Inspiration and Cacti

Let’s keep the momentum going! This isn’t a Simple Real post, but I’ve been feeling so motivated to create and inspire, and really turn this blog into something that can make an impact on my community that I’m updating twice this week! I really want this blog to be on fire and keep it consistent, so last weekend, I decided to get serious and treat it like a job: I sat down and created a schedule for myself based on some goals that I want to achieve each week.

One of the goals I set was to write for at least 30 minutes every day. I thought it would be something realistic and doable, even on days where I’m gone from home all day. Having a writing goal in the back of my head all day gets me thinking about things to write about all day. It’s becoming easier and easier every day to write more and even go over my 30 minute time slot. I’m learning that inspiration and motivation doesn’t necessarily have to be something that I wait for to come around after seeing something beautiful (although that’s a huge source of my inspiration) or because of some new success. I recall a quote from artist Chuck Close I saw floating around Facebook one day:

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

That’s some creative truth right there.

So besides all of these goings-on, the inspiration I created today came from the bag of nopales (prickly pear cactus pads) I bought at the farmer’s market last week. The first time I tried eating cactus was at a local taco shop here in Phoenix called La Santisima. It’s in their vegan taco and oh my gato it’s delicious. Seriously, if you’re in Glendale or Phoenix, take the time to try it sometime! They have an incredible salsa bar, too.

Cactus pads are tangy and a similar texture to a pepper when cooked. They go great with other vegetables like onions, peppers, potatoes (the base of today’s recipe), and mushrooms. They can also be pickled or used raw for salsa. Just be sure to cut or burn off the dots of tiny spines called glochids that freckle the pads before cooking or eating! It would totally ruin the amazing-ness of these breakfast tacos if you were to get spines in your tongue eating them! The combination of southwest  vegetables and eggs with tortillas is a tasty twist on chilaquiles to make for a (soon-to-be) classic breakfast or brunch.

Cactus Breakfast Tacos

2 small nopales pads

½ bell pepper, diced

¼ onion, chopped

1 medium-sized potato

2 eggs, or 2/3 cup crumbled, extra-firm tofu

2 tbsp oil

1 clove garlic

1/8 tsp Paprika

1/8 tsp Chile powder

1/8 tsp Cumin

Sprinkle of allspice

Chili flakes to preference

Salt to taste

Prep the pads by shaking them around in a bowl of water and splash of vinegar for a few seconds. This will not only clean the pads, but remove some of the spines. Drain and rinse one more time, pat dry with a towel, and grill over a very hot flame til browned and blistering. The fire from grilling will burn off the spines. If you don’t have a grill, carefully chop off the spines before cutting into cubes and sauteeing with the rest of the vegetables.

In a pan, add the oil, spices, potatoes, and onions and cook until the onions are transparent and the potatoes start to become soft, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic, bell peppers, and diced cactus and cook until just heated through. Make a well with the vegetables in the pan, and add the eggs or tofu to the space created. Sautee everything together until the tofu is incorporated and hot, or the eggs are set. You can add cheese at this step if you want; fold it in just before putting everything on a plate. Serve with steamed tortillas and salsa or avocado.

In Arizona, fresh nopales are pretty easy to find – check the farmer’s markets or specialty “international” grocery stores. If you can’t find them fresh, they are also available canned, usually in the Mexican foods aisles pretty much anywhere. You can also harvest your own if you happen to have a plant growing in your own yard or have a generous friend or neighbor who will let you use some of theirs. J As scary as this vegetable might be, don’t be afraid to try something new!

Simply Real: What is Health Food?

Health food is a touchy subject. I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of, or maybe even tried the different recommendations from different doctors, nutrition “experts”, and health gurus, and wondered what exactly it all meant, and if you really had to stick to eating cardboard to be healthy.

                As I wrote this, I overheard a girl around college age telling her friends about a brand of snacks she had found, and she insisted that they were good. I heard a lot of health buzzwords: gluten-free, fat-free, sugar-free, low-carb… you get the idea. Finally, one of them chimed in, “so, basically, they’re joy free!” Seriously, as much as I agreed with this girl in this particular situation (it turns out the snack being discussed was rice cakes) this is one of the worst myths about healthy food – that it has to be boring!

Perhaps a better introduction to teaching you what health food is, is to look at what it isn’t:

Healthy food isn’t boring.

Healthy food isn’t hard to cook.

Healthy food isn’t Lucky Charms.

Healthy food isn’t hot dogs.

Healthy food isn’t quinoa.

Healthy food isn’t smoothie bowls.

This is what you might be thinking right now: “Woah, woah, woah wait Emily. You just put quinoa and hot dogs in the same list of “not healthy foods”. Your ASU degree is  totally showing.”

Now hold up.

First of all, ASU’s school of nutrition is actually a great program. But I’m not here to advertise for them. Second of all, I wanted to set a theme. Each of those points falls under a bigger idea:

Healthy food isn’t boring. Healthy food isn’t hard.

