Heart health for every age

"Studies have shown that if you can avoid the conditions that put you at risk for heart disease until you turn 50, chances are good that you may never develop heart disease. The payoff is well worth your investment." - Go Red for Women


The Go Red for Women campaign has a great website with helpful, easy to understand information directed specifically towards women in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Information is broken up into: Prevention, Eat Well, Be Active, Watching Your Weight and Visit Your Doctor. Seriously, check it out. It is worth five more minutes on the internet. Click here. 

Whatcha eating? Crock pot chuck roast!

When Oliver biked to YDFM last Friday he picked up a two and half pound chuck roast. On Sunday he dropped into our crockpot and let it roast for eight hours. We've been enjoying it ever since.

When slow cooking a chuck roast keep the left over juice; it's the key to making the most of the roast in subsequent meals. Here's how: after braising strain the remaining juice into a clean container and chill to separate the fat. Once the fat has hardened scrape it off and throw it away. Cover the remaining gelatin and store in the fridge. When you're ready to eat add a spoonful or two of the gelatin to the meat and reheat in a skillet.

This week's roast was eaten on rice with leeks, in a ciabatta roll with pickled vegetables, mixed into homemade fried rice and as a main course with sides of new potato and kale.

 

Emergency heart health

I've been thinking about other ways I can increase my heart health awareness - and emergency training continues to be one of the first things that comes to mind. I want to take a CPR/AED/Heart Attack response class. The one I've found is around $100 which means I need to wait until after the holiday season to sign up. But for anyone who has the money and wants to do it now - please do! If anyone else wants to join me when I sign up in January let me know. We can do it together.

Atlanta's Red Cross course catalog: click here

It's a great day to be a Foodie

Happy Sunday morning everyone! I just opened my New York Times newspaper and was super excited to see that this week's magazine is all about food! After enjoying the paper and a cup of coffee Oliver and I are going to walk down to the Grant Park Farmers' Market and pick up some more greens to add to the garden.

Another reason today is great day to be a foodie? The Field of Greens Festival at Whippoorwill Hollow Farm! It's today from 11am to 5pm. Live music and tastings from many of Atlanta's best restaurants all happening on a 74 acre working organic farm just 45 minutes outside of Atlanta. If you need a reason to get out and enjoy the sunshine today - this is it. More info on their website: www.fieldofgreensfestival.com

Side note: After I finishing reading the NYT magazine I'll post links to my favorite articles. Check back for it.
Ok, I'm back!
Michael Pollan answers your food questions: click here
Food Curiosities (be sure to look at the 67 types of Pringles illustration) click here
How can food change your life? And how can food change the world? Allow Mark Bittman to tell you

The food is gone (also titled: Every single thing I ate on Friday)

It happens to everyone: you wake up one morning to realize all the food is gone. The milk, the cereal, the lunch options - eaten up and gone. Friday that was my day.

The alarm clock rang and I instantly realized I'd forgotten to buy breakfast foods on my way home the day before. No  breakfast, no reason to get out of bed. I rolled over and pulled the covers up. But Oliver siezed the opportunity and insisted this was the time for me to try his delicious oatmeal concoction. (Need I point out he is a morning person?) I said no, I'd skip breakfast and sleep a little more. Fifteen minutes later when I finally rolled out of bed there was a piping hot bowl of oatmeal topped with half and half, golden raisins, walnuts and maple syrup waiting for me on the kitchen table. 

It was amazing. I thought I hated oatmeal. I realize now, I hate those creepy factory flavored packets of instant Quaker Oats. The real stuff with real toppings is WOW.

At the office work kept pushing my lunchtime later and later. By 1:15 I was very hungry. I drove past the Moes, Panera and Wendys to reach Alon's (one of Atlanta's local bakery cafes). I picked up a $3.50 container of their tuna salad, a $.69 fresh baked multigrain roll and a $1.30 Orangina. I sat on the worn wooden bench in the front and enjoyed my traveler's style meal while catching up on Sunday's New York Times. (I admit, preserved tuna and mayo is not the healthiest - but it is better then Wendy's.)

