Detox: Day 3

I'm a day late on this one - oops! I can't even remember what I had for lunch on Day 3 (Wednesday) so it was either totally unmemorable or my memory is going - perhaps it's a little of both.

So here's Wednesday's rundown:

• 7 am: Pint of room temperature water with juice of half a lemon
• 8 am: Mug of herbal tea10 am: Raspberry and rice milk smoothie made exactly according to the recipe on Goop - obviously I had a lot of raspberries.  Believe me, we're tired of this one, too.
• 11:30 am - 8 ounce glass of coconut water
• 1:30 pm - Ginger-lemongrass-coconut soup with shiitake mushrooms and mizuna
• This was a riff on my recipe for hot and sour coconut-lemongrass soup (minus the hot - no chilies allowed this week.  Bummer.)  The broth for this was really tasty but the mizuna was completely the wrong green for this soup.  I ate all the mizuna out of the soup and then ate the mushrooms and soup. Not the most enjoyable experience but the second half was way better than the first.
• 4:00 pm: handful of blackberries
• 7:30 pm: Quinoa with breakfast radishes, green beans, and red wine vinaigrette
• This was a modified version of this dish, which I've been making for a few months now and is one of our favorites.  I didn't pickle the radishes because I had bought beautiful breakfast radishes from the Madura Farms stand at the Union Square Greenmarket
• 8:00 pm: Polenta with Tristar strawberries and balsamic vinegar
• Yeah, we had dessert, what's Gwyneth going to do about it?  I bought a big basket of small, bright right, juicy, strawberries at the market and I wanted to do something more with them than just eat them raw.  I contemplated a quinoa pudding but there's only so much quinoa one can eat in a given week.  The polenta was from Cayuga organics and the sweet corn flavor went perfectly with the super sweet strawberries.  I didn't add a drop of sugar - the berries had plenty in them. I topped off the whole thing with sliced strawberries and a drizzle of high quality balsamic vinegar. I'm not sure if we loved it because it was really good or because we hadn't eaten anything remotely sweet all week, but, whatever the reason, it was wonderful.

The first few days of this diet were totally torturous, but now that it's Friday, I'm not tempted by other foods the way I was on Monday (I came home and had a showdown with a box of rosemary crackers, thankfully I, and not the crackers, won). I'm also thinking differently about how I eat and what changes I can make to my diet to make it healthier. 

• I've decided to use quinoa in place of couscous - it's much better for you and it has virtually the same texture as couscous, so why not go with the high-protein option?
• I've also decided to minimize the amount of pasta we eat (not that we eat that much, but I know that come summer, I will use it as a vehicle for the wonderful produce from the market, as I do nearly every summer) and only use really high quality pasta if and when we do eat it.
• As much as I love cheese, I realized this week that I often add it to dishes and it's really not necessary. Yesterday we had a spinach/mushroom/quinoa dish to which I normally would have added a few shavings of parmesan cheese, but the dish didn't suffer without it. I figure those few shavings on most dishes will add up and leave me for the better.

There are a few other things I'm considering, but all of the above are simple changes that aren't really radical or drastic and are very easy to implement, and more importantly, won't really alter the taste of or make me think my meals are boring.

And with that, I'm off to drink my lemon water!