Nicoise salad
Cucumber Gouda Sprout Sandwich
Ingredients
2 Tbsp (30 mL) light cream cheese, softened
1 tsp (5 mL) chopped fresh dill (or 1/4 tsp/1 mL dried)
2 slices rye, whole wheat or gluten-free bread
4 slices cucumber
2 Tbsp (30 mL) quinoa sprouts
1/2 tsp (2 mL) balsamic vinegar
2 rings sliced red onion
1 slice Gouda cheese
Directions
1. Combine the cream cheese and dill and spread on each slice of bread.
2. Place the cucumber on 1 side. Toss the quinoa sprouts in the balsamic vinegar and place on top of the cucumber. Add the red onion and top with the Gouda cheese and the remaining slice of bread.
“Quin-WHAT?”
Quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) is not a grain; it is actually a seed and related to the spinach family. When cooked, quinoa is light, fluffy, slightly crunchy and subtly flavored. It actually cooks and tastes like a grain, making it an excellent replacement for grains.
But its flavor is only part of why quinoa is such an amazing “supergrain.”
Some of the nutrients in quinoa include:
- Complete protein. Quinoa contains all 9 essential amino acids that are required by the body as building blocks for muscles.
- Magnesium helps relax your muscles and blood vessels and effects blood pressure. Quinoa contains high levels of this vital nutrient.
- Fiber. Quinoa is a wonderful way to ensure that you consume valuable fiber that eases elimination and tones your colon.
- Manganese and copper. Quinoa is a good source of these minerals that act as antioxidants in your body to get rid of dangerous cancer and disease-causing substances.
Compared to other grains, quinoa is higher in calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, iron, copper, manganese, and zinc than wheat, barley, or corn.
Studies have shown that quinoa has documented health benefits too!
Quinoa, in its whole grain form, may be effective in preventing and treating these conditions:
- Artherosclerosis
- Breast cancer
- Diabetes
- Insulin resistance
Researchers attribute the health benefits of quinoa to its complete nutritional makeup.
We made organic quinoa from Trader Joe’s with dinner the other night. It was super good and fluffy! I think it would work wonderfully as a non-wheat alternative to cous cous and generally a great way to mix up your grain intake (well, it’s technically a seed, but there you go). We’d had it before, but I think only the red kind - the blonde variety from TJ’s was super good.
Also it is fun to walk around saying “Keeen - waaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh”
Fascinating article on calories in cooked versus uncooked/unprocessed foods. Bear in mind that this does not mean that uncooked foods are universally healthier - they’re just harder for your body to digest, thus you take in less calories (energy) from them. [Discover Magazine: Why Calorie Counts Are Wrong: Cooked Food Provides a Lot More Energy by Richard Wrangham]
Excerpts:
To study how cooking (and processing, like pounding or chopping) affected calories, we turned to mice. They are a good species for this because their diet choices are rather similar to human food preferences. They like grains, roots, fruits and even meat; in the wild, there are populations of mice that get most of their food by eating live albatrosses [video]. Rachel Carmody led a study in which mice were given regular mouse pellets for six days at a time, interrupted by four days of eating sweet potatoes or beef. Half the time the sweet potato or meat was presented raw, and half the time cooked; half the time it was also pounded and half the time unpounded. She and Gil Weintraub carefully measured the exact amount of food eaten by the mice, and then calculated the animals’ gain or loss of weight over four days as a function of the weight of food eaten, using both wet weights and dry weights of food to check the results. For both meat and sweet potato, Rachel found that when the food was cooked the mice gained more weight (or lost less weight) than when it was raw. Pounding had very little effect.
The USA uses the Atwater Convention for assessing calories in food, a century-old system that treats food as being composed of a certain number of components, each of which has a fixed calorie value–such as 4 kcals for a gram of protein, 4 kcals for a gram of sugars, 9 kcals for fats [ed: kcals are popularly called “calories”]. Modifications to the original convention allow advances in nutritional knowledge to be incorporated, such as better estimates for some specific types of carbohydrate. The system gives a good approximation for foods that are highly digestible and demand very little work by the digestive system, such as candy bars. It is convenient because it produces standardized numbers that everyone can agree on.
But the Atwater Convention has two big flaws. First, it pays no attention to the extent to which food has been processed. For example, it treats grain as the same calorie value whether it is eaten whole or as highly milled flour. But smaller particles are less work to digest, and therefore provide more net energy. Second, it treats foods as equally digestible (meaning, having the same proportion digested) regardless of processing. But cooked foods, as we’ve seen, are more digestible than raw foods.
Yet despite all these advantages over anyone who might try eating wild foods raw, the average woman on a 100% raw diet did not have a functioning menstrual cycle. About 50% of women entirely stopped menstruating! When a raw-foodist’s reproductive system does not allow her to have a baby even when her diet is composed of processed, high-quality, agricultural foods, the obvious explanation is that she is not getting enough calories.
An attempt to estimate calories
Breakfast:
- Trader Joe’s 100% whole wheat Middle Eastern Flatbread (1pc): 130 cal
- Eggplant hummus (estimating 4 TBS): 70 cal
- Coffee with estimating 1oz 2% milk/half-half (poured a smidge of half and half so estimating at whole milk): 18 cal
Total: 218 calories
Coffee in meeting: I don’t really know what it was so let’s just call it 1 oz half and half so 37 cal
Lunch: Trader Joe’s Palak Paneer (2 servings): 500 cal
Snack: Like 3 almonds + 1 piece Trader Joe’s Swiss Dark Chocolate = 50 calories (maybe?)
Dinner:
- Let’s call it 1/3 of the pâté (it’s supposed to be 4 servings at 200/ea) so 267 calories
- 1 flatbread @ 130 calories
- Say 3 servings of eggplant hummus at 105 calories
- Let’s guess 6 pieces of melba which is 90 calories
- I’ll call it 3/4 cup baby carrots so 53 calories
- Say 1.5 cups broccoli so 25 calories
- Say 1/6 of the bag of bananas sooo… 50 calories
Total (generous): 720 cal
Overall total of 1,525 for the day being liberal with my estimates.
According to this site, if I’m at 130 (which the scale at work says I’m around) and saying I work out thrice weekly:
Maintenance: 1924 Calories/day
Weight Loss: 1539 Calories/day
Extreme Weight Loss: 1154 Calories/day
