Category Archives: Food

Right back where I started from

Saltine crackers, nice noodles, and lots of bonding time with the couch.  35 weeks is looking a lot like 7 weeks, though I suspect it’s not entirely pregnancy related.  Rather than nausea, I’ve been experiencing lots of GI cramping, so I’m guessing I picked up some kind of stomach bug at some point last weekend (I have a couple of suspicions as to the source — let’s just say that buffets and salad bars are notorious sources of food poisoning).

My normal healthy, high fiber diet keeps my GI tract in pretty good shape.  I like to think that things move through so quickly that the microbes that might normally create stomach problems never have a chance to get established 🙂

But whatever I have now is established and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  Matthew’s pushing for a doctor’s visit, and I finally agreed to call on Monday if I’m not feeling better by then.  If I break my promise, I have to give him my first-born child 😉

Entropy in the Kitchen

As a child, I was slightly obsessive about having a perfectly neat and clean bedroom.  I somehow grew into an adult with much lower standards.  The normal state of our kitchen:

Not bad, but not great.  And it moves rather quickly from the in-between state pictured above to really bad.  Behold the horror:

I took these pictures last Friday morning, after a very frustrating time cooking dinner amidst this mess on Thursday night.

With dirty dishes covering the already limited counter space, we didn’t have much to work with.  A relatively simple meal prep turned stressful.

Fittingly, I forgot to snap a photo immediately after I cleaned last Friday, and by the time I thought to pull out the camera, things had devolved into the middle state depicted at the beginning of this post.

Cooking vs. Cleaning

The time from clean to messy is frustratingly short.  Here’s the thing: we like to cook and eat good food.  We’re often exhausted when we arrive home in the evening, but looking forward to a good meal usually provides motivation to cook.

However, by the time we cook the meal and eat, we’re ready for some down time — returning to the kitchen to clean up is the last thing on our list.  We USE our kitchen, and there are only so many hours in the day.

Green vs. Clean

Part of the problem is my own doing.  In an effort to reduce the amount of dishes we use, and therefore the amount of water and energy required to wash said dishes, I like to use dishes and utensils that are relatively clean a few times before washing them.  In this state between clean and dirty, there’s not much to do with the dishes other than leave them sitting out on the counter or table.

Between the cooking and the conservation attempts, the kitchen rarely looks like this . . .

. . . and the time it requires to go from clean to messy is distressingly short, but I am hoping that with a little more effort, we can maintain something a bit more sane, livable, and sanitary.

Spring on my plate

Best way to eat asparagus?  Broiled, hands down!  Grilled is also great, but pulling out the grill just for a few pieces of asparagus would be silly.  The broiler setting on the toaster oven makes perfect asparagus for two — just brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt before broiling.

Main dish (not so local, but yummy): quinoa with portabello mushrooms and artichoke hearts, plus lots of our garlic chives.  I bought the portobellos at City Greens, but I forgot to ask about their origin — they MAY have been locally grown/foraged.

On the side, we ate a simple salad with greens from our garden. I’m loving all of this fresh, local goodness.

Speaking of which, I don’t have photographic evidence, but I spent last Saturday in the kitchen (barefoot and pregnant 😉 ) with 12 quarts of gorgeous, delicious strawberries.  I saved some for eating fresh, but most are topped, bagged, and frozen, ready for eating throughout the year.

Eating for two — A vegetarian pregnancy

Food is one of my favorite topics, and it’s been a bit neglected around here lately, but not for lack of eating, just lack of documentation 😉

Despite the first trimester nausea, I managed to eat fairly healthfully in the beginning of the pregnancy.  Not having to scramble to make dietary changes when I found out I was pregnant was one nice aspect of having a well-established healthy diet, though I was a little worried for the few weeks where pasta and rice noodles made up the bulk of my diet.

I haven’t had any specific food cravings, just a general craving for salt (and diminished interest in sweets).  I’m usually a bit of a salt-o-phobe, but the body needs more salt (to make more blood) during pregnancy, so I didn’t spend too much time worrying over my increasing affinity for salty foods and the salt shaker.  (I am curious about how long it will take to reset my taste buds and adjust to less salt post-pregnancy, though.  Will things that taste good now all-of-the-sudden taste way too salty, or will I have to scale back slowly to readjust???)

During the second trimester, I was pretty much ravenous all the time — packing enough food in the morning for a 9 1/2 hour work day presented a bit of a challenge.  Snacks included extra of a previous day’s leftovers, peanut butter and toast, or cheese and crackers.  Sometimes I just snacked on well-cooked beans with a bit of salt and olive oil.  In general, I picked fairly healthy snacks and tried to balance them with my other eating throughout the day (e.g., if my lunch was fairly cheesy, I would probably not have cheese and crackers as a snack that day).

In addition to needing more salt, the pregnant body also uses more protein.  Depending on weight, activity level, sex, etc., most adults need somewhere in the range of 40-50 grams of protein a day (many people, especially non-vegetarians, regularly eat WAY more than this, which is not necessarily a good thing).  When pregnant, that recommendation increases to 70-80 grams a day (some places recommend up to 100 grams a day, which is excessive).

I was fairly confident my protein consumption was adequate, but my midwives requested I keep track of what I ate on an average day and calculate the protein.  Being somewhat of a nutrition nerd, I complied happily.  Based on the one-day food record, I came in a bit above 70g of protein — right on target, no meat required 🙂

While I have continued to consume a more-or-less regular diet, I have kept an eye on the protein, making sure we’re eating legumes regularly, and perhaps eating a bit more eggs and dairy than usual (less green, I know, but we do our best).

Now that I’m into the third trimester, I notice the decrease in my stomach capacity.  Small, frequent meals/snacks is the name of the game now, which tends to be my preferred style of eating anyway.

By the end of April, I longed for the fresh produce that we’re getting from the garden and farmers’ markets now: lettuce, arugula, Swiss chard, broccoli, asparagus, strawberries — nom, nom, nom!  I’m looking forward to more of spring’s bounty in the coming weeks, as I nourish myself and the ever-growing little one (who is putting on about 1/2 pound a week now!).