Holiday parties and get-togethers are the perfect opportunity to try out a few new recipes (and possibly convert some of your meat-eating friends and loved ones). Here are a few easy vegan appetizer ideas to serve up this December.

Frosty’s Falafels

Though most people eat falafels as part of a main course, I think they make great appetizers. To get really creative, stick a large toothpick through three falafel balls stacked on top of each other, add humus eyes and a smile, and call it a falafel snowman.

Ingredients:

• 1 can of chickpeas, drained
• 1 large onion, diced
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 3 tablespoons flour
• Vegetable oil
• 2 tablespoons cumin

Directions:

• Add chickpeas, onion, garlic, and cumin into a food processor or blender.
• Blend until relatively smooth and freeze the night before or in the morning.
• The next day, add plenty of oil to a hot frying pan.
• Add flour to the mixture and mix in with spoon.
• Roll the mixture into small balls.
• Fry on all sides until dark brown.
• Serve with humus and/or tahini.

Blitzer’s Bruschetta

Another crowd pleaser, bruschetta is easy to make and goes great with practically every meal. Italian food naturally incorporates Christmas colors (and, coincidentally, the colors of the Italian flag), so you don’t have to try too hard to call this holiday food.

The toppings should be added to the bread just before serving, or else the bread will be soggy. For a more tangy flavor, vinegar can be used as a substitute for or paired with the olive oil.

Ingredients:

• Lightly toasted bread of your favorite variety
• 3 large tomatoes, diced
• Salt
• Olive oil
• Oregano

Directions:

• Slice bread in pieces one inch thick.
• Place a spoonful of tomatoes on top of each slice.
• Next, drizzle a bit of olive oil on the tomatoes.
• Add a pinch of salt and a pinch of oregano.

Festive Fruit

If you’re running short on time, you can whip up this Christmas-colored fruit dish in a few minutes.

Ingredients:

• 1 package of strawberries
• 6 kiwis
• 3 red apples
• 1 package of green grapes

Directions:

• Chop up kiwis, strawberries, and apples into bite-sized chunks.
• Pairing kiwis with strawberries and apples with grapes, arrange each set of fruits into holiday shapes like stars or Christmas trees.

Jasmine is a chronic traveler scouring the world’s streets for vegetarian and vegan street food. She is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on accredited online universities for Guide to Online Schools.

Rules to Eat By
[Source]

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, who also contributed to the movie Food Inc., has written in the The New York Times several times and I’m finding his most recent contribution, “Rules to Eat By” here, incredibly compelling.  Pollan is writing a book called Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (due out in Jan.) in which he surmises “for all the authority we grant to science in matters of nutrition, culture still has a lot to teach us about how to choose, prepare and eat food, and that this popular wisdom is worth preserving — perhaps today more than ever, in this era of dazzling food science, supersize portions and widespread dietary confusion.” He then asked readers of NYT to share their own “rules to eat by” — pieces of wisdom and advice they could share on how they eat the way they do — of which he chose his favorite 20 and included them in the article.  I have listed my favorite five from his list, but encourage you to read them all — they are amazing!

• Don’t eat anything that took more time to ship than grow.
• If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you are not hungry.
• Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it.
• Don’t create arbitrary rules for eating if there only purpose is to help you feel in control.
• Never eat something that is pretending to be something else.

In the News/Blog-Land

• New Scientist‘s, “Has the Pill Changed the Rules of Sexual Attraction?” (10/7/09) here
• Science Daily‘s, “Los Angeles Fast-food Restaurant Ban Unlikely To Cut Obesity, Study Finds” (10/7/09) here
• New York Times‘, “The Calorie-Restriction Experiment” (10/7/09) here You may need to register for free to access.
• Science Daily‘s, “Exercise Improves Body Image for Fit and Unfit Alike” (10/9/09) here
• Nicole Eggert fires back to all the fools who’ve called her fat here – Loved this.
• The F Word’s “From Hollywood to Bollywood: The whittling waistlines of Indian actresses” (10/9/09) here – Does Westernization mean weight-obsession?
• Science Daily‘s, “Owners Should Count Calories For Obese Pets, Consider Several Factors For Good Health” (10/9/09) here

