Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in Canada and abroad who celebrate. I know Americans hold off until November, but up North we figure, why wait? It's getting cold out so bring on the festive season!
It's typically a time of getting together with friends and family around a harvest table to give thanks for our many blessings and to celebrate the abundance of the season. We eat, we drink, we feel stuffed and then the guilt comes on. The trouser button gets undone, the pepto bismol gets uncorked, and for two or three months, we promise that we'll do better at the next party or next occasion.
I have a sugar addiction. A serious one. It's no secret. Other artists drink spirits or inject chemicals or sniff powders, I do none of the above. But offer to hook me up intravenously to a bag of chocolate and I'm in. I thought I had finally conquered this demon, but stepping onto the scale recently I came to the rude awakening that I have been in denial!
My sister's birthday is October 24th. But it is also a very significant day for me because sixteen years ago on her birthday I quit smoking. I thought perhaps I could gain some significant strength from the date and came up with a plan to give up sugar again. Once and for all this time, on her birthday this year. The plan was that I was going to take the next two weeks and hit all my favorite shops and restaurants to indulge in each and every one of my favorite sweets and desserts, saying a heartfelt goodbye to each one. Then I thought I could photograph the various delights and talk about my love and longing and blah blah blah!
Really? Kill me now for being so sorry and pathetic. Omigod I think there is a far better use of my time and resources than a sugar pity party. I had had a lot of sugar yesterday and by last night I felt absolutely horrible. Head-ache, bloated, irritable. Gross. I was like that guy in the Monty Python sketch...
Wafer-thin mint, sir? Ugh, not another bite. I had to ask myself: "What the hell are you waiting for?" It's an addiction, there is always a reason, always an excuse, but none of them are good ones. I needed to quit and I needed to do it now. But having been down this particular steep and pot-hole ridden road before and failing so miserably, what is a girl to do? Sadly, there is no magic potion, no magic bullet or quick fix.
Like ripping off a band-aid. You've got to just do it. Plain and simple. No mess, no fuss. Simply quit. Full stop. That's how I gave up the smokes. It took a few tries but here I am smoke-free sixteen years later so...
I got to thinking about this exercise (game) I play when I am struggling with a problem. At the top of a clean sheet of paper I'll write: This is the condition I am currently struggling with.
I'll list the issue.
Then below it I'll write: If this condition were to resolve itself right now, I would feel...
And write down all the feelings that might come with the resolution of the problem. So why not try this with my sugar addiction? Instead of thinking about all the types of sweets I love and will inevitably miss, or all the reasons it's hard to give them up, what might happen if I focused on how I'd feel if I suddenly wasn't addicted to sugar anymore?
It would look something like this:
This is the condition I am currently faced with.
I cannot control myself around sugar. It creates a hole that cannot be filled and I eat and eat and eat until I can literally make myself sick.
If this condition were to resolve itself right now I would feel:
Healthy, liberated, clear-minded, free, at ease, awake, slim, in control, happy, off the hook, unchained, well, uplifted and so on.
I went on to fill a whole page, repeating the words of feelings that felt the most empowered or the strongest so that by the time I was done writing I actually started to believe that giving up sugar was a really good idea. That I could do it. Why not? I'd done it before and can still remember how great I felt. Not only is this possible I'm doing it and I am happy to be doing it.
So on this Thanksgiving weekend, a time of indulgence and feasting, allow me to introduce myself to you.
Hello, my name is Shannon and I am a choc-o-holic. I have one day!
Happy holidays everyone. I hope your weekend is filled with hope, happiness and good health.
xo
Shan
Hey y'all, this is a recipe post!
A real recipe not one for dog food I promise, and it's even kind of diety. I'd like to preface this by saying that I am not a food blogger. Nor am I a foody. I like to leave that stuff to the pro's - Oh Basmati Lime how I dream of your cooking and Spontaneous Foodgasm where ya been girl? Missing you. (I know, huge move, renovations etc. Some of us live vicariously you know!)
In any case, on occasion a recipe will catch my eye or I'll make something up that becomes part of my regular (read: easy) food rotation when it's my night to cook. Yeah, we do that in my house. My night, his night, my night, we eat out, grab take away, we order pizza, ugh, it can go down hill very quickly. So in the interest of staying on top of my game, I've been looking for some healthy easy recipes that will make leftovers for lunch the next day or stored up for when my night comes back around.
And I stumbled across this recipe for Crunchy Thai Salad. Don't worry, it's more than a salad. Have you ever wondered who the heck would ever buy a salad cookbook? I mean come on. It's lettuce. Add any vegetable you choose and top with some kind of dressing. It's not rocket science and I'm not about to stand squinting over a book reading instructions. And yet...
Ha ha here we are. This technically has cooked ingredients so it's not a 'typical' salad in my books. Now I don't know if you've been seeing this, but since last year, Mason jars seem to be making a come back in a big way, used as everything from stemmed wine glasses (they're called red neck wine glasses, I kid you not, my sister bought them for me) to tea mugs, shot glasses, to smoothie jars with straws coming out of the top. Well now it seems, Mason Jar salads are like the new fast food. Yes people, you heard it here first.
Check it out.
I made those. Yeah I did! Usually I just rip the picture off from where ever I found the recipe, but this was from a magazine and well quite frankly a photo of a photo looks kinda tacky.
You can totally make these, trust me, the hardest part of this recipe is actually getting the stuff into the small opening of the jar, other than that, you're golden.
So here it is. Enjoy.
Crunchy Thai Mason Jar Salad
You'll need 4 glass jars with lids.
