Finding Inspiration in Cooking

Recently, I have been struggling with lunch. My days are packed– even more so right now between work and planning for a June wedding– and I have so many phone calls that I don't have time to think about what I'm going to have for lunch. 

Finally today I decided to pick up some frozen meals just so I didn't have to think about it for a week. I was at Target and looked for a few of the Amy's brand Mexican casseroles. I like them but as someone whose body can't handle a lot of salt, the sodium content is much too high for me. However, today I found them with half the sodium. But then I looked to the right of the Amy's section and saw the evol (with the backward e) meals including gluten free burritos (which Greg's says should not be called burritos at that point). And then I spotted a fire-grilled steak bowl with black beans. I need meals high in protein, low in carb. It took me a long time to figure out how I function best; there is no pizza for lunch in my world or I'll be asleep all afternoon.

As I continued to walk through the frozen food aisle, I realized I was getting ideas: inspiration. While sometimes recipes are good inspiration, trying a combination someone else has made can work better. The fire-grilled steak bowl wasn't bad but a little tasteless for me. That means next Friday I'll be picking up the ingredients to make my own. Look forward to the recipe here soon.

The key for me is having enough meals in the refrigerator (because I work at home) that I don't have to think hard about lunch. And with today's inspiration, I think I'm good for awhile. All it took was a little time to let my mind wander at the store.

Adventures in Cooking and in Life: Avochocopudding

A few weeks ago when the priest came to dinner, I served my signature carob peanut butter cookies for dessert. After Greg announced that I also make chocolate pudding with avocados, Father turned to me and said, "You're quite adventurous with your cooking."

I never thought of that way but since then I've been reflecting on why I am constantly tearing out recipes from magazines (I always pass the magazines along to people but warn them that some pages are missing) and that a chest of drawers my grandfather made by the front door my house is filled with an unorganized mess of recipes (the most unorganized part of my house). 

Cooking is a release for me and as a creative person, I am always looking for new ways to do things, new foods to try, new ways to make foods healthier but still good. I'm the same way in my life: while I admit I like to have the opportunity to jet off to various places, that doesn't always happen and when I'm home I need to find ways to make the day meaningful to me. I do that by creating. 

The recipe below is originally from the Martha Stewart Clean Slate cookbook. I have altered it by using carob instead of chocolate. While I was recently cleared of my chocolate allergy, I'm finding that after not eating chocolate for so long, I must prefer the taste of carob. You can substitute cocoa powder for the carob but I dare you to use carob powder. You'll be surprised by the taste– and there are health benefits behind carob (digestion is one) as well. I also don't like honey and substituted maple syrup instead.

It might sound weird, to use an avocado, but what we're doing is giving the pudding its texture by including ingredients that are healthier. I only advocate that you don't let it sit for more than a few days in the refrigerator as the carob taste seems to melt away and you're left with, well, avocado.

3 avocados (halved, pitted, and peeled)

at least 1/4 cup carob powder

1/4 cup maple syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Puree all ingredients in a food processor or blender until smooth.

Coping and Eating

I started to read a novel once about a woman whose husband died and how she ate a lot of ice cream. While it is easy in the face of loss to not take care of ourselves, this is the time when we need to somehow find the energy to do just that. No matter if a loved one has died or we are coping with the end of a relationship, we must take care of ourselves.

Grief is not just emotional, it's also physical. It takes a toll on our bodies as much as it does our emotions (and our spirituality). It uses a lot of energy to cope with the loss, to get used to a new life. We find we are tired a lot of the time and we lack the energy to do things like grocery shop or make meals.

It's going to take a little more work but the benefit in the later will far outweigh the energy you have to push yourself to put into making better meals. As I continue to write this blog, look forward to recipes that will help you keep your energy at a peak level so you can grief the loss while still being present in your life. 

And all those people who have asked you how they can help? Ask them to help you eat healthy: to bring over healthy foods, to give you a hand in making healthy meals. You're giving them an opportunity to help you while they also will be helping themselves.

Don't succumb to the half gallon cartons of ice cream. They are a good treat but not something for dinner every night. You owe it to yourself to go forward (which doesn't mean you forget who or what you have lost). Life is about being present now and the more you do that, the more peace you will find.

