My birthday and an awesome local find

We found the most awesome little pizzeria on my birthday. It's called Kaos Pizza and it's on Pearl St. in Denver (near DU). We went looking for an old favorite restaurant, but found it had closed, so we found this little gem instead. The food was unbelievable! It's a 100% locally-sourced restaurant (and apparently, they are the only one in the Denver area, surprisingly) with fresh food, a lovely atmosphere, and friendly staff. I could spend every afternoon just soaking up the feel of that place. But I would soak up a lot of pizza and wine, too, and that would be bad for my waistline and the concept of a juice fast. Ah, well.

 This picture was taken under the leafy arbor where we ate. The chair back you can see in front of me is at our table. They have misters running to keep it cool out here. Having my sense of smell for my birthday meant this was a really excellent place to hang out. Everything smelled really good and clean and natural. It's been 11 years since I could smell on my birthday. This was such a welcome experience. I really do attribute it to the juice fast. I decided to go ahead and eat for my birthday. So, we went out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was really fun. We were planning to eat salads, but each restaurant Jason had planned to take me to didn't work out for one reason or another. So, I ate a veggie/egg dish from Blue Sky Cafe in Golden for breakfast (Blue Sky runs a double-business by having a rastaurant in the morning and a yoga studio in the afternoon. Their food is really good and really good for your body, too.)

Then there was this incredible place for lunch. Sorry for all the pictures of me. Jason wouldn't take pictures without me in them. I feel a bit over-present on this post. This is the garlic bread and the most excellent pasta sauce we've ever tasted. We bought a gallon of it. The bread had fresh rosemary on it. We watched the dude step out of the kitchen onto the patio to cut rosemary for it. Pretty much amazingly awesome. The kitchen is detatched from the main building. It's right behind me in this picture. The street is in front of me and the main building is to my right.

 You can see the windows on the kitchen in this shot. That's where the magic happens. Seriously, if you're in Denver, try this place. It's affordable and delicious. Best pizza ever. And go this summer. It's so beautiful with the patio open!


Jason took me shoe shopping. He's the best shoe-shopping companion because he knows my taste in shoes and he also has good input himself. It was a lot of fun and I got some cheap shoes that are more like sneakers, so I wear them all the time. We also went to the book store, and the sneaky man let me buy a cookbook for a slow-cooker. I've been hoping to have a slow-cooker for a long time now. I just thought it would make my kitchen more effective and fun. Below is a picture of me with my birthday brownie (I was trying to be careful with calories, but still enjoy the day). And beside it is me with my gifts. Jason doesn't wrap presents. Nope. He kinda makes a mess and they're super easy to get into when he does wrap them. So, he let Amazon's wrapping be enough.

I got a VitaMix blender from our entire family and from Jason, and I got a slow-cooker to go with my cookbook. Both are amazing. I made fresh flour with my VitaMix the other day. About 2 lbs of flour! It's sweet! The dress I am wearing is an awesome birthday find by my mom and sister at Charming Charlie. LOVE that place. Ladies, it's organized the way we think, so only bring the money you plan to spend! It's that incredible.

 For dinner, Jason took me to Indulge Wine Bar in Golden. And they were having a party and the patio was closed and we had a long wait. Sooo....we went to Simms Landing in Lakewood. We dined on the patio and our view was spectacular!

I was completely amazed at the quality of the service, as well. Seriously, the waiters treated us like royalty. They were incredibly accommodating! The place is very well-decorated and classy. It's a really elegant place to go. And the food was amazing. Really amazing.

 We watched it get dark and our view transformed into this. It was gorgeous. We were there a long time. Behind us were lounge seats with fire pits between them so people could have more casual dining or more formal like our seating. And yet, the atmosphere was very relaxed.

