Tips for getting your 28 on.

I'm a huge fan or Apartment Therapy, and they posted this good advice over at their cooking site The Kitchn.

I also want to share a new dressing Sarah came up with to pair with winter braising greens. They are one of the reliable winter offerings at our farmers markets and in our CSA boxes here in the PNW. They are also tough, and as advertised normally used in braising or other preparations. They make an excellent salad however when chopped and served with blue cheese, dried cranberries and a strong dressing.

One egg yolk
olive oil
apple cider vinegar
garlic clove, finely minced
salt & pepper to taste

This is so fantastic, everyone is doing it now. The egg yolk does a good job of replacing prepared mustard in my standard dressing (often not GF). I also made this once last week with ginger instead of garlic, still fantastic. The heavier dressing stands up to the texture of the greens and makes a fantastic salad.

The shame of 26

I fell short this week. Mostly because I let my tracking get disorganized.
Last night Sarah texted me that she was deadly short (she'd spent the weekend with some in-land relatives and hadn't seen a single vegetable in days).

She hustled off to the store for smoothie ingredients.

I still hadn't erased my chalk board from the week before, and wasn't super accurate with my paper tracking last week.

Also last week another friend said she was planning to try The 28, but only after she put a chalkboard in her own kitchen. I mostly thought that was funny, but tracking your 28 in a highly visible way is actually pretty important in realizing your goal each week.

Snowy Morning Breakfast

I woke up to beautiful snow falling, a rare occurrence here in Seattle.  Snowy days make me want to sit near a window drinking coffee and eating toast with jam on it.  I must have remembered this yesterday as Candice and I braved slushy precipitation at the farmer's market because I bought a little jar of Blackberry Gem from Growing Things.
Almost every morning for breakfast I make breakfast tacos.  While I generally try to add any vegetables that are laying around the house into my tacos, I've been slipping lately.  I've found myself in a totally not boring rut of cheese, bacon, hash browns, and eggs, wrapped in a corn tortilla.  Delicious, but certainly a waste of a meal if I'm trying to maximize fruit and veggie consumption.  This morning I ate 4 fruits/vegetables, not in taco form though.  Full servings of sweet potatoes, blackberries, mangos, and raspberries all found their way into my breakfast.  One of the tricks that both Candice and I have learned is the magical smoothie.  If you find yourself at 24/28 on the last day of your week (ours is today - Sunday), you can easily throw down a smoothie for your final 28.  Having a freezer full of fruits and vegetables is pretty helpful, especially in the winter when the farmer's market consists of 10 different varieties of kale and root vegetables.  Another trick is bacon.  Frying new vegetables that you are unsure of in bacon fat, or with bacon, almost always makes them delicious, butter works this way too - usually.  

Chard for beginners

Recipie Yam* Leek Chard.

So we have rainbow chard here, a leek, butter, and pre-chopped frozen sweet potatoes. You can of course use raw but I take shortcuts where I can get them. I first had a variation on this at Cafe Flora here in Seattle. This is a great dish to talk people into being chard fans. It turned me onto the stuff, and I've converted a couple people with this dish. Its very easy, chop, heat, eat. Its also a great way to force more veg into your day as a lazy weekend brunch can easily be a boozy, carby, meaty affair.

Chard prep: You need to rinse chard, kale, leeks, and most other greens REALLY well. Go ahead and do it twice. They frequently get muddy and you don't want that grit especially if you are trying to convince a new-comer.

To prep the kale I chop off the stems by folding the leaf in half, chopping off the stem, bunching the stems and chopping them roughly 1/2" thick. Set aside.








Then I cut up the chard leaves roughly 2"sq.

Leeks cut perpendicular, leave out the tough green ends, although these are good to save if you are planning to make stock. Don't forget to rinse!

Saute leeks in a generous (double pat?) of butter you want the leeks to melt not caramelize. Then add your frozen or raw cubed sweet potatoes. If you or someone you are serving is less than enthusiastic on the chard go 50/50 potatoes to chard, once you decide you love chard you can have less. Add your chard stems, once they have softened you can pile on the chard leaves.

They won't really fit, they kind of mound and try to spill out of your pan. This is normal, wait patiently for a minute or cram a lid on to speed the wilting process. Once they've wilted everything will suddenly fit in your pan. Toss all your veg to be sure its incorporated. This dish is similar to a hash.



My favorite way to eat this is topped with an egg, runny yolk in my case. It works great to fry eggs to order on the side, especially if you are making this for a large crew. This is a fantastic breakfast dish if stretched with some nice toast, maybe grits, and bacon for those that eat it. This particular pan was eaten mostly by me as a post-work out lunch.

On the day in question I cracked two eggs right into the hot pan and topped with a lid to set the whites. I probably ate 2/3rds of this as a lunch but as i said it could serve 2-4 depending on what you had as sides.

*Yeah, I know sweet potatoes aren't yams, and sweet potato / yam confusion is a serious issue but its easier to say.

So it begins.

From time to time I try to improve my health by eating at least twenty eight different fruits and vegetables in a week. This magic number comes from a study done on cancer patients tracking diet. Patients eating 28 or more fruits and veg per week had the highest survivor-ship rates, and lowest cancer rates.

This also hooks into Bill Byrson's interesting essay (In a Short History of Nearly Everything) on scurvy. Wherein he explains it is not simply a shortage of vitamin C, but a result of a monotonous diet.

Who wants a monotonous diet, who wants a monotonous life?

S and I (C), as a encouragement strategy decided to compete on our respective 28's. Today she sent me the included pic on her phone with the caption "#winning".

After some text banter we decided a blog would be the best way to track actual triumphs and defeats as well as share recipes and talk food.

So it begins. January 9th 2012. Each week begins on Monday. The competition will go until the world ends this December or barring an Aztecan Apocalypse, a mutually agreed upon finish line.

C