I have been using this recipe from Martha Stewart for an afternoon smoothie. I make it with cherries instead of mixed berries and sometimes I'll add unflavored protein powder. For me, afternoon snacking is a challenge and having something that fills me up and gives me more energy is just what I need. Don't freak out that it's tofu! It has no flavor which makes it a great protein source when mixed with other ingredients. Check out the recipe here.

Finding Taste in Healthy Eating

There is nothing worse than bland food. And not just bland food but waking up in the morning, wanting to eat better and feel better, but knowing that, well there isn't much to look forward to food wise in the day.

While none of our lives should revolve around food, there is some truth to the satisfaction we feel in a good meal. After all, our bodies need to be nourished. It's part of the emotional-spiritual-physical pie of life. 

I remember back in the seventies and eighties how challenging diets were because the knowledge people had about how to use spices was minimal. And ice berg lettuce isn't exactly nutrient rich although it is filled with water. That satisfaction doesn't last long though.

My father ate a very bland diet but my mom always had the bottle of crushed red pepper near her. I often hear how children don't like spicy foods but somehow that crushed red pepper always made it onto my slice of pizza and I got used to the flavor.

In my own quest to eat well, I have finally figured out that it helps to food to look forward to. And that means food with taste. I feel fortunate to live in New Mexico. I see now how coming here in 1994, when I was 22 for graduate school, has been a huge influence on my cooking. I didn't realize how much until I moved away and came back.

I have learned how to use chiles to make food desirable even with less fat. Look forward to more blogs and recipes that use spices, not hot ones, but just enough to give it flavor to make it a meal you'll feel satisfied and ready to continue to create the life you've always wanted by feeling good and looking good.

Check out the black bean soup I use here– from Martha Stewart. I don't use my regular blender to mix the hot beans anymore after the lid was too hot and popped out of my hand that one time. It's not so much fun to clean a black-bean splattered kitchen! I have Ninja blender that works great for hot foods. It also doesn't matter what kind of chiles you use– whatever you can find in the store. I do love sliced avocado on top of my soup though. With some chips it makes a great lunch or meal on a cold day.

Tofu Scramble and Setting up the New Year

I am not a huge fan of new year's resolutions. As someone who has been running for a long time, I see the number of people out running increase after January 1 and then fall off after people get bored or tired or both. I do think it's good to set goals and for me January is the usual time I set goals because my birthday is in December: I'm coming into a new individual year and an overall new year. But I do then at any point during the year when I feel the need to make a change or move my life forward because it doesn't matter when you set your goals, the key is sticking them.

And I believe one of the hardest parts about setting goals regarding eating is finding healthy food that tastes good. I've been trying to eat well since I was in junior high– this was the middle 1980s and we didn't have the access to the food we do now. We also didn't have the knowledge. For instance, everything would say that you need to eat salad. That was great and I was happy to do that but no one told me to add some protein to my salad (in those days "salad" meant all vegetables) so I wouldn't have a headache at the end of the school day when I went out for track practice. 

After a few days of that, there was no more healthy eating; I needed protein I wasn't getting. Today I would add hard-boiled eggs and nuts.

But I also didn't understand why I would attend a conference and want to sleep during the keynote: orange juice and bagels are not exactly the best breakfast to keep people awake (but they are cheap!). I finally started bringing my own blender and making smoothies. It wasn't worth the exhaustion I felt when I didn't get a good breakfast.

Now we talk more about eating proteins that will fill us up and keep us full for a number of hours. We have access to whole grains rather than simple carbohydrates. And we are encouraged to eat more greens. 

There are lots of good happenings in the eating world but I'm sure many people don't think that tofu is one of them. I would agree– the one time I made tofu I didn't get it. The white substance had no flavor and left me hungry.

I decided to give tofu a chance again with this recipe from the Martha Stewart Clean Slate Cookbook (one of several that I've tried already). I made it Saturday for lunch and while I did things slightly differently: used chile powder instead of turmeric, no cojita cheese, and onions instead of scallions, it was quite tasty. I liked the spice off the chiles and the chile powder. The tofu wasn't too bad either because it had been blended with several other spices. We also had strawberries as a side.

