Eat...just like old times...part two

One of my grandfather's four apple trees

My grandparents’ garden, where I spent many a summer reading books and eating raspberries, is still producing in October. There are 4 apple and pear trees, grafted so many times that they form unusual shapes, that bear 20 different varieties for which my grandfather cannot offer names. The simple greenhouse still houses pimento peppers and pickling cucumbers. Portuguese winter kale, paler and softer and sweeter than that which you find in the grocery store, is flourishing and there are still plump blackberries on the (unthinkably smooth) vines. Pumpkins are hiding in tall grass.

The pumpkins in question

When I was little, this garden was my hideaway. I was always a bit of a loner, preferring to spend the long summer days reading books and stuffing my face by myself. The garden was the perfect spot to pass the time: I could sit undisturbed and enjoy the sun and whenever the urge struck, I would just reach up a grab a snack. Cherries, blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries and green peas kept my belly full. I remember eating so many cherries that I would get a stomachache. I can also remember afternoons spent with my grandmother in the basement, fingers green from shelling peas to store in the freezer. I am not sure how many of my peas escaped my mouth, but I at least I though I had contributed.
 Pomace from wine making the week before my arrival is pungently fertilizing the resting soil. I am sorry I missed the crush. While many grandfathers make their own “two buck chuck” from commercial wine juice, my grandfather has grapes shipped here and actually crushes his own wine, which is then stored in oak barrels in the basement.

The seeds for this kale came directly from Portugal

Not that a touch of grandfatherly thrift isn’t present: instead of making wine from 17 cases of grapes, he learned that he can create it from fewer cases if he adds raisins. I just found this out. I had always wondered why it tastes like raisins…I guess my palette isn’t so useless after all. I remember as a child watching this process with an intensity befitting a future food geek. On tip toe, I would peek into the pungent barrels, frothy as the yeast did their business. When the barrels weren’t present, I would bound into the basement at speed. When it was winemaking time, some part of me expected that quiet and stealth were necessary so as not to disturb the alchemy at hand. The grapes are crushed via a small hand crank crush that sits on top of the barrels. I always wanted to try and crush the grapes myself and would attempt, each year, in vain to muster up the strength necessary to get the crank a full turn, always succeeding only when a strong hand came to my assistance. One turn, and my work was done. My little hands had made wine.


In this house, the next meal begins as soon as this one is done. Breakfast dishes cleared, one must set to marinating meat for dinner. There are ingredients to be defrosted. More food from the cold room brought up to be crammed, impossibly, into the overloaded fridge.


The basement in any Portuguese home is where the dirty work of feeding a family really happens. There is a second fridge, an area under the stairs that serves as a pantry, barrels for wine, a cold storage room, a deep freeze and of course, a bar where the men congregate to drink and gossip.

Taro...not just for poi...we fry it in the drippings left over from making linguica

In preparation for our arrival, linguiça, or Portuguese sausage, has been chopped, filled and cured in the basement. The cold room is filled with this fall’s harvest (and the surplus of shopping trips that could feed a small army). The a deep freeze is filled with blackberries, raspberries and rhubarb, beans and peas…but not cherries this year, as a late frost stunted the supply down to 15 pounds.


Having been a vegetarian for 14 years, my grandparents are still confounded by what I will eat. Not eating bacon (my childhood favourite) is suspicious. Actually, not eating meat at all is suspicious. The young me ate steak, bacon and chicken with vigor. My grandmother cannot reconcile that my tastes could have changed so dramatically. The first trip back to Terrace after changing my eating habits as a teenager, my grandmother was convinced that it was my mother who would not let me eat meat. She implored my mother at every meal to allow me to eat each dish, as it had once been a favourite.


My grandparents seem to be more accepting, or at least used to my unusual lifestyle choices. The first morning I was here, my grandfather took me to Save on Foods and instructed me to buy whatever I needed. At the checkout, the cashier saw my 82 year old grandfather and a basket full of tofu, plain yogurt, All Bran Buds, veggie burgers, sprouted grain bread and soy milk and astutely remarked that she didn’t think grandpa would be indulging in said delicacies.


