Sunday, February 26, 2012

pushing the bowl away, and pretttttty colors!

This morning I met a friend for breakfast before church.  Restaurants have been a place of weakness for me; I tend to order big and consume every morsel on the spot.  Part of the reason I was able to "take the other half home" on my recent La Rancherita trip was knowing I'd have the pleasure of eating it again later, and none of it would be "wasted."  This morning was a different challenge.  First of all, I ordered reasonably - we were at Village Inn, and I got a bowl of cranberry-nut oatmeal, canceled the muffin that comes on the side and replaced it with a single scrambled egg.  I could NEVER have ordered such a reasonable breakfast until very recently - it's one thing to do good breakfast at home, but isn't eating out all about decadence?  (This is why the Lord has had to do such a huge work in me over the last 14 months...thinking like that!)  


Secondly, I didn't eat it all.  The bowl of oatmeal was an ordinary bowl, which is to say HUGE compared to what I eat at home most days.  I made a mental AND verbal note that it was too big...and then....(insert drum roll)....I stopped at just over halfway through and pushed it away!  

*The crowd goes wild!*


Well, maybe it doesn't seem like a big deal to you, and if not, you were probably never nearly 150 pounds overweight, which is where I started this journey.  Trust me, IT'S A BIG DEAL.  We card-carrying members of the Clean Plate/Tight Budget Club really struggle to understand this concept:  I am not a human waste disposal.  It is *not* my job to ensure no food is wasted by consuming it all.  The food is just as "used" if they pitch it as if I had consumed it.  I love my body enough not to over-stuff it.  Little things like pushing half a bowl of oatmeal that I paid good money for away and sending it off to be garbage...it's a Very Big Deal.


For lunch, I juiced.  This recipe is one of the 25 from that free e-book I recommended and it is called "Red Fusion Juice."  Get ready for some eye-popping colors!


 Ingredients:  half a head of red cabbage, 1 cup red grapes, 1 carrot, 1 red apple, 1 peeled lemon
 This shot is the apple juice (I thought the red peeling would color it, but it doesn't) while the lemon juice pours in.  Sorry for the blurry pics...I'm pushing things through the juicer with 1 hand and shooting with my iphone with the other.


Here comes the carrot juice (I swear it was brighter than this in person)!
 Red cabbage juice next - we're gettin' psychedelic here, eh?
 The grape juice was wimpier than I expected it to be...but it's hard to live up to that red cabbage zing...
 Layered again.  Today's effect destroys my yesterday's hypothesis that it was the sugar in the fruit juice keeping it on the bottom.  The apple/lemon juice rose to the top and stayed clearly delineated from the cabbage juice until I really stirred.  Now I'm REALLY curious what makes one stay on bottom...
 I wonder if readers are asking, "WHY does she show the garbage part?!"  It just fascinates me that THIS is all that's left of that whole big colander full of produce, ya know?  The inappropriate, sick-puppy part of me just notes that this is the part that woulda literally got pooped out (you owe me HOW many smacks now?!)
Stirred and poured into a quart mason jar.  I never would have guessed 100% natural juice could be so very bright.  If I had seen you walking down the street sipping on it, I'd have guessed it had added colors and sugars included.  


How did it taste?  WOW!  Flavorful, sweet, zingy.  Went down easy - no effort required to finish this huge jar. Nutrients are pulsing through my body even as I type. 


This is fun. 

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