Jonell Galloway
Mindful Eating: Get serious about what you put in your mouth!
Mindful Eating means getting serious about what you put in your mouth.
Mindful Eating is sensual -- in this case visual -- as well as cerebral.
You don’t have to think with your taste buds every minute of your life, like I do, but eating takes on a new importance in your life, and is no longer just an essential action required to fuel your body.
Mindful Eating starts by being mindful of every aspect of our food chain, from the very soil to the end product we put in our mouths. It is about taste and smell and nutrition, but also about respect for the land and soil that provide our nourishment.
It is about the seeds we plant, the fertilizer we spread.
It is about the human contact between a producer and a buyer and the bond that is formed when he puts the vegetables he has grown with tender loving care and the sweat of his brow into your hand. It is about leaving the land in a condition that will allow our children to live on in a healthy manner.
Jonell Galloway
Recipe: prime rib steak, smashed russet potatoes and wild garlic leaves
Serves 2
Ingredients
1 prime rib steak with bone, large enough for two people (about 600 grams / 1 1/3 lbs) (in French, “côte de boeuf”)8 small to medium russet potatoes, scrubbed well 1 cup thick veal stock (or you can use the “fond de veau” powder you find in France) Salt and pepper to taste 150 g / 10 T. low-fat Greek yogurt 1 bunch of wild garlic leaves (in French “ail des ours”; in English, called by many names, including ramson (Allium ursinum))
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Jonell Galloway
Recipe
This is another low-fat, high-fiber meal that fits perfectly in to any weight loss plan. All these ingredients are available in April.
4 to 6 scallops per person
6 to 8 spears of green asparagus per person
Balsamic vinegar
500 grams / 1 lb. strawberries (for 3 or 4 servings)Szechwan pepper to taste
Instructions
Preheat broiler or grill.
Wash, top and slice strawberries. Put into a medium-size saucepan. Cover with Balsamic vinegar, until vinegar is about 2.54 cm / 1 inch above strawberries. Add Szechwan pepper to taste.
Bring strawberries and Balsamic vinegar mixture to a boil, then turn heat down to medium, stirring from time to time. Cook until it forms a sauce of a syrupy consistency, with bits of strawberry in the “syrup”. This usually takes 15 to 20 minutes.
Jonell Galloway
Recipe
Ingredients
Photo courtesy of Five Prime.
Preheat grill or broiler.
Cut stalk end of fennel out, then slice thinly in the lengthwise direction.
Scrub potatoes, but do not skin. Slice thinly.
Jonell Galloway
Please, Mara des Bois, get thee here! Even though we still don’t have local strawberries in the Lake Geneva region, it’s almost impossible to resist the Spanish and French ones that are already available.
Photo courtesy of Sodapix.
Strawberries are extremely high in fiber as well as vitamins, so I try to use them in as many dishes as possible. You can also make low-fat or no-fat sauces and salads that are highly complimentary to a weight loss diet. And contrary to traditional wisdom, they can be used in both sweet and savory dishes.
Recipes
Strawberry and seed salad
For salads, put sliced strawberries into a vinaigrette made with Balsamic vinegar and marinate them for about 30 minutes. When ready to serve, add mixed greens or mesclun and toss. You can also use baby spinach. (Both of these are in season right now.) Right before serving, add some mixed seeds (the kind you find in the supermarket in Switzerland), or you can mix your own favorite seeds: pumpkin, sesame, etc. Toss well and serve immediately.
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Jonell Galloway
Swiss Sérac cheese, a fresh cow’s milk cheese made with whey
Whey cheese is produced when the curds are separated from the whey to make cheese. Ricotta is also a whey cheese, but unlike Sérac, it is often made with sheep’s milk. As a result, you can use your local cheesemonger’s Sérac in most recipes that call for ricotta.
Photo courtesy of Fribourg Region tourist office.
Sérac is made in most regions of Switzerland, and each region has its own version. Some regions smoke it; others flavor it with herbs, spices or pepper.
Sérac cheese is soft and creamy in texture, so it is easy to spread it on bread to make a healthy sandwich or snack, but Sérac is not only a snack cheese. It can also be used to make healthy, quick meals, such as the recipe below. In the summertime, I often use it like mozzarella, with tomatoes and basil or other Italian-inspired recipes.
It is a great way of teaching your children to eat healthy snacks. Top it with fresh fruit to make a healthy, low-fat dessert, or use it for between-meal snacks on chunky whole-grain bread.
Since it is a fresh milk cheese, it does not keep, and should be eaten shortly after purchasing. Because it is made from fresh milk whey, it is also naturally low in fat. In Switzerland, it would have about a 3.8% fat content, the same as milk.
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Jonell Galloway
I’ve been talking a lot about Mindful Eating lately. It’s a term that came to me out of the blue, and only weeks later did I realize that I picked up the word “mindful” in my many years of studying Buddhism and Hinduism. I studied these for so long that the vocabulary has become somewhat incorporated into my way of expressing myself and my subconscious. I am mindful; I live mindfully.
