Chocolate Brownies - Low Sugar and Grain Free

One of the reframes around food I did in my head when I started taking my health seriously was to ditch counting calories and instead decide if a food built health in my body or if it tore health down.

I was exhausted at 46 years old, my body felt like it was falling apart and changing hormones meant that I did not feel like myself.

With the beauty of hindsight and with my qualification from the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition under my belt I realize I was prioritizing dense nutrition to support my beautiful midlife body through its second natural hormonal change.

This is important. Life in the patriarchy, under the male gaze, conditions us to prioritize skinny over vital, energized and healthy to achieve acceptance and win the game of being a woman.

At 46 years old, I was depleted after having my three kids within three years and being constantly on the run from the consequences, from multiple moves as a family, two internationally, from over eating to suppress my emotions within this whirlwind of family life AND from constantly prioritizing the restriction of food from my body since I was 15 years old.

My daily regime of skipping breakfast with a venti Latte replacement left me spiralling downhill as soon as I hormonal change. I was pre-diabetic and shaking between meals, I could not lose a pound as my body clung to every calorie, my hormones were a mess with my anxiety through the roof and my sleep gone. I was too exhausted to get out of bed in the morning and tired but wired, rushing round the house to get housework done at 10pm in the evening. All the joy was sucked out of my life as my feelings of overwhelm were real.

When our hormones start to change in our forties, the worse advice we can receive is to eat less and exercise more.

During our second natural hormonal change, our bodies need the full support of dense nutrition, good sleep and active stress management to reduce the symptoms we feel on a daily basis. Our thinking needs to shift from diet and restriction to nurture and nourish if we want to be like that one woman we know who annoying sails through menopause symptom free.

When we balance our blood sugar eating a breakfast rich in protein and health fats to start the day, we can more easily maintain our ideal weight through midlife and banish our mood swings.

When we create healthy boundaries for ourselves to ditch alcohol and caffeine for the duration of our hormonal change, we are better able to absorb minerals for healthy bones, we protect our sleep and we support our bodies by keeping cortisol, our anxiety and hot-flash inducing, sleep-busting stress hormone, nice and low.

When we remove our bodies from a stressed state of fight or flight by eliminating starvation and eating dense nutrition, embracing healthy fats and actively engaging in therapy or mindset work, we hold onto our libido through into menopause, protect our brain health and work towards the prevention of cardiovascular disease.

We have the power on our plate to decide what hormonal change is going to feel like and when we work to educate ourselves, become self-responsible and seek out support we can become that one annoying symptom-free woman for ourselves.

We are not victims of our hormones at midlife but empowered women with choices about how we nurture our bodies and show up for ourselves at midlife. Friends, Pick your player!

Does this mean we cannot eat foods we love? The answer is no and I offer you the Low Sugar Grain Free Chocolate Brownie as proof!

When you make your sweet treats at home, you have the choice to use a sweetener that comes with its own slow release mechanism in the form of FIBRE. This ensures you do not flood the blood stream with glucose and trigger a hot flash, but the sweetness of life is released into the body in a manageable way…a trickle and not a flood.

Medjool dates are one of natures natural sweeteners that are packed with fibre and nutrition.

This is a sweetener that contains so much fibre, it can be used to relieve constipation!
Fibre is a midlife womans best friend as any excess hormone amplifying our uncomfortable symptoms of menopause is removed from the body with fibre in our daily detox or poop. Adding fibre to your diet at midlife changes your experience of menopause.

Dates are packed with iron and the B group of vitamins to help you to feel energized daily. Iron is a vital co-factor for efficient thyroid function. Our thyroid gland manages our menstrual cycle, metabolism and circadian rhythm. It comes under stress when we move into hormonal change and deserves all of the nutrition it needs to function.

Dates also contain easily absorbed calcium to build up bone strength as we stride into the next chapter . Remember, you can build health at midlife or tear it down. Our bones are an area where we really need to take care to build health as we are in the natural process of losing the bone protective presence of estrogen.

Dates are also high in both phosphorous and magnesium which in combination with their rich source of calcium helps optimize bone-strengthening benefits. Think of dates as both a sweetener and an addition to your calcium/magnesium supplement; in the form of food

This is a Brownie, a sweet treat that builds health in the body providing dense nutrition that nurtures you through hormonal change. Is it also delicious, you bet it is because during your break-up with diet culture, you also deserve the pleasure of good food.

