Bison stroganoff with Caboodles

Just had to share this delicious new recipe with y’all! Why do I love it (besides that it is SUPER tasty & easy to make!)? It’s loaded with iron, B vitamins, CLA (fats that help YOUR BODY burn fat) & antioxidants.

Ingredients:

  • 1 lb grassfed bison (buffalo), cubed
  • 2 Tablespoons grassfed/organic butter
  • 1/2 leek, thinly sliced
  • 1 cup mushrooms, cubed (I used portobellos)
  • 1/2 cup organic sour cream
  • 1/2 tsp. paprika
  • 1 pinch mace
  • sea salt to taste
  • 1 head green cabbage
  • 1 T. butter to cook cabbage noodles in

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How To:

  1. Add butter and bison cubes to a large skillet on medium-low heat and cover. Cook for 5 minutes (don’t need to stir).
  2. While cooking, chop up mushrooms and leek and add after the bison has cooked for 5 minutes.
  3. Add spices (mace, paprika, and sea salt). Turn the heat to low and let cook with lid on for 10-15 minutes.
  4. While that’s cooking, take out a large skillet. Cut the cabbage in half down the middle and remove the stem/core. Lay each half flat side down and slice from top to bottom in 1/2 inch thick strips.
  5. Melt butter in large skillet and add the cabbage noodles. Cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 8 minutes until fork tender.
  6. Turn heat off of stroganoff and stir in sour cream. Done!

Enjoy!

Food & fitness favorites from my European holiday

After a fabulous 2 week family vacation in Amsterdam and Germany, it is my pleasure to share with you some of my favorite meals and workouts.

Food!

Honestly, the food ROCKED. It’s hard to pick favorites…but here goes.

  • Breakfasts were usually centered around eggs, but you won’t hear me complaining: look at how orange these egg yolks are! Also, I brought some raw chocolate powder & stevia with me and was able to make my favorite healthy hot cocoa wherever we went!

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  • Ribs in Amsterdam (no pic, too messy)
  • Chicken liver with bacon and onions in Amsterdam

chicken livers

  • Turkey in a cream and local Riesling sauce with mushrooms, carrots, and leeks (dinner in Bad Wildungen, Germany)

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  • Suckling pig salad with roasted veggies and topped with fried onions (which my daughter devoured, of course), (lunch in Marburg, Germany where the Grimms brothers went to college)

Marburg salad

  • Rabbit rolled up and stuffed with mushrooms, side of asparagus & mushrooms (dinner at Sleeping Beauty’s Castle)

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  • Local, wild venison stew, veggies on side (dinner at Rapunzel’s Castle)

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  • CREAM!!! Aside from a couple of dark chocolate gelato splurges that left me feeling pretty blah (my body isn’t used to sugar and therefore gave me the middle finger when I had it), my desserts were whipped cream and a few squares of 85% dark chocolate. The cream was fabulous! And it was nice to be able to go to any of the hundreds of gelato stands in any town and get a portion of cream in a little cup with the fun gelato spoons. Funny how those spoons make you feel like you’re on vacation and “splurging”. 😉

cream cream, happy me IMG_6505

Workouts

I brought my TRX with me to stay on track with my weight training. Here’s me working out in a castle hotel where we stayed in Waldeck, Germany!

trx castle lunges wall windmills

Have you ever tried doing chinups on a rope before? I hadn’t until two days before coming come. We were at a park in Wiesbaden and I couldn’t resist–they were SO hard. Normally, I can do 15 chinups on a regular bar, but could only manage 5 consecutively on the rope. Plus, my abs were sore. Nice!

Lunges are always a fave: doing them on a moving train made them a lot more challenging! My daughter joined me in doing jump squats, pushups, and planks (what a great way to pass the time on our train ride from Amsterdam to Cologne!).

We walked SO much. It was great! Lots of fresh, crisp air and plenty of lovely architecture to admire. Oh yeah, and I was chasing me kid so I got some burst training too. 😉 Good times!

