With yesterday being the first day of October, I thought it would be timely to post a simple tutorial for cooking squash! Winter squashes of all varieties are one of my favourite foods, which is interesting because they literally made me gag as a kid – I wouldn’t even carry the squash dish to the Thanksgiving table. There are so many varieties of squash, each with their own flavour profile, all of which are packed with nutrients. High fibre, lower in carbs than the typical starchy veg (if that’s important for you) and containing powerful antioxidant carotenoids (eg. lutein, zeaxanthin, beta-cryptoxanthin), they are a great food to consume on the regular.
However squash does come with one downside. They’re hella hard to get into! For anyone who has attempted to cut into a large butternut squash, you know the feeling of hoping you don’t lose a finger! For anyone who hasn’t attempted, I can see why you’re waiting. Well fear no more! This here is my technique that I use to preserve all of my fingers. It has worked on every type of squash I’ve tried it with – butternut, acorn, pumpkin, kabocha, buttercup, spaghetti and other varieties I scored at farmer’s markets or in my food bin that I have no idea what they actually were!
Squash Tutorial
1. Place the entire squash in your oven.
2. Close oven door, preheat oven to 400F and set the timer for 25 minutes. No need to poke holes or check on it – it won’t explode!
3. After 25 minutes, you should be able to cut into the squash much more easily than if it was raw. However, it’s not cooked too much that you lose the flesh when scooping out the seeds. Scoop out the seeds and if you want to cube it, do so now. The skin should come off easily with a vegetable peeler or a sharp knife, and cubing the squash should be quite easy because it’s partially cooked! If you don’t want to cube it, go to the next step.
4. Place face down on a baking sheet and return to the oven for another 20-30 minutes, depending on the size of the squash. Start checking at 20 minutes to see if the flesh gives to pressure.
5. When the squash is done to your liking, remove it from the oven. See the beautiful orange colour it turned? At this point, do what you like with it! Turn it into a roasted Butternut Squash Soup; stuff it with ground meat and cauli-rice; shred it (if it’s spaghetti squash) and top with bolognese or toss with sausage and mushrooms; or simply mash with some ghee, butter or coconut oil and season with sea salt (add extra flavour by adding maple syrup and orange juice – that’s a secret family recipe btw).
UPDATE: If you have an Instant Pot, you can cook a squash WAY faster. However, it won’t have that caramelized, roasted taste. It’s fabulous for soups and spaghetti squash though! Here’s how:
Slice squash in half, remove the seeds.
Place trivet in the bottom of the Instant Pot. Add 1 cup of water.
Place squash on top of trivet.
Close lid. Set to “Manual” for 5 minutes (for spaghetti, acorn… for a large butternut, you might need to do 7 minutes).
Use the “Quick Release” method when the 5 minutes is up!
What is Leaky Gut – A compromised digestive tract lining that can lead to a whole host of health concerns from minor allergies to full-blown autoimmune conditions
What Causes a Leaky Gut – Food (specifically wheat, sugar, alcohol, dairy, grains and legumes) stress, pharmaceuticals, GMO’s
My goal with this blog post is to give you a concrete plan for healing your leaky gut. Not sure if you actually have leaky gut? Odds are, you do. Still not sure? Read the above post on causes – if any of the causes are currently, or at one point in your life were applicable, you’ve more than likely got leaky gut. So this post is for you!
Aside from healing chronic leaky gut, the recommendations in this blog post can also be used in the following situations:
post “bombing” by a food trigger (i.e. “dairy-bombing” as I like to call it when I accidentally ingest dairy)
during times of serious stress and/or poor sleep
when you have been exposed to illness
if you feel like you are coming down with something
if you are sick!
if you have any GI issues ranging from irritation or discomfort to food poisoning or other “every body out” situations!
Step 1 – Eliminate Foods that Contribute to Leaky Gut
At absolute minimum, get rid of gluten, sugar and dairy. Unfortunately when we’re sick, we’ve been trained to want crackers or dry toast because they are “easy on the digestive tract”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only are they completely devoid of any nutrients, but they damage the gut, feed pathogenic overgrowth in the intestines and cause an blood sugar/insulin spike that contributes to poor health.
