Tag Archive for: skills

Pomegranate Pear Salad

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There’s simply no excuse for a boring salad.

 

Today I’m sharing a winner of a salad recipe I’ve personally tested with three different groups on three different occasions with overwhelming success each time. It’s an inventive crowd-pleaser, and I suggest you tuck it into your back pocket so you’re armed and ready the next time you’re asked to be the salad guy or gal for a gathering.

 

The first time I made this Pomegranate Pear Salad was for a holiday celebration on my dad’s side of the family. Let’s just say we have lots of “conventional American eaters” in this group – peeps who load up on meat and dairy and go light (or totally skip) the veggies and anything else they deem “new or exotic.” This group wants their food familiar, hearty, and not necessarily healthy. But at least half of the group tried my salad and loved it. Several of my cousins and aunts asked for the recipe after commenting on the bright, interesting flavors – the ultimate compliment. Success!

 

Since then I’ve made it for two distinctly less fussy groups of friends, all of whom strive to eat healthy. I was pretty confident they’d enjoy it, but even so you can never be sure that salad is going to go over well on a cold winter’s day. I’m happy to report it ended up being a delicious complement to chili  one day and to roasted chicken and sweet potatoes another day. I think the palate cleansing flavors and the natural sweetness in the fruit and dressing hit those taste buds that didn’t get satisfied by the spicy and savory flavors in the rest of the meal.

 

The original recipe came from the Salad Girl blog, a resource I share with all my clients. If you tend to think of salads as boring, your assignment is to browse that lovely site. I’ve used it as a resource over a dozen times and haven’t been disappointed yet. It’s a reliable source of inspiration. I ended up making some tweaks to the original recipe this time. Below is my spinoff:

 

Pomegranate Pear Salad

Yield: 6-8 servings

 

8 oz fresh mix of local baby greens

1 cup pomegranate seeds (fresh are better for the fun “pop” they give, but frozen will work if that’s all you can find)

2 ripe pears, thinly sliced or diced

1 cup chopped pecans (I use unroasted, unsalted pecans)

1/2 cup – 1 cup white cheddar shavings or Peccorino Romano, depending on how much your audience likes cheese

1/2 cup red onion, sliced paper-thin

Salad Girl Pomegranate Pear Salad Dressing (widely available at Lunds, Byerly’s, Kowalski’s, Twin Cities Food Co-ops, Whole Foods, etc.)

 

When ready to serve, simply add salad fixings to salad greens and toss well. I typically let each individual dress her own salad with the Pomegranate Pear Dressing, but feel free to dress the salad just before serving, if you think that will work better for your group.

Becoming a Batch Cooking Boss

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I changed my life dramatically when I began batch cooking. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this term, “batch cooking” is the practice of spending a few hours one to two times a week prepping, cooking, and properly storing food so you have ready-to-go healthful meals at your fingertips. This is a practice I loosely began in college, mainly because most of my friends were busy watching football on Sundays (a sport I don’t like), and I often had no one to hang out with. Somehow I got the idea to spend my Sundays cooking, which resulted in me feeling rewarded with a fridge full of healthy meals I could eat throughout the week. In the decades since, I’ve become much more practiced and savvy at batch cooking, and I believe it is one of my keystone habits that helps my entire week unfold somewhat predictably and flow smoothly.

Everyone’s lives are a little bit different, but I believe batch cooking is the key to consistently eating healthy for most people. I believe this because most of the reasons people give me for not eating well or “slipping up” sound something like this:

  • “There was nothing in the fridge.”
  • “We didn’t have enough time to make anything; we only had 30 minutes before it was time to take the kids to dance/piano/violin lessons.”
  • “I didn’t have anything to pack for lunch and the only place near work is (insert xyz fast food restaurant).”
  • “We’re just so tired when we get home from work; cooking feels like too much after a long day.”
  • “We’re ravenous by the time we get home. It’s easier just to stop somewhere quick and grab something.”

You get the idea. I’m guessing you’ve heard yourself saying something similar. Heck, I’ve said a couple of these things before, but those occasions have been rare because I’ve established the keystone habit of batch cooking.

Home cooking is essential to health, but it’s a skill that, unfortunately, many people have lost. You and your family will eat whatever is readily available in the refrigerator or cupboards. If you don’t cook regularly, you’ll rely more on processed foods and restaurant food, which are usually not the best choices for our health. There’s nothing wrong with having these things sometimes, but I discourage people from eating this way daily. I’m excited to help rekindle the art and joy of cooking in your life.

Let’s walk through some potential obstacles/excuses you may have to home cooking, and see if we can clear some space in your life for this essential habit to emerge:

The #1 reason people give for not cooking is a lack of time.

Many of us have allowed our lives to become very busy and fast-paced. In fact, it takes solid boundary setting skills and clear intentions to NOT allow our lives to become overbooked. Take a few minutes now to evaluate when you could set aside 3-4 hours to cook during the week (you’ll likely become faster the more you practice). If 3-4 hours is a stretch, find 2 hours. You can get a solid start in 2 hours. As I mentioned above, Sundays are usually a great day for me to knock out a bunch of meals. If I make other plans on Sunday, then I immediately figure out an alternate time to cook; sometimes it’s Saturday, sometimes it’s Monday late afternoon/evening. Just like anything else that’s important to you, you will need to schedule it in order for it to happen, and you might have to say no to something else in order to squeeze your cooking in.

