Eat Dance Live

Back in my optimal health days, I ate a grapefruit every day. There were so many great reasons to do that, and I can tell you I definitely felt a difference! You might already know that along with celery, grapefruit is one of those "negative calorie" foods, ie. it takes more caloric energy to eat it than the calories in it! There's also a flavonoid in grapefruit that helps balance out blood sugar levels and to prevent metabolic syndrome, which is when you pack on the pounds around your waist. Finally, if you start your day with a grapefruit, it actually kick starts your liver into fat-burning mode! Now, I've discovered a way not only to get my daily grapefruit in, but also add a whole bunch of other healthy ingredients to make an optimal morning or post-workout meal. I give you: The Fat Busting Smoothie This smoothie has a satisfyingly tart and "healthy" taste. Packed with fibre, all sorts of nutrients and metabolism boosting goodness, it's...

Sometimes in winter, when your face feels so cold it hurts, you just want to come home to something warm. A couple night ago, that something came in the form of a warm vegan bolognese sauce poured over gluten-free brown rice linguini. Now for your little bit of food history: Bolognese sauce is a meat-based sauce that originally came from... Bologna, Italy, of course! It was first documented in the late 18th century by the father of Italian cooking, Pellegrino Artusi (also the guy who penned one of the earliest recipes for minestrone, which he thought had made him fatally ill until he found out it wasn't bad minestrone, but cholera. No really, look it up.) The original recipe calls for meat, specifically veal (the cursed meat of all vegans), onions, carrots, and butter. Mushrooms were approved as a good addition. The recipe was pretty simple: nicely mince and brown everything, and then cook the whole thing in meat broth. My vegan recipe is almost just as simple... but healthier...

As Fall comes along and the weather gets colder, I tend to follow the "raw until dinner" rule pretty often. When I go for that option, the day is made up of fruit, green smoothies, and a few dehydrated goodies, and dinners tend to be any kind simple cooked veggies with the occasional tempeh. I've mentioned before that I tend to get a little bit obsessed with certain foods and eat them every day for a month until I move on to something new. This month, I figured why limit myself? So I took all of my favourite meals from over the past few months and put them into one. The result was this amazing  kelp noodle bowl that I created a couple days ago. It pieces together all my favourite cooked and raw foods all into one giant bowl of yummy. On top of a flavour and texture extravaganza, it's nutrition-packed, warming, and can be made in under 20 minutes. Pure deliciousness. Given its components, I'm also sure it contains all the minerals, vitamins, healthy fats, prot...

How many times have I gone on and on about my on-and-off again relationship with yoga? From an ode to discovering the beauty of a Yin  practice, to endless praises for the benefits of a daily 20 minute yoga practice , to my 3 month love affair with Bikram , I always wanted to commit... and finally, I've made the leap! I can now say that yoga and I have been in a steady relationship for about two and a half months. I don't know what came over me when we got back from our trip to France in mid-June, but I got home and knew it was time to nurture that relationship again. As usual, the first month or so was super emotionally taxing, releasing (or starting to release) all sorts of bizarre hang ups. Now, as much as yoga is always  about clearing the mind, I know it's become more about the physical practice as well, learning to push and test my limits just that much more, and grow physically as well as mentally. So far, I've been doing a minimum of two and a half hours...

I celebrated two stages of matrimonial bliss this weekend, all of them involving mountains of happiness and buckets of tears. Needless, to say it was an emotionally packed weekend, but I'll share its joys with you in the way I know best... through food. The first tearjerker was the beautiful wedding of two very dear friends. They both just  looked so beautiful and so happy. If I haven't cried already at some point during the day, all you have to do is push the "first-time-the-couple-hears-the-terms-husband-and-wife" button that just really gets me going. Call me old fashion but there's something so beautifully transitional (and traditional) about that moment that's just... timeless. But back to the food. The reception was a pot luck, and given that the bride has been a vegetarian/raw foodist/vegan, it was right up my alley. Everything I made was of course 100% organic, 100% vegan, and 100% made with love. For a main dish, I went for something that would f...

Luckily, I never really had time since I went vegan to become a "junk food vegan" before choosing to go mostly raw. However, that didn't stop me from eating my share of junk food in my pre-vegan years. Thus, like most children, I remember the very specials days when we got to make Rice Crispy Squares with my babysitter. Though the occasions were rare since we didn't eat that kind of stuff too often, it was always wonderful. The smell of melting butter, the joy of making a gooey sticky mess when I added the marshmallows in and then tried to stir in the Rice Crispies, flattening the whole thing out with the white spatula I still have in our kitchen today... pure high fructose corn syrup deliciousness. Fast-forward about fifteen years: Here I am in the natural foods store before my dance class in front of the discount shelf. And there, shining brightly in the centre of the display is Suzanne's Ricemellow Creme , a fancy vegan and gluten-free name for Marshmall...