Sweet Potatoes Brown Rice (红薯糙米饭)

In my list of 10 most healthy food, brown rice is number 1 and sweet potato is number 3, behind onion.  Sweet potato is also number 1 in detox, or getting rid of "poison in your body" in the Chinese saying.  This is another of my easy way to enjoy the sweet potato.  I just put it in my rice cooker and cook it with my brown rice.  For 2 cups of brown rice, I added 1 organic sweet potato, cubed and cook it like usual.  When it's done, I left it for 10-15 minutes before lightly stir it.  Be careful not to break the sweet potato as it would be soft.  It's okay if you mash some of it as well.   Sweet potato regardless of color is one of the super-food and I will make sure to eat it often.

Meatless Monday Dinner

I am showing a picture of my meatless Monday meal so that you will have an idea of what to cook for your family.  Sweet potato rice (recipe coming up next), mapo tofu with carrot and scallion, asparagus with homemade sambal and pear, carrot and onion soup (recipe posted).

Losing weight is empowering so I might do meatless weekdays and on Tuesday and Thursday to include fish.  We still eat meat on Sat. and Sun when we eat out and probably have cheat day if my hubby go buy some chicken wings.  Will have occasional Chinese herbal chicken tonic soup as well.

I want to do this and start juicing and then go get my blood test to see the effect of this on my body.  I am my own experiment and I am curious about the result.  I just came back from Malaysia and have gained 8 pounds.  After 1 week, I lost about 4-5 pounds.  Still have 3-4 pounds to lose to become where I was before.  But my goal is to lose another 5-10 pounds on top of that, then it will be the weight before I got pregnant or when I first came to the U.S.

Healthy Juice

I used to juice years ago.  At that time my mother in-law was into juicing and she encouraged me to juice for my health.  I juiced for a little while and then in my pantry it went.  I took it out recently and started juicing again but not everyday as it can be pricey as I do recommend using organic produce to juice (The best is to juice everyday and drink it in the morning).  Frankly fresh juice is delicious, I had tried the common carrot + apple, carrot + apple + celery, carrot + celery, carrot + pear + celery, pineapple + mango, carrot + cucumber and this.  As you can see, usually I have carrot as a base.  I am not quite adventurous in my juicing (as thus far no green leafy green or sprout as I eat that in my stir-fry) but I will sure to add some veggie (mostly just carrot, cucumber and celery) into the mix.   Fruit juice alone would be too sweet so my juice would be vegetable base.   Had a glass of this for late afternoon snack and surprisingly it's quite filling.  It made 1.5 glass, my Edda had the other half.  :)

I saw a documentary where a man juice for 60 days to detox and lose weight.  In these 60 days, all he ate/drank were juice from fresh vegetable and fruit.  He also exercised during these 60 days.  At the end of 60 days, not only he lost weight, looked healthy but he was indeed healthier that he no longer needed a long list of medications.   All his numbers were at normal range.  This documentary is called "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead", pretty interesting!  This lead to an interesting point, my thought of this is if people are open minded, willing to change their life styles and the way they eat, all the prescriptions for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetic would go down leading to less obesity, heart problem and other diseases.

Added Later: 
I heard that carrot is not suitable to mix with fruit when juicing because it will prevent the absorption of vitamin C.  So, it's best to separate the veggie and fruit when juicing.  Carrot and apple are the only interchangeable items that can be mixed into fruit or veggie juice.  So that our bodies can best absorb the nutrients.  Luckily the above is the most extreme that I had used.  I would suggest my readers to read more about juicing before you start.

Pear, Carrot & Onion Soup

Pear is a cooling food and usually in Chinese cooking, they used Asian pear to make tonic soup.  But for me, I find that the Bosc pear resembled Asian pear the closest as it is crunchy, sweet and juicy and I loved to use it as a substitute.  This soup is made without chicken bone/ drumstick/ pork bone so it is a healthier version without the grease.

Since it is a cooling soup, it's suitable for people who feel heaty or have a cough.  As it is good for soothing the lungs.

Meatless Thursday Dinner

A view of my meatless Thursday dinner.   I only started doing this about 2 weeks ago and I am dropping pounds.  Not much, only 1 or 2 pounds but it's dropping.  I didn't start this to lose weight but just want to eat less meat, so this was a welcoming surprised.

Turmeric garlic brown rice, asparagus with carrot in XO sauce, tofu with frozen mixed veggie and imitation lobster and Chinese fried eggs seaweed anchovies soup.  I believe most recipes already posted in my blog.

Easy Stir-Fried Carrots

Carrot is better if stir-fried it with a little oil.  It is also better if you don't peel it with a peeler but scrape it with the back of your knife and then rinse it.  Just like gobo/burdock root (outer layer is packed with nutrient too).  Since I started to plan meatless meals for my family twice a week, I need to come out with more vegetarian dishes.  Carrot has always been a side ingredient in my Chinese cooking but I wanted to make it a main ingredient so I created this easy dish.  It's really easy and only used garlic and carrot, not to say simple to make too.