However, I was hungry about two hours later. In the future I would find something to pair it with to help stave off my hungry and I would add more black beans. While I agree it is important to eat every few hours, often our lifestyles don't allow us to do that. The less I think about food, the better off I am.

Give tofu a chance in the new year.

The tofu scramble recipe is here.

The New Year and Ice Cream Cake

The New Year and Ice Cream Cake

With the New Year upon us tomorrow, I will admit I fully enjoyed all the treats from this holiday season, and recapping the memories many of them have for me. However, starting next week I’ll be venturing back to healthier eating although that doesn’t mean there won’t be desserts! I am working on recipes that lighten up what’s already good: my goal is not to lose taste and flavor while educing fat and calories.

But for New Year’s I’m finishing off 2014 and starting 2015 with my Grandma Zurawski’s Ice Cream Cake. I don’t recall my mom ever making this but Grandma would when all of us gathered for a birthday, usually my grandfather’s.

About fifteen years ago, I made these at a holiday party I hosted at my house. They were such a hit that a friend who always held a party right after me asked me to bring them­ to her party– and kept asking each year she held a party thereafter.

Grandma Zurawski’s Ice Cream Cake

2 eggs separated

½ cup sugar

¼ cup milk

2 teaspoons gelatin (plain, usually by Knox and sold with Jell-O)

¼ cup water

9 ounces cream cheese (I use the reduced fat version)

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ pint whipping cream

1 package graham crackers

¼ cup butter

Beat egg yolks with 6 Tablespoons sugar and the milk; then cook over a low flame and stir until thick (coats the back of a spoon). Soften gelatin in cold water and add it to the egg mixture, allowing it to cool. Cream the cream cheese and add the vanilla, then add to the cooled custard. Beat the egg whites and 2 Tablespoons of sugar until stiff. Fold into the custard mixture and then fold the whipped cream into the custard mixture.

Crumble the graham crackers (giving them a whirl in the food processor works well) and melt the butter. Combine them and press on the bottom of a 9 x 12 glass dish, leaving a small portion of crumbs for a light topping. Add the custard and spread evenly over the top, sprinkling the crumbs to finish the cake. Place in refrigerator overnight.

Auntie Virgie's Christmas Cookies

At some point after I moved to New Mexico, when I would fly home for Christmas (usually the week before Christmas) my mom and I would stop off at her sister’s house for lunch. My Auntie Virgie and Uncle Mark lived not far from O’Hare and Mom’s other sister, my Auntie Janice, would come as well.

I loved sitting at the table with all of them, hearing their stories. And when I moved back to New Mexico, taking Mom with me, the tradition ended. Uncle Mark died about seven months after we moved and then Mom died about five months after that. Suddenly, the tradition was just a memory, but one I am lucky to have. We can’t ever get the time back with our loved ones.

Every year Auntie Virgie bakes up a storm of Christmas cookies and for me she would fill a small green tin with candy canes on it and give it to me. I’d keep it until the next Christmas and we would repeat the process. I had two favorites: her pecan balls and a refrigerator cookie that’s so light it melts in your mouth.

I tried the recipe with walnuts, not being much of a pecan fan, but this year I realized there is no replacement for the pecans. They give the balls the great flavor that make them hard to stop eating.

Auntie Virgie’s Pecan Balls

6 Tablespoons shortening

½ cup butter

¼ cup confectioner’s sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 Tablespoon milk

2 cups sifted flour

2 cups coarsely chopped pecans or walnuts

Cream shortening and butter together, add sugar and cream until light. Add vanilla and milk, blend well. Mix in flour and nuts to creamed mixture, blend well. Roll into small balls. Bake 25-30 minutes until lightly browned at 325 degrees. Cool and roll in confectioner’s sugar.

Memories of Mom: The Cookie Press

These cookies are not going to win any awards for presentation and I definitely wouldn’t invite Gordon Ramsey over to eat any. But they represent something else to me: Mom.

Every year this was the one item on the list we could count on Mom to do at Christmastime, even in the last years when she didn’t go out to buy us cards. At least she still made the cookies. When her original Mirro cookie press broke, we found her a new one at an antique store.

