2014: The Year We'll Eat More Vegetables

It feels as if half the people I know are giving up gluten and/or dairy.  Since we're not suffering from any symptoms of gluten or lactose intolerance, I'm pretty reluctant to give up these up just because one book says that they're the root of all modern-day illnesses. Or that we should be eating like our hunter-gatherer ancestors who never lived long enough to even contemplate the diseases of old age like dementia. See now I'm getting grumpy again about someone trying to take away my occasional bowl of pasta or morning toast with honey and butter.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't be making an effort to eat more vegetables and less bread and cheese. Somehow choosing to eat more of one thing instead of eliminating something else sounds better. Maybe I'll call it a French approach to healthy eating and really convince myself that we're not being deprived at all.

With that little personal justification for sourdough and butter behind me, I've been reading these two books and trying to figure out how we'll eat more vegetables in 2014, despite the tiny carb-obsessed tyrant who lives with us:

 

Although he is indeed eating snow and eggs for breakfast here. Because why not?

We heard the author interviewed on NPR on our drive home from Thanksgiving. She writes about how to choose vegetables and then prepare them to maximize their health benefits. She also shares some interesting food anthropology along the way. Over time, humans have selected for fruits and vegetables that taste the best to us--i.e. sweet, not bitter--and in doing so, bred the most nutritious phytochemicals right out of the plants. Take home message: Eat your blue, red and dark green veggies, folks.

I have a thing for eponymous blog cookbooks and just added The Sprouted Kitchen to my collection, along with this one and this one.  Sprouted Kitchen has charming anecdotes, beautiful photography and some very delicious, healthy recipes. Some of which Ford might eat.  For my last night on my own before the Mountain Man and Munchkin returned from their Wyoming adventure, I made something I knew Ford would not touch, but it was soooo good:

Autumn Roasted Vegetable Salad with Horseradish Vinaigrette. Delicious, pretty and healthy. Note the other eating alone indulgences.

Happy New Year to you all!