Vegetarians + Carnivores = Dinner??

For some time now, I've decided to stick with vegetarianism. Maybe one day I'll actually post about my reasons for making this choice, but for now, y'all just get to hear about FOOD!!!

Meanwhile, boyfriend has stood his ground and wants meat. Lots of meat. Carnivorous to the max. Tried vegetarianism for a month or so, hated every minute of it.

Like many couples or families with meat-eaters and salad-chompers cohabitating, we have faced some challenges in making sure that both of our needs are met. I am still eating fish though, so most of the meals that we can both eat revolve around fish/shellfish and makes life easy for the person cooking (me). However when the urge for meat comes calling to boyfriend and I get sick of fish, we often end up eating completely separate meals. Something involving tofu for me. Something involving a former animal for him. It gets pretty challenging to plan two completely different dinners, try to have them both ready at the same time, and oh - the DISHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *shudder*

So. How can a vegetarian and a carnivore possibly make meals that make everyone happy AND don't require cooking two separate meals??

Here's a great start: stuffed peppers! I made the filling following a vegetarian stuffed pepper recipe, and just added some meat to half of it. Done and done. Also made some pretty fantastic smashed potatoes as a side dish.

Observe! The power of omnivorous cookery!

Vegetarian Stuffed Peppers and Meat-Eater Stuffed Peppers

What you need:

1 Tbsp olive oil

onion, chopped up

1 clove garlic, chopped up

handful of baby carrots or 2 carrots, chopped up

1 tomato, diced

1 cup peas, either fresh or frozen (I used canned :( they smelled funny)

1 tsp each basil and oregano

1 1/2 cups cooked brown rice

2-3 cups tomato sauce, either prepared or homemade

4 peppers (big'uns if you can find them!)

about 1/2 a package of lean or extra-lean ground beef, chicken or turkey. Whatever your meat-eater prefers.


Preheat the oven to 350 C (unless you are also making the potatoes. Check potato instructions!)

You should get started on your meat and rice at this point. Check the directions on your rice to see how long it will take. Traditional brown rice can take up to 40-60 minutes to cook!!!

Now we can get started on those peppers! Cut off the tops of the peppers and scoop out the seeds and membranes. Place them in a baking dish so that they can all stand upright. NOTE - if you prefer a less crunchy pepper, you can steam them for a few minutes before putting them in the pan.

Next, chop up all your ingredients! I have made excellent use of the Slap Chop here to chop up my onions, carrots, and yes - my walnuts. You're gonna love my nuts! (bahahaha!) The tomato I chopped up by hand because I wanted them to be bigger bits and not mushy, but hey, to each their own.
Don't forget about the meat. Check on it often. When the meat is cooked, drain out the grease (eew) and set the meat aside for now. Set the rice aside when it is done as well. Let's cook the stuffing! Saute the olive oil, garlic and onion till the onion is golden yellow, about 2 minutes. Add the carrots, peas and herbs. Cook till the carrots are tender, about 3 minutes or so. Reduce the heat to medium-low and add the tomato, walnuts, brown rice and a 1/2 cup of tomato sauce. Heat through.

Now it's stuffing time! Stuff your vegetarian peppers first (and stuff them good, don't skimp out! This recipe makes an insane amount of leftovers once the meat is added!). When the veggie ones are done, toss in that meat that you cooked and set aside earlier. Heat the mixture up again to get the meat heated through. When it's hot, stuff the meat peppers too.

Add about 1/2 cup of sauce to the bottom of the baking dish before putting your peppers in. Once all stuffed and placed back in the dish, liberally top your peppers with more tomato sauce. Mmmmm :)!

Pop the peppers into the oven and let them cook for 20 minutes. If you like softer peppers and haven't steamed them first, leave them for a little longer (up to about 30 minutes is enough).



Ridiculously Easy and Delicious Smashed Potatoes

mini potatoes (for two people, I used about 12 to give us 6 each)

olive oil

kosher salt and pepper to taste

rosemary (dried or fresh)

The potatoes take the longest time, so get them started first if you are making both recipes. Preheat the oven to 400 C. In a bowl, put your mini potatoes in and roll them around in about 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Then, place them in a baking dish (this here is a cake pan, but it totally doubles as a roasting pan *shifty eyes*). Pop 'em in! They will need to cook for 20 minutes.
When your 20 minutes is up, take the potatoes out of the oven. Use a large metal spoon or a flat-bottom pot and squish each potato just until you hear the skin pop. Your potatoes are smashed!


Drizzle your taters with a little bit more olive oil (about 1/2 Tbsp), and sprinkle with pepper, kosher salt and rosemary. Pop 'em back in the oven for another 15 minutes.

*note, you can put them in the oven with the peppers at the lower temperature too, but they'll just take longer. They will end up coming out of the oven at the same time if they are at 350 instead of 400 C).


The final product! Behold!

These are the veggie stuffed peppers and delicious little smashed potatoes (with a few that got a little bit too eagerly smashed :P). Check it out, they even look good when the meat-eating pepper falls over and spills everywhere!