But I will be the first to admit they are not my favorite recipe to make simply because of the cookie press. The dough has to be at an exact temperature for the cookies to come out perfectly. I used the trigger-operated press once but I never found it to be easier to use and now that Mom has died, I have her second generation press.

However, if I wanted any of her cookies this year, I had to make them. While the they are made of cookie basics (flour, sugar, butter), these also have almond extract which gives them that distinct flavor. And in my laziness, I combined the two colors of dough but found that they actually create tie-dye looking cookies.

Mostly, this was about eating the cookies and tasting the memories that came with them.

Mirro Cookie Press Recipe

2 ½ cups flour

¼ teaspoon baking powder

1 cup butter

¾ cup sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon almond extract

green and red food coloring

decorating candies

Sift together flour and baking powder. Cream butter; add sugar gradually and cream thoroughly. Beat in egg, almond extract, and food coloring. Gradually blend in dry ingredients. Fill cookie press. Form cookies on ungreased baking sheet. Decorate with candies. Bake 10-12 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 6-7 dozen cookies.

Red Velvet Cake with...Beets? Carob?

Periodically I will talk about the challenge I always faced when I was very into running in high school and trying to eat better: I wanted to use better ingredients and find more nutritional density to my food but it was almost impossible in the late 1980s. 

My fiancé and I were talking about this a little while ago. He said, "It wasn't just that you didn't have the access to ingredients but you also didn't have access to the recipes."

While I would make pizza using wheat flour, I knew of all most no one else who did that (outside of Rocky Rococo Pizza, a Wisconsin chain that had opened in the next town over from mine in Illinois).

Now there is so much out there and I'm willing to explore all sorts of ways to make my food not just be nutritionally better but also have unique flavors.

For a dinner party across the street yesterday, I used the Cooking Light recipe for red velvet cake that uses beets for the color. However, instead of using cocoa, I put carob powder in my version. While I had some issues with the recipe (I don't believe there was enough frosting or filling), I was very happy with the outcome and the taste which wasn't overly sweet but brought together several foods one might not consider before. I also like the lightened calories and fat content- including using Greek yogurt in the filling.

Carob Peanut Butter Brownies

Ah, the carob peanut butter brownie.

I started making carob brownies in my quest to create something for myself that didn't include chocolate and was a bit healthier than the regular brownie. It started with cookies and branched into brownies when I realized it was an easier way to make a dessert for a gathering (it happened to be a Tupperware party I held last fall).

I took a peanut butter cookie recipe that has no egg and used wheat flour and altered it with carob plus upped the ingredients to make a thick, moist brownie.

And honestly? It's one of my favorites. When I need a sugar fix, I know I'm getting better nutrition here (flax! oats!) than with many other sweet desserts.

Carob Peanut Butter Brownies

1 cup whole wheat flour

½ cup ground flax seeds

1 cup quick oats

1 cup brown sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons vanilla

4 tablespoons canola oil

2 tablespoons applesauce

½ cup maple syrup (minimum)

½ cup peanut butter, creamy style

2 cups carob chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Mix all ingredients in a large bowl. I usually add more maple syrup and extra carob chips. Bake in greased square pan 35-40 minutes until inserted toothpick comes out clean. Cut after the brownies have cooled and thickened.

Evolution of My Cooking: Perfecting the Yield

As I continue to write in the Food & Wisdom Diary, I'll be sharing the evolution of my cooking: how I came to be the cook that I am and how it intersects with my life.

To prepare for approximately 70 people coming to our engagement party this Saturday night, I've been baking cookies for the past month, freezing them as I go along. On Saturday I made the Chewy Molasses Cookies from the latest issue of Cooking Light. 

Yes, the cookies turned out great but even greater was that this was the first time I made a batch of cookies that came out in the exact yield that the recipe called for. I doubled the batch and ended up with 48 cookies, double the 24 the recipe says.

Lately I've been finding that years of making mistakes and just plain cooking and baking are paying off: I'm able to make better decisions about changes to make and mistakes have taught me things not to do. And apparently I'm also able to judge exactly how big 1 1/2 tablespoons is when I bake.