This trip, I have initiated an even stranger habit: taking pictures and video of the everyday dishes that my grandmother has made for our family for years. I am actually shocked that she has allowed me to document her in the kitchen. Notoriously camera shy, I managed to convince her that I was not taking pictures of anything but the food and her hands (and if I caught a few of her in the process for my own memory books, no one needs to know).


Where my grandmother has been accommodating, my grandfather has been surprisingly enthusiastic. Each meal, he kept dreaming up new delicacies to document and stories from our food history to be shared. I wish I could document every last bit of this incredible knowledge because my grandmother famously refuses to write recipes. Hers is an expertise that doesn’t bother with such crude utility. For her, food is a living, breathing substance that needs to be expertly coaxed and crafted to perfection despite variations in weather, taste or texture. A recipe does not offer the subtlety required to produce such nourishing fare.

A few of said recipes are to come…stay tuned!
Desiree

Eat...just like old times...part one

Tree Carvings on Ferry Island in Terrace BC

As I write, I am sitting in the house that formed my primary education in food. My mother is Portuguese by birth, having arrived on chilly Canadian soil as a child in 1959…and I am Portuguese by acculturation via these four walls. I grew up, for all intents and purposes, in my grandparent’s house here in Terrace. The small, simple house at the end of a quiet street, anchored by a giant old cherry tree and flanked by lovingly tended gardens. The house where there is always more food than its inhabitants (and neighbours, for that matter) could possibly eat. Where my grandmother does not greet you with a traditional “Hi” or “So good to see you” but “Did you eat?”



After 48 hours here, memories are flooding back and now in a more reflective state, induced no doubt by my recent foray into motherhood, I am starting to make myriad connections between who I am now as a dietitian, a cook and an eater and my formative food experiences which occurred right here.

Life in this house revolves around food and wine. Everyone who enters will either help themselves to whatever is on the kitchen counter - cake, boiled taro, fried broad beans – or will be lovingly force fed these and more upon taking a seat. If you don’t eat, my grandmother will offer more and different types of food until she finds one that you like and will eat. Not being hungry is unfathomable and therefore you are refusing because she has not correctly guessed what might be appetizing to you.

 My culinary history is filled with a historically appropriate dichotomy of traditional and “modern”, simple and processed, home grown and store bought. Arriving in Canada without immediate access to the foods she knew and wanting to make a life in harmony with her new nation, as was common for immigrants of the time, my grandmother embraced Canadian foods with open arms. Mid century marvels such as Shake and Bake chicken, Jello molds, Cool Whip and Duncan Hines cake mixes shared pride of place alongside the familiar caldo verde, feijoa assado, massa sovada and arroz doce of our Azorean homeland. I remember as a child eating all of these traditional foods happily but still wanting the brand name treats I saw on the Saturday morning commercials. So I pleaded for my grandmother to buy Lucky Charms (from which I removed the toy and left in the cupboard, uneaten). I bought Chips Ahoy and Oreos instead of eating homemade meringues and butter cookies. But I sat down and ate every kind of vegetable imaginable (Brussels sprouts! Kale! Cabbage!) without complaint. And then I downed Pringles for dessert. Now that all of the grandkids are grown up, the processed foods feature somewhat less frequently than the foods of my grandparent's youth but the chips and candy are still hiding in the same spot…ready for snack attacks whenever they occur.

 I spent my childhood watching my grandmother move deftly through the kitchen with admiration. A chair beside the counter was my prime vantage point. There were bowls to be licked (cake batter and cookie dough) and chicken to be shook and I didn't want to miss a minute of it. The turning point in my culinary education occurred one day when I was waiting to shake chicken. My grandmother had received a phone call before she could stuff the first piece in the bag, leaving me on the chair, staring at the chicken…dying to shake it. Patience was not one of my early virtues, sufficed to say. Pestering my grandmother as to when we could make the chicken, she simply stated, “you can do it yourself”. I could? This was serious business. I had not touched raw chicken before. It was slimy. And weird. But as my pulse quickened with the weight of the decision, my impatience finally outweighed my trepidation and so the fingers gingerly grabbed the chicken and placed it in the bag and shook away. Emboldened, I tried another piece, then another, until I proceeded to finish the entire batch.


