High Protein, Green Goddess Salad

You will hear me repeat familiar mantras, over and over again when talking about midlife womens health and hormonal change, and one of those mantras is: ‘fibre is a midlife womans best friend’.

Studies tell us, only 5% of U.S. citizens consume enough fibre in their diet, in Canada only half of the population gets the fibre it needs and in the UK all age groups, across the board, consume less than the government recommendation of 30g per day.

This issue of being deficient in fibre comes to a head when we are in peri-menopause as fibre helps us to manage the spikes and crashes of hormone in our bodies. Fibre can reduce the severity of the symptoms we feel day to day, by hooking onto the cholesterol tail of excess estrogen and carrying it out of the body in our daily detox (read poop!)

Detox is not just for 1 week, twice a year. It is happening 24/7/365 and fibre DRIVES the detox pathway where we POOP out toxins and excess hormone that body does not need. It’s important for our liver health and helps to prevent colon cancer.

We also need to be aware, as we enter peri-menopause, that estrogen has a role in creating insulin sensitivity in our bodies.
This means, as estrogen depletes, we experience a metabolic change in our bodies and we are gently pushed towards insulin resistance and diabetes.

We have the power on our plates and in the way we move our bodies to adjust our diet and lifestyle and compensate for this metabolic shift.

Fibre is one of the tools we can use in our diet to both help slow down the passage of glucose to our bloodstream and prevent cravings for sugar as we feel fuller for longer.

We can also add protein to our meals to help us to manage our blood sugar levels when we lose the support of estrogen.

So, this is not your flimsy iceberg lettuce salad, that leaves you feeling empty and wanting more, but a satisfying, hefty salad to support our midlife health with a double whammy of fibre and plant based protein.

I made this salad with chickpea pasta which comes in at a whopping 23g of fibre per 100g serving and added frozen peas and pistachios for their fibre and protein contribution.

Substitute a can of chickpeas if you cannot find the pasta. Choose any type of nut that you enjoy or have on hand and frozen edamame beans are a great substitute for frozen peas.

This is a pick your own adventure of a salad. What’s important is the completion of the recipe, not perfectionism. Trust yourself, you know what you love!

There is another beautiful aspect of adding fibre to your diet, if you are in peri-menopause or menopause. Many fibres contain lignins, plant fibres, which mimic estrogen in the body and can reduce menopausal symptoms using gentle phyto, or plant based estrogens.

As we move through hormonal change we will experience dips in estrogen and our ultimate destination is a place where our adrenal glands drip feed us with a much lower level of estrogen than we are used to. Every time we add phytoestrogen to our plate we are supporting our adrenal glands and our libido, brain and bone health.

This recipe contains phytoestrogens in the chickpea pasta, the sesame seeds in the tahini and the edamame or peas.

Vegetables and herbs are packed with fibre and this salad is rich in both.

I added white cabbage, cucumber and zucchini to pistachios and frozen peas.

Again, pick your own adventure with the vegetables but, if you are experiencing hot flashes, you will want to add some sort of cabbage, Brussels sprouts or broccoli, as the cruciferous vegetables directly support the liver with the compound indole-3-carbinol to remove excess estrogen from the body.

This is going to directly reduce your uncomfortable symptoms of hot flashes and is also protects your body from breast cancer. Yay for the common cabbage, the protector of midlife womens health!

I added cilantro, parsley, chives, mint and homemade pesto as the herbs for the Green Goddess dressing. Use what you have in your store, refrigerator or garden and if you have a jar of pesto, you can use that also to amp up the flavour.

Know that fresh herbs are rich in vitamin C, our relaxation mineral, magnesium and antioxidants.

Herbs are very rich in nutrition and can be easily grown in the home or on a balcony, liberating you from the supply chain. We should all be eating more herbs in our diet as we did in the past.

This recipe took about 20 minutes to make, including cooking of the pasta and will sit in the refrigerator for several days, holding up better than any limp lettuce confection..

Enjoy this mouthful of summer flavour!

