Just wanted to let you know, space is available in the upcoming PCOS Saturday Seminar, which is scheduled for Saturday, April 11, 2009, at the office of Marissa Kent, RD, in Rancho Santa Margarita, California.
This program starts at 9 am and ends at 3 pm, and will cover the basics of nutrition, activity, sleep, and stress management strategies that are the basis of our PCOS program. Marissa and I (Monika Woolsey) will be co-facilitating.
Cost is $50. If you are a health professional, you may apply this registration fee toward a registration in my upcoming comprehensive PCOS training, in West Los Angeles, in July of 2009.
Click here to register for the Orange County event.
Click here to learn more about the professional training.
I noticed after posting information on our presentation in Orange County that those keywords starting bring people into the blog. If you are one of those people…welcome!
I thought I'd put contact information right here for those of you who do need help, to save you the trouble of clicking additional links.
Marissa Kent, RD, has two offices, one in Lake Forest, and one in Rancho Santa Margarita. I've known Marissa for several years now, and she loves working with PCOS! Please check out her website: www.marissakentnutrition.com
Lisa Arroyas, RD, has a practice in Huntington Beach, and she also sees clients in Pasadena. Lisa just completed the training, and says it's really enhanced her work with clients. Lisa is also an exercise specialist, so if you're not experiencing weight loss with your exercise, or don't know how to get started…she would be a great resource for you. Lisa's phone number is 562-217-5392, and her e-mail address is lisaarroyas@yahoo.com.
I hope you OC cysters take advantage of these inCYSTERS and the expertise they are eager to use on your behalf!
Just a quick note of congratulations to inCYSTer Marissa Kent, one of the very first members of our network. Marissa just completed, and passed, her exam for her Certified Diabetes Educator (CD) examination. Marissa has a great combination of knowledge and skills pertinent to PCOS, including this CDE certification, and training in eating disorders and intuitive eating. Her practice is located in Mission Viejo, California.
Marissa is accepting registrations for her next intuitive eating group, starting in June 2010. If you are interested in learning more, please visit her website, http://www.marissakentnutrition.com/.
Congratulations, Marissa! That's no small deal what you've accomplished and we're excited that women with PCOS in Orange County have you to guide them toward balance and health.
Practically ever client I have ever had, has come to me with some kind of expectation that the secret to their weight problem/eating disorder/heart disease lies in a magical set of recipes filed away on my computer. If I don't hand them recipes, they feel as though I have failed them.
It's not that I don't mind creating recipes, in fact, it is one of my very favorite things to do! But I feel as if I give you too much structure in what I encourage you to do, you miss the point of cooking. And I feed the delusion that some specific set of instructions on a piece of paper is going to magically fix your problem.
So today I thought I would share what my morning has been like. I hope you will see, that the best kitchen inspirations come from the most surprising places. You often have to put the recipes away in order to see them.
My culinary challenge this week for Chow Locally is developing recipes for mustard greens. My big barrier to this challenge is that try I as I might, and trust me, I have done so many, many times, I just can't get into mustard greens. They are pretty bitter to my palate. But since we have about 125 customers wanting to know what to do with the mustard greens we gave them, and since mustard greens grow pretty well in Phoenix, I got the feeling the Universe decided to tell me it was time to cut the mustard (Ha! Couldn't resist!)
I didn't snap my fingers on this one. I am pretty sure by now, in fact, I have read every single blog post about mustard greens, looking for ideas that sounded like they might work for a wide spectrum of taste buds. When I woke up this morning, needed to try a recipe, I had no idea what I was going to do.
In typical procrastinator's style, I decided to clean my kitchen instead. And…there sat inspiration #1: a couple of inches of stale beer that I was not able to finish last night. It was tasty, a local brewery's White Chocolate Ale, and I didn't want to throw it away. I realized since it was sweet I could get away with less sugar, which I had been thinking of using.
On the way but not totally there, I decided to procrastinate even more by working on my pile of samples from Expo West. This is what my living room floor looks like for about 2 weeks after I get home!
Out from the pile popped my collection of samples from a great family-owned business over in Orange County, Matt's Munchies. They have created a fun variety of healthy fruit leathers. The ginger spice, which is really a ginger and cinnamon-laced mango leather, became ingredient #3.
I poured the beer in a skillet, heated it up to dissolve the mango leather, and then put my chopped mustard greens in to let them braise. I cooked them all the way down until the sugars started to caramelize.
OK, I lied, it did use recipes in this process…but not in the way you are thinking. Because I'd read literally hundreds of recipes in search of inspiration, I noticed that a lot of Indian recipes for greens incorporate just a touch of brown sugar. So I knew if my concoction had something sweet in it, it would caramelize and offset the bitterness that make mustard greens challenging for me. I am not going to give you any more instructions than this, and you won't get a nutrition analysis. You all know the ingredients here are good ones, and to give you more of a script defeats the purpose of my nudging you to free yourselves of overly rigid behavior in the kitchen. I promise you, your very favorite foods will be the ones where you left the script and started having some fun!
Finally, I threw in just a touch of sweetened coconut flakes for color and texture.