I must admit a small disclaimer on this magical meal though - it's not skimpy on dishes. But since the peppers and potatoes take a while to cook together, you've got time in between to clean up :)

What other meals can carnivores and vegetarians both enjoy together while still feeling satisfied?

Well shit.

Pardon my French.

Remember a short time ago when I posted that my bike was going to have to be my main mode of transportation for the next little while?

Well.

I rode to work and locked the bike up right outside of the yoga studio doors. There were several other bikes also locked up there, and it's a fairly busy road with lots of pedestrians and some car traffic. Sometime in the afternoon, during a very busy time at the studio with three classes walking in and out, this happened:


That would be one end of my supposedly "indestructable" bike lock which, clearly, is quite destructable when one uses a flame to melt the outside casing and spends a good long time hacking through the cables within. Clearly this took quite an effort to work through since it's not a clean cut. I find it very difficult to believe that nobody saw anything here given that it was a busy time on a well-traveled road. Sonofabitch.

Unfortunately, to my own demise, I had only this lock attached to my bike. However, this was the strongest lock in the universe according to my bike-riding-highly-security-conscious father who bought it for me, who was subsequently in shock when I told him that his lock sucked.

So, I walk out of the studio ready to ride home, when surprise! All that remains is my lock lying sad and limp on the ground, the lock itself still fully intact. Major sad face :(!!!!!!

Now I'm waiting for the police to call me back to collect the serial number and bike information to file a report, and need to call my house insurance people to see if I can get anything, though I suspect that my insurance will end up increasing if I make a claim on it. Bah!

The moral of the story: make sure that you have double or triple locked your bike if you're parking on the street, and try to lock up on a main road where surely somebody will see and may actually stop to beat up whoever is trying to steal your bike. For now, I have to either start looking for a new (hopefully cheap) bike or start walking a lot farther :S

H 2 Ohhhhhhhhhhhh yeah!

That's right friends, this is a blog about WATER!

We all know that water is important, but many of us struggle to get enough in each day. Heck, most of us don't know how much we even need in one day!

Water is a vital part of our body's functioning. About 60% of the average human is made of water, including the water that flows around in bodily fluids (blood, lymph, digestive fluids, cerebral-spinal fluid, interstitial fluid...) Water has numerous functions in the body, including:

• Lubrication - fluid surrounds joints and organs (e.g. ocular fluid around the eyes) to reduce friction.
• Transportation - most vitamins are water soluble, so water helps to transport nutrients around the body to muscles and tissues that need it. Oxygen and carbon dioxide are also transported through fluid (i.e. blood).
• Eliminates wastes - newsflash, urine is also mostly water :) It transports all of the unneeded nutrients and metabolic wastes out of the body.
• Regulates body temperature - sweat helps to cool the body by evaporating from the skin
• Chemical reactions - water is needed for many chemical reactions in the body to take place, including all of the activites of digestion, absorption and use of the water-soluble nutrients.

Unfortunately, even though we have so much water inside of us, we also lose it in a lot of ways. Water is used to excrete wastes and to control body temperature, as mentioned before. We also lose water through breath (ever noticed that your breath is foggy in the winter? Guess why :)!)

Canada's Food Guide is very vague about water recommendations, saying only that you should "drink water regularly. It's a calorie-free way to quench your thirst. Drink more water in hot weather or when you are very active". Soooo... what does that actually mean? How regular is "regularly"?

The 8-glasses-per-day rule doesn't apply to everyone, but it's still a pretty good guideline to get started on. For someone consuming a 2000-calorie diet, at one mL per calorie, 8 250-mL glasses per day (about 2 litres) is perfectly fine. For someone looking to lose weight or who is very active, they may need more water to ensure that their bodies needs are met and that lost water is replaced. When you are active, especially if you are breaking a sweat, increase your water intake to replace the water lost through sweat and breathing. If you are sweating a lot or exercising for an extended period of time (more than about 40-60 minutes), you will also need to replace lost electrolytes.

I hear you. "I hate drinking water!", you say, "It's soooooooo boring and gross". It doesn't have to be this way my friends! Many fluids that we consume can count towards that 8 glasses, such as:

• Milk
• Juice (preferably real juice, not sugary fruit cocktails)
• Coffee and tea - recent studies have shown that despite their caffeine content, coffee and tea do not contribute towards dehydration as previously thought. However, drinking caffeinated beverages in excess may indeed cause dehydration, so be cautious if coffee is your only source of water :)
• Herbal teas and decaf coffee

Note, alcoholic beverages do not count, because they do contribute a diuretic effect.

Still not convinced? Here are some other ways to get more fluid in your day!

• Fruit has a crazy amount of water in it. Some fruits have 90% of their total mass as water, such as watermelons, peaches, strawberries, oranges, etc. Things that taste juicy generally ARE juicy! Some veggies also have a ton of water inside, such as cucumbers and celery.
• Soups still count as fluid, especially broth-based soups. Mix up an easy veggie soup and get slurping!
• If you hate the boring taste of water, add some stuff to it. Fruit (berries, orange slices, lemon and limes) can add some zing to a boring beverage, as can mint and/or cucumbers.

