Blasting Off With Thermogenesis

Now there's a big word - thermogenesis.  Here's Ani's definition of thermogenesis from page 41 of the 15 Day Fat Blast:

Now that's pretty cool!  The foods that fall into this category are:

• Black Pepper
• Caffeine - My personal favorite!
• Calcium rich foods like blackstrap molasses; collard, mustard and turnip greens; sesame seeds, spinach
• Cayenne
• Grapefruit
• Ginger
• Green tea
• Ice water
• Lean protein like buckwheat groats, brown rice protein powder and seeds
• Turmeric
• Vitamin D-rich mushrooms, including shiitake 

So as we'll see the foods that make up the rest of our menus are jam packed with these foods to help rev up our metabolism.  I know this is exactly what I'm looking for since as I've gotten older it seems like my metabolism has slowed to a snail's pace.  

One other thing I've been wanting to mention is that Ani mentions using filtered water when making all of these soups and shakes.  Since living in California we drink a fair amount of bottled water but at home would typically drink water from the tap.  That is until we went to Africa last winter.  Since I knew that the water on the ship was heavily chlorinated to be safe I made sure we brought a water filtration pitcher.  Just before we left I saw a commercial for a new filtration pitcher called "ZeroWater Pitcher".  This thing paid for itself over and over and over!  Although the water there was safe it had over 700 parts per million (ppm) of particulates in the water - euww!  And it tasted horrible!  The only way the water was at all palatable was to add all sorts of chemical laden drink crystals of various sorts.  Double euww!  If you look at the chart that the company has you can see the average amount of dissolved particles in the municipal water where you live.  You might want to get one of these pitchers.  

I have a class for three hours tomorrow so I need to prepare a couple of my meals for travel yet tonight. This short class will be a good trial for me to get into the travelling food routine since starting Monday I have a professional meeting that lasts all day for the four days and I'm trying to do the planning for success since this is where I typically fall down on the job.  So - on with today's food.  

 For breakfast we started the day with a Pineapple Cilantro Shake.  This sweet, refreshing shake has cucumber, flax and some coconut oil in addition to the pineapple and cilantro.  Although this is a good tasting shake it didn't knock my socks off so I give this a B.  

For our mid morning snack we switch gears and have a dip called Cucumber Guacamole.  This really did taste like a refreshing version of guacamole since there's a fair amount of cucumber in addition to the requisite avocado.  As one would expect there's lemon and garlic as well as some cayenne for thermocharger.  I think it was a good thing that I didn't have any chips in the house as it is hard to eat guacamole with out chips I think.  I gave this a B - oh, heck!  Let's give this a B+ since I think if I'd eaten at night in front of the TV I would have really loved it.  

For lunch we have another salad but quite different.  A Cabbage Salad with Cucumber Miso Dressing  where the dressing is really the star here since the salad is just shredded cabbage and carrots.  The dressing has cucumber, miso, ginger some sesame oil, oil and vinegar.  The dressing is quite good but once I put it on the coleslaw it was just "Meh" with a capital M.  I was surprised.  OK - I will admit I am not a big coleslaw fan so if you like coleslaw give this a try.  Me - I'll probably use the dressing on something else next time.  Obviously this gets a C from me.  

Mid afternoon snack today is Garlic Bell Soup.  This is one of the best soups we've had the pleasure of trying from this book - in my opinion.  The red pepper, avocado, miso and garlic along with a dash of chipotle pepper had enough kick and lots of smooth.  Really terrific.  I will definitely be making this soup again so I give it a solid A.  Yummy!  

Finally we have an unusual dinner tonight in Celery Almond Pate'.  In addition to coarsely chopped celery, ginger, garlic and miso we add in almond meal.  Almond meal is basically almonds dry chopped into a powder.  They are then folded into the the rest of the mixture and it forms a pate'.  It doesn't look terribly appetizing but is to be eaten either as a dip or rolled into a lettuce leaf or a sheet of Nori seaweed.  Since I had some Nori I made this into a Nