What Do Grain-Free Vegetarians Eat? Birthday Edition!

I turned 36 on Saturday, which means the blog turned 3. I have started drafting three different birthday/blog goals/life aspirations posts and then I've scrapped them all. The truth is, I have no idea what lies ahead this year. None of us do, right? I could set goals, muse about changes I want to make to my daily routines or the ways that I pray God will be at work on my heart this year. I am thinking about all of that stuff, and I have PLENTY of time to think about it these days while still jobless.

But here's the stone-cold truth: I'm thinking about food today, and every philosophical post I tried to write kept turning its way back to food. So I'm going to follow where my heart leads me, and my heart leads me to CAKE.

Whenever I tell someone that I try to keep a grain-free, vegetarian diet, the next three words uttered are inevitably "What do you EAT?!".

Good question.

Here's a snapshot of a Day in the Life of my food  (What I actually ate yesterday):

Breakfast - frozen berries, flax seeds, and cherry juice blended into a smoothie, plus an apple with almond butter.

Lunch - home-made lentil salad with dill and tomatoes, a few tapioca-based crackers with guacamole.

Dinner - baked potato with sun dried tomatoes and goat cheese and a green salad

Basically, I eat what a lot of vegetarians eat, but I replace bread and rice with things like plantains, sweet potatoes, quinoa and veggies. Disclaimer: I am not perfectly consistent. I occasionally buy gluten-free things that are made with rice flour. I eat corn chips sometimes. They make me feel kind of crummy, but I choose my battles. Sometimes a minor chips-and-salsa digestive hangover is worth it.

I'm learning and cooking and baking my way through this, and I hope to have enough recipes in my repertoire soon that I can get away from any corn or rice cheats and lean more towards a mostly-vegan diet. But that's for another blog post.

What about the cake? 

Ok, so in January I decided that I would invite a few friends and my dear siblings over for a Birthday Brunch to celebrate. Party prep would give me something to do and a fix a deadline for getting the house more or less in order. I wanted to make a menu full of food that everyone would enjoy, but that I could eat with the gluttony one reserves for one's own birthday.

Yum.

One thing was for certain: There had to be macarons. 

The original French recipe for macarons is totally grain-free and made with almond flour. Learning how to make a pretty macaron absorbed many wintery hours in February. They are pretty much the hardest thing I have ever tried to bake, but they turn out sooooo pretty, even the imperfect ones. And they are filled with things like jam and chocolate and Nutella. What's not to love? Here's the best macaron recipe and tutorial I found in my trial and error. After the 4th pan, I really had the hang of it! Now I want to make them all the time.

So, one sweet option was settled with the macarons. But it seemed that there should be something savory in the spread, so I made some little omelet cups in muffin tins. They ended up being a melange of a couple of different recipes I saw online, but essentially I baked scoops of frozen hash browns in muffin tins until they got a little crispy and made a bit of a "crust", and then poured eggs that I had whisked together with milk and seasonings into the cups. Top with omelet fillings like peppers, cheese, herbs, and other veggies and bake them up. Easy! 

And now, for the Cakes. Yeah. That's right. Cakes, plural.

It just wouldn't be a birthday party without chocolate cake, as far as I'm concerned. I made this grain-free dark chocolate espresso cake and it was simple, tasty, and chocolatey. Honestly, I expected it to taste even darker, so don't be afraid of it if you are not a dark chocolate fan. 

The other cake was definitely the surprise hit of the brunch. Lemony, soft, almondy grain-free perfection. The recipe is converted from an Australian cooking blog. I've made this twice now, so if you want to make it, message me and I'll send you my notes. I found I had to tweak a couple of things to make it turn out, but in general it is a simple, quick and elegant cake to make. 

As you can see, I'm really not at a loss for what to eat on most days. If I could get away with eating cake and omelet muffins every day, I would, and I'd be fine (if spherical). Being at home for a few months with little to do besides cook and scour Pinterest for new recipes has really turned out to be a blessing. I'm optimistic that a job will come around eventually, and I'll be much better prepared to eat things that are working with, rather than against, my body every day. And when I do get a job, I'll celebrate with cake.