Ingredients
1 cup black rice rinsed
2 cups frozen shelled edamame beans
4 large carrots peels and diced
6-8 radishes trimmed and sliced
4 cups chopped red cabbage
1 large red bell pepper seeded and diced
6 scallions, sliced thinly (light green parts)
Dressing
6 tbsp coconut milk
1/4 cup packed fresh cilantro leaves
2 tbsp natural unsalted peanut butter
2 tbsp fresh lime juice
1 tbsp grated fresh ginger
1tbsp reduced sodium soy sauce
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp raw honey
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
Okay so I have to make a small amendment here. I do not happen to have natural peanut butter, coconut milk, rice vinegar, raw honey or sesame oil kicking around my humble kitchen (Did you read the part about not being a foodie? I don't even have ketchup for crying out loud, lucky to have salt and pepper!! Okay I'm done now.)
So I bought a nice sort of similar style dressing. I think I'll live.
Also, I'd never made black rice before so I picked up this Lotus Foods one so I'd have directions. Honestly, I have no business posting food stuff really, but I digress.
Here's how you make it.
Directions
1) Cook the rice.
Spread cooked rice in an even layer on a plate to cool thoroughly. OR, you can do it like I did and cook it in the morning, then stick it in the fridge until the evening when you're ready to make the meal.
2) Meanwhile, cook the edamame, drain, rinse in cold water and set aside to also cool. Refer to my fridge note above 'kay.
3) For the dressing if you're making it:
In a small blender or food processor, blend all dressing ingredients until smooth.
4) Divide dressing among the jars. Because I used store bought, I guesstimated that I'd need about a 1/4 cup each. Sounds like a lot but it has a lot to cover. You can use your best judgement.
Then layer the rest of the ingredients in the following order;
carrots, radishes, cabbage, edamame, bell pepper, scallions, and rice.
NOTE: they said there would be a bit of space at the top which will allow you to shake up the ingredients with the dressing when you're ready to eat. Mine didn't really have space, but again, I just used the jars I had and I might have over done the cabbage??
In any case, screw the lids on tight and you can refrigerate these babies for up to 5 days. Cool, huh?
When you're ready to serve, shake it up and dump it into a bowl and enjoy!
Here's the nutritional info per jar
435 calories
15 g of fat
68 g Carbohydrates
12 g fibre
17 g sugar
16 g protein
226 mg Sodium
That's it. Easy peasey, lemon squeezey.
I might top mine with a tiny bit of avocado and a few sunflower sprouts upon serving.
Bon appetite!
Shan
It's been a real coupla weeks. You ever get that feeling? Like you're behind the eight ball of your life? In pool or billiards, being behind the eight ball is a losing position. Basically you can't win for losing. It's not that my life has been horrible. I had some dark days a few months back, but I have gotten through the worst of that. Yet recently, it feels like no matter where I'm going, what I'm doing, or who I'm talking to, I seem to be causing friction of some kind.
I'm changing the metaphorical lens so I can better reframe the situation to a more pleasant view and not get too down about it all. In the last post I wrote, "out with the old and in with the new", I appear to be clearing space, ridding my life of relationships that are not healthy, saying no to things I don't want to do, and setting fire to all that no longer serves me.
Is this part of the shift that happens at this stage of growing up do you think, or am I just at a general turning point? How many of you, when you hit a certain birthday simply decided that "good enough" was no longer good enough? What woke you from the delusion that adequate was okay and suddenly made you decide that you wanted more? Perhaps it was something thrust upon you that made the ground shake beneath your feet and got you walking off in another direction?
I heard a wonderful quote from Oprah that went something like this:
"Every day brings us a chance to start over. We all have those stand down moments that require us to stop and center ourselves to clear the way for truth and transformation. Sometimes those are painful moments. Though it's hard to imagine when you lose what you thought was the perfect relationship, when the job that defined you for twenty years is gone, when the people you counted on turn their backs on you, you may actually be taking a step forward on the path to your truest desires and ultimately to your destiny."
Are those just fancy words to try and help assuage the pain of letting go or is there a grain of truth in there? It strikes a chord within me that whispers "it is truth, your destiny awaits". In spite of saying good-bye to who I thought was a terrific agent, walking away from a book contract (yeah I did), and steering myself away from conversations about merely fighting our middle-aged spread in favor of discussing things a little less tangible, I feel a sense of hope. Like there is a spark in there somewhere that's dying to ignite something bigger and better to lead me to what I truly want. You ever feel that?
Either that or I am actually a little bit totally crazy and am about to crash and burn. I'll never work again and any slim chance for happiness will be gone forever.
Oh darling, the drama of this midlife. Ha ha ha.
While the eight ball currently before me does feel life-sized, perhaps I'll overcome some of these perceived obstacles and this will make a fantastic success story. I once read that -- the obstacle is the way. Interesting, no?
In spite of everything looking like it's crumbling down around me, why do I feel this tiny spark of excited expectation? Crap, maybe this is the first sign of actual madness.
In the movies when a character finds him or herself in a moment when "all is lost", they have to dig deep and dip into the well of courage and strength and do something they had not been capable of doing before the movie started, and it's this action, this untapped power that leads them to victory. They say art imitates life and life imitates art. Could this be an "all is lost" moment when our former youthful selves give way to our wiser and more mature selves?
What I really want to know is, have you found yourself standing at an all is lost moment, looking up and down the crossroads of your life, feeling like everything really has turned to shit... yet somehow, rooted deep inside of you, you felt a twinge of eager anticipation? Like the next steps, although scary, might be okay and might ultimately change the course of your life?
I certainly hope so. Seems I have more questions than answers these days but sometimes that's okay. If we never ask the questions, how can the answers come, right?
xo
Shan