Ingredients

Chocolate Brownies (Sugar-free, Grain-free)

1 ½ cups Medjool dates, pitted

1 cup Fair Trade Dark Chocolate Chips, or 2x100g bars broken into pieces

½ tsp baking soda

3 eggs

¼ cup coconut oil

1 tbsp vanilla extract

1/8 tsp sea salt

1 handful of raw walnuts and 1 handful of frozen cherries defrosted (optional)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F.  Lightly oil an 8"x8" square cake pan and line with parchment paper.

Place the broken chocolate or chocolate chips and baking soda into a blender.  Blend until they have a rubbly, sand-like consistency.

Add the pitted dates, eggs, coconut oil and vanilla extract.  Blend all the ingredients until they form a frothy batter consistency.

Pour the batter into the cake pan.

I pressed raw walnuts and defrosted frozen cherries into the raw batter before it went into the oven to make this treat nurturing for heart health with its added vitamin E and antioxidants.

Bake for 30 minutes. the top should be soft to the touch when cooked


Want more ideas to include added fibre in your diet to tame excess midlife hormones whilst boosting your immunity in the Winter? Click here to try my recipe for Red Cabbage and Apple Sauerkraut (New research links a healthy microbiome to increased immune health AND reduced symptoms of menopause with increased protection against breast cancer!)

Comfort Food Macaroni and Cheese

How is everyone holding up during this Covid 19 pandemic and who is in need of some comfort.

I have taken a favourite childhood recipe and amped up the nutritional content by adding greens. This is how we feed the belly and the soul ladies!

Adding fibre rich, cruciferous vegetables to your favourite dishes will support your liver in detoxifying excess hormone from the body. Sulphurous compounds found in Brussels sprouts support stage 2 of the liver detoxification process, support a healthy gut microbiome and have been shown to help prevent cancer.

Cruciferous vegetables and leafy greens in general are one of the foods i recommend in my FREE downloadable E-book, The 10 Essential Health promoting Foods to Help Midlife Women Feel Nourished All Day.. Click here to get your copy.

I would not say no to bacon in this recipe either…if that is what you need right now!

Macaroni Cheese with Brussels Sprouts, Broccoli or Kale

This is comfort food with a dose of nutrition. Use whatever greens you have to hand but include the vegetable so that you are nourishing both your body and your soul! Dark leafy greens are rich in betacarotene that converts vitamin A in the body and supports your immune response.

Ingredients

½ pound twisty pasta of your choice (what was left on the shelf in your store? Is it quinoa?)

2 tbsp butter

1 tbsp olive oil

2 garlic cloves

10 ounces/ 4 cups finely shredded Brussels sprouts, kale or broccoli (Just use the greens that you can find)

Salt and pepper to taste

½ lemon zest grated

3 tbsp all-purpose flour

½ cups chicken or vegetable broth or stock made with a cube (what is in the back of your cupboard?)

½ lemon juiced

½ cup Parmesan

1 cup Cheddar cheese

1 cup Mozzerella

Or

Feel free to use any cheeses you may have in your refrigerator.(Use what you have!)

Instructions

Bring a pot of salted water to the boil and cook the pasta until just done.

Heat the oven to 400 degrees and butter the bottom and sides of a 2-quart baking dish

Heat the olive oil in the same pan as you just cooked your pasta and sauté your greens and garlic on a medium heat until bright green and just wilted. 2-3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Add the lemon zest and 2 tbsp of butter and heat until the butter melts.

Add the flour and stir in until you can no longer see it.
Add the broth a glug at a time to make a sauce and simmer the sauce for 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and add the lemon juice and cooked pasta.

Add the combined cheeses and plenty of black pepper.
Turn the pasta and sauce into the buttered baking dish and top with the reserved cheese.
Bake in the oven for 20 minutes until browned on top.

If you are looking for a family friendly meal that is full of flavour, click here for my recipe for anti-inflammatory and vegetable rich Turmeric and Vegetable Thai Curry.