Even better – get off all grains and legumes as well. While whole grains and legumes have some nutrition (especially if they’re actually prepared properly), the nutrient bang-for-your-buck is woefully inadequate compared to whole foods such as eggs, meat, fish, vegetables (both starchy and non-starchy) and healthy fats. And with a compromised digestive tract, you don’t want to make it work extra hard to actually obtain nutrients from these foods.
For most people, adopting a grain, legume and dairy free diet is plenty. But if you have underlying health concerns or a history of severe digestive and/or autoimmune symptoms, the following should be avoided as well:
Omitting the eggs and nightshade vegetables are only recommended for people following an Autoimmune Protocol – a very strict, but incredibly effective dietary intervention. It is usually not necessary for the majority of the population.
Step 2 – Focus on Nutrient Dense Foods
While the gut is very quick to start healing itself (new cells replace old ones in as little as 3 days!), many nutrients are required to become the building blocks of those new cells. Foods to focus on are:
wild caught seafood
grassfed beef
pasture raised pork
pasture raised egg yolks (unless following AIP)
healthy fats (avocado, olive, coconut and grassfed/organic ghee if tolerated)
vegetables, both starchy and non starchy
A quick note about vegetables – if you are experiencing digestive symptoms (not always the case with leaky gut, many symptoms are found on the skin, brain, joints or organs), you may do better with cooked vegetables than raw. Serious digestive damage can be made worse by raw vegetables, so choose soup over salads.
Step 3 – Add in Super Foods
The number one food you can add in to your diet to heal leaky gut is Homemade Bone Broth. Not only is it high in minerals in an easily absorbed form, but the gelatin found in homemade broth is critical for healing the digestive lining. Bonus is if you are experience any other connective tissue symptoms (joints, skin, vaginal lining, bladder, brain…), broth can help there too! Read my post on Bone Broth for a detailed explanation of the science behind this powerful food!
Next up – LIVER! This polarizing food is one of the most nutrient dense foods you can put in to your body. Now I get it – I wasn’t raised on liver, so it has taken me a while to get to a place where I actually enjoy it. But I worked at it because I knew how important it was to include in the diet. This Chicken Liver Pate from Balanced Bites was the first way I actually enjoyed liver, but now I can eat it fried with onions, and bacon of course! Worried about the toxins that are “stored” in the liver? Lucky for you, this isn’t actually how physiology works. The liver processes or neutralizes toxins, but it doesn’t store them. If for some reason it cannot excrete them through bowel movements and/or urine, it will store them in the fatty tissue of the body (another reason for choosing grassfed/organic/pastured meat products). It does, however, store a huge variety of vitamins and minerals, including important ones that are otherwise hard to get from our diet like Vitamins A, D & K, as well as folate and iron. (UPDATE: want to know more? I wrote an entire post on liver – found here!)
Another group of foods that you want to include in your healing protocol (actually you want to include these all the time) are foods high in omega-3 fatty acids. The most concentrated sources are cold-water fatty fish like salmon, sardines, mackerel and even trout and tuna. This is followed by all other seafood and shellfish, which still contain loads of omega-3’s, at a slightly lower concentration. Bonus is seafood-based protein is exceptionally easy to digest. Worried about toxins in fish – read this and this. Additionally grassfed beef and pastured egg-yolks contain some omega-3 fatty acids. Finally, you want to avoid consuming large amounts of omega-6 fatty acids (vegetable oils, grains, conventional chicken) because this contributes to inflammation and further increases our need for omega-3’s – we’re going for optimal balance between omega 3’s and 6’s.
NOTE: plant-based sources of omega-3’s donotcount. They are a different form of omega-3 (ALA), which the body has a very difficult time converting to the form we need (EPA or DHA). That means flax, chia, walnuts and any other plant-based “omega-3” is not helping you out!
Sea greens such as kelp, dulse, nori and other seaweeds are an easy way to get healing minerals in to the diet. Add to homemade broth or soup, or buy flaked sea greens and shake on to meals before serving to add a good hit of nutrients.