 
Oliver commutes on his bike. Friday he decided it was a nice enough day that he didn't mind riding all the way from Georgia Tech to YDFM for a few of the groceries we were in such need of. Round trip it was just shy of twenty five miles. The last minute dinner he whipped up was a beef bourgogne made with Omaha steak tips from a gift basket I'd recieved earlier in the year. (Thank goodness for meat in the freezer!) He combined the thawed steak tips with mushrooms and a bottle of cheap red wine. Walla! Romantic dinner for two!

For a day without a meal plan I feel ok with how we managed. Granted, we didn't eat anything green; but we also didn't eat anything fake. Sometimes it's all about those last minute choices!
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Homemade Salsa

When Oliver asks for dinner ideas classic Latin American dishes are always the first to come to my mind. Tacos, enchiladas, moles and mojos (oh my)! There is no denying these are my favorite foods.

Oliver's guacamole is by far the best I've ever tasted (and I have tasted many gaucamoles). It's heavy on citrus and fresh ground cumin. So this week, when he announced that he planned to also start making his own salsa, I was very excited.

The salsa recipe combines fresh tomatillos, several types of dried peppers, onion, garlic and a dash of salt. After quartering the tomatillos and onions he tossed them in olive oil roasted them in under the broiler. The peppers were cut with kitchen scissors, seeded and soaked in hot water. Then it all went into the blender together. The result was a smokey, hot, delicious homemade salsa.



What's for lunch? Arugula with lemon and parmesan

This has been one of my favorite salads for at least five years: fresh arugula, the juice from one lemon, a drizzle of olive oil, a small pinch of salt and parmesan cheese. Its an easy lunch to make in the office too. I keep all of the ingredients in the office fridge or in my desk drawer so I don't have to worry about finding time to make a lunch at home in the morning. It beats the pants off a can of Slim Fast!

This arugula came from the Grant Park Farmer's Market on Sunday. When I got  home and put my bag down Topher went straight for it. He rubbed against it incessantly until I pulled the arugula out. I finally gave in and let him have a leaf...because Topher wants a healthy heart too! The video is posted below.









Atlanta's impressive intown coops

Over the weekend Oliver and I participated in the Atlanta Urban Coop Tour. It's a tour of 28 in-town chicken coops with the proceeds going to Georgia Organics and the Oakhurst Community Garden Project. We couldn't afford the $20 tickets so we spent three hours volunteering at the will call booth and each earned a free ticket. And I'm so glad we did! The coops and chickens we saw were all so different and so interesting. Impressive doses of ingenuity.

 In addition to the coops on the tour I can think of five more friends or neighbors who also keep chickens. That means there are at least thirty three people within an eight mile radius raising city chickens. I can't speak for the owners we met over the weekend but one of the reasons I want to raise my own livestock is to bypass the CAFO meat system.


CAFO is an acronym for concentrated/confined animal feeding operation. Georgia is one of the nation's highest chicken CAFO producers. Growing up in Dunwoody I'd seen and smelt the coops during trips to Lake Lanier but it wasn't until I saw the documentary "Our Daily Bread" that I realized what was going on inside the buildings. If you don't know what I'm talking about then this four minute clip is worth watching: click here. I've seen it dozens of times  and the scenes of live baby chicks dropping along conveyor belts still leaves me in awe.
There is such a stark contrast between the factory chickens' environment and that of the family backyard chicken. All the homes we visited felt effortlessly idyllic. As if adding chickens to ones home helps emphasize a slower pace of life and appreciation for basic human needs. All the coops shown here are located in Grant Park, Ormewood or Inman Park (neighborhoods in the center of the city of Atlanta's perimeter). Thank you to all the owners for letting me photograph their yards! 



Side note: "Our Daily Bread" planted the no-CAFO diet idea in my head but Robert Kenner's "Food Inc" solidified it. Many of my friends have given up meat entirely; while I understand their choice I do not think it's a solution to the problem. I believe in using my shopping dollars to support those who are raising animals the right way. We still eat meat but we make an effort to only buy meat that has been raised in a healthy, ethical way. More about this in a future post. 