 These are apparently the faces we make when we have not had wine in a long time and have a glass each. Haha. Behind me, you can kinda see the lounge seats and fire pits. Not really though. There's a bit much of a glare off of my white face!
Wine makes Jason feel suave, but it comes across like this. It was a lot of fun. Thanks, Jason!
Being able to taste everything and smell everything was well worth the month of not eating food. And I am not hungry, per se, just miss the experience of eating. My friends have noted lately that I am posting a lot of comfort food on my pinterest account and then I blog about drinking juice. Yes, it's a paradox, haha. I miss those cheesy, bread-filled dishes with pasta and meat, but I am also much happier to be losing weight and experiencing summer without the allergy overload. It's well worth it, but those of you who see me on Pinterest know what I am thinking. :) My final day of the juice fast is August 3rd. Still have a ways to go.

A deeper cleanse

I have decided that the way I spend my time needs a re-evaluation as well. :)

I am tired of parts of days going by without being really spent intentionally. Things like Facebook, Pinterest, news, Youtube, etc. just kinda suck my time up if I let them. So, as I finish out this juice fast, I am going to fast from non-deliberate internet use. So, the above-mentioned things will be out of my picture. Replaced by things like taking a walk/hike/run, gardening, cooking, cleaning, visiting people, reading (I have quite a list!).

I don't seem to need to water my garden right now, so even that time can go elsewhere. Monsoon season has apparently struck Colorado. Never knew we had a monsoon here. :) It's lovely. Every morning is fresh and clean and every evening this week, we get lots of rain. We're sleeping under just a sheet and leave the windows open all the time. It's awesome. Reminds me a lot of the rainy season in Africa, but it's much MUCH cooler here and MUCH less humid.

Today already, I have gone out and tended to my compost pile (cardboard boxes have to be chopped up, so I leave them out in the rain and then they're really easy to tear into pretty small pieces), picked fresh kale and collards from my garden for juice for me, and picked onions for a meal I am cooking in the slow-cooker for Jason. I'll include the recipe for it later.

This cookbook is amazingly excellent. Most slow-cooker recipes seem to involve a lot of things I don't want to cook with like cream-of-chicken-soup. What is a creamed chicken anyway? What are those chemicals on the label? I don't like dumping cans of things someone else cooked into my slow cooker and basically letting someone else cook my meals. Somehow knowing what's in everything feels a lot better to me. This cookbook is for my generation and includes few canned or pre-prepared items. I like it a lot. And they're pretty easy. There's a series of "Not Your Mother's..." cookbooks and I kinda want to collect them all.

Today, my kitchen is making Provencal Garlic Soup and the recipe promises it's not as intense as it sounds. It smells amazing. The garlic gets blanched before going into the soup, so it mellows out a bit. If it is intense, Jason won't care. The man eats garlic cloves raw sometimes. But I think this will be something palatable to a wide variety of people. It's a complete thrill to have it just cooking away in the slow cooker. It feels like having it done for me. I am way more likely to feel like cooking in the morning than in the afternoon, so this is ideal.

After I am done with my cleaning for the day, I am planning to go to the gym and do some swimming, biking, and jogging. I am training for the Fort Collins Club Triathlon in September. Kinda nervous! It's my first triathlon ever. It's a short one, so it shouldn't be that bad. It's a sprint triathlon. This race involves the following: Swim 450 Yards (in a pool), Bike 13 Miles, Run 3 Miles. Not awful, but indeed worthy of training! I am hoping to accomplish it well, not fast, but finished. I've been slowly training for the last few months and now is time to step up the game and get really serious and focused about it. I am hoping to do some research about what runners should eat. My goal is to complete the Tough Mudder and a half-marathon next summer. I have a year.

The Tough Mudder is an obstacle race that involves some pretty extreme obstacles and challenges. From things like scaling walls and swimming in mud pits to running through electrical wires and carrying heavy things uphill. This is a challenge of mental toughness more than anything else, I believe. I want to believe I can take something like this on and win against it. Beat my own expectations of myself. That's what this entire time is about for me right now. I want to find out who I really am and what my best self can be and do and accomplish. I believe I can do this.