Do you remember those commercials, the one where the little girl exclaims “It’s Shake and Bake…and I helped!” That day, I did...indeed.
My grandfather, as in many traditional European homes, dictates the menu by virtue of what he will and will not eat. This makes learning to cook in this house more difficult. One can assist my grandmother, but taking over the menu will leave you at the mercy of my grandfather’s critique, honed by years of exacting standards at my grandmother’s hands. My mother knew better than to try and take over the reigns until she had her own family to cook for. I, however, had to learn the hard way.



I remember getting permission as a child to make dinner with my friend, T, one summer vacation. We decided to make fajitas. My grandfather took us to the grocery store to gather our ingredients and once at home we set out creating chaos in the kitchen from which a fairly passable meal emerged. We were so excited to present the first “real” dinner we had ever made. I must have been 8 at the time but what I remember most vividly from that experience was that my grandfather informed us that we had sliced the steak incorrectly, going against the grain.
My grandfather had been a meat cutter when he first arrived in Canada.

Thankfully, he was not able to dampen my enthusiasm for cookery…but let’s just say that young child never again attempted to feed her grandfather. My husband, however, has fared far worse experiments and eats them without complaint. How times have changed...

More to come,
Desiree

Eat...like me!

There is nothing stronger than photographic proof...so time to share a day in the diet! This was my Wednesday...nothing too unusual going on, although I was trying to clear out my fridge before leaving tomorrow for 9 days away....

Breakfast was organic steel cut oats with unsweetened soy milk, hemp seeds, a fair trade banana and a bit of brown sugar....starting your day with a combination of high fibre whole grains plus the extra protein from the hemp and soy milk will help to keep you full.

Lunch was a 2 egg omelet (Rabbit River Farms Omega 3 Eggs) with a sliced organic potato, light feta and a chopped green pepper on top. The pepper provides 2 servings of veggies (although not the most nutrient dense option...) and perhaps a touch too much saturated fat from the egg and feta - but not too bad!

Every once in a while, I get a craving for one of their sugary concoctions...and then am always left unsatisfied. I had a decaf, half sweet toffee mocha. Not too bad...but not that exciting. Even half sweet, it is more sugar than I needed.

An afternoon snack  (which looks completely indistinguishable here!) was Liberte apple pie yogurt with a sprinkle of raw trail mix, All Bran buds and hemp seeds. Now this is a good sweet treat: probiotic yogurt, protein and the heart healthy soluble fibre that all of us need more of.

Yum! This is a riff on a Jamie Oliver recipe from the Cook with Jamie book. It is a raw beet, pear and feta salad to which I added chick peas for protein. And leave it to me to forget to take a picture of the bread...but there was bread too. Two slices of Terra green olive bread with butter. I love chopped salads to help you get a huge proportion of your fruit and veggie servings at one go but I never serve a main course salad without a protein: either beans, tofu or eggs. It's a must! 

See you in a week or so...I shall actually be without Internet access while I'm away!

Desiree

Losing it...the post baby diaries...Sept 28

Losing the baby weight goes way beyond willpower. It requires the stubbornness to stick with it even though you are exhausted, interrupted multiple times by baby and facing a big pile of laundry in the bin. You also need to strike a fine balance between a dose of pragmatism and avoiding the justification trap. 


Last week, I did it...I made it to my 5-workout-a-week goal. I felt pretty damn good. And here is a ringing endorsement of the Tracy Anderson Method: after doing the video 5 times in a week, there is a significant change in my body. Gravity be damned! Talk about motivation. Still 17 pounds to go, but I am bolstered by this apparent progress.


There was a large amount of stick-to-it-ive-ness required to achieve this goal. The first tenet was, workout no matter what. Typically, I workout after I wake up and have fed my little one and then I set him to lay down near me while I put the DVD on. Early after birth, I would do this and then put him in the stroller and wheel him into the gym while I worked out. And to my delight, he would sleep through my workout. Now, not so much. No matter what I have tried, he refuses to just hang out through the 45 minute DVD. So to get through the workout, I have to stop an average of 3-5 times to pick him up, rock him, change his diaper etc. The first couple of times this happened, it was enough to make me not want to work out...now, I just accept it as part of the routine and allot 1 hour to my 45 minute DVD. 