Give-Away Round Up

• Win a copy of the Food Inc. book and coupons for free Oikos Greek Yogurt here
• Win some Silk Soy Milk here

What are your “rules to live by” and your “rules to eat by”?  Weekend plans?!  The boyf and I are going thrift shopping and then eating sushi (vegetarian for me, of course!) tonight.  Tomorrow is writing my paper and presentation day and Sunday is band practice and  then more homework!

<3, The Cranky One

p.s. Good luck to Lauren and Morgan on their races this weekend!

Hey guys!  I was doing my usual random health readings and research (*cough*NERD*cough*) and I came upon a BBC news report about there being a strong link between obese parents and their children of the same sex.  See BBC video here; The summary of the actual study may be found here.

If you know me, you know that I am very opinionated when it comes to health and parenting.  Do I have children of my own? Gracious no — I’m still a baby!  But it’s certainly not too early for me to start thinking about these important issues, no?   What I found most interesting is this quote from the study’s director:

“These findings could turn our thinking on childhood obesity dramatically on its head. Money and resources have focused on children over the past decade in the belief that obese children become obese adults, and that prevention of obesity in children will solve the problem in adulthood. EarlyBird’s evidence supports the opposite hypothesis – that children are becoming obese due to the influence of their same-sex parents, and that we will need to focus on changing the behaviour of the adult if we want to combat obesity in the child.”

Am I the only one who had a “no shit duh” reaction to this?

From Saltycotton on Flickr
Does a “Little Mother Goose” have little geese?  An obese mother goose, obese geese?

I mean, it’s true — we do spend a lot of resources on healthifying (yes, I know that’s not a word) school lunches and banning vending machines.  And, at the end of the day, we all know that these efforts really contribute little to a child’s overall future well-being if he then goes home and plops down next to dad on the couch and is spoon-fed lard from a tub.

Of course behaviors towards food and fitness are learned and particularly correlative between a kid and the same-sex parent he or she presumably mirrors most.  But this study left me cocking my head to one side and going…yea, but what about…

• Families where one parent is absent or might as well be considered absent? Isn’t the child, whether his or her parent is the same sex or not, going to mimic and copy those same lifestyle patterns regardless of the parent’s sex?  Yes, I realize the study said that kids are 10 times more likely to be obese if their parent of the same sex is.  But I think what the study is pointing to is that if the parent with the most influence is obese, he or she, in general, will rear obese children.  Do you agree? So, I feel that yes — we definitely should focus our resources on healthifying parents!  DUH!
• Families where one or both parent(s) lead unhealthy examples but are not obese? We’ve all seen these parents who eat like crap and yet are not obese – -usually because they are chain smokers, drug users, have eating disorders, have anomalous and/or fortunate gene pools or whatever — the point being that they do not get obese from typical “obese behavior.”  If, for some reason, the kid isn’t blessed with super-de-fatting-genes and doesn’t take on early-age drug use (or something), won’t the kids suffer a fate of being obese even if the parent(s) did not?
• Families with kids of multiple births? Being a twin, I always have to throw the twin angle into the mix.  Neither my mom nor dad were obese when my twin and I were obese.  Our older brother, also, was not obese. I feel like my twin and I were a bit accustomed to being our own familial unit and we both developed poor eating habits that spiraled out of control and were propelled by mutual reinforcement of these behaviors. In other words, we were not so concerned with mirroring our parents, but mirroring each other.  This is why when one twin finally got on the health band wagon, this twin did too.

What do you guys think about the relationship between parents and children and behaviors towards food and fitness?  Is there, in your view, more of a correlation between kid and parent of the same sex?  What about between siblings?