I am also in the process of losing weight that I have spent 10 years accumulating. In the last 5 years, my weight has fluctuated dramatically. I've weighed between 145 and 193 lbs at different times over these past years. It's actually a battle of overcoming mental blocks I have built and the fact that much of my weight gain has been a result of emotional eating. Not cool. I am working to learn the proper place of food (functioning as nutrition, not an emotional filler) and learn that I CAN beat this and I CAN do it. Each day is a new challenge and I am realizing that a lot of the emotions that helped me pack this weight on are going to need to be dealt with in order for me to lose it again. When I reach my first goal, I get to register for a half marathon and the Tough Mudder next year. I am looking forward to that. I feel like it's finally time for me to be the one running my life instead of letting it run me. YEAH!

Provencal Garlic Soup

Cooker: Large oval

Setting and Cook time: LOW for 6-7 hours

Ingredients

8 heads of garlic

2 large yellow onions (I used two smaller white onions from my garden)

6 teaspoons of chicken broth base

84 ounces of water

2 6-ounce cans of tomato paste

2 fresh jalapenos

1 fresh banana pepper

6 tablespoons of olive oil

Crusty bread to serve with it

*My recipe is doubled and edited a bit from the book. They used 6 14-ounce cans of chicken broth, I prefer to use homemade broth or the chicken broth base (Better Than Boullion brand) instead. I also added the jalapenos and banana pepper. We like spicy food and had a couple jalapenos on hand and I picked my first fresh banana pepper from our plant yesterday, so wanted to use it, too. I also thought about using fresh tomatoes instead of the tomato paste and then mixing some flour in for thickening, but I don't have any tomatoes today!

1. Fill a small, deep saucepan with water and bring to a rolling boil. Separate the garlic heads into cloves (leaving the paper on) and toss them into the boiling water. Blanch for 1 minute. Drain the garlic cloves into a colander and rinse under cold running water. Peel with a paring knife and remove stem-end of each clove.

2. Combine the garlic cloves, onion, broth base, water, tomato paste, and peppers in the slow cooker and stir to blend well. Use a wisk to make sure the tomato paste and broth base break down completely. Cover and cook on LOW for 6-7 hours.

3 Puree the soup with an immersion blender or food processor or blender. Before serving, add the olive oil. Serve with hot, crusty bread.

I'll post a picture tonight when it's done. Right now, my house smells divine. We are in the third hour of cooking.

Alright, thanks for reading, I am off to work my body into a triathlon-ready machine. Nerves and all, here I come, athleticism!

Cheers to a birthday without allergies

I went to my garden today and realized that I have sorely neglected it lately. I water it every day, but apparently, right now, it needs much more than a daily dousing. So, I drenched the thing. I spent like 2 hours digging and churning soil so it would moisten all the way through, I filled the trenches I've dug between the rows with water again and again and again. And I planted some new plants!
Most exciting of which is popcorn! I found blue organic popcorn on Amazon.com and decided to give it a go. I am expecting it to grow like regular corn (which I have at about my shoulder height right now just a few feet from where the popcorn has been planted) and then dry out and be harvested about the same time pumpkins are harvested and voila! I will have home-grown popcorn this winter. Tomorrow, I am planning to go out and water it first thing in the morning (6am) and again at night. If I take care of it, I hope it'll take care of us, too. :) It's been a little weird watering it lately because the person we share the house with was worried about the cost of watering. It's not bad, really, and when you plant more costly things (like artichokes, eggplant, tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, etc), it really pays off. But I don't want to be out there watering all the time if it annoys her. She has the primary access to the back yard, so it's me in her back yard. Oh well, she gets to eat from it, too, and enjoys it, so I should get over it and water my poor garden.

Tomorrow's a new day.