The #2 reason people give for not cooking is that they don’t know how.

Cooking is a skill just like any other skill, so if you don’t know how to cook there is simply no way around the learning process. Start with a simple recipe and give yourself the space to learn and make mistakes. Everybody burns things and attempts a recipe or two that doesn’t turn out. Every mistake gets you that much closer to figuring it out next time! Consider taking a knife skills class or a Cooking 101 class to help get you started. Keep track of your questions and lean on me, or ask a friend who likes to cook to come over and show you some easy tricks. You can also ask Google or tap YouTube for how-to videos about anything you find confusing.

The #3 reason people give for not cooking is that they don’t enjoy it.

 One common reason people don’t enjoy cooking is they’re too busy and don’t give themselves the time to cook a nice meal – so it becomes a stressful activity. Nobody enjoys that. A second common reason is that they simply haven’t practiced enough so they lack confidence. We already addressed these two obstacles above. The other reason I hear somewhat frequently comes from people living alone who say, “It’s no fun to cook for myself.” My response is always, “Let’s explore why that is.” To cook for oneself is to love oneself. You are worthy of quality, home-cooked meals. You are worth the time and effort. It might feel like a chore, but it is one of the most important things you can do to take care of yourself, so I encourage you to start dismantling that story you have.

All of that said, I empathize with people who don’t want to cook because, believe it or not, there are days when I don’t feel like cooking either. If my week has been unusually busy, I’ll definitely feel resistance to spending my afternoon doing this weekly chore, but because it’s become a strong habit I rarely give myself the option of not doing it.

I’ve also figured out how to increase the batch cooking “fun factor” by:

  • Playing music I love while cooking. I have so much fun pulling out old CD’s and jamming out while preparing our food for the week.
  • Playing Ted Talks or other YouTube videos on topics that interest me. If you’re into a TV or Netflix show and you have the means to play it in your kitchen, watch/listen while you cook. Nobody said we have to chop, prep, and cook in silence.
  • Cooking with a friend. Try inviting a friend over to batch cook with you. Several of my clients have played with this and have had a lot of fun combining their weekly meal prep with some social time. Instead of going out for a happy hour, knock this task off your to-do lists together and catch up while being productive.

Becoming a Batch Cooking Boss

Cooking once and eating once is a recipe for spending a lot of time in the kitchen. Batch cooking allows you to make several meals at a time, speed through your clean up all at once, and will then give you several days or more away from cooking (depending on the size of your family). Also, if you’re someone who makes several trips a week to the grocery store, you’ll likely cut that back to one or two bigger trips.

Steps for Batch Cooking

  1. Choose meals you would like to make for the week and the day(s) and time(s) you will prepare them.
  2. Use a grocery list tailored to your family’s needs.
  3. Shop once a week.
  4. Batch cooking includes making your meals and also cutting up your greens, veggies, fruits and preparing any snacks for the week.
  5. Keep a well-organized paper or electronic copy of your recipes. Make notes after making a new recipe that you enjoy so that you feel confident making it again.

(If you do this, eventually you’ll have a resource binder full of recipes you love and feel confident making.)

  1. Tip: I always double a recipe. If it ends up making more than we can comfortably eat, I store a few portions away in the freezer immediately so I don’t have to worry about it going bad. Having prepared food in the freezer is as good as money in the bank.

An Example of my Weekly Batch Cooking/Meal Prep:

Though the food I make varies each week, below is an example of what my batch cooking might look like:

  • 1 big pot of soup
  • 1 big batch of brown rice or quinoa (about 2-3 cups cooked)
  • 1 roast or baked hash/casserole (a bunch of vegetables combined with some meat and broth)
  • 1 vegetable egg bake (sort of like a quiche but without the crust)
  • a bunch of washed and chopped up veggies, ready to stir-fry or snack on at any point during the week (broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage, etc.)
  • In addition, we also buy plenty of fruit and a big pre-washed tub of salad greens

(Remember, you could start with just one of these items; you don’t have to become a batch cooking boss on your first try.)

Stephanie Meyer, a Twin Cities food photographer, stylist, and author who offers meal planning subscriptions, bases her subscriptions on the following template, which may be helpful to emulate (or you could buy her subscription for a while to get a jumpstart):

  • Saturday or Sunday (Batch Cook Day): Classic Roast Dinner
  • Mondays: Pastas/Casseroles
  • Tuesdays: Tacos/Wraps
  • Wednesdays: Hashes/Stir-fries
  • Thursdays: Entree Salads
  • Fridays: Soups/Stews

The Benefits of Batch Cooking:

 

  1. Life goes much smoother.
  2. You reduce stress because eating is no longer an afterthought.
  3. You and your family become more efficient in your work because you’re running on high quality fuel at regular intervals.
  4. Your thoughts improve because what you eat plays a very significant role in your thoughts. Anxiety levels will drop.
  5. When your thoughts improve, your mood improves.
  6. When your mood improves, you feel more confident and can move forward in your life in a much more positive, productive way.