Practice does finally make perfect.

Love and Tiramisu

In 2005, when I went to Europe for the first time, I visited my junior high pen pal Catia in Luxembourg. She taught me how to make tiramisu and sent me back over the pond with several packages of lady fingers.

Last year on my first date with Greg at the Indian restaurant down the street, over my saag paneer, he invited me out for a second date. But this wouldn't be just any second ate: he asked me to go to a party his friends were having. That meant it was trial by fire since we barely knew each other.

Then he proceeded to tell me he was supposed to bring a dessert to go with the Italian theme. He said he was going to buy something. While I knew he was a forty-something bachelor, I was horrified he would consider buying a dessert and offered to make tiramisu. Not knowing me and believing it was too much time, he insisted I didn't do it.

But I did.

It took some work on my part to find lady fingers (World Market is the best place) nor did I have enough time to make them. But the dessert was a hit and his friends told me he could definitely bring me back to future parties.

Instead of making something traditional yesterday for Thanksgiving, I made pumpkin tiramisu. I love pumpkin and I'm always looking for new ways to use. I was short a package of lady fingers (something I didn't realize until about 5:30 pm Wednesday night- a time when I was not going near any store!).

Once again, the tiramisu was a hit. I didn't use the cream topping- to me it's overkill- nor the shavings. The great part about pumpkin is that it's very flavorful and with the sugar and cream, becomes just sweet enough to become a delicious dessert.

Greg told me I will need a trifle bowl if I want to continue to make desserts and when I offered to add one to our wedding registry, he said, "Anything that will encourage you to make more desserts."

You can find the Food & Wine pumpkin tiramisu recipe here.

New Mexico Cooking Lessons: Chile Rellenos

I failed miserably at making chile rellenos last winter. While I had been cooking up a storm of dishes IMG 2742I had learned when I lived in New Mexico to treat my suburban Chicago neighbors, the time that I made chile rellenos I missed a major step: beating the egg whites until they are fluffy. I'm not sure if the recipe I used even said to to do that. I simply dredged them in flour and then soaked them in beaten eggs. But after I moved back to Albuquerque my friend Veronica came to the rescue when she told me it's a dish she sometimes make, one that she learned in her native Mexico.

We spent Saturday afternoon creating the steps below (complete with a short video!) of how to make chile rellenos so you can avoid the embarrassment I endured several months ago.

For this dish Veronica used:

• 15 green chiles (they are more easily found throughout the country and not just in New Mexico anymore)
• 10 eggs
• 1 pound of mozzerella cheese
• oil for cooking

The chiles should be roasted on the grill or on a gas stove to remove the skins. Be careful not to IMG 2745touch your eye or any other sensitive part of the body during this process as the seeds are hot! After roasting, I run my chiles under cold water to remove the skins but Veronica slathers them in oil for the same outcome.

Once the chiles are cleaned, she put a small slice in them and slid a piece of cheese inside the chile. IMG 2748At this time, the tops of the chiles could be removed as well; the seeds can be hot for those you not used to this type of cooking!

The key step (the one that I missed) came next. She mixed ten egg whites until they were fluffy, at the end adding back two yolks for color.

With the chiles stuffed, we moved outside where I placed a cast iron pan filled with oil (she chose olive oil) on the gas burner and heated it. Veronica had filled a plate with flour and she first dredged the chiles and then soaked them in the egg mixture before taking them to the grill. You must move quickly in this process before the egg mixture disintegrates. See the video for more instruction. The oil should be hot and the chiles covered as completely as possible. Fry them until they are brown, just a few minutes on each side and serve with a chile sauce or salsa. The salsa shown in the finished dish is sauteed onions, garlic, chipotle peppers, and tomato sauce.

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Merging Food with Our Holistic Selves

We can’t separate food from ourselves because it’s tied to our existence on multiple levels.
Often we forget that for us to be a complete person we have to be balanced and we need to nourish our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves. We can’t just set goals for one aspect because it will throw the balance off. If we want to lose weight, then we need to make sure we are doing something emotionally and spiritually as well.

