last night’s Roasted Spaghetti Squash with Bolognese
Here’s a new little story for you. It concerns food choices.
Mindful Food Visualization – this is what I am calling my new little technique.
Ahhhh, education and application……isn’t this just one huge daily challenge? What good is what you know if you aren’ mindful enough to apply it on a consistently positive basis?
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about Knowing Your ANDI Scores. https://kitchen-inspirational.com/2013/02/26/know-your-andi-scores-nutrient-dense-foods-in-your-face/ This is indeed important information to have in your repertoire if you are at all food aware. While I have done something akin to filing this away in my cabinet and am obliquely aware of it, I have found that I don’t access this file very often.
I got to thinking about this recently. Being that I am a highly visually-affected person I wondered if I could put this sensory phenomenon to work to my benefit in the eating department. I have begun to think of a very new way (at least I haven’t heard of it) of helping myself to choose what I eat. I might just find it to be helpful during these months of craving things like chocolate cupcakes, crumb cake, sea-salted dark chocolate caramels and a wide assortment of “bad” carbs, (like the 1/2 pint of Haagen Daz Lemon Gelato that I am known to go in search of), where I struggle, virtually daily. And being that my favorite thing to do as often as I can, is to get into the kitchen and bake something, I have a particularly tough challenge. I work constantly at trying to balance out what gives me pleasure and is a very important part of my life (baking) and the eating part.
In my little experiment, I have begun to try to be more aware BEFORE of what might happen AFTER I ingest what I do when my will weakens vs visualizing what happens when I make better choices. I try to imagine what the potential for positive outflows is into my body. In my imagination, it’s sort of like a mental image of rain, showering down and all the nutrients of your food are quenching your thirst for healthy, highly usable and helpful nutrients. Of course, this is just my imagination at work. Feel free to imagine otherwise. As we all know, vegetables and fruits are among the absolute best choices we can make, for nutrient density and in most cases, for ease of digestion – that so important and highly complex process we put our bodies through every day to try to use up the supposed fuel we are feeding it. And, it’s one that has a great affect on many of our other systems and the quality of their functioning – like mood, sleep, our sense of alertness, duration and quality of energy, just to name a few.
So, let’s just say that you were to imagine in your head, in a nice, non-disturbing format, the process by which your breakfast, lunch or dinner, let’s say (let’s not use chocolate cake right here) travels through the machine that is your body, becomes digested and is broken into its array of inherent nutrients, available to nourish your body, then consider if, whether you did this during the choosing phase, might you just do a better job? Like for example, wouldn’t a dish of unsweetened applesauce (Ina Garten’s Roasted Pear and Applesauce) give you a better mental picture than that carton of Lemon Gelato or a huge wedge of chocolate cake! 🙂 🙁
Another way to emphasize the point would be to consider if would you choose something different if you say, could stop yourself and for a moment visualize, just what a large quantity of non-nutrient-containing sugar blasting (like white sugar) its way into your body via a candy bar did vs say the vast array of nutrients from an avocado might cause you to do. Or, conversely, if you “saw” how something you were going to eat might actually damage you, or encumber you (as in indigestion or a bad night’s sleep), would you choose otherwise? That rain storm of usable nutrients might be pictured as something more akin to a rolling storm. If you saw this in your head in advance, would you change your behavior? Using visualization is not a new concept, but hmmm, I’m game to test it out in this particular genre.
Especially at this time of year when I’m not outside all day working in the yard (or sitting in the sun) my metabolism slows down, way down. I sit under my Happy Lite for at least an hour every morning but, as the afternoon wears thin and the sun continues to dip below the tree line by around 3pm, I can feel the inner gears slow down to a near crawl. It’s uncanny that I can actually feel this happening to me and yet, I have a huge aversion to dragging myself off to a gym, where I can rev up my metabolism on a self-initiatied basis. It’s just one of my many weaknesses.
One of the ways I have found I can help myself at this time of year is to eat a lighter dinner. One of the ironies of the old metabolism however, is that we crave heavier foods in the darker months. There’s no getting around this and I can feel this self-stearing mechanism take over as I am circumventing the grocery store. I inadvertently avoid the fish counter and go looking for meat and potatoes, whereas the opposite would be true in, say July. I could literally eat an entire baguette with a stick of butter every night. And, if I let myself, I could eat a mounding pile of spaghetti and meatballs, my Mom’s recipe, of course, anytime, anywhere.
Well anyway, you get the picture here. Basically our health is very substantly influenced by what we eat every day. And, if you’re anything like me, you’d rather have a big fat crispy croissant or two with sweet butter and best raspberry jam (basically nutrient vacant) for breakfast every day instead of something “better”. And so, every morning the quest begins. Is this going to be a good day or a bad day? I have been successful at eliminating a great many not-so-healthy eating trends out of my existence, for the most part. But, particularly in Winter, when I’m indoors a lot more and I’m craving those food items that give a little boost to the pleasure centers of my brain (um, sugar-laden), I’m constantly in conflict. For most of us, if we start the day well we have a better chance of finishing it well. If you start the day poorly, chances are you’ll continue on a bad streak.
So, all of that said, where am I going with this? You know. I’m going to try to visualize what is going to happen to my food before I stuff it in my mouth – as often as possible. I am going to try to see if this will help me make better choices. For, I posit, if you can visualize that chocolate cupcake with a huge scoop of frosting going down and being disbursed in the nutrient dispenser, vs the dish of unsweetened applesauce or the Lemon Gelato, you just might pick the applesauce. Shall we try this out?