You will need to feed yourself for the rest of your life. Consider investing more time in food planning, cooking, and learning what foods your body feels best eating. It’s a skill that will repay you for the rest of your life.

Is my face too huge on my new website?

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Man oh man, am I ever excited about my new website! After YEARS with a static web presence showing a dated, decade-old picture of me, I finally have a new dynamic site I’m excited to show off. It’s pretty, but more importantly, it’s functional and it’s going to help me run Wellness with Claudine MUCH more efficiently. I’m crazy-excited.

I love my new site, but I also have my insecurities about it too, like whether or not my face is too huge on the home page. If you would be kind enough to share your feedback, I’d be grateful. And please be honest.

Creating this site was an interesting and stressful process for me, and get this, I’m not even the one who built it! For crying out loud, I hired someone who did 90% of the work, which makes it a little hard to explain exactly why I found the process stressful. But I guess anyone who knows me knows that nutrition is my thing – technology isn’t. I love devouring nitty gritty details about digestion or hormones, but ask me to make decisions about my website or learn how to run its back office and I immediately feel blurry, overwhelmed, and irritated. It’s like a bad blood sugar crash, except I’m not crashing.

One day when I was feeling frustrated and tempted to abandon a pain-in-the-butt task I needed to do to get the thing launched, I had a profound realization that the frustration and irritation I was feeling was likely akin to how many of my clients might feel when they’re embarking on (or continuing) the journey to improve their health. They can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel – no matter how hard they try.

It was an important space for me to step into again because it put me squarely in the shoes of my clients. See, even though I find shopping and preparing healthy food for myself and others fun, many of my clients don’t (yet). The same could be said about exercise; I think it’s enjoyable, but I’m sure some of my clients would like to strangle me when I suggest that they, too, could learn to like it. The truth is that following through with new, foreign tasks that I knew were necessary but didn’t want to do took some healthy doses of positive self-talk and discipline.

So I wanted to offer some tips for staying on track for success when you really don’t want to. Don’t get me wrong, these tips aren’t about making something easy – they’re about getting ourselves to follow through when we don’t want to:

  • For crying out loud, hire a professional who knows what he/she is doing. I think my new site is pretty doggone cool, and I never, never, never could have built a site like this myself. And nobody would expect me to because technology is NOT my thing. I’ll admit that in the past I have “put up” websites myself using templates in order to save money, and you know what? They sucked. They didn’t look good and they didn’t generate website traffic, which added up to a whole lot of wasted time and energy. This time I was serious about making a positive change happen and hired a professional who could help me achieve my goals. I hope with all my heart that this is the role I play for my clients. This is what I strive to be every single day – your partner-in-crime in achieving the goals you have for your health.
  • Get clear about why the task/project at hand is important. What’s the ultimate result you’re going for? Clarity and purpose go hand-in-hand. In my case, this new website will ultimately mean my business will run more efficiently and make it possible for me to spend LESS time on tasks I don’t enjoy instead of thinking about them and having them sit on my to-do list in perpetuity. When trying to improve your health, I’d say most people are trying to avoid bigger health concerns down the road and improve their quality of life now. That’s super motivating provided we stay in touch with that greater vision and purpose.
  • I had to remind myself that almost everything takes longer than you anticipate when you’re learning. This reminder was then followed by a deep breath and some self-encouragement, “It’s okay, Claudine. It’ll get done, and you’re not stupid for not ‘getting it’ right away.” Just like when we’re learning to cook and care for ourselves in a new way, showing ourselves some compassion and patience during the growth process is critical. When we’re faced with a learning curve, why do we so often think we should already know how to do something?
  • Break tasks down into small steps to decrease overwhelm. This is super important. No step is too small, and any step taken in the direction you want to go is better than nothing.
  • Identify preconceived judgments you have about the situation or task at hand and ask yourself if they’re really true. It’s embarrassing to admit, but there were times when I’d already decided that a task on my to-do list was going to bite just because it was website related, and then it turned out to be no big deal. How often do we do this to ourselves?! I thought revising the content for my site was going to take me FOREVER, but it didn’t. Human beings have a knack for making things harder than necessary. Learn to check yourself.

I became an Integrative Nutrition Coach because I love to support and nurture people on their health journeys, not because I was super stoked to deal with technology and website stuff. But it’s a necessary “evil” of being an entrepreneur.

No matter how much we wish it weren’t so, sometimes we just have to buckle down and do the work we’ve been avoiding. It’s great spiritual practice. If there’s something you’ve been avoiding because you think it’s too hard or because you’re positively sure you won’t enjoy it, I hope a little piece of you feels more capable and inspired to tackle it now. Inch by inch, life’s a cinch. Just take the first step.

Now tell me, what do you think of my new site and my big face?

Love, Claudine