March 16, 2006

Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, the Wearin’ O’ the Green. In addition to wearing green, why not eat green? Green vegetables, that is. Helen Nearing, author of several books about back to the earth, claimed that greens, not grains, are the staff of life. So for today’s blog entry, I invite you to prepare some of these green foods. Please note that my recipes are generally simple and provide a wide range of choices and amounts, depending or your needs and taste buds. There is no wrong amount!

GuacaSalsa

Ingredients:
One ripe avocado
Garlic & Lemon juice
Salt & Pepper
1/2-1 c. organic* salsa

Directions:
1. Peel, scoop and mash avocado with a fork
2. Add (crushed) garlic and lemon juice to taste
3. Optional to taste
4. Add to avocado and mix well.

Chill & serve with natural tortilla chips, blue corn chips, or baked corn chips and with raw veggies, such as peppers, celery and raw okra (an unusually good taste when raw—no slime!!!)

*Tomatoes are heavily sprayed, so I recommend organic salsa

Pasta Verde

Cook one package of your favorite pasta according to directions. Drain and toss with parsley pesto.

Parsley Pesto

Ingredients:
Two cups fresh parsley
1/2 cup virgin olive oil
Salt, pepper, & whole garlic to taste

Directions:
1. Wash parsley, trim stems and place in blender.
2. Add trimmed parsley to blender.
3. Pour in olive oil and add spices.

Puree all ingredients to a smooth paste, adding extra oil if too thick to pour.Feel free to add walnuts, pine nuts, or pistachios and to use the traditional basil along with, or in place of, the parsley. Parsley is high in chlorophyll, which not only freshens the breath but acts as a healing agent, since chlorophyll is to plants what hemoglobin is to our blood.

Sesame Green Beans

Ingredients:
12 oz. Green beans
2-3 Tbl. Sesame dressing
1- 2 Tbl. Sesame seeds

Directions:
1. Wash, drain, and trim stems. Place in steamer and steam 5-7 minutes, until tender-crispy.
2. Toss steamed beans in a bowl with 2-3 Tbl. of your favorite dressing or the one below
3. Sprinkle on sesame seeds right before serving.

Sesame Dressing
Ingredients:
1/2 cup sesame oil (regular or toasted)
2-3 Tbl. Plum vinegar or vinegar of your choice
Dash of tamari soy sauce or Bragg’s Aminos (Unfermented soy condiment)
Dash of ginger sauce, if available

Directions:
Whisk all ingredients in a small bowl and when green beans are cooked, toss beans with 2-3 tablespoons of the dressing, sprinkle on sesame seeds, and serve. Makes about one cup. Refrigerate remaining dressing for tossed green salad.

HAPPY GREEN DAY!!

Midlife, including menopause and beyond, is a wonderful opportunity to examine yourself at the third quarter of your life, celebrating all the changes instead of worrying about them. If you see change as a positive “power surge” (name my daughter Basha gave to my hot flashes), then you can use this time to reinvent yourself and regroup for the next phase of your life. After all, aren’t the first 50 years only a warm-up for the zest/rest of your life?

As a nutrition educator and natural foods cook, one main focus of this blog will be on The Good Taste of Health, the title I coined for my cooking classes. (My company name is Hands on Nutrition.) Each posting —every week or every two weeks— I plan to feature a tasty recipe of my own or one from a book I review, nutritional information and natural remedies supportive of midlife, resources for you to investigate (websites, books, workshops), renewal articles, “reflexions,” humor, and anything else I can glean from my overflowing file drawers and bookshelves of information on women at midlife. In the future, I hope to schedule small workshops with women who would like to host one in her home. At first, they will be in my immediate area of Philadelphia, and then later, further out into other cities and states. More on this in a future posting.

Finally, the word “menu” has taken on new meanings since the advent of the Internet. A menu need not be only about food. (Likewise, a recipe can be a formula for living.) Therefore, while food and recipes may have been my original focus of this blog, as I thought about it, I realized that a recipe for life can includes all aspects of living and a menu can be an assortment of offerings from many different areas of that life.

Hopefully, this blog will make a positive difference to you as your navigate the sometimes muddy waters of midlife, learning on the way how to live fully, joyfully, and deliberately so that you will be able to look back and say Yay! Menopause!!!