Gluten-associated cross-reactive foods

First of all, THANK YOU SO MUCH for voting for me for Best Nutritionist and Best Personal Trainer in Santa Cruz (Shazzam!). I am so very grateful. 🙂

Now back to gluten.

Many of my clients have multiple food intolerances including gluten. In fact, now that testing options have improved by leaps and bounds in the past few years, I see more “positive” test results for gluten sensitivity (previously, very few of the possible toxic peptides were ever even tested). These individuals need to stay completely off of gluten in order to recover from the inflammation caused by gluten exposure.

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Some of you may be thinking, “Yeah, I already know about staying off of gluten,” but did you know that there are 24 foods that are potentially cross-reactive (the body can confuse them for gluten)? Someone can be on a 100% gluten-free diet and still experience symptoms and compromised health if they continue to consume any of the cross-reactive foods (fatigue/exhaustion, gas, bloating, abdominal pain, headaches, difficulty maintaining ideal weight, emotional disturbances/irritability, etc.). The great news about this is that I’ve worked with clients who came to me because they were following their gluten-free diets and they were still having symptoms and they were actually relieved to learn that they had a cross-reactive food! Once they took the cross-reactive food out, they felt so much better.

24 gluten-associated cross-reactive foods

Below is an excerpt and image from Cyrex Labs’ website reiterating what I’ve already written and showing the cross-reactive foods.

cross reactive foods, gluten sensitivity

Don’t Guess…test!

If you’ve been wondering whether or not you have a gluten sensitivity or cross-reactivity, contact me to run the test and find out. Otherwise, staying 100% off all gluten and cross-reactive foods on an assumption is certainly possible, but many people struggle to maintain the motivation to stick to it and end up making occasional exceptions.  However, the way inflammation works, even having gluten once a month or once every couple of months isn’t enough to avoid a flare up if you are reactive! Those with a sensitivity must be 100% compliant to eliminate inflammation and repair the damage done by previous gluten (or cross-reactive) ingestion.

As gluten-related autoimmune expert Dr. Thomas O’Bryan says, “You can’t be a little pregnant: you can’t have a little gluten.”

Glasses that can help you fight cancer & improve sleep

I know the title of this blog post sounds strange, but as you read in my blog post 3 health tips for techies, the blue light from tv’s, smart phones, and computer screens interferes with melatonin production. Why should you care? First, melatonin is a potent cancer killer. Two, melatonin is mandatory for a good night’s sleep.

Wearing amber lensed glasses is such a simple solution. Check it out…

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I wear my (amber-lensed) sunglasses at night

My colleague Chris Kresser has done a great deal of research in this area. He writes “… use amber-lensed goggles once the sun has gone down. These blue-blocking lenses are highly effective in reducing the effects of blue light exposure, and in most cases completely eliminate the short-wavelength radiation necessary for nocturnal melatonin suppression. (222324) These goggles have been shown to improve sleep quality as well as mood, simply by blocking blue light and simulating physiologic darkness.

The main reason I recommend using these goggles is because normal room light alone is enough to suppress melatonin at night, and unless you’re shutting off all the lights in your house when the sun sets, you’re still at risk for disrupting your melatonin-driven circadian rhythms. (25) While f.lux is a useful tool for your backlit devices, it’s nearly impossible to address all sources of melatonin-suppressing light in today’s world of modern technology and late-night work and entertainment habits. Amber-colored goggles are one of the only tools available to completely eliminate all blue light exposure at night, without ‘going off the grid’ and powering down your entire house after 7 PM.”

Great info, right?! Aren’t you wishing you already had a pair? That’s simple enough to remedy.

Brands of glasses

Two excellent and very inexpensive options for amber-lensed glasses/goggles are available online. I wear the Uvex brand (ordered on Amazon).  If you wear eyeglasses, however, you’ll need to get a wraparound pair like the Solar Shield brand (also available on Amazon). Sure either one is going to look a little silly, but so do plenty of other health and beauty regimens (think about waxing, mud masks, & hair coloring for goodness sake!). Getting better sleep and keeping your cancer fighting melatonin at optimal levels is certainly worth looking a little goofy before bed in the privacy of your own home. 🙂