Pink Monster

This morning as I was setting up the ingredients for my Green Monster I realized I had forgotten to purchase a key ingredient-- kale! Duh! Alright so you may think I'm crazy but ask yourself this: how many vegetables have you eaten today? Ketchup, by the way, does not count as your vegetable for the day. Green Monsters are a great way to pack in those greens your body needs and is especially excellent if you are a picky eater! By no means am I a picky eater but I am always on the lookout for ways to bump up my vegetable intake.

The reason why I like kale so much is because it is a dark, dark green. The rule of thumb is the darker the green, the more nutritious, which is why you should replace all of that iceberg lettuce with some spinach, romaine or arugula... Anyway, kale has great antioxidant and anti-cancer properties as well as being a great source of vitamin C. My only issue with kale is that it is a very rough green, which makes it a bit difficult to eat raw. Steaming it with garlic would be delicious but you could also tear up three leaves and throw it into your blender along with your favorite smoothie ingredients. Your smoothie will turn green with envy (from all the benefits your body will receive from it!) and you will just have fulfilled part of your vegetable requirement for the day. Woo-hoo!

While I forgot the kale, I did remember my other ingredients:

1 cup 0% fat Greek yogurt
1/3 frozen banana (freeze your browning bananas!)
6 frozen cherries
1/2 cup water
1/2 avocado


Just throw everything into a blender and in a minute or two you will have a creamy smoothie that you will swear is sinful. If you want your smoothie to be a bit thinner just add more water while blending. While it ended up being a Pink Monster due to the cherries and lack of kale, this sucker kept me full for the entire afternoon!


Check out Oh She Glows for more Green Monster ideas! I have a sneaking suspicion that I will be stuck in my apartment tomorrow, so I'm going to give you all a peak into my grocery shopping habits!

With health,

Melissa

Ping Pong Dim Sum

If you read my London blog (BubblesandSqueak)
you will know that I am an enormous fan of the dim sum restaurant Ping Pong. Well last night I was one of 400 lucky people to attend their Chinese New Year event at their first and only US location located right here in D.C.! The music was booming, people were dancing and the smell of steaming and frying dim sum was in the air. The first time I ever had dim sum was when I was in high school on a Model UN trip. We walked into this huge banquet hall (well, it used to be a banquet hall but was bought over the a restaurant), sat down at an enormous table and just started ordering foods such as dumplings and spring rolls. Plate after plate of fried, steamed and griddled foods were placed on the table and we all ate to our heart's content.

Every dim sum restaurant I have ever been to functions in this way. People come around with carts filled with plates of food, they check off a piece of paper which indicates what you took from the cart and you just let it all keep coming to you (until you get the bill, uh-oh!). Ping Pong is a bit different-- you first check off the food that you would like (and you know the prices ahead of time!) and then the food comes to you which will ultimately result in your mouth being so pleased that you will order more. Seriously.

The restaurant was set up beautifully, with the chairs and most of the tables cleared leaving room for mingling and dancing. They even set up a dim sum instructional station along with a Chinese calligraphy station, which I thought made the evening really special. Waiters and waitresses with blue/green-painted faces walked around with stacks of wooden steamers and placed the pieces of dim sum into eager hands using chop sticks as their utensil.

Here I am with my friend Bill holding a vegetable bun which is a soft, fluffy, white bun filled with vegetables such as baby corn, all drenched in a succulent brown sauce.


Other foods of the night included a chive dumpling filled with king prawns and chives, scallop and shitake dumplings, crispy hoi sin duck spring rolls (one of my personal favorites!), vegetable spring rolls, crispy prawn balls and fried banana with a chocolate dipping sauce... because there is always room for dessert.





On top of the great crowd, lion dancers, music and food, we were all given these fabulous gift bags containing flowering green teas, chopsticks, a copy of their wonderful menu, a gift card and (my personal favorite) a wooden steamer!



I can't wait to put that thing to use! Any suggestions?

