One More Lesson: What's For Breakfast?--Troubleshooting and Kale Chip Recipe

Traveling can be challenging because it disrupts routine and raises questions that I don't even have to consider, ordinarily. But this disruption also offers the opportunity to re-evaluate components of that routine and see whether they work as well as I assume they do.

This is the story of why we've been home for three days and I haven't yet made a smoothie (shocker). It's not just because we've been very busy.

Until we went on our trip, my breakfast was always a green smoothie.

It was a smoothie with a lot of ingredients and in my current yeast cleanse, the base was: 

thin (homemade) coconut milk, 

coconut kefir whey, 

a carrot (sometimes two), 

frozen peas (or lately I was using frozen beans because their omega3:6 ratio is better: minutiae, I know)

three or four heaping teaspoons of my superfood mix of chlorella, wheatgrass juice powder, ginger, cinnamon, maca, tocotrienols

a little pea protein powder (seem to have been using less and less lately)

a little piece of avocado

a little blob of coconut oil

drop of stevia

a handful of greens, either fresh, or dried nettles or peppermint

and then it would sometimes have irish moss, or a few flax seeds, and sometimes some extra spice like cardamom and cloves, or cooled peppermint tea, leaves and all; sometimes a drop or two of medicine flower flavor extracts.

Originally, that amount made my breakfast, but before we went on the trip I was diluting the same amount into two smoothies and having it for breakfast and lunch. I was doing so because (despite the fact that it's not very calorie dense as smoothies go) I was feeling too full from it, uncomfortably so! And even cutting it in half, I still always felt a little sick after drinking it, to the point that I was often going right through to lunchtime with no in-between snack.

I assumed that my body was to blame--yeast die-off, etc. 

But on our trip, with a little jar of superfood mix and some unsweetened store bought coconut milk and no blender, I never felt sick after breakfast! I often ate vegetables for breakfast, or leftover salad, sometimes with a little glass of coconut milk with a little bit of the superfood powder. And I often had carrots, frozen (thawed) peas or beans for breakfast too. So it wasn't the powder per se, or the veggies. 

What gives? It seems like it was something about the smoothie itself that was making me feel icky. Interesting that I persevered, had exactly the same thing day in and day out, and it never occurred to me that if I ate something different for breakfast, I might not feel sick!

Since we got home, I've eaten leftover salad and carrots, or thawed(ish) frozen peas and beans, and carrots--weird breakfast but it works.

At this stage, I'm really looking forward to being over the yeast cleanse (three more weeks!) and going back to more fruit, in my smoothies and otherwise. I'm over the fruit-phobia with which I was afflicted when I started this blog over a year ago, with which I had been afflicted for over a year before that. I've reconnected with the recognition that I felt great for many years eating a lot of fruit. Discovering cooked root veggies and how much better I feel with them has been a great stepping stone in that direction.

More on this soon. Any ideas on why that particular smoothie combination would be so stomach-churning?

It's delightful to see all the green growth here. Down in OR, of course, it was lush and green and many steps ahead of us. There was a big stand of kale in the garden at the farm, so I made kale chips (there are dehydrators at the farm).

I'd never made these before, and of course it was my typical Ela 'throw it all together' kind of recipe, but here it is approximately:

1/4 cup coconut butter

2-3 tablespoons tahini

2 tablespoons mustard

juice of half a lemon

dusting of stevia

chili powder

chipotle powder

2 tablespoons flax seeds

1/4 cup nooch

black pepper

I added warm water to all that until it was a thick sauce, then added torn kale into the bowl until all the sauce was coating kale. Dehydrated for about 6 hours at 115--I was impressed with how quick it was.

Everyone loved them except Phil, who thought they were just ok--which often happens when I make something new. But he loathes kale, doesn't like nooch or tahini, so what do I expect? He thinks it's uncanny that all my favorite tastes happen to be the 'few' things he doesn't like. Disappointing for me at times, given our huge dietary differences to begin with, but we love each other anyway and respect each others' gustatory differences! And I've written several poems about that very situation, so it can't be all bad.

What's your favorite breakfast?