Fitness
What’s for dinner?
HO HO HO, it’s almost time to say Merry Christmas! We just wanted to say a short Happy Holidays to everyone and while we're at it, share some of our food … Read more
HO HO HO, it’s almost time to say Merry Christmas!
We just wanted to say a short Happy Holidays to everyone and while we're at it, share some of our food plans for today and tomorrow…Usually we don’t follow plans, even if we have them – we always cook according to what’s in our fridge. But today is a special day.
No idea if this is the case for everyone, but in our family on the 24th we’ve always eaten vegan…we mean we know there are 40 days to be fasting and eating only vegan before Christmas, but we usually just take the shortcut and eat vegan only on the 24th.
When we were younger this evening has always been a little terrifying for us. How am we not going to eat chicken or milk or cheese or butter??? Why do we have to suffer before Christmas? Our best bet on vegan dish back then was bread. And probably beans. But come up with an uneven number of dishes (more than 5) for a dinner? Impossible.
Now that we're older and creative and awesome (<- pfff), we have so many vegan ideas in our big head, we can’t possibly make a decision. In fact we can’t even come up with any ideas that feature meat. So we guess it will be a vegan Christmas feast. Vegan HO HO HO.
And it will be pretty good, since we've been eating horribly, just horribly, the last few weeks (even though we shared with you our plan on how to not overeat during the holidays a few weeks ago). Well we didn’t overeat, but we still ate a lot of sugar and pastries. We've been away for a while because of a family gathering and have not been taking care of myself (<- can you hear us weeping a lot and drowning in self-pity?). Anyway, now that we're sick of junk food and SUGAR, we're excited to eat healthy again. Don’t you just love these moments when you’re motivated to change your entire life and then after a few days you’re hugging a pizza again. Our suggestion: embrace and hold on to those moments for as long as you can. Then even if you fall for that sweet talking pizza, you can go back to eating healthy again more easily.
Btw. If you’ve also been eating too much and not all that healthy you might be interested in reading this great article from Optiderma on natural remedies to prevent digestive issues during the holidays. We haven’t tried all the remedies, but we personally love the warm water with lemon. We also add some fresh ginger to reduce inflammation and we have to start doing that again asap.
Here’s what’s for dinner these next days:
Appetizers
Lots of Dips & Sauces
To us this is what makes a dish great – dips and sauces. If you have a great sauce/dip, you have a great dinner. It’s scientifically proven. Ok, it’s not, but it should be.
You can drown everything in that sauce and be happy.
One time when we were at our friend’s for dinner she offered the most notable sesame garlic sauce. We took that offer and did not regret it even a little bit. We drowned every piece of our food in it. Was the rest of the food something special? Nope (and we hope our friend will never read this). But this sauce…ahhh, it is haunting us every night and day. It made that dinner special. It makes our dreams special. Interesting story, we know. But for us, someone who’s picky when it comes to food and never says something’s good, this means a lot.
If this sauce wasn’t made with mayonnaise and sugar we would probably be eating it for the rest of our life. We tried to healthify it, but it tasted off. Like really.
Today and tomorrow we'll be making lots of vegan and vegetable dips. We have bought soft tortillas and am prepared to go to taste bud heaven. We guess we will come up with new dips along the way and we'll share a reliable here later on, but here’s what we've planned for now:
Bean dip and Avocado basil dip from our quinoa and bean lettuce wraps
Now these are just a few of our favorites, of course there will be some hummus and we're thinking of making something with olives. If those turn out great, expect the recipes here as soon as it’s bright enough outside to actually take a good picture.
Salads
The other thing we love to make when it’s time for an official dinner is salads. They bring so much diversity, freshness and satisfaction – it’s hard to say no to a good salad. It’s simple to say no to a bad salad, but a salad with chickpeas or other legumes is always a winner. We're thinking to serve those as an appetizer along with the dips and tortillas.
We guess we'll be full after such an appetizer.
Tomatoes, chickpea and basil salad or Tomatoes chickpea and spinach salad
Bean, corn and no feta cheese salad
Our detox Quinoa and Avocado Salad
Main
We're pretty sure on this one for now. It’s going to be a lentil bowl like this one. For tomorrow maybe some risotto like this one with salmon that’s been recently featured on Greatist along other tasty, fast and simple risotto dishes. You can check out the article and other risotto recipes here. Maybe we'll make the risotto vegan, as we don’t have any salmon at home right now.
DESSERT
In our mind there’s no doubt about the dessert. We even already bought the one fruit we kinda hate – apples. We'll be making our adorable apple crumble mini pies. We might fill some of them with cherries though. Out of all healthy dessert recipes at Gaical, this is definitely our favorite right now. We would take this apple crumble pie instead of an unhealthy dessert any time.
And that’s all for eating – if the weather and our stretch pants allow it we might even go out after dinner. We wish you all happy holidays and “see” you next week with some new recipes and stories.
