenly nap time is upon us, and he’s throwing a fit.

Parenting has been my crucible this winter. I called Husband with shaking hands one day to tell him, You have got to pray for me right now because I don’t think I can make it through this day, because it’s how I feel, barely making it. I get to the end of each day, and thank God for my miracles - I didn’t lose control, I didn’t lose my temper. It’s been the kind of month when I’ve thought less about doing the right thing and more about keeping myself from doing the Very Wrong Things.

We all have these times in our lives of desperation. I remember sitting in my university dorm room, anxiety washing over me with two hours to go before the deadline of a research paper for History of Spain. I had been awake all night and almost written nothing. Every semester was full of anxiety, worry, desires, frustration, pushing myself and feeling like I was failing, failing, failing.

I wish I knew then what I know now - doing less is doing more, breathe, speak life over yourself, look for what you’re doing well and don’t nitpick at what you’re doing badly, there is a season for everything, embrace limitations, receive the daily graces of every moment. 

What does this look like while I live in a state of unraveling?

Doing less  -  spending less time with people who are draining, discouraging and emptying my schedule of events and activities that leave me depleted of time and energy, spending more time at home, taking naps and resting while Small One is napping instead of doing chores.

Breathe  - taking deep breaths when I feel stress rising, finding a healthy release for anger and frustration through brutally honest prayers, journaling and open conversations with Husband and people whom I can trust.

Speak life  -  literally, standing at the kitchen counter while Small One whines and flails about on the floor saying to myself, I can do all things, all things, ALL THINGS through Christ who gives me strength, I am equipped and prepared to deal with every situation that comes my way, having honest conversations with my 22-month-old son, Mommy is having a tough day today, so I need your co-operation more than ever, I need you to listen to me, I need you to talk to me and tell me what you want, I need you to know that I love you very much, but you will not be getting everything that you want today, and I’m sorry about that, but it’s how life is at the moment, but you are loved, you are safe, you are secure. 

Look for good  -  looking for what I’ve done daily that is worth celebrating, there is no such thing as too small or insignificant: Small One devoured the peas and pasta for dinner – great job, Mommy, got through the day with no Mommy tantrums – great job Mommy, you meal planned for the whole of March and April including detailed grocery lists and kept track of all the spending for the month – great job, Devi, you bought several pieces of clothing that look great on you – well done.

Seasons, limitations  -  every season of our life involves two realities: the season will end at some point, the season involves ways in which I will be limited, instead of spending my time fighting against my limitations, I will live peacefully within them. I can’t carry Small One up and down the big slides in the park more than five times, but I can take him on bus rides all over the city because he absolutely adores buses. Focus on the bus, not on the slide. I haven’t planned activities for him in March, but I planned all of our meals, focus on the meals. Think about activities in a month when you don’t have another big project on your mind.

Receive the graces   –  thankfulness, gratitude, oh the simple act of picking up a pen and writing down the words, Thankful for 264. sunshine, 265. getting on a new bus so I didn’t have to lift the stroller, 266. crunchy asparagus, 267. his adoration of strawberries, and on and on and on. So many moments, so many gifts, so many ways in which my mind can dwell on what is good, what is noble, what is excellent, what is true . So many ways I can receive goodness, excellence and truth in my life.

One day I will look back on this time in my life, and it will be over. I will not hear the sound of a small voice whining, I will not be going to play dates or changing diapers, but there will be new challenges, different events that push me to breaking point, and the same truths will still remain – do less, breath, speak life, embrace your limitations, live in your season, receive the graces.

And so in these truths, in these realities will I live, and when dinner time comes, I will make this pasta dish – as I did last night, holding back tears while I chopped courgettes and asparagus, thanking God for surviving another day, and thanking God for leftover Easter lamb, feta and lemon that was in the fridge.

• Spring Pasta    this is one of those “take what’s in the fridge and pantry and cook” dishes. I chopped an onion, while it sauteed in olive oil, I chopped two courgettes and several spears of asparagus, then threw it into the pan to sautee as well. Water for spaghetti boiled away. I stirred the veggies every now and then and when it was cooked to my liking, which is a bit on the raw side, the dish is essentially done.
• To serve  again, I used what was on hand. We had left over lamb from Easter dinner and feta cheese from an Easter salad, so I chopped both up, and tossed it with the spaghetti and veggies. There was no real sauce, but we squeezed lemon juice on top and sprinkled on sea salt and pepper. It was light, delicious and I’m still eating it today.