Tomorrow I will be showing you how I make one of my favorite Green Monsters!

With health,

Melissa

p.s.- I asked one of the calligraphers write out "health" for me. It is now on the wall above my nightstand as a mindful reminder of what I'm all about.

Whittle My Middle-- or something like that?!

So as promised, I am going to share with you my new fitness plan! Usually I go to the gym and do 30ish minutes on the elliptical and 30ish minutes of strength and try to change it up but this never ends up actually happening. Instead, I end up doing the exact same thing every single day (anyone else with me here?!). My favorite blog, which inspired me to slurp up Green Monsters in the mornings (more on these on Thursday), is called Oh She Glows and is written by a woman named Angela.

About a month ago she started the second "Whittle My Middle" workout plan and I decided to start it on the first of February. You can find the link here: and please follow along with me if you are stuck in a fitness rut, too! I've only been doing these exercises for the past two days and I already feel like I am standing up straighter and I recognize my core muscles when doing simple things such as bending foreward. I think I am going to supplement these routines (which have so far been taking me about 8 minutes) with elliptical and strength training and see what happens-- who knows, maybe I will lose an inch or two?

I am definitely pretty strong-willed about working out. As my Mom has always told me, "If you like to eat you are going to have to love working out." I certainly believe that but I also believe that you are doing a disservice to your heart if you don't strengthen it. (Can anyone say cardiac muscle?!). Anyway, I will let you all know how it is going and what the results are along the way. I encourage all of you to change up your fitness routines in order to call on different muscles. In my own experience, I've found that if workouts become boring they simply will not work, so do something different for your body! Plus, working out gives you the right to reward yourself with something like a satisfying soy-vanilla shake made with frozen berries. YUM!

OK, OK enough with all of this fitness stuff! Today I ate a breakfast of organic honey-nut cereal and milk with blueberries, a lunch of oatmeal bread with organic provolone cheese and roasted turkey, a sliced apple and toffee-something Cliff bar for snack and a dinner of... well... a lot. I was invited to the Ping Pong D.C. Chinese New Year Event and trust me, I ate to my heart's content. I took a TON of pictures and had a wonderful time and will dedicate my entire post to the event tomorrow!

With health,

Melissa

"Veggie Bites" Gets A Blog!

I. Love. Food.

This is a relationship that stems from the early days when I ate a handful of my first birthday cake before the "Happy Birthday" was sung, and the time when I chose to have grilled chicken and Penne a la Vodka on the kid's menu at my Bat Mitzvah-- I figured it would be a nice escape from all of those chicken nuggets.

I want to share my love of food with the world and inspire people to realize that food should not just be thought of as something you utilize three times a day in order to satisfy hunger. When you really think about it, those three meals a day (plus a couple of snacks thrown in here and there) are the perfect opportunities for you to celebrate your body and nourish it with only the best, most delicious foods. I hope that through this blog you will learn to do so.

For those who do not attend American University (AU), "Veggie Bites" is an AU-based vegetarian cooking show that teaches college students how to cook vegetarian meals that are both satisfying and delicious (even for omnivores!). To clarify, I myself am not a vegetarian. You might be wondering why I'd create a vegetarian cooking show if I eat meat. So many of my friends and colleagues at AU are vegetarians and I wanted the show to target an audience of people who may feel left out in terms of on-campus food options, and provide them with vegetarian recipes that are healthful crowd-pleasers. Despite the fact that I eat all foods, I have a great appreciation for foods that come from the earth and choose not to spoil my body with chemicals or processed food-like items (yes, 100-Calorie Packs and Nutri-Grain bars, this includes you!).

I am going to include several topics in this blog:
*media updates and recipes from "Veggie Bites"
*the food that I eat, which does largely consist of vegetarian meals
*the food I discover in Washington, D.C. and beyond
*fitness tips (not that I know many!)
*food blogs and articles that I think you will find interesting

Tomorrow I am going to tell you all about my new fitness regime and my favorite food and lifestyle blog!

With health,

Melissa