As a result, before publishing my own Mindful Eating Manifesto–a practical approach to my favorite subject of food–I only thought it fair to publish the somewhat more philosophical article by Buddhist thinker and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.
Traditional Buddhist and Hindu teachings urge us to be mindful about every act, at every moment, every day of our lives. The word “mindful” is not a trademark. It is a way of being. Mindfulness gives meaning to every action, and creates a sharper awareness and a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of all living things.
What does mindfulness have to do with the way I eat?
This may not seem to have anything to do with how you eat, but indeed it does. It’s the current food trend in the developed world, and I feel confident that it will spread at a rapid pace. Eating is not just about filling your belly.
Mindful Eating is about love and care from A to Z in the eating process, from the ingredients you buy, and how they were grown and processed, and whether you prepare them with TLC, to filling your belly and providing your body with the nutrients they need. To eat mindfully, you have to be aware of every step in the process, which by definition connects you, either directly or indirectly, with everyone involved: the butcher, the baker, the farmer, the fertilizer manufacturer, the seed seller, the cook, the chocolate maker (I do live in Switzerland, after all), etc.
Jonell Galloway
Creative ways to use vinegar in cooking, in place of fats
I’m a vinegar collector. I have orange vinegar, walnut vinegar, grapefruit vinegar, a long list of Balsamic vinegars of various origins and ages, and lots of other more common ones.
In Switzerland and France, there is such an impressive variety of artisanal vinegars (a well as oils) that it is easy to build up quite a collection and use it in creative ways to liven up winter vegetables, bland grilled meats, or salads. The beauty of it is that you can often use vinegar to add flavor, and thereby avoid the more traditional use of butter or meat bases, which contain fat. It is a good way to reduce fat in your general cooking habits.
Photo courtesy of FivePrime.
A tasty, good quality vinegar is an easy way to add flavor to an otherwise unappetizing vegetable or meat. After cooking meat or fish, I often deglaze the frying pan with a nice vinegar, then pour the glaze over the beast in question, along with a drizzle of good quality olive oil. It makes for a much healthier sauce than cream or butter and adds flare to the dish.
With magret de canard, or duck breast, which can have quite a fatty taste, I pour off most of the fat, and then deglaze the drippings with Balsamic or sherry vinegar. Raspberry also works well with duck, and you can add a few crushed raspberries to the sauce as well. The vinegar helps cut the fatty film you often feel in your mouth after eating. Raspberry vinegar is also a perfect compliment to calves’ liver.
Jonell Galloway
The 7 foods experts won’t eat is an enlightening article by Liz Vaccariello, Editor-in-Chief of Prevention magazine in the U.S.
It’s an article that will educate even those of us who consider they are in the know about what’s good to eat and what’s bad (for instance, me!). The opinions are from scientists and doctors in the field, so we have to take them seriously.
For example: “The resin linings of tin cans contain bisphenol-A, a synthetic estrogen that has been linked to ailments ranging from reproductive problems to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.” We’ve somehow left behind what our mothers taught us. I remember my mother always saying you should never store acidic foods in metal. How did we manage to forget that in less than a generation?
Or that cattle are genetically wired to eat grass, not grains, so corn-fed beef has fewer nutrients. Common sense really. If we keep in in line with nature, there’s less likelihood that we’ll harm our health, and more likelihood that we’ll be eating in a healthy manner.
A good read, and an important one.
Jonell Galloway
Invention through sloth: a recipe for lazy people who really would like to eat a healthy breakfast but can’t manage it
Cappuccino oats.
We don’t stop hearing about oats — they’re full of fiber so they’re good for your digestion and your bowels, they contain beta-glucans that help cut cholesterol and spread the rise in blood sugar over a long period of time, they make you feel full for longer so they encourage weight loss, they are anticarcinogenic thanks to their phytochemicals — and the list goes on.
Confession to my mother and request for forgiveness
I try and eat my oats every day, really I do. It has always been one of my mother’s Golden Rules of Healthy Eating. But Mom, I have to tell you: sometimes I just don’t, because I’m absolutely, unequivocally not a morning person and I just can’t get it together to cook the oats the good old-fashioned Scottish way we might all prefer.
So Mom, to relieve this deep guilt I have lived with my entire adult life, I found the solution, though I admit more by sloth than by wit. It was one of those days when no one was to speak to me before noon. I decided to pour some dry steel-cut oats into a bowl and eat them dry, in order to avoid the risk of pouring milk all over the stovetop instead of into the pan it was meant for, and then adding oats and other necessary ingredients into the milk that was already running down the front of the kitchen cabinets (I have already experienced this and it is not a good way to start the day). I was absolutely incapable of giving them the loving care they so deserve.