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Sweet potato fricassee

This recipe allows you to make a quick, tasty and vegan lunch in no time, combining the French potato fricassee with a Provençale tomato into one preparation, and one dish.

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Sweet potato kale salad

There are so many ways to make salads: using raw vegetables or cooked ones. You can also make them light as an appetizer, or nutrient and calorie-dense giving you enough for a full meal. This sweet potato and kale salad uses raw tomatoes, with cooked potatoes and lightly steamed kale, and it is a full meal.

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Garbanzo bean and kale salad

Time is a scare resource: we only have 24 hours in the day do it all. When on a busy day, it is possible to make a quick and nutritious lunch, and this was the driver of this garbanzo beans and kale salad. The entire process took under 10 minutes from start to finish. All you need is to have the ingredients at your disposal.

I started with the kale, and felt that if this was going to a full…

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Beet and kale salad

Tonight I wanted to make something nutritious, colorful and tasty, hence this beet and kale salad. By themselves, beets provide a full array of red, pink and purple depending on what you look at: the vegetable, the water it cooks in, the white cutting board which is no longer white, or your hands after preparing them. At any rate, beets represent some of the most wonderful ingredients and are…

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Ratatouille without eggplant

Like many of my recipes, the story from the ingredients and the preparation is that the customer is king. This week my customers are my two teenagers, and since I am cooking mostly plant-based meals, I am listening to their quirks. Marc does not like eggplant, but he loves the taste of ratatouille otherwise, so I decided to make this ratatouille without eggplant.

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Baked sweet potato fries

As much as the tradition calls potato fries French fries, they are actually not from France, but originally from Belgium, with the mussel fries combination called “moules frites”. At any rate, sweet potatoes have the advantage of providing vitamin A, so you’re eating carbs – no doubt, but unrefined, unprocessed carbohydrates which contain nutrients. Today we did sweet potato fries for lunch.

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Tofu fried rice in Vietnamese sauce

When you have kids it can be hard to cook something new that they are going to like. I try to remember the culinary preferences from each of my two teenagers, but each of them is quite different. I made this tofu fried rice in Vietnamese sauce tonight and to my surprise, it was a hit.

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Natto quinoa in wasabi sauce with seared tomato

If you’ve been reading other recipes on this blog, you noticed that I am a big fan of combining flavors of French cuisine with those from Japanese cuisine. Having lived in both countries, it feels natural to do so. For some time of your life, you eat ingredients in a certain combination and preparation. Then, you transition to new ingredients from another country, new sauces, new tastes. But in…

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Review: Vitus Vitesse EVO CR Ultegra road bike

I have been for 35 years on BMX, mountain bike and road pretty much everywhere. Bikes tend to last me a long time, as I start with a frame which can last and upgrade components as they need maintenance over time. This new Vitus just arrived today, and will be replacing my 2005 Giant TCR. 13 years with a bike, it was time for a new one. This review accounts for the self assembly of the bike, then…

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Vegan quinoasotto

I often find it remarkable that with limited amounts of ingredients, we can invent so many recipes. The risotto is an italian classic with variations in the way it is prepared. Tonight I wanted to use quinoa instead of rice, and other ingredients that reminded me a little about risotto, namely mushrooms and a creamy sauce. So I thought about quinoa, which happens to meet the gluten-free, vegan…

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Vegan, gluten-free pastas with garlic and olive oil

Delicious food can be extraordinarily simple, when it meets your taste and nutritional needs. In Europe, whether it’s Italy or France, it’s very common to eat pasta with an easy seasoning of olive oil and garlic. This recipe makes a small variation, in which we replace gluten and animal products contained in regular pasta, with a gluten-free and vegan alternative. For this particular recipe, I…

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Should we defer fitness and health decisions to machines and robots?

There will be a time of perfect calibration for those who can initially afford it, and more broadly, for those who want to follow the directions given to them by machines. A computer application will ask you a series of questions like this: how much do you want to behave for potential longevity? How much risk do you want to take to satisfy pleasure, assuming immediate gratification may carry…

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Become a stronger athlete by resting, sometime

As much as consistency is important, and as much as the most important behaviors happen when they are built into your life, built into your routine, such that exceptions never show as an excuse or get in way, days of rest are also necessary. You might say, how come then? Isn’t this going to break the flow of repetition, possibly create a new pattern of rest and couch potato-ization? We have to…

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A way of dealing with pain that eliminates it in the long run

To understand the root of the problem with how we cope with stress and pain in general, consider the fact that we are naturally wired to seek pleasure and move away from displeasure. Your normal state is joyful, playful, happy, and that state seeks interactions that either increase the feeling of pleasure or decrease pains that you may be experiencing. Back to the mind-body connection, much of…

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How to avoid and stop motion sickness in cars, boats and planes

Movement is part of life: we spend energy. We can experience one location, then another. All of life is in constant movement. Our body has motion sensors: the eyes see what’s happening, and inside our ears, sensors pick up the motion itself, the change in gravitational force. When we walk, ride, or even are the driver of a vehicle, we initiate the motion. Therefore, the brain expects the…

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Why are the Galapagos islands unique?

We are finishing a family trip to the Galapagos Islands, off the coat of Ecuador. It has been almost 10 days of walking, hiking, boating, swimming, and biking around the main islands: Isabela, Santa Cruz, Daphne, Bartolome and San Cristobal. I knew of the role that the location played in Darwin’s studies, to explain the evolution model for species. But some questions remained: why are these…

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Learning technicalities to thrive, as a person and an astronaut

The more you know the less you fear – Chris Hadfield, astronaut

I was opening my computer this morning to write about this section and noticed an advertisement for a class that the veteran astronaut Chris Hadfield teaches. In the ad, Hadfield talks about the experience of going into space, looking at the earth from the outside, looking at the solar system, the milky way, and asking himself: how…

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