“Best Your Stress Month” Winds Up and Recipes

What a great experiment Best Your Stress Month has been. One day to go. I have room for great amounts of improvement, but I have also done a lot to relax and plan to keep it up. Today was an Olympic relaxation effort. A day that goes down as the most relaxing in the last decade. I started the morning with an almost two hour walk with my dog. I am continuing to look off of the path and have discovered amazing new flowers. How can I walk these paths for the last few years and never have seen them? I am trying to apply the “look around” to other parts of my life – maybe new and fun things will result.

After that I prepared a leisurely breakfast of bacon and fresh strawberries, and I eventually made my way to the store to pick up a few things for a paleo Singapore Street Noodles recipe I am going to make tomorrow.

After lunch (turkey and veggies wrapped in toasted Nori), I tinkered with Ryan, planting the flowers that he and Colson are growing from seeds. Then we were off to an amazing performance of Carmina Burana, with our Oriental medicine doc playing percussion at the request of the symphony. What doesn’t that guy do? There were over 400 people on the stage, between the orchestra, chorale and soloists. What a gorgeous, bawdy and hysterical performance. Little did I know that Carmina Burana is often used in movies and, according to Colson, in the Maria Brothers Wii soundtrack.

When we got home, with huge smiles on our faces and lots of conversation about the performance, I hung out on the back deck with the neighbors (thanks to Ryan's urging), cooked a delicious and easy lamb burger and green bean dinner, and then some more relaxing with the neighbors.

And now I am leisurely writing this blog post at 9:00 while listening to Run DMC (that is Ryan’s doing – he about fell over when I told him they were sampling the Doobie Brothers. He thinks he is the king of rock - whatever). That kind of day needs to happen more often.

People have been waiting for me to blog my family’s daily meals, and I just haven’t gotten to it. I needed today to relax, as we have spent the last several doing home school stuff, including finishing up Colson’s geography fair project on Greece.  I made some really delicious paleo sweet potato hummus for the fair - the recipe will follow. The reason that we got so jammed up and I haven’t blogged is that I decided that Colson needed to write neatly using upper and lower case letters. What would normally take a half day took five. Even after the arduous and somewhat painful writing effort, Colson loved his final exhibit and is ready to go again next year. This was the best geo fair we have participated in, and Colson is really proud of himself. He even learned to mind map, which is powerful for brainstorming and ultimately for organization, and he quickly adopted it and ran with it. Here is my rockin’ geography fair superstar:

And here is the Sweet Potato Hummus recipe (adapted from garbanzo bean version used by the Lebanese side of my family):

• Enough baked sweet potatoes to approximately equal 1 can of Progresso garbanzo beans
• 1 large clove of garlic
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 2 T tahini
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/4 t cayenne pepper

Put it in a food processor and whip it up. Adjust taste as needed. 

Now to figure out what to do. With all of this relaxation I am not remotely tired and it is 9:00. 

 

Comments

[Wholefoodhalfas]

Hey there, it's Sarah from Whole Food Half Ass. Just wanted to see how the Singapore Street Noodles turned out. Thanks for trying our recipe!!

[Laura Combs]

Thanks for checking in. They totally rock! I need to update folks on that. Even my 9 year old loves them. Need to scope your site some more - and love the title of it by the way.

[Erin]

That's so funny you made sweet potato hummus! I just made some a couple days ago for the first time. I had tried it at Whole Foods once and it was sublime! After my father-in-law tried it, I'm not joking, his real-food attitude had a shift. Instead of grumbling about not having his junk food, he actually has started telling others about how great my cooking is! He even asked me to put an egg yolk in his soup last night since that is what my husband, children and I had in our soup! I can hardly believe he now wants to eat like us!!! Praise God! Who knew the sweet potato hummus would finally win him over!

[Erin]

BTW, I used navy beans instead of chickpeas since they're supposed to be a little easier to digest.