Finally, fermented foods. Fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, yogurt (if dairy is tolerated), and kombucha are a fabulous source of probiotics. In fact, fermented foods blow probiotic supplements out of the water when it comes to the number and variety of probiotic strains they contain. Why are probiotics so important for gut health? Well that’s a blog post in and of itself – but the main reason is the health of your gut bacteria is the largest indicator of the health of your body, across the board. Regardless of what you’re trying to recover from, you need to nourish your gut bacteria. You do this by eating lot of vegetables, avoiding gut-harming foods (grains, vegetable oils, sugar) and regularly inoculating the gut with healthy bacteria in the form of fermented foods. Now, this recommendation may time some time to work up to. If you are experiencing major gut pain, you are going to want to start very slow. I’ve had clients need to start at ½ tsp of sauerkraut liquid and slowly go up from there. If you are new to fermented foods, I recommend starting at about 1 tsp, once or twice a day. More is not necessarily better when it comes to fermented foods. Diversity, variety and frequency is more effective.
Step 4 – Get Your Lifestyle in Check
Stress, intense exercise and less than 7 hours of sleep all cause leaky gut. So you can be doing all of the above steps, but if you’re crossfitting 6 days a week, training for a marathon, are super stressed at home/work or are telling yourself and others that you “do fine on 5 hours of sleep” you will not heal your gut. So, what do you need to do?
Mange your stress – however that looks for you (with the exception of additional intense exercise). Yoga, meditation, adult colouring books (my new fav thing!), deep breathing, reiki, walking the dog, listening to music – whatever it is, make it a priority.
Sleep at minimum 7 hours per night. In fact, sleep more. Sleep 8-9. I honestly wrote 7 hours because I know the backlash I receive every time I tell a client to sleep 8-9, so I cave and say 7. So make sure you get at least 7, ideally 8 or 9 hours every night.
Dial in your exercise. Most people should not be exercising hard more than 3 or 4 days per week. If you do, you need to be working with professionals to make sure you can recover properly, and that you are doing all of the above recommendations all the time. In bad cases of leaky gut with concurrent adrenal fatigue, autoimmune conditions or another health crisis, I often recommend limiting exercise to restorative yoga, short walks, gardening and gentle stretching.
A common complaint I receive when I make these time-consuming recommendations is “I don’t have time for all that”. At risk of sounding like a total jerk, I want to share a quote that I once read: try replacing the words “I don’t have time” with “that’s not a priority” and see how it feels. Brutal, but oh so true!
Additional Steps
So let’s say you’ve done all of the above (be honest with yourself!), and you are still experiencing issues related to leaky gut – it is time to call in professional help. Find a practitioner you can work with to identify additional causes of leaky gut. Things to look for include (but are not limited to):
dysbiosis, yeast, fungus and/or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth
As with all health concerns, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for healing leaky gut. It is a complex web that needs to be approached from a holistic and functional perspective. But without addressing diet and lifestyle factors, you will not be able to recover. So start today by taking baby steps, or jumping in whole hog, whichever method works best for you. Respect your digestive tract and you will set the stage for whole-body wellness.
Avocado’s are the best. They are jam-packed with nutrients, fibre and healthy fat. And they’re freakin delicious too!!! Adding half an avocado to your eggs, salad, or burgers, is the perfect way to not only get in some additional nutrition, but to make sure your meal will be filling for hours. Also, please note that the fat/calorie content of the avocado is not to be feared. The era of “1/8th avocado per day” is long gone. Avocados are not going to jack up your cholesterol. They’re not going to make you gain weight (unless you go bananas on them, but that can happen with any food) – I regularly eat 2-3 halves/day, often more if I’m hungry. Enjoy this yummy food free of worry forever and ever!
A lot of people are a little nervous the first time they buy an avocado. That’s totally normal. It’s a weird little fruit that requires a few tricks to peel/open it and not destroy it in the process. This article is designed to help de-mistify the avocado and teach you how to make the food that avocado shines in…guacamole!
Step 1 – Determining if Your Avocado is Ripe!