Dehydration can be easily avoided. When you first start to feel thirsty, you are already becoming dehydrated! Be sure to keep sipping your beverage(s) of choice throughout the day to ward off dehydration before it even starts. If you are peeing regularly and the colour is a pale yellow or clear, then you're good to go! If it's dark, chances are that you're dehydrated (though sometimes colour can be caused by excess vitamin C or other vitamins, but more often than not it's because the urine is super concentrated - i.e., you're dehydrated). If you ignore the thirst, other signs of dehydration include nausea or lightheadedness, headaches, dry mouth, dry eyes and weakness. If you're exercising moderately/high intensity and not sweating, that's also a bad sign! As dehydration continues, the situation can become life threatening. So please, drink up, and up, and up!

What's your favourite way to get enough water in a day?

Back from NOLA!

Hello again, blog!

I'm back from New Orleans! A group of 23 students from Ryerson, York and Western Universities went down to NOLA for two weeks to work with community organizations and with St. Bernard Project to help rebuild homes in this fabulous city.

When I first found out about this course, I was like "What? Wasn't Katrina like, 6 years ago? Why would they still need help rebuilding houses? I thought everything was back to normal now...". Pretty much every person I've told about this has had the same thoughts, even those who have actually been to NOLA (NOLA = New Orleans, LA) since the storm. Of course, usually these people were hanging out in the French Quarter/tourist areas, where a) there was little or no flooding in the first place, and b) the neighbourhood is quite wealthy and was able to repair what damage there was pretty quickly compared to other areas. The rest of the city, however, has large pockets that remain completely devastated. We walked and drove by several blocks at a time without seeing a single house that was inhabitable - if there was even a house left at all. Many homes have been abandoned, torn down due to mold and damage, or simply were washed right off of their lots during the flood, and never rebuilt because the owner of the lot simply cannot afford to come home.

How is it possible that in the United States of America - theoretically the richest nation on earth - that the situation has not changed in SIX YEARS????

So along came a group of students from Canada to help rebuild a house. The home that I was assigned to belonged to a man whose home was completely destroyed during the storm and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Everything he had was lost. He has been living in Baton Rouge with family for the last six years, but wants desperately to return to the community where he grew up and raised his children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren (!!!). This man deserves to come home. Sadly, many of his neighbours have not been so lucky, and there still stand many uninhabited homes or empty lots around his new house.

People have asked me a lot of questions since I came back. Why can't these people just rebuild their house with the insurance money they got, or the money they got from FEMA? Why would they need to rely on volunteer labour 6 years later rather than just hiring skilled contractors so that construction could be done way faster?

Most of the neighbourhoods that were most affected by the storm were the poorest areas of New Orleans (e.g. the Lower Ninth ward). It just so happens that the major levee breach, at the Industrial Canal, broke in this neighbourhood. This was a manmade levee, as were the others that broke and the MRGO that helped to funnel the storm directly into the city and destroy what remained of the city's bayous by releasing salt water into freshwater areas. The natural levees that exist along the Mississippi River did not break. Ironically, in 2004 this neighbourhood was removed from the flood warning list, because it had experienced NO flooding in 40 years. People were no longer required to have elevated homes (costs about $100K to elevate a house) or flood insurance ($2500-3000/year). Now that these major expenses were no longer required, many homes canceled their insurance and didn't worry about massive renovations to their homes for flood protection. The very next year, Katrina came along. Residents who had no flood insurance got NOTHING for their homes. They were lucky if they received a few hundred or a few thousand dollars for part of their property, e.g. if a tree happened to have fallen on it, but nothing for the actual flood damage. As for FEMA, the US government failed the people of NOLA massively. Yes, they were given some money for their damaged homes, but not near enough to rebuild anything. Some were "lucky" enough to receive FEMA trailers to live in while their homes were under construction. I say lucky in quotation marks because it turned out that these $100K trailers were chock full of formaldehyde, making many people sick. Did I mention that they were poor, had no insurance money and had to live in a trailer? This means that they probably didn't have the money for their medical bills either.

Way to go, FEMA.

Without money, people can't afford to pay a skilled contractor. In addition, some contractors weren't exactly as skilled as they claimed. We've all seen Holmes on Homes and seen the shotty work that is done by unskilled and overpaid contractors. Imagine that in a disaster situation, where the greedy can gain even more. Sadly, many who did use their insurance/FEMA money to hire contractors ended up right back at square one, with a lot less money, due to unsavoury contractor work. With no other option, many homeowners have turned to non-profit organizations like St. Bernard Project, Habitat for Humanity, etc. to find help in the form of volunteers like us. Even better, the volunteers learn new skills. Some of the volunteers that participate in these projects include other NOLA residents, and recently some of the fisherfolk from St. Bernard parish who have been unable to fish after the BP oil spill. The volunteers are learning new skills that may help them to get new jobs that will still help their community. Win win situation, anyone?

Long story short, New Orleans was amazing, and I can't wait to go back. I want to return and see the house that I drywalled standing tall and proud in the Lower Ninth among all of the other destruction. I want to see the neighbourhood come back to life. And, I want to encourage everyone I run into to do the same!