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Remember to check out all the contests listed here and add these to the list:

• Want to win The Eating Well Diet Book? Click here.
• Want to win some swag and ginger candy chews? Click here.

Later this Week

• Another video post? Why yes, yes! I will be doing a review of some damn good vegan cookies sent my way. I know my facial expressions can get a little out of hand, but I just happen to be rather expressive! Hope ya find it amusing
• MizFit Thursday!

News Alert

• Macaroni Grill offering healthy options?!  I’ll be honest — Mac Grill is pretty much the last place you’d ever find me dining at.  But with that being said, congrats to them for getting on the “let’s do what’s right” bandwagon and offering some revised and healthier choices (for CA peeps only so far, sorry!). Check out some cool new options here and thanks to Hungry Girl for the heads-up!
• MixMyGranola alert — Get 20% off your entire order when entering promotion code “MIDSUMMER” at checkout.  Ends on Thursday, July 16th at 12pm.

<3,

The Cranky One

What My Boyfriend Taught Me About Healthy Eating (W/o Saying a Word)

1. Eat when you are hungry. Seems simple enough but I think most of us know that it really isn’t!  Some of us snack mindlessly (guilty!), eat when we are not hungry (guilty!) or when we are full (guilty!).  If we simply listen to our body — it talks to us, why don’t we listen?! — it would be so much easier to have a healthy relationship with food.
2. Eat what you want. My boyfriend eats what he wants and for this reason he never binges or suffers from angry moods spawn from restrictive eating.  The thing is – since he listens to his body, the actual portions of what he eats are so much smaller in comparison to how much I would eat of that same food.  If I had a huge slice of cheesecake, I would want to eat it all even if I were not hungry or full.
3. Stop eating the second you are full. This boy stops eating the SECOND he feels he might be full. He just drops the fork and exclaims he’s done.  As someone who is accustomed to cleaning her plate no matter what, this has always shocked me.  “How can you leave that cookie on your plate?!  How did you not finish your french fries?!” I’ve asked almost in panic. “I’m full” he says with a shrug.
4. Share your food. He’s never hesitant to share his food.  You will unceasingly catch him trying to fork me over a tiny sliver of this or that.  Why is this important? Because he realizes that food is delicious and it’s not something to be shunned.  But that also doesn’t mean you should eat a pound of chocolate cake in one sitting.  He will kindly pass me a fork-full of a treat he eats knowing that, in reality, one bite of a treat is really all one needs to get the satisfaction of having it.  Plus, sharing food is such a sweet gesture that really reminds me that food is about nourishing mind, body and spirit.  It’s not this demon lurking in the corners or a Siren singing you to doom. It’s f-o-o-d.
5. Talk while you eat. He loves to chat while he’s eating and this is genius!  When I eat it’s like an event and the guest speaker is my food.  My boyfriend takes a bite and starts talking (yes, sometimes while still chewing LOL). The fact is — he doesn’t have food on a pedestal.  He’s eating because he’s hungry.  Food is a way to bring us both to the table, face to face.  He relishes his companion at the table (that’s me *cue the awws*), much more than his food.  Plus, taking breaks while eating to discuss Aristotle’s Poetics gives his tummy time to say “hey, I think I’m getting full over here!”

So there you have it.

I said in a prior post that I no longer wanted to lose weight, that it was now about being fit and strong.  Unfortunately I do continue with a bit of a scale addiction and have watched my weight continue to maintain and even go up here and there.  But there’s one thing the scale has not been telling me that I know it means to…

I’m a Bad-Ass

There’s a budding bicep there, promise!

Gotta love how *amazing* it feels to be getting stronger.  I can see definition coming into my arms and back.  My one cherished chin-up is turning into two and three.  I’m holding my planks and L-sits longer.

Being physically stronger makes me feel emotionally stronger. Craziness.

Has anyone in your life taught you a very important lesson without saying a word?  Do you have a healthy attitude towards food? How are your budding biceps?