Boost Your Immunity with Sauerkraut

So often in nutrition I notice that everything old is new again and this definitely true of this recipe for Red Cabbage, Apple and Ginger Sauerkraut.
Preserving vegetables with salt is how my colonizer ancestors stored their home grown vegetables over the cold winter months right here on the prairie where I live. Their health throughout the winter would have depended on the bountifulness of your home garden and the time you dedicated to preserving the vegetables they grew.
The science of nutrition has moved on since these pioneer farmers first made their homes on the prairie across North America and there is now so much that we know about the vitamin content of fermented vegetables, our microbiome and the importance of vegetables and fibre in our diet.
Sadly in this same time we have seen our Western diet become eroded with the advent of fast food chains, processed foods, farming subsidies for wheat, soy and corn, chemical fertilization and the extensive use of glysophate in the farming and combining of crops We also live in a society where there is a general feeling that life is too busy to care for our own basic nutritional needs and we do not have time to cook. Our personal health has eroded over time in tandem.
So let’s bring these thoughts and timeline together and then jump into this incredibly easy recipe.

What have we discovered…

What our ancestors did not know, was the nutritional powerhouse that lay in the vegetables that they fermented to store through the winter. Science has told us that…

1. Vegetables that have been fermented increase their vitamin C content by 300%

2. Foods that have been fermented provide a powerful dose of probiotic friendly bacteria for our microbiome.

3. Our microbiome (the ecosystem of friendly bacteria that lives inside our digestive tract) is heavily involved in boosting our immune response, boosting our mood, promoting the health of our digestive tract, balancing our hormones and keeping us at our ideal weight.

So that is health benefits from easily prepared fermented foods that impact our immunity and resistance to bacteria and viruses, the joy that we feel life and the happiness we feel daily, the ability of our bodies to receive nourishment and digest foods without symptoms of gassiness and bloating and the impact of peri-menopause on our bodies in the shape of uncomfortable symptoms

What we have lost…

1. We have lost our collective palate for foods that are sour or acidic and crave the sweetness of corn syrup as it is an ingredient in most of our foods from the liquids we drink to our meat, breads and prepared meals.

2. We have eroded our microbiome as it has taken multiple hits from over use of antibiotics, from prescribed and over the counter medications, from excessive sugar and from the role of the digestive system disruptor, glysophate as a desiccant for grains on the stalk to improve yields for the combine, resulting in this chemical appears in our food in unhealthily large quantities.

3. The erosion of the nutritional content in general in the foods that we consume as our soil become depleted, as animals are raised in unhealthy systems and in general as we eat foods that impact our bodies in a negative nutritional fashion as they are so packed with chemicals and sugar that our bodies need a disproportionate amount of nutrition to cope.
   
   

And here we find ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic and needing to deeply nourish our bodies, especially with vitamin C, build our microbiomes, address chronic underlying health issues and fire up our immune response
At this point in time, everything old is new again and this recipe is practically a life line.

So let’s get our hands into a bowl of cabbage and salt and make like our wise ancestors!

Ingredients

1 small red or green cabbage or half of a large cabbage

3 tart apples

1 thumb sized piece of raw ginger

1 tbsp sea salt

Instructions

Remove the outer leaves from the cabbage and reserve on one side
Chop the cabbage finely removing the stalk and place into a large bowl.
Chop or grate in the apple and grate in the ginger
Add the salt and using your hands massage the salt into the vegetables and fruit until the cabbage become bright red or green and is beginning to release water. Keep massaging for another five minutes.
This process allows the healthy and friendly bacteria from your clean hands and present on the ‘bloom’ of the cabbage, that cloudy texture on the surface of the leaf, to come into contact with all of the cabbage and begin the fermentation process. These bacteria are more varied than any probiotic capsule you can buy in the store and will increase in number to become more powerful for your microbiome than a store bought probiotic.
Once the cabbage is beginning to run with released water pile all of the vegetable and fruit into a large clean mason jar and pour in the liquid.
Press a reserved cabbage leaf over the top of the vegetables and place a weight on top to press down the vegetables.
Put a lid on the mason jar and place in a dark warm place on your counter.
Check on your jar a couple of hours later and if the cabbage is not covered with liquid, make a brine with an 8oz glass of filtered water and 1 tbsp of salt and pour into your jar to cover.
Leave your sauerkraut out on the counter for 24 hours and then allow to mature for 5 days in your refrigerator.
Eat with cheese and crackers, as a side with meat dishes or served next to fried eggs for breakfast.

Try and eat a small portion of fermented foods daily to rebuild your gut health and microbiome. You will notice the inclusion of fermented foods in the softness of your skin and as the antidote to constipation.
If you are looking for other ways to boost immunity you can read about Kukicha Tea here.