Fall Planting - Round One

Fall planting has begun! This year we're trying a few new things. For starters, we're planting our leafy greens in bi-weekly waves. The last few seasons we've found ourselves with more ready-to-harvest greens then we could eat while they were ripe. After the perfect month of greens had passed there wasn't much left in the garden to eat. By planting new greens every few weeks we will hopefully spread out the harvest time thus providing garden fresh greens throughout the fall and into the winter. We're starting with Bibb lettuce, Romaine lettuce, and bok choy. We'll be adding kale, arugula and spinach.

We're also trying a new fertilizer recommended by an organic vendor at the Grant Park Farmer's Market. It's a liquid fish emulsion. Smells terrible but supposedly produces great results.

And finally, onions! We've never tried growing root vegetables because frankly - how are we supposed to know when they're ready to be picked? These onions were an impulse buy at Home Depot. They were cheap so we decided to give them a try.  Oliver planted them in the raised bed that previously held cucumbers.
 

What's for lunch? Pinto beans!

In an earlier post I explained my weekday breakfast goal is to eat a cereal high in fiber, low in sugar and made of real food ingredients. My goal for weekday lunches is just as simple: beans or greens. Beans means a bowl of homestewed black or pinto beans. Greens is a salad of spinach or arugula (depending on the season).

It's true what the kids say: beans, beans they're good for the heart. So today I'll highlight a few of the reasons beans make the MVP list of heart healthy eating.


1. Beans are an excellent source of cholesterol-lowering, heart diease preventing, fiber! In fact "a cup of cooked pinto beans provides 58% of the recommended daily intake for fiber". 
2. That same cup of beans fulfills 23% of a body's daily need for magnesium. What does magnesium do for the heart? It "improves the flow of blood, oxygen and nutrients throughout the body. Studies show that a [lack] of magnesium is...associated with heart attack". (Full article here: WH Foods)
3. One cup of pintos also provides 73% of the recommended daily intake for folate. Top 5 Health Benefits of Folate (Folic Acid) listed here. 
4. Besides, your colon just loves pinto beans! My Dad would refer to them as "roughage". (As in, "You need to make sure you're eating enough roughage".)

Beans! The more you eat the better you'll feel. Beans, beans - well maybe not at EVERY MEAL - but how about four times a week? Your body will thank you (but your significant other may not).

Side note: A pot of stewed beans is a very cheap meal that requires four hours of stewing and returns many days of eating. We purchase our dried beans in quart containers from YDFM. Costs about $2.50. Stewing them is a day long process. (Historically stew day coincides with wash day, Monday, and the left over meat carcus from Sunday's meal). A big pot will make more then enough for Oliver and I to eat Tuesday through Friday as lunch. By Saturday we're both tired of them and what's left tends to be thrown out. Picking up a bag Vigo beans and rice at the grocery is a tempting alternative but high sodium content counters some of the health benefits.

Works in Progress

It was a great weekend for drawing, painting, exercising and eating well. On Saturday we rode our bikes to the East Atlanta Village Strut (a neighborhood festival). The ride is a little over 4 miles round trip with quite a hill in the middle. Thanks to the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition for the free bike valet!

Blog writing is still on hold while I generate goods for the upcoming Etsy shop but I wanted to share a sneak peek at my progress. Everything painted has been scanned in. I'm now working on creating papergoods featuring the drawings and paintings.






















Also, the stuffed poblano peppers (made with the previously blogged pig butt) were INCREDIBLE. Oliver drizzled them with a mixture of sour cream, lime and cilantro. Just a small amount but it really made the all the flavors pop. So good.

Peachtree Road Farmers Market

This morning we headed eight miles north of our house to check out the Peachtree Road Farmer's Market. I'd been curious to see if it was any better or different then our neighborhood farmer's market.   Overall I'd say the two are comparable; we even recognized a handful of vendors. In the future we'll stick with the Grant Park Farmer's Market  simply because it's within walking distance of our house. But for anyone living on the north side of Midtown or in Buckhead the Peachtree Road Farmers Market is a great option. Check it out!

