The Big 3-5: Another year older and a New Year of GGG

Happy Birthday to Me! And Happy Anniversary to the Green, Gray and Grace blog!

Year 2 of the Green Gray and Grace initiative wraps up today, and Year 3 begins. This year has been full of transitions and do-overs and inches and inches of movement towards a greener and more graceful life. The Gray always pretty much takes care of itself. The Green and the Grace and I are duking it out every day, year after year. It's a long but oh so good battle.

I've been feeling a bit sheepish that I don't have so much to "show" for this year. It has been tough to find as much time to write and to try projects and to cook as I would like, and I haven't earned any Gold Stars for discipline and self control. But even if everything didn't exactly go as planned, I have definitely learned a lot. Learned a lot, still a lot of room to grow.

Since last February, I:

• Tried to grow a container garden. Getting started. Getting excited. Crushed by Reality.
• Started to embrace the fact that my quality of life is significantly better when I keep a grain-free diet. 
• Attempted to massively overhaul my eating habits to focus on simplicity and abundance. And failed miserably. 
• Adopted some *slightly* crunchy, but satisfyingly simple Green personal care habits. 
• Wrote the "Why I do not eat meat" post that had been making me unreasonably anxious. 
• Thought I would hate but learned to LOVE keeping a Sabbath on (most) Sundays. 
• Wrote this post about grieving that turned out to be the most viewed and most shared thing I've ever written. 

And I got a fun new bob haircut to show off my gray:

I'm ashamed of how many camera phone self portraits I took to get ONE that I didn't totally hate.

Ok, so what's next?

I'm not entirely sure. I'm hopeful that I'll have more time to do the things that I love this year than I had last year, so hopefully more cooking, crafting, making, writing. And HOPEFULLY I'll actually take a photography class so that my blog photos can actually resemble something artful rather than embarrassing snapshots in our poorly-lit kitchen.

God and I will keep wrestling with the ways in which my desires to live more simply and graciously and abundantly only get as far as my head. 

My hair will just keep getting more awesome. 

Green, Gray, and Grace: One Year Later

Happy Birthday to Me!

Co-Conspirator Les, Blog Editor-in-Chief AugDog, and me in the closest we could get to a family self-portrait.

One year ago today, I started this new blog with a grand scheme and big goals. The gray hair got the most attention, but that turned out to be the easiest goal to keep (Um, just didn't dye my hair. Pretty easy). A year later, I can honestly say that I'm surprised by the changes that came easily, and the changes that are still grinding away in fits and starts. I thought it would be really traumatic to Embrace the Gray, but it was fun, and I kind of love my hair most days. I thought I would get really into cooking and expand my culinary repertoire and make a bunch of things from scratch. And, naively, I thought the spiritual stuff would sort of magically align as I set goals and mini-goals and plugged away at "being a better person". Laugh with me now: Hahahahahahahahhhahhhaaahha!

Let's check in with what I set out to do last February:

My Goal: By Feb. of 2012, I want:

- To produce fewer bags of trash AND fewer bags of recycling

Reality: I've definitely cut back on a lot of single-use and disposal stuff, but the dent hasn't been huge. Wastefulness was one vice that I really thought would be easier to overhaul once I declared my intent.

- Cook more, buy fewer packaged foods (put more FOOD in my food)

Reality: Yeah, this one was a lot tougher than I thought it would be. Even now that I know that I need to be even more careful about what I put into my body, making the time and space to cook has been a huge challenge.

- To be slimmer and fitter - back under 10 min miles for a 10K

Reality: Turns out, I am no slimmer or fitter than I was in Feb. 2011, and I have probably not run more than about one mile since I wrote that goal. But weirdly, despite my deleterious sluggishness all year, I feel better about my body than I ever have. Hmm.

- Give my gray hair a chance to really rock (let myself be myself)

Reality: I'm rockin the gray, and I love it a lot more than I ever thought I could.

