healthy eating – Fervent Foodie

Vegetarian Whole30: Week Two Menu

January 8, 2017 4 Comments

I just keep rambling on and on about how easy the Whole30 is, and I get the sense some of you are virtually rolling your eyes at me. So let me be honest here. I ate a slice of bread with butter this weekend. It happened, and I’m not proud. But when you get invited to a retreat in Hocking Hills and you’re too embarrassed to BYO vegetables, the Whole30 becomes significantly more challenging. Especially when dinner on night #1 is pasta and bread. It wasn’t even special. Just a small hunk of cold french bread with a bit of butter to quiet my growling belly.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt angry. It took me a bit to put my finger on it, but I realized that I was angry I’d lost control. And that perhaps the reason I like Whole30 so much is that it appeals to my strong desire to be in control. (Verdicts still out on whether this is a good or bad thing. . . )

Kale & Onion Potato Pie #whole30 {ferventfoodie.com}

On day #2 of the retreat, I got back on the wagon. While my comrades indulged in biscuits and gravy, french fries, all-you-can-eat pie buffets, and 13-variety wine tastings, I ate eggs and potatoes, SALAD BAR x 100, and maybe a little too much coffee. And I felt really good, actually. Even when I turned down a cheese-loaded potato skin. Even after passing on the gooey candied apple. Even when declining the wine slushy. Even when offered a hot gooey brownie FOR BREAKFAST. (Full disclosure: I brought the brownie home and popped it in the freezer for post-Whole30 enjoyment.) I felt so good, I decided to start my Whole30 over again, to make up for that lousy slice of bread and butter.

Food Articles, Urbanspoon

Restaurant Trend: Healthy Eating

May 9, 2013 No Comments

Fervent Foodie is a contributing writer for the official Urbanspoon blog.

With spring in the air and bathing suits on the brain, healthy eating is getting lots of attention these days. It seems each year more and more diet fads appear, and while many people find these fads a bit extreme (Cabbage Soup Diet, really?), few can argue the benefits of swapping a day or two of healthier eating into their weekly eating regimen.

Feeling a little confused on the different healthy eating trends? Get the skinny on raw eating, juicing, the macrobiotic diet, and Paleo over on the Urbanspoon blog.

Fitness

My Top 5 tools for Healthy Living

January 3, 2013 No Comments

Oh, January. I love the start of a new year. It reminds me of the whoosh of relief you get after a huge exam mixed with the excited butterflies of a new relationship. Once we cross over that line in the sand, we are all bubbling over with hopes and goals and visions of doing things differently in the new year. It’s no wonder healthy eating and exercising are such popular topics this time of year.

Healthy living has been a priority for me for the past few years, in fact, it’s one of the reasons I started this ole blog (check out my take on healthy living here). My life struggle is balancing my love (obsession?) of food with my desire to maintain physical health. It sounds like an oxymoron, but I truly believe it’s obtainable.

As a creature of habit, there are a few tools I use religiously, day in and day out, to help me in my quest for health.

If you’ve ever tried to lose a few lbs, you know the first step is getting a handle on the amount of calories you consume each day. Plus, I’m a numbers girl, so I need to see the numerical nutritional breakout of my meals to understand if what I’m eating is really as healthy as it looks. I’ve been using MyFitnessPal since 2010. It’s an awesome tool for tracking calories consumed and burned, plus it has a huge nutritional information database. I also love that you can input and save recipes to the site (p.s., this is how I compute the nutritional stats for the recipes posted on the blog). The site also has a weight tracker, goal setting features, and smartphone aps. It’s COMPLETELY free. LOVE IT.

At least a couple times a week, I’ll catch someone staring at my hip before they point and blurt “what is that thing?!” I love my fitbit, and I’ve worn it daily for over a year now. In a nutshell, the fitbit is a pedometer that tracks your steps, distance, stairs climbed, calories burned, and even how well you sleep at night. AGAIN with the numbers. I know. The newest fitbit model synchs your activity data wirelessly, which I am oober jealous of. Once the data synchs, you can log onto the fibit site and see how your activity measures up to your goals plus you can challenge your friends. My personal fitbit goal is to log 35 miles per week and a minimum of 10,000 steps a day. If I see I haven’t reached my daily goal when I get home from work, I find an excuse to get moving. I take out the trash, I vacuum, I’ll go to the mall and do a few laps (yes, really). Whatever it takes to get to my goal. It all adds up. Another feature I love: the fitbit displays random words of motivation. Things like “WALK ME” or “I LIKE YOU” or “MISS YOU” when you haven’t been moving enough lately.

Recipes

Zucchini Pancakes

July 26, 2010 6 Comments

Sometimes life is just about compromises. Tonight, I had a serious craving for some french fries… a big ole mound of french fries and some ketchup.. mmmmm….

In lieu of this, I opted for a big ole salad… hmm big ole salad vs. big ole mound of french fries? That’s not exactly a fair fight…

My salad consisted of:

1/2 bag fresh express romaine
2.5 ounces grilled chicken breast
1 roma tomato
1/4 cup red onion
1/4 cup white mushrooms
2 tbsp Ken’s Steakhouse Lite Italian Romano dressing

Not exactly a french-fry-craving cure… but darn tasty in its own right.

Stats on the salad: 204 calories, 18g carbs, 6g fat, 17g protein, 5g fiber

To help curb my desire for some grease, I decided to try out this recipe I found for Zucchini Pancakes on Gina’s Skinny Taste blog.

Here’s what went in to my zucchini pancakes:

1 medium zucchini, shredded
1 shallot, chopped
2 tbsp chopped chives (holler at you, backyard garden 😉 )
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1 clove garlic, minced
1 large egg white
2 tsp DiGiorno Grated Parmesan Cheese
1 tbsp all purpose flour
1/4 tsp each S&P
Sprinkling of red pepper flakes

I combined everything up, then heated up a skillet I had sprayed with some cooking spray. Using a small cookie dough scooper, I dropped 3 pancakes into the pan.

One by one:

Batch #1 Finished Products:

These tasted AWESOME. They really spoke to the onion-lover in me. Only problem was they didn’t get crispy like a traditional potato pancake. I tried several different methods, including flattening them out til they were very thin–but they just wouldn’t crisp up! Maybe it’s the whole egg that helps to get them crispy–but regardless of the texture issues the taste was yum-o.

I tried one bite with some ketchup of course:

And I tried one bite with some Frank’s red hot:

(I preferred the ketchup in this case)

The zucchini pancake “batter” made 9 of these little fritters. I ate 7 of them (I had to try one for each cooking method…. haha), and I saved two of them for breakfast tomorrow so I can see how well they heat up in the microwave.

Stats on 9 Zucchini Fritters (entire batter): 159 calories, 27g carbs, 2g fat, 11g protein, 2g fiber