I am already testing the strength of this first tenet this week: my little guy has taken to not sleeping well through the night and I have been so exhausted that I have gotten up "too late" to get my workout in before rushing to prior appointments. Two days in a row...but tomorrow it ends (and lucky for me, I will still have 5 days left to get my workouts in).


This weekend, I am even leaving for a week with family...and I am determined to keep going. I am bringing my laptop, yoga mat and weights so I can still get my workouts in. Actually, with both my mom and grandma around the house, I now have child care for a week straight and consequently, a lack of excuses. 


As for my eating regime...I have eaten very well for the last week but there have been a few hiccups. Six, to be exact. Let me explain: Sunday was my birthday. And throughout the week, I have had multiple celebrations (and of course, leftovers) which has meant 6 servings of birthday cakes. So much for my "no junk food plan". 


Now here is the balance between pragmatism and justification: the dietitian in me knows that I have eaten really well so I have had a "good" week in terms of nutrient density. And a birthday is once a year...it is easy to forgo treats made for others but pretty impossible to forgo treats made specially for you. However, this will not be a great weight loss week. This is one of the trade offs: if you approach a diet as a quick fix, any number of slip ups could be incredibly frustrating and lead you astray. A common diet mentality is "well, I am 'ruining' this week anyways....". Hold it right there! I did not give myself permission to eat loads of junk food because I knew each day wouldn't be "perfect". To be honest, I wasn't craving junk...but I still planned healthy meals to help "balance" the indulgences. And once we finally rid our fridge of the birthday treats (which my husband can thankfully help with), it is back to the original game plan. I am halfway through this 6 week "phase" of my eating plan...so 3 weeks from now, I am going to ramp up the diet efforts. My motivating deadline is that I would like to be close to my goal so I can wear something fun for New Year's Eve. A week with my grandmother's cooking should be interesting...stay tuned next week. 


In good health,
Desiree


PS: do you have any diet disaster stories? Feel free to share them here!

Losing it...the post baby diaries...Sept 21

This weekend was a disaster. Total. Disaster. Progress wise, at least. 


It started Saturday morning, as I was lying in bed. As I laid there in a dreamy waking state, I thought to myself, "Ah...I can work out without having to worry about my little one fussing because my husband will watch him. Hmm...it could be fun to have a Solly's cinnamon bun instead. But I need to get my 4th workout in and I am totally capable of doing it. But I haven't had a cinnamon bun in like 4 months..."


What is strange is that in diet attempts past, I have always had such strong cravings that I routinely cave from the pressure. In the last couple weeks, I have not had cravings at all. I have felt kind of liberated from junk food and relieved not to be eating it anymore. So why my bedhead drove me to stay in my pajamas and send my husband to Solly's, I do not know. But one meal in two weeks would have been a forgivable non-issue. Then lunch with friends was a reasonable (if not ultra health conscious) mushroom omelet (the only veggie option with significant protein) and rye toast and dinner was a "we're running late" portion of leftover thin crust veggie pizza (whole grain crust and lots of veggies, but still pizza) and you now have a total write off day. 


Sunday I managed to claw back a little with a Jamba Juice protein smoothie and a gorgeous Kung Pao tofu and Kale salad dinner....but there was a significant amount of chips consumed in the car mid-road trip. Damn.


So a new week begins and I plan on skipping over the 4 workout week to the 5 workout week that this week should be. And as evidence as my return to the "no junk food plan", here is what I ate today:


Breakfast 2 slices Silver Hills sprouted grain toast with 2 tbsp natural peanut butter and 2 tsp honey. 2 kiwis. 1 cup tea with milk and honey.


Snack decaf Americano with 2 tbsp cream and 2 tsp sugar


Lunch leftover roasted veggies and chickpeas with some mozzarella broiled on top (yum!!). 1 apple


Snack tea with milk and sugar


Dinner Whole wheat macaroni with sauteed zucchini, mushrooms, lemon and feta


Snack Liberte apple pie yogurt with a sprinkle of trail mix and All Bran buds 


In good health,
Desiree