It’s easy to think, oh, I’ll just lose some weight and everything will be well. What we aren’t realizing is that some of our weight gain might be related to emotional issues. Maybe we are an emotional eater and when we get upset, we eat. Or maybe we haven’t cared about what we look like so we also don’t care about what we eat. Only will we make headway into losing weight and keeping it off if we make sure to set an emotional goal to understand why we do a certain behavior and then work at changing it.

And it’s not much different with our spirituality, something many people neglect. By taking some time each morning to prayer or meditate, we are setting ourselves up to cope better with the day ahead. We also are putting our bodies in a strong place so whatever the day brings bounces off us. We can’t control what happens to us but we can control our actions.
In the process of setting these goals, we also realize we must give our body the best nutrition possible. It’s not easy as life is busy but I also don’t believe anyone should deprive themselves of anything unless it’s a life or death matter. Have that occasional ice cream cone but don’t eat a half gallon of it every night. Eat pizza sometimes. Enjoy an evening of dinner out with friends.

As you work toward your goals, you’ll see you feel better when you eat better. You’ll want to eat better because it gives you more energy to have the productive day you yearn for and you’ll feel the changes in your body as the foods you give it leave you feeling satisfied and energetic, not lethargic or empty.

The first step is wanting to make change in your life and that’s what brought you here. Don’t stop now. Life is too short to give up on an opportunity to be happier and more hopeful.

Paper Bag Pizza

My mom began making pizzas on paper bags when we were growing up although she isn't sure where she got the idea. She thinks maybe she read it somewhere. And despite what anyone thinks, the bags don't burn. In fact, they create a very tasty crispy crust.

Mom used the Chef Boyardee pizza mixes and there was no cooking spray yet so she would rub the cut paper bag with margarine. When I began making pizza using the recipe below (out of the Naper School cookbook- Mrs. Hall's recipe), I tried using a metal pan but I found the crust wasn't as crispy, thus I went back to the paper bags.

I honed my pizza-making skills at Oodles Pizza in Naperville on Ogden the summer after my freshman year of high school for $3.35 an hour and I've been making pizza since. The only problem now is that paper bags are made much smaller and my friend Jim's mom suggested using some of the sides of the bags to make the pizzas larger. I also spray my hands with cooking spray and use my hands to form the pizzas rather than roll them out. I have tried to used wheat flour with this recipe but because it's more dry than white, it's best to mix the two flours together.

Paper Bag Pizza

• 2 c. flour
• 1 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 1/2 tsp. sugar
• 1 pkg. dry yeast (approximately 1 1/2 Tbsp.)
• 1 1/2 c. lukewarm water
• 2 1/2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
• 2 c. flour

Mix flour (2 c.), salt, sugar, and yeast together. Add water and oil. Beat mixture until just blended with electric mixer. Stir in 2 c. more of flour. Form into ball, let rest for five minutes. Cut in half and roll out in flour for 2 pizza crusts.

Placed on greased paper bags and add your favorite sauce and toppings. Bake approximately 15 to 20 minutes in a 425-degree oven. I let the pizzas sit for a few minutes after coming out of the oven on a cooling rack before I use a spatula/turner to separate the pizza from the paper bag and cut it. Doing this helps the pizza crisp up.

Bon appetit!

Love and Sticky Date Pudding

While this is an older writing, it remains a favorite of mine and I’m sharing it in memory of my “UK dad” John Peters who died in April. This was the kind of work he wanted me to continue to pursue and revamping the Chef Chelle web site and devoting myself to creating more food and blogs are my way of keeping him alive in my life. Each time I went to visit him and his wife Jean in England we were sure to find a piece of sticky date pudding for me.

On my second trip to Australia, I was in a Melbourne restaurant with several friends for dinner when one of them, an Australian, went with me to pick out a dessert. There was this gloppy mess of a cake and I asked Susan what it was. “Oh, that’s very Australian,” she said. “It’s sticky date pudding.” As she would later say, it’s mostly made up of butter and sugar (plus some dates). While looking quite like a messy cake, and obviously very sticky, it’s a wonderful dessert that I easily fell in love with.