I’m no artist, but I drew this little picture to show what I’m thinking about – that’s a bowl of spaghetti squash, in case you didn’t recognize it LOL:
you’ll note that I drew happy faces as the outcomes – but they could just as easily be sad faces, right?
This (finally) brings me around to my first venture a couple of weeks ago into the Roasted Spaghetti Squash with Bolognese recipe. (That was a very long-about way of saying I need lighter meals now, wasn’t it?) I found myself bizzing around the grocery store anticipating making this dish with Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese, a recipe I’d surprisingly never made. Weakling that I am, I slyly stuffed a bag of premium Pappardelle into my basket “just in case”. Ha-Ha – there’s nobody else in this equation who serves to suffer here but me. And, even though I had to pass by Osteria Morini, home of perhaps my favorite Bolognese, from Chef Michael White, and could have easily stopped right in there and picked up an order of their Bolognese with Pappardelle, and gone home and had a little feast, I decided to keep on point and try the spaghetti squash option. Now granted, I have almost totally and permanently left traditional pasta behind – a not insignificant sacrifice for someone of my ancestry. I have dabbled with Brown Rice Pasta and this is a good alternative – yet, I find myself eating a quantity greater than advisable, which thereby leaves me with a less than happy night’s sleep. Eating a big dish of spaghetti squash, even with a lovely bolognese, doesn’t result in this same overall strain on my digestion process, the spaghetti squash bearing less weight, bulk and difficulty in the digestion machine.
So, here we go. You can make this recipe as I have done or you can go ahead and experiment with any manner of vegetarian or vegan pasta “toppers”. Go ahead, knock yourself out! You’ll have a delicious dinner, one that fills all the requirements, very tasty, satisfying, nice array of nutrients and easier to digest.
Here is a very easy version. Please note that you will have to begin your sauce early in the day. I am presently working on adapting Marcella’s recipe (I hope she won’t mind) and I will post it when I get it to where I want it. But, until then, here goes – and, you just be game enough to try this recipe out on your Super Bowl contingent.
ROASTED SPAGHETTI SQUASH WITH TRADITIONAL BOLOGNESE one recipe Marcella Hazan’s or Michael White’s Bolognese sauce – see below
one large spaghetti squash
olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
Freshly grated parmesan or Romano Cheese to taste
Preheat oven to 400F. Line a large baking sheet with sides (a jelly roll pan) with aluminum foil. Cut the spaghetti squash in half lengthwise. Scoop out seeds and top layer(loose) of pulp. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place skin side up on the prepared pan, brush outer skin with olive oil and bake for one hour or until a knife pierced the flesh and it is soft. Remove from oven. Using a fork, scrape the strands of spaghetti squash out of the baked squash. Arrange on your plates and top with a nice scoop or two of your bolognese. Sprinkle with parmesan cheese to taste. Serve immediately with a nice Super Tuscan! Enjoy!
http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015181-marcella-hazans-bolognese-sauce
Michael White’s Meat and Tomato Sauce – recipe courtesy Michael White
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 small yellow onion, diced (1/2 cup)
1 small carrot, peeled and diced (1/4 cup)
1 small rib celery, trimmed and diced (1/4 cup)
1/4 cup tomato paste
2 28 oz cans whole peeled tomatoes, undrained
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 lb each ground beef, pork and veal
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 sprig fresh sage
2 bay leaves Parmigian0-Reggiano rind, 2-4″ (optional)
In a large soup pot or dutch oven, heat 3 tblsp olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook, stirring occasionally, until golden brown – 12-15 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste and cook, stirring constantly for 1 minute. Add the tomatoes one at a time, crushing them by hand as you go. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cover the to and simmer over low heat.
Meanwhile, heat the remaining tablespoon of olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the beef, pork and veal, season with salt and pepper, and cook until the meat is no longer pink, about 7 minutes, breaking up the pieces with a wooden spoon. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the meat to the sauce. Add the rosemary, sage and bay leaves along with the rind of the parmigiano. Cover and simmer the sauce over low heat for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, stirring occasionally. Remove the bay leaves and cheese rind and taste to adjust the salt and pepper.
You’ll note that these are both lovely Bolognese-type sauces and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with either of them. However, here’s a vegan option with Lentils:
http://food52.com/recipes/34414-vegan-lentil-bolognese-with-cashew-parmesan
You get where I’m going with this – you can fix a satisfying dinner entrée in the depths of Winter that doesn’t drag you down. Visualizing this is better than visualizing a pot roast with mashed potatoes! (I love that too!)
You can incorporate any manner of vegetables suitable for roasting in this kind of entrée and work to lighten up lots of recipes. You can also select lots of sauces made with vegetables, legumes, herbs, even nuts, zests and spices to use as toppers. So, try some out. I will try to post some more recipes to follow this little plan over the next few months – until we are back outside for most of the days!
Now, what can I visualize this morning for breakfast? It might involve blueberries, cherries or cranberries – or a soft boiled egg and half a mango.
Please refer to my Zucchini Pasta recipes for the summertime version – you can make a great entrée with zucchini “pasta” and top it with roasted garlic shrimp, for example!