I'll be taking several days off from blogging to make some art for the Etsy shop. Aiming to have the store open by the start of October. Until then, bon appetit!

TGIF! Boiled Peanuts

Earlier this week Oliver picked up a bag of fresh green peanuts from YDFM. The result, a tasty (read: salty) local snack that probably does NOT count as heart healthy. These bad boys had our ring fingers swollen within 24 hours. Oh well, everything in moderation. Enjoy your weekend!

























And a "Thank Goodness its Friday" from Topher too!

Oliver's Big Pig Butt - it's whats for dinner!

We picked up 4.4lbs of pork butt (butt is actually shoulder - go figure) at YDFM on Tuesday. Last night Oliver coated it in homemade seasoning, wrapped it in plastic wrap and left it overnight in the fridge. This morning he dropped it into our crockpot with a sliced onion. After ten hours of roasting he peeled away the (admittedly giant) chunk of fat and pulled the pork into tender and delicious pieces. $17 of pork sounds like a lot for two people but it will feed us for the rest of the week and into the weekend.

Tonight we ate it as a main dish with sides of yucca con mojo and toasted kale. This weekend it will be stuffed into poblano peppers for dinner, topped with BBQ sauce for lunch and mixed into omelettes for breakfast. Not all in the same day! Today is Thursday; knowing our eating habits my guess is that we'll enjoy this cut of pork once a day for four more days. Seventeen dollars divided by ten individual meals equals $1.70 per meal. That is less then a taco at Moes (read: unbeatable) with the added benefit of knowing where the meat came from and how it was cooked. Hooray for another Chez Oliver dinner time homerun!


 

Dinner from the garden

Mid-September in Atlanta can be unexpectedly warm. The meterologist is reporting that today is the 90th day we have hit 90 degrees or higher. With fall planting still several weeks away we're making the most of our last few, homegrown, summer vegetables.

What to cook with two large eggplants, one greenish-reddish pepper and two cherry peppers? Curry! We combined our homegrown ingredients with a bit of curry paste, a few small potatoes, an onion, rice and coconut milk (all from YDFM; see previous posts for more about YDFM). And wall-la! Dinner for two with leftovers for four individual lunches. Heart healthy, incredibly delicious, and local - my favorite kind of meal.


(For anyone wondering, the beer is Heavy Seas Great'er Pumpkin Imperial Ale aged in Bourbon Barrels. We shared a bomber. Super good. Get your hands on some of this seasonal beer if you can find it!)





"A Year of Food Life" - a must read!


Locavores, foodies and home gardeners have all found inspiration in the true story of Barbara Kingsolver's year long food experiment. In 2007 Barbara Kingsolver (you may already know her as the author of the novel "The Bean Trees") moved her family from Arizona to Virginia with a vow to survive only on food that either they had grown themselves or had been grown in their neighborhood. In her novel "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" she details their family experiment. Over the course of twelve months Barbara, her husband and her two daughters raise heirloom turkeys, perfect the art of daily homemade bread, can hundreds of vegetables and learn to make cheese all while running their own hillside fruit and vegetable farm. If that isn't enough, each chapter ends with a recipe.

If you're someone who is still putting off starting a garden or needs convicing about the joys of eating in season foods then please read "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A year of food life". This book is the reason our garden went from summer to year round. It also inspired my desire to learn canning and my ambition to eat not just real food but real, local, in-season food.
  • The recipes are on Barbara's website. Click the following for a direct link: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recipes
  • You can read an exert from the book here.
  • And finally, as I give this awesome book two thumbs, do me favor: click the following link to play aloud the background.  Click here!





Brew Day

The skies have cleared and the weather is mild; a perfect day for brewing beer! Today Oliver made a German Altbier. Should be ready to tap in a few weeks.



It might go without saying, but we're craft beer drinkers. No Bud or Coors for us. Fortunately there are a lot of great breweries and brewpubs in Atlanta so finding a delicious beer that is brewed locally is easy. Options abound!

Red Brick Brewery 
SweetWater Brewery
Monday Night Brewing
Wild Heaven
Terrapin
Jail House