Okay so this is probably the trickiest part of the whole process and it is pretty important. Once you cut into that avocado, it will no longer ripen. If you open it up and it’s really tough inside, there’s nothing you can do but toss it. So how do you determine if your avocado is ripe? I personally use the squeeze test:
Not Ripe: avocado is hard as a rock and bright green
Almost Ripe: avocado gives slightly when you squeeze it, but still fairly hard
Salad Ripe: avocado gives when you squeeze it and leaves a slight indent. Perfect for salads and burger toppings.
Guac Ripe: avocado easily gives when you squeeze it and stays indented. Fabulous for guacamole, and still totally great on salads and burgers!
Over Ripe: avocado is black; you squeeze and it easily gives way to the pit inside; the inside feels like liquid; or there’s mould on it.
The more you use the squeeze test, the better you’ll become at determining if the avocado is ready to go or not! However, if that’s a little too subjective for you, I recently saw this neat trick floating around Facebook. Originally from Northwest Edible Life – this photo shows how removing the stem will tell you if the avocado is ripe or past its prime:
Step 2 – Storing Your Avocados
If your avocados are hard as rock, store them on the counter for a few days to let them ripen. Speed ripening by keeping them near other fruit such as bananas and apples. (Warning: this will also ripen the fruit faster!)
If your avocados are perfectly ripe, or when they reach that desired ripeness on your counter, move them to the fridge. You get a few extra days out of them this way – unless of course you want to eat them all at once! I find if I move the avocados to the fridge as soon as they hit the “salad ripeness” (ie. as soon as they give a bit under pressure), they last a good week before they move into that over-ripe zone.
Step 3 – Opening Up The Darn Thing
1. Using a sharp knife, cut into the avocado, lengthwise. The pit will stop you from going further. Rotate the knife all the way around the pit.2. Twist the 2 halves in opposite directions.The pit will stay in one half. If you are only eating half, choose the one without the pit. Store the half with the pit still in it, in the fridge. This will prevent it from browning.3. Using a chef’s knife, sharply strike the pit with the sharp side of the knife. The knife should stick into the pit.4. Hold the avocado steady and twist the knife (as it’s attached to the pit).Voila!
Step 4 – Making Guacamole
Ingredients:
3 ripe avocados
½ red onion (or 1 small onion)
juice of 2 limes
1 cup loosely-packed cilantro
sea salt, to taste
green onion to garnish (optional)
Directions:
1. Cut open avocados. Slice avocado horizontally and vertically (a.k.a. make a grid with the knife).
2. Use a spoon to scoop out the avocado into a bowl.
3. Juice 2 limes and add to the bowl.
4. Dice red onion finely and add to the bowl.
5. Season with a bit of sea salt and mash away! I use a potato masher, but a fork or meat tenderizer both work fine.
6. Taste and season with more sea salt, or add additional lime juice, based on you preference. Top with green onion if desired and enjoy! My personal preference is to enjoy guac with plantain chips or clean potato chips. The hubby loves it on organic blue corn chips!
GUAC HACK: If you’re making guacamole in advance and you don’t want it to turn brown, there are 3 tricks you can use:
Cover with lime juice (downside: much more lime flavour)
Place saran wrap directly on the guac so no air can get in (downside: plastic, waste)
Place the pits of the avocados in the bottom of the bowl, right in the guacamole. I learned this trick from a dear friend of mine who’s Argentinian and says that’s the only way to do it. This is what I do now!
So tell me – what’s your favourite way to enjoy guacamole??
With yesterday being the first day of October, I thought it would be timely to post a simple tutorial for cooking squash! Winter squashes of all varieties are one of my favourite foods, which is interesting because they literally made me gag as a kid – I wouldn’t even carry the squash dish to the Thanksgiving table. There are so many varieties of squash, each with their own flavour profile, all of which are packed with nutrients. High fibre, lower in carbs than the typical starchy veg (if that’s important for you) and containing powerful antioxidant carotenoids (eg. lutein, zeaxanthin, beta-cryptoxanthin), they are a great food to consume on the regular. 
In the first 2 posts in this series, I discussed:
