Healthy Food

I've been wanting to start writing here again but the little voices of self doubt have been standing on a tall stool lately.

Healthy food. I'm on a long road to making it a familiar, comfortable part of my health. A long, long road. I am a very, very emotional eater. Pizza, mac n cheese, and canned soup were like my best friends. I had a very limited taste range that I liked and was/am very attached to -- salty, sweet, savory, and the texture was basically "processed" -- mooshy, flaky, smooth, consistent. In itself such a narrow range is not healthy. A variety of foods is healthy and the foods with the most vitamins rarely fall in that particular range.

Lately my strategy for healing my food sensitivities and preventing future ones is to eat the widest variety of foods possible. I am eating things that taste weird to me even after a whole decade of avoiding MSG, and a whole two years of eating okra and buffalo and quinoa on a regular basis. I grew my own brocili sprouts - they tasted fresh, which I do really like, but they were also bitter, and had some other flavor I couldn't identify. I've been making salads with Savoy cabbage. Normally this is fine - I splurge and use a little vinegar to make it taste like salad, but every once in a while I taste the cabbage-y of it, and it kind of turns my stomach a little. And last night I made a salad out of soy beans, water chestnuts, carrots, fresh ginger, oil & lime juice. Last night it all went down fine and I was happy with myself. But I ate the leftovers for lunch today and my brain and stomach are talking to each other about how gross soybeans are. The rest of the ingredients covered up the flavor of the soybeans so I could totally enjoy the freakishly yummy texture, but still... it will take some getting used to.

Last weekend I also finally tried dinosaur kale. The stem goes all the way down the very narrow leaves, which meant a lot of cutting up. (The stems on regular kale are dis-gus-ting, so I made the leap and assumed the same with the dinosaur.) I simmered cubed lamb roast for 2 hours, then added cubed sweet potatoes (the real sweet potato, light brown outside, and very pale orange interior) and the sliced up dinosaur kale, and simmered for another 1.5 hours. It was super yummy. No complaints about this healthy soup at all. I love kale, I just kind of loathe cutting out stems.