Hello, moment.

Watermelon Crush

Again with the watermelon - I can never get enough during the summer, and that's actually a good thing, because the benefits are practically endless:

Watermelons are an excellent source of several vitamins: vitamin A, which helps maintain eye health and is an antioxidant; vitamin C, which helps strengthen immunity, heal wounds, prevent cell damage, promote healthy teeth and gums; and vitamin B6, which helps brain function and helps convert protein to energy. Tomatoes have been highly touted as a great source for lycopene, a powerful antioxidant that helps fight heart disease and several types of cancer — prostate cancer in particular. Watermelon, however, has the highest concentrations of lycopene of any fresh fruit or vegetable.

Hear that? It's practically a superfruit! I ate about 1/3 of that quarter up there sliced up for dessert on Monday, made juice out of half of it on Tuesday, and froze the rest for a slush this morning. Now it's gone, and I'm pretty sad about that. Is it possible to eat too much watermelon? No, right? Let's go with no, because I'm going to buy another one this weekend.

So anyway, they're simple enough to figure out on your own, but here are two great watermelon recipes, one from my own kitchen, and one not from my own kitchen. First, watermelon and classic (yellow) peach juice. You might think you've seen this recipe somewhere before, but you'd be wrong, because that recipe calls for white peaches, and this one uses yellow peaches. Totally different animal, trust me.

To Get:

- About 1/8 of a watermelon
- One or two yellow peaches

To Do:

Throw everything into your juicer (I use a Breville Juice Fountain - I love it and it cost me less than $100), pour it into a Mason jar over ice and top it with your Cuppow because you know you're a total hipster, stick a stripey straw in there (hipster), and suck it back. Breakfast! Or lunch! Or a snack! It's never not perfect!

And also, frozen watermelon slush from You Are My Fave. Caveat: I left out the water, strawberries, and most of the sugar, and I blended mine into a consistency that was more ICEE than Slush Puppy, and then I ate it with a spoon for a mid-morning snack.

Oh, watermelon. Love you forever.

Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter

It's arguably the most famous sauce on the Internet, this perfect, simple pasta sauce adapted from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking. And it's been my go-to sauce for a few years now, perfect because I don't like to fuss in the kitchen, but I only want to eat things that taste amazing, and this sauce fits that description perfectly. It has three simple ingredients and cooks slowly while you work or clean the kitchen or put your feet up and snuggle a dog or two.

I made it tonight for dinner because it's Monday, and I'm fairly sure that's as good a reason as any to boil up some spaghetti and make a sauce from scratch. Also, I have leftovers, and that means lunch tomorrow and maybe, maybe even dinner on Wednesday. It's perfectly reasonable, pasta three times in a week, especially when you're a single gal. Or a not so single gal. Or anyone, really.

Ingredients:

- 28 ounces whole, peeled, canned plum tomatoes (you want San Marzano if you can get them)
- 5 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1 medium-sized yellow onion, peeled and halved
- Salt to taste

Method:

Put the tomatoes, onion and butter in a heavy saucepan over medium heat. Bring the sauce to a simmer, then lower the heat, keeping the sauce at a slow, steady simmer for about 45 minutes, or until the fat floats free of the tomatoes. Stir occasionally, crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot with a wooden spoon. Remove from heat, discard the onion, add salt to taste, and keep it warm while you prepare your pasta. A note about discarding the onion: if you find it too good to let go of (like I do), stand there and eat it while you wait for your pasta water to boil. I won't tell.

Music:

Ryan Adams - Gold (the entire album; you've got time)

Summer Sips: White Peach Lemonade

Summer arrived a couple of days ago - for most folks. It's been creeping in for weeks here in Florida, frizzing up everyone's hair and soaking us with mid-afternoon showers and keeping us inside during the hottest part of the day. I still love every bit of it, though, and this lemonade is the perfect accompaniment. I adapted it from Mirch Masala, only changing a couple of things - using white peaches instead of yellow, honey instead of sugar, and reducing the amounts to account for my single gal needs.

I love white peaches - they're a little sweeter than yellow peaches, a bit more delicate, floral, and well, pink. You can use yellow if you like - just make sure they're nice and ripe or you'll need to use more honey. Your best bet is to go with whatever is fresh and local, so let that lead the way.

Ingredients:

- Two white peaches, chopped and stone removed.
- 3 lemons.
- Local honey (as much as you want).
- Water.

Method:
First, get out your juicers - electric and citrus. If you don't have a juicer, a blender (and a reamer, or your muscles) will do nicely. Juice your peaches, then use your citrus juicer to juice your lemons. Add the honey to your peach juice, then add your lemon juice to that. Pour it all into your favorite lemonade serving apparatus (I used a large vintage Mason jar because I have a lot of those on hand, and very few other containers), add as much water as you want, and shake it all up. This made about 32 ounces for me. I dig my lemonade pretty strong, so your mileage may indeed vary.

Pour it over ice, add a straw, and take it out to your back yard and drink it up. You can drink it anywhere of course, but it won't taste quite the same if you're not outside. It's a summertime rule, I think. Serve it at an outside dinner party and wow your friends with your hipster homemade lemonade mixology.

Music: Daft Punk + Pharrell Williams - Get Lucky

What I talk about when I talk about food

I realize that most of what I've been writing about lately has been nutrition and health related, but it's become pretty central to my life and it's on my mind a lot. I spend a lot of time reading books and watching documentaries and talking about it, and while it's super interesting to me, I hope it's not too boring for everyone else! Topics around here will probably even out soon, but writing about it helps me keep track and process things, and this blog comes in pretty handy for that. So here's to more of the same for now, and the hope that you'll hang in there!

So, food. One of the biggest personal projects I've ever undertaken in my life has been the transformation of my diet from what was arguably a lot worse than the so-called Standard American Diet (which isn't great to begin with) to one that is healthy, whole, and sustainable. Here's a short list of things I've changed over the past six months:

- Stopped eating fast food.
- Stopped drinking soda.
- Cut out white sugar almost completely, and stopped using Splenda entirely.
- Switched to local, organic, grass-fed meat.
- Which I eat a lot less of nowadays (meat, in general).
- Started juicing with fresh, local, organic produce.
- Cut out most processed food with a goal of going completely unprocessed.

It's still a process, but all these changes have made a huge difference in how I feel, both physically and emotionally, and how I look. My skin is clear, and the dark circles that used to take up permanent residence under my eyes have vacated. I have plenty of energy, and I feel really, really good in general. I even sleep better, which was totally unexpected but also completely welcome. Obviously!

Food was so confusing to me for such a long time. First, it was confusion over what to eat, then confusion over how to stop craving junk and processed food and then it was exhaustion over the effort that it took to make the changes. But everything gets easier with time and consistency, and now I find myself on the other side - a place where I never really thought I'd be. It seems simple, but for someone who was raised with processed food, fast food, a massive sugar addiction, and a real lack of nutrition education, it's a minor miracle. I feel really grateful, and really blessed, and pretty proud of myself, too. It's no minor thing to completely renovate your diet and make big changes to your own health, you know? I did that. I am awesome.

Here are the documentaries, books, and resources that have helped me the most in my progress. Maybe they'll help you, too!

Documentaries:

Food, Inc.
Fresh
Ingredients
Hungry For Change
Food Matters
Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead
Crazy Sexy Cancer

Books:

Salt Sugar Fat
In Defense of Food
Food Rules
The Art of Simple Food
Unprocessed

Resources:

Slow Food Tampa Bay
Florida Fresh Meat
Saturday Morning Market
The Alkaline Sisters
Raw Raw Life