What health bloggers don’t want you to know is that health food doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t have to make a roasted butternut squash stuffed with quinoa, porcini mushrooms, and tri-colored lentils with a drizzle of cashew pesto to eat healthy. The more complicated and fancy a recipe sounds doesn’t necessarily mean it’s healthy. In fact, the healthiest food in my opinion is the simplest: steamed, baked, roasted, with some spices to make it interesting, because healthy doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice flavor. Companies like to market “health” foods according to what’s popular in the majority of “health” culture: think of the girls from earlier. Gluten-free, low-carb/paleo, fat-free; all of those are buzzwords. They sound great, but in the grand scheme of what health is, they mean very little. In future posts, we’ll look at how to use spices and different ingredients to cheaply and easily make flavorful, deceptively fancy-looking-but-simple meals.

Healthy food isn’t Lucky Charms. Healthy food isn’t hot dogs.

Long story short, this blog is called “Keeping it Real” for a reason. The “real” in the title doesn’t just refer to portraying myself in a realistic manner as opposed to the fitness model culture that is health blogging. Healthy food is real food. Sure, hot dogs are made of real meat scraps – but there’s a lot of stuff added to those meat scraps that turns it from meat to mystery meat in a tube. Healthy food is simple. It’s fresh, or just a little processed (frozen, fermented, and some canned fruits and vegetables are an example of ''good" processing).  It doesn’t come from a box on a shelf with sugar and salt and vitamins added to it because it has those things in it already.  During this series, we’ll also look at some examples of “healthy” grocery lists, and how to make eating healthy truly affordable.

Healthy food isn’t quinoa. Healthy food isn’t smoothie bowls.

Yes, both of these have their respective places in health food. I love both of them, when I can afford them, because these two items are also notoriously expensive. Who would spend $12 for a smoothie bowl when you could get a coiplr burgers for $3? It’s fad foods and expensive “alternatives” that give healthful eating a bad reputation for being unaffordable, unrealistic, and exclusive. Guess what? There’s no rule that says you have to make quinoa pilaf to be healthy. Steam some brown rice to go with your meal instead. Just because something is common and accessible doesn’t mean it’s bad for you.

What I want you to learn from this is those three main, over-arching points:

·         Health food ISN’T complicated. Health food IS simple.

·         Health food ISN’T highly processed. Health food IS fresh, or minimally processed

·         Health food ISN’T expensive. Health food IS affordable.

Keeping these three points in mind, my definition of a healthy food is one that is closest to its natural form as possible, with the highest quality in nutrition available to you.

The name and overall theme of this blog is Keeping it Real, and in our reality, not everyone has access to fresh fruits and vegetables and unprocessed food. For some, the only food they have access to is frozen, dried, or canned. If that’s you, don’t feel that it’s impossible for you to be healthy because of what is available for you. It’s wildly unfair and tragic that in the United States and many other first-world nations, people still go hungry and malnourished because of where they happen to live. I want to maintain this perspective in this series, because I want it to benefit more than just those of us who are fortunate enough to have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. We can live in an ideal world in our minds where everyone can go to the grocery store and buy the best quality food, or we can acknowledge that there is a problem with our food system and make an effort to change it. Part of my vision for this series is to begin to make that effort, starting with education.

Next week, I’ll introduce you to some basic nutrition science that explains what gives nutritional quality to foods.

Simply Real: What Exactly Is Health?

Simply Real: What Exactly Is Health?

Welcome to the very first post in a new series that I am calling “Simply Real”!  Think of it as a crash-course on everything you’ve always wanted to know, but maybe were too embarrassed to ask because it seemed so simple. Many food and health blogs these days (my own included until now!) have a bit of a problem with tunnel vision. We share fun, creative recipes and challenging workouts that seem easy to us, but not everyone starts or functions at the same level. This series is intended for those of you who are just walking into the world of healthy eating. After all, not everyone has the opportunity to grow up learning how to cook and eat healthily, or attend culinary school, or get a degree or certificate in nutrition, and you shouldn’t feel bad or miss you on the fun if you didn't. As I love to say, you should never stop learning, especially when it comes to your health. I hope that this series will teach you how to start your own adventure in health and wellness, and that it inspires you to keep learning and continue growing along the way to your health goals.

                Over the next few months, I will take you step by step through basic cooking and prep methods, spices and flavor development, alternative diets, nutrition concepts, and more. My goal with “Simply Real” is to demystify health food, and give you options. I’ll never tell you that “this is how you should eat”, because I don’t believe there is one way of eating that’s right for everyone. I will, however, give you the building blocks to make informed decisions for yourself and your family when it comes to food. And with that, we’ll begin with one of the most common questions I get asked:  what exactly is health?

Health and What it Means

                Before we get started with the fun stuff (food!), let’s look at the word "health" itself. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. There are many definitions of “health”, and it’s such a subjective word that there were several times during my schooling that we were encouraged to create our own definition for the word. The WHO definition is my favorite of the “official” definitions because I believe that health is more than a mere physical state of being. It includes the body, mind, and soul, and if any one of these is unhealthy, then the whole person suffers.

