Day 33: Getting Creative

So, I wanted to share with you some of the lovely (and not-so-lovely) combinations of the Five Foods that I have eaten over the last 33 days.

The Good:

1. Apples sliced horizontally (in circles) with almond butter*. Yum. Okay, I'm getting up right now to go make some before I go on... standby... okay muff bewwah. (That's me saying "much better" with apples and almond butter in my mouth.)

2. Diced apples, almond butter and sliced almonds mixed together for the morning meal formerly known as "breakfast".

3. Apple-spinach popsicles. This is a hard sell, I know. But if there's any of you out there who "juice" (with a juicer, not steroids), you understand that fruit + vegetable in the juicer = delicious. Frozen = deliciouser.

4. Apple-spinach-almond slaw salad. Match sticked (julienne cut) apples, raw spinach leaves cut into strips, sliced almonds (don't try to do this yourself. ouch). Toss and eat. I can't wait to try this with an actual dressing, like a raspberry vinaigrette, but it's pretty delicious as is.

5. Edamame in pods, dry sautéed then flash steamed with lightly salted water. Topped with kosher salt. There's a reason why P.F. Changs sells this stuff by the bucketload.

6. My sister-in-law, God love her, made a delicious cheesecake topped with handmade chocolate ruffles for an extended-family dinner. Riddled with guilt, she made me brown rice and almond crackers in consolation. She food-processed the two and smushed them into shape (A, did you bake them after? or just let them dry?). Anyway, they were pretty dry (it's not your fault! look what you were working with!) but when I topped them with almond butter and apple slices -- c'est magnifique!

The Bad:

1. Brown rice with diced apples and sliced almonds. I thought this would be good for breakfast, an oatmeal of sorts. Not good. Did I eat it anyway? Yes, yes I did.

2. Undercooked brown rice. And I had forgotten the salt. (It was a to-go.) Like eating a mouthful of roly-polies.

3. Bowl of edamame already out of pods. No better than a bowl of lima beans. Drink lots of water.

4. I accidently bought "extra fine chopped spinach" from the freezer section. Let me correct that. It was: Buy any premium frozen veg (i.e. edamame), and receive a free "extra fine chopped spinach". FREE. I bought seven sets. How could I pass that up? Well, except that the extra fine you-know-what was... extra fine. If I wanted to make a spinach pesto, this would have been perfect. It might as well have been spinach paste. Yuck.

The Ugly

These are the suggestions that some of my "friends" gave me. I contain the "friends" in quotes, because I detected a hint of a smirk under their suggestion, and I question their true intentions.

1. Edamame-apple-spinach smoothie. "It's like a protein shake!"

2. Brown rice pudding. "Well, you couldn't use sugar or milk or eggs. But I'd bet you could sweeten it with apple juice!"

3. Soy milk. As in, "You could make your own soy milk from edamame!"

And, no, I did not try any of these. Geez, give me some credit.

But, mostly I ate the Pick Five foods in their simplest form. And only cried over a bowl of edamame two or three times. I thanked God for the food, as I still do now, on day 33.

*Not all almond butters are created equally. Some have oils and sugar in them. The two that I used were MaraNatha Natural Almond Butter, ingredients: dry roasted almonds, and also the kind at the grocery store, where you flip the switch and watch the machine turn almonds into almond butter.