Life is messy but nothing is messier than love. I think of that sticky date pudding, and the sweetness of the cake and smooth texture. But also the gumminess of it on the fork, the plate, and your hands if you’re not careful. We expect that love will be perfect, that when we love someone we won’t hurt again, and we won’t fall out of love with them. Some of us grew up dreaming about fairy-tale love or fairy-tale families that loved us. We thought about how love would conquer all, how love would make everything perfect, how once we found that perfect person to marry, all would be great. There would never be another worry because love would take care of it.

Love is work though. Sometimes we want to wring the necks of people who love (be honest, you know it’s true!). It forces us to reach outside our comfort zones, to do things for the people we love even though it’s difficult for us. We become better people because we love and force ourselves to take part in it. While we enjoy the sweetness of it, we also must get the fork and the plate dirty if we are to truly grasp the full meaning of what it is to love. And be loved. We must reveal our whole selves to be loved. Many songs have lyrics that say something along the lines of, “I’ve seen the best of you, now I want the rest of you.” We don’t often realize the difficulty of revealing everything about us if we are to be loved. Dust bunnies under the couch, chipped nail polish, and all.

The reality of love is that it appears on our doorstep at our house, dressed as the white glove lady, while we stand there waving our hands and looking at the mess in the house saying, “But I wasn’t ready for you!” Love doesn’t come when we want it to. We might think we have to work more on our career, that we aren’t fully recovered from a previous relationship, or that our lives just aren’t where we want them yet if we are to let love in the door. But love comes to us when it’s supposed to. The universe’s timing is perfect even though we often don’t understand it.

Love didn’t come when we were ready nor could we use an all-purpose cleaner to keep it growing in a straight line. Love doesn’t work that way. Life is unexpected and love comes in unexpected places. My friend Jeff said to me a few weeks ago that the element of not knowing is what makes life so great. I thought about banging my head on the table, thinking of the many unknowns in my life. I long used up that all-purpose cleaner trying to control love and make it perfect. Or at least make it the perfect love I dreamed of. Love can hurt. Sometimes it makes us hurt the people we love or the people we love hurt us. It comes to us when we don’t feel we are ready although it has a reason for appearing. And we might not understand that reason as we step on the road to travel with it.

In times of loss and change, it’s easy to overlook the love in our lives. As I heard last week, sometimes we have to love people for what is best for them, not always easy for us though. We have to let go of our own needs and wants for someone else’s. That can be extremely difficult when we feel pain for what we have lost, for what has changed, for what we aren’t sure is next. That’s because, love, like life, is messy. And that’s what makes it worthwhile. Just like sticky date pudding.

Here's the recipe I used the last time I created this dessert. 
 

The Smoothie

I was never a fan of breakfast, even as a kid. It also took me a long time to realize that while I loved bagels and pancakes, the heavy carbs would leave my sleepy and unproductive. In the quest to make some changes in my life several years ago, I adapted a smoothie recipe from Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food in 2011 into my morning drink.

What I like about the smoothie is that it leaves me full for several hours and gives me the energy that I need to be productive, especially because while I don’t jump out of bed in the morning, I am my most productive in the am hours.

Recently I made the change from regular peanut butter (I used the unsalted kind from Trader Joe’s that has nothing added to it) to the powdered kind by PB2. It’s become readily available as I have found it at my local grocery store and Target, however, to get a larger container of it I order it from www.vitacost.com. I’m using the powdered peanut butter to cut down on fat content.

While it’s important to have some fat in our diet, right now I’m doing a little tweaking with my body and needed to find places to cut fat and calories without sacrificing taste. I have used almond milk in the recipe in the past and I add coffee as a small caffeine boost– just enough for me. Finally, I add unflavored protein powder because I don’t want to taste it!

This recipe has saved me on days where I don’t have time for lunch but I need to keep myself going. If I didn’t make the smoothie, I might not get to lunch until 2:00 or 3:00 pm.

Feel free to adjust the amounts as they work for you.

The Michelle Smoothie

• Several ice cubes
• 1 banana
• 1 scoop unflavored Jarrow protein powder
• 2 tablespoons PB2 powdered protein powder
• 2 cups milk
• ¼ cup coffee (warm or cold)

Add the ingredients as they are listed above and then blend until everything is mixed well.