Ingredients

For the Salad
100g or 1/2 packet chickpea pasta cooked to the directions of the box or 14oz can of chickpeas drained.
1/4 small pointy green cabbage
1/4 cup pistachios
1/2 cup frozen peas
3 small zucchini diced
1/2 English cucumber diced

For the Dressing
Juice 1/2 lemon
1 tbsp tahini
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1/2 red onion
2 cloves garlic
1 cup pressed full of herbs (cilantro, Basil, parsley, chives, mint and jar or homemade pesto if needs be)
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
Salt and pepper to taste
Up to 1/2 cup filtered water to get the cinsitency you wnt in the dressing.

Instructions

Cook the pasta as per the directions on the packet or open a can of chickpeas and drain.
While the pasta cooks, finely slice the cabbage, dice the zucchini and cucumber and place in a large bowl.
Add the nuts and frozen peas or edamame to the bowl
Add the cooked and drained pasta or drained chickpeas and combine all the salad ingredients together in the bowl.
Blend all the dressing ingredients together except the water.
Add as much filtered water as you need to get the consistency you desire.
Taste and add more salt, pepper, lemon juice, pesto or nutritional yeast if you desire.
Add the dressing to the diced ingredients and combine.

Roasted Cauliflower, Pistachio and Pomegranate Salad.

It is hard to emphasize the importance of cruciferous vegetables to women going through hormonal change.

Let’s take a step back and reacquaint ourselves with what is happening inside our bodies…

As we move through peri-menopause, our chill and juicy hormones of progesterone and estrogen begin to deplete. This is not a smooth curve down to our ovaries retirement, but is full of spikes and crashes of hormone. We are living animals and the organs of our body do their utmost to function to the best of their ability. As they splutter to a halt our ovaries can gather the building blocks for manufacturing estrogen only to spurt an excessive amount into the bloodstream. We can go from zero to 60 from one week to the next and our health needs to be good enough to handle these changes so we experience the least amount of symptoms and can roll with them with grace.

The organ helping us out here is the liver. Our liver grabs excess hormone from the bloodstream and deconjugates, or breaks it down into compounds that can be easily removed from the body via our poop. The magical daily detox!

If you have constipation, you are going to have issues with feeling excessive symptoms of hormonal change.

If you do not like vegetables or fibre in your diet…think standard American diet where 95% of people are deficient in fibre, then you are going to experience excessive symptoms of hormonal change.

The food we eat changes our experience of menopause.

Cruciferous vegetables support us by offering the body fibre and a healthy serving of a compound called 3,3-Diindolylmethane. This is the compound that gives cruciferous vegetables their cabbagey smell. It also helps the liver in its process of breaking down hormone. You have the fibre for the poop and the fuel for grabbing and smashing up the hormones that are driving you crazy with symptoms.

Eating cruciferous veg regularly in your diet, throughout menopause means you have constant liver support, reduced constipation and a reduction in your hot flashes, mood swings, breast pain and bloat.

Cruciferous vegetables are all those in the cabbage family.

Think red and green cabbages, kale, cauliflower, collard greens, broccoli and Brussels sprouts.

We wouldn’t want to just eat boiled cabbage…that would be punishing! But this Cauliflower Salad with its burst of Middle Eastern flavour is something you are going to want to ladle onto our plate.

For this dish I roasted a stunningly beautiful, lime green, romanesco cauliflower but a regular white cauliflower or broccoli would be great too.

The roasted veg is paired with nuts, pomegranate seeds and the warming spice blend Baharat from Turkey. Think black pepper, cardamon, cloves, paprika and nutmeg.

The beauty of using nutrition as your first line of defence against menopausal symptoms is that as you nourish your body with these gorgeous crucifers, you are also protecting your heart health, preventing colon cancer and introducing an easily absorbed plant based source of calcium into your diet…as well as delighting your taste buds.

Ingredients

1 medium cauliflower or 1lb of broccoli
5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
5 tbsp raw pistachios or hazelnuts
1/3rd cup pomegranate seeds fresh or frozen ( approx 1/2 a pomegranate)
2 sticks celery sliced on the diagonal
1/3rd cup roughly chopped parsley
1 tbsp Balsamic Vinegar
1 tsp Baharat spice mix.
1/2 tsp sea salt

Instructions

Toss the cauliflower or broccoli in 2 tbsp of olive oil
Roast in the over a 400F /200C for 20 minutes.
Add the pistachios or hazelnuts for the last 5 minutes of roasting the cauliflower to toast them and bring out the flavour.
Meanwhile chop the celery and parsley and prepare the pomegranate seeds
In the bottom of a bowl whisk the remaining 2 tbsp of olive oil, 1 tbsp of Balsamic vinegar, the Baharat spice mix and the salt.
Add all of the ingredients to the bowl and toss in the dressing.
Serve with roasted chicken or salmon.