For my birthday this year, my wonderful, sweet husband got both sides of our family together to get me a VitaMix blender (professional series...the thing has a logo that says "Culinary Institute of America" on it...which probably means nothing, but makes me giddy inside just a bit) and a CrockPot slow cooker. Now that I have a slow cooker and realize the emense benefit of it, I can't really understand what I've been up to all this time without one. YAY! I now have the most amazing kitchen in the world. I can make fresh juice, amazing things in the blender, and cook sumptuous meals while I get other stuff done all day. Only one thing holding me back from truly basking in the glow of the new kitchen items.....my juice fast.

Oh, the juice fast lingers on, and every day, I tell myself that this is a two-month (relatively short) period of time in which I am resetting myself and after this is over, I can start living in a healthy, balanced way and enjoy good health. This is how I get through the day. It works.

So far, I have lost almost 20 lbs and have had no allergies this June. For me, that's HUGE. Since high school, every June has become increasingly more challenging. Last year, my birthday was an antihistamine-buzzed blur of sneezing and Jason making lovely plans which I could barely witness or experience through teary eyes, a red (raw) nose, and fits of sneezing that left me needing to sit down. My allergies have historically crescendoed on my birthday. This year, though? Nope!

I had a momentary itch in my right eye for like ten seconds on my birthday. Marked difference. I also decided to go ahead and eat some real food on my birthday. And a day later, I had a day of sneezing and hayfever. It was worth it, of course, but still, notable. So, this juicer has saved June for me. I am back on track with losing weight and have had NO allergies whatsoever in the last day or two since I re-started the juicer. It's amazing to really think about the fact that God gave us fruits and vegetables as food, and He knew that those things would provide our bodies with the ability to maintain optimum health. And we decided to "improve" on those food items and look where it's gotten us. The US has so many allergy problems, so many diet-related health issues, and such pained immune systems. We eat processed this and canned that and freeze-dried those and none of us know the actual source of our food. It makes me really sad.

This summer, I am on a quest to learn where my food comes from and to change the way we eat and begin consuming almost exclusively, only things we can trace to their source. This means a lot more cooking, a lot more legwork for every purchase, and a lot better prices, health, etc. Jason is excited because he has been on his own quest for the best-tasting food. He's found that through elimination of processed foods, and finding the most local, organic, fresh foods, we get the best products. Funny how two different quests lead to the same destination.

Since I am eating just juice, and Jason is being fed mostly fresh fruits and veggies, homemade (not canned) beans, fresh salads, etc, we aren't consuming much that we can't get at our local Farmer's Market in Golden. This week, I'll have to take pictures and post them. It's a beautiful menagerie. Once I am finished with the juice fast in August, I will begin buying milk and eggs and such things from local farmers. I've found a couple of sources for eggs (which I have yet to visit to compare) and am still on the hunt for a good dairy in our area. For me, it's important how the animals are handled, for Jason, it's important that the food is FRESH so it tastes the best. Both things mean finding people here who sell those items. We'll see where that takes me! I am planning to begin making and keeping my own yogurt, mozzarella, cottage cheese, mayonnaise, ketchup, etc. I have the most beguiling things growing in my garden and the hope there is that I'll have enough tomatoes, tomatillos, okra, edamame, corn, peppers, squash, collard greens, etc, to freeze and store over the winter that we can eat from our garden for a decent portion of the year. That means now is crunch time! It's a very back-in-time feeling to be planning to put away the summer's produce for winter when there won't be anything to pick in the garden. It's exciting and fun and a little thrilling. And now I have this incredible kitchen full of things that enable health to the fullest. I am so blessed to have a husband who sees the value in this kind of stuff as much as I do, and who believes in me. He views these appliances as investments in our future. Sweet man.

Food for thought. I am reading Michael Pollan's book, "In Defense of Food," and I am really loving it. A lot of new understanding of food and its relationship to our modern life has come about through my reading. If you're looking for a good read, give it a look. (sorry, no pictures today, I am not that organized)