- Re-energize my spiritual life by focusing on gratitude, abundance, and loving my neighbor

Reality: So, um, yeah. I think I have seen some spiritual changes over this year, but not how or where I expected. I thought about Gratitude and Abundance a lot more, but if they only come to mind when you're holding yet another pair of shoes in your hands at Target while you try to talk yourself out of them, I wonder how much spiritual maturity is shining through and how much is just a reality check from your wallet. I certainly put this goal into some sort of passive hope rather than an active pursuit.

- Scrutinize my purchases for their impact on my health, the planet, and my spirit

Reality: I'm pretty satisfied with my progress on this one. I've definitely made some bone-head impulse buys this year, but I've learned a lot about what things are actually made of, and where those ingredients/components/materials come from. It is far easier to put something back on the shelf when you can conjure up a fairly accurate picture of everything that went into it, from the thing itself to the packaging to the shipping to my cart. Still room for improvement (and impulse control), but a marked difference from this time last year.

So... What?

I'm glad - really glad - I took this year to intentionally regroup. I haven't blogged 3 times per week, and I couldn't keep up with the time required to research and write about all the things I really wanted to post. I didn't make it through even half of the projects I hoped to attempt this year, and I can honestly say that I haven't had any seismic shifts in lifestyle or habits. But little things. Ah, those million little things. They add up. They change you. Slowly, maybe, like a steady drip. Some of the biggest changes I have noticed are things that it would be really difficult to blog about. Not difficult to share, but difficult to articulate. Making peace with my body is a Big. Fracking. Deal., and it arrived quietly and uneventfully by way of a thousand drips of acceptance. I guess the hard edges of my body image have softened right along with my thighs. I don't mean to say that I don't care about being in good shape. I do care, and Les and I are setting some goals to get back into running. But whether or not I end up in smaller sized pants by my next birthday is about the farthest thing from my mind. Maybe all of those little gratitudes and gray hairs have taken up the space where my skinny-envy used to live.

And there's a strange kind of freedom and even joy that comes along with scrapping some convention and running face-first into Doing It Your Own Way. Things like the Sock Bottle and the oil method come to mind. When you don't have spendy face wash, body wash, or Pro-V and Silk Protein shampoo to replenish every couple of weeks, you can avoid Target all together. We get most of our personal care products from Whole Foods now, so no special trip for toiletries. And far fewer products in general, just by making a handful of tweaks.

Remember my shower at the beginning of the experiment?

Check it now:

Shampoo, Dr. Bronner's hair softener, soap, and razor.

And my makeup cabinet, Feb. 2011

Make up cabinet now:

Yay for fewer products and less clutter.

Of course, the other Big Reveal is the hair. I got it cut a couple of days ago as the last leg of this yearlong journey. Now my gray goes all the way to the ends of my hair - I had the dry split end part cut off (a good 2 inches), and now I finally do not have any bizarre brown ends at the bottom of my silver slabs. Ta Da! Full-out Gray from root to tip:

The State employee at the North Carolina DMV categorized my hair color as "Sandy", which was very diplomatic of her. I told her that I had just finished up a year of growing out my gray, and she said that it had turned out "a lovely salt-and-pepper. But mostly salt!".

I admit that from straight-on, it doesn't look that impressive. But the top of my head and the sides from my part are pretty remarkably gray...

And even more remarkable, I sort of love it.

I've grown out my gray, I've tried to pare down my products, I've learned a lot about the stuff I consume, but I feel like I'm just getting started! We're in a new place, I have some new Food Rules, and a much MUCH bigger kitchen. And a yard! And a deck just screaming for some vertical gardening. And a heart that is growing sort of weary of trying so hard to "be better".

Maybe 33 was just a ramping up year. Just the ground work for much bigger changes to come. Les and I have been reading a lot of challenging, terrific stuff about faith lately, and I'm excited to make prayer and service and the Bible a priority for 34. You know, the whole Grace part of the experiment that got a bit sidetracked. And I've got a whole new set of dietary considerations to embrace and some space for a garden for the first time EVER in my adult life. So I don't think 34 will be boring. If y'all want to come along for the ride, I'd be happy to have you.

Cheers, and thanks for reading and enjoying the ride with me.