 

                I have experienced this personally myself: I struggle a lot with anxiety, and at times, depression. During times when I’m not mentally healthy, I have this awful habit of not eating. At that point, I’ve neglected my physical and mental/emotional health, and probably my spiritual health, as well. It begins a horrible loop of negative actions that take a bigger toll on my health than any one factor on its own. You need to take care of every aspect of yourself to be truly healthy. I won’t say that adopting a healthful diet will magically make all of your problems disappear; that’s never the case. However, learning how to better manage your diet can help you to notice and destroy the bad habits I’ve described above, and it can help you feel better physically. Plus, I have a degree in nutrition, not in psychology or theology, so I'll stick to my area of expertise ;)

As we begin this first part of the series, I encourage you to write down what health means to you, and really think about it: are you “healthy”, even according to your own definition? Set two or three goals for yourself based on the definition you've created, and post it somewhere you will see it every day to motivate and encourage you.

Next week, we’ll look at what “health food” really is!

The Basics: How to pick your own cactus fruit!

If you follow me on Instagram (@keepingitrealblog), you may have seen that a couple weeks ago, I took a detour on a day trip to pick some prickly pear fruit. I used the fruit to make some candies, which I featured the recipe for on this blog a long time ago (like actual years).

I was delighted to see that Phoenix Public Market was hosting a workshop on desert foraging – more specifically, on foraging prickly pears and their fruit! Peggy Sorensen is an expert on desert foraging, and hosted the workshop. Her mother – the absolute sweetest and most adorable lady I’ve ever talked to – was in the audience and talked to me about her daughter and how amazed she is at what she does after the presentation. Seriously, made my day. I also got to talk to Peggy herself afterwards, and she was excited that I was going to be writing about my day and “getting the word out” on edible desert food!

Although I’d harvested prickly pear fruits a couple times before, I learned some great information today! I also got the answer to the pressing question I had last week – what do I do with the seeds?

Basics of Processing a Prickly Pear Fruit (and Pad!)

- First and foremost: be a good steward! Us humans can be greedy and it’s easy to take more than we need simply because it’s there. Sorensen made a point to let us know to be sure to leave fruit on the plant for the birds and bugs that eat the fruit. The fruit also adds a splash of color to the desert, so let it be beautiful!

- It’s actually best for most people to find plants on private property and ask the owners if you can pick their fruit. A lot of “wild” plants may be on owned land and it’s a little sketchy to harvest in a lot of areas, though experienced foragers will tell you where you can safely harvest in the wild J

- Use tongs to gently twist fully red fruits off the plant. Put the fruit in a paper bag or a box. The tiny spines won’t poke through, and you can shake some of them off as part of the first step of removal.

- Sorensen boils her fruit for about 10 minutes. This softens and dissolves the tiny, painful spines as well as sanitizes the fruit, removing any botulism that could be on the plant.

- Remove the spines by burning on a grill or with a torch, or by soaking and rinsing 3-4 times.

- To juice the fruit, there were several methods – the one I use is to place the fruit in a blender and puree. You can also freeze, thaw and smash through a colander; process in a juicer, or use a press.

- You can use the juice to flavor teas and water – just start out using a little at a time. Many people of European and African descent are sensitive to large amounts of the raw juice and can get a little sick. If you start small, you become tolerant to it.

                - use the juice to make jelly candies or jam

                - make syrup for pancakes, ice cream, flavoring drinks, etc.

                - if you make your own kombucha, you can even add it to that during the second fermentation.

Some other cool things I learned

- The pads (green part) are edible, as well, and I’ve eaten them before. La Santisima, a taco shop in Phoenix and Glendale, as some amazing tacos featuring grilled prickly pear pads. You can grill to remove spines or peel and grill to cook. They’re similar to a pepper in texture.

- The pads are also an amazing natural remedy for infections, minor burns, and sunburns. Sorensen said she believes that the pulp and juice from the pads is more effective than aloe vera used this way.

- Filet a prickly pear pad by using tongs to hold the pad. Trim off the sides of the pad where the spines, are, then slice the pad through the middle. You can then score the juicy side of the pad and use that as a poultice for sunburns, or you can cut it up and cook it or grill whole like a steak.

- There are OVER 2,000 edible and medicinal plants in the Sonoran Desert and mountain desert alone. I learned that almost every part of both Palo Verde trees and Mesquite trees are edible – think of all the resources we have access to that we aren’t using simply because of a lack of education on the topic.

- Almost every variety of cactus and its seeds are edible – and they’re super nutritious! “Upright” cacti like saguaros have seeds that are oilier and you can blend into a seed butter. They were called the “salmon of the desert” because of their omega fatty acid content.

- THE ANSWER TO THE PRESSING SEED QUESTION: if you have a strong enough blender, grind the seeds fresh and wet, then dry the pulp in the oven on the lowest setting – break it into powder after dried. Or, dry the seeds out beforehand, brush the dried pulp off with your hands, and pulse the dried seeds in a coffee grinder.

When I spoke to Peggy after the presentation, she told me she was hoping to start teaching classes in –guess where – the west valley, particularly for the city I live in! I’m excited to learn more and hope that she’s able to start this soon. I would love to learn more about what our beautiful desert home has to offer! If you read this blog and are interested in learning more, when I find out more information about this, I will be sure to share it here and on the Instagram!