Tomato and Nectarine Salad

We may be rapidly moving into fall but it is still unseasonably warm where I live which offers the perfect opportunity to reach for the end of season produce. Local tomatoes are still abundant and the last of the seasons peaches and nectarines sit side by side in the store with ripe corn. It is an abundant time of year!

This recipe takes only ten minutes to prepare and is a perfect example of how easy it is to eat local, seasonal whole foods. Visually it is exciting for the eye and the high vitamin C and fresh flavour dances on the taste buds.

Just three seasonal ingredients are simply combined with good olive oil and sea salt so that their natural flavours can excite the palate.

This salad offers the opportunity to step out of the supermarket with its bland and well-travelled produce to visit the farmers market, grow basil and tomatoes in your own back yard or on a balcony and experiment with the fuller flavours of heritage varieties of common fruits and vegetables.

This recipe and seasonal eating in general is an opportunity to take one tiny step in healing the disconnect from our ecosystem we experience in our modern lives.

In the modern world we inhabit, many of us are separated from nature and the ecosystem in which we live. This divide from nature around us impacts our health in very real and measurable ways.
There are numerous studies that explain how intricately we are intertwined with our environment.

When we get outside into morning sunlight we sleep better at night as morning sunlight resets our brains for bedtime and increases the amount of melatonin, sleep hormone, we produce.

There is evidence to suggest that women who enjoy more green spaces in their environment experience reduced stress and better health outcomes including lower blood pressure and that the absence of green spaces around us increases the stress hormone cortisol in our bodies. The impact of green spaces around us is greater on womens bodies than on mens.

Research goes as far as to explicitly demonstrate that women who live near green spaces are less likely to suffer the symptoms of PMS including better sleep, less breast pain and bloating and reduced incidence of depression.

In a study of families who garden and eat their own produce at least once a week and families who don’t, gardening families were found to have significantly more diversity in their microbiome during gardening season and to consume greater amounts of fibre, vitamin C and the antioxidant selenium.
From the study:
’Changes in gut microbiota composition in urbanized regions have been linked to the rise of inflammatory and non-communicable diseases37. Evidence suggests that fibrous diets22 and environmental interactions38 can increase exposure to beneficial bacteria and potentially mediate this disease prevalence. Gardening remains the primary source of soil contact in the modern era and provides access to fibrous fruits and vegetables.’ It is clear that humans are primed to interact with the soil microbiome and our environment in order to create optimum health in the body.

Even just standing barefoot on the earth or ‘grounding’ has been shown to reduce pain, cortisol levels and inflammation in our bodies and can reduce the electronic pollution that comes from an office cubical environment and a wireless connected world. (Turns out the hippies were right!)

In a world where we are disconnected from nature, overworked, cubical based and stressed. This recipe is a plea to step away from the hand sanitizer, get your hands dirty and grow your own tomatoes, nurture a pot of basil on your window ledge and interact through seasonal foods with the ecosystem of which we are a part. Your health depends on it!

Ingredients

2 large hands full of ripe cherry tomatoes (about 2 cups) halved

1 very ripe nectarine

1 large pinch of sea salt

1/2 cup chopped basil
2 tbsp olive oil to drizzle

Sharp cheese, feta cheese or burrata

Instructions

Slice the ripe cherry tomatoes in half and pile into a bowl.
Cut the nectarine in half and then dice into cubes and add to the bowl.

Sprinkle the tomatoes and nectarine with sea salt to get the juices running

Drizzle with good quality olive oil

Chop or tear up the basil and sir into the fruits and oil

Serve at room temperature to let the flavours shine. Pair with with sharp cheese, combine with cubes of feta cheese or pile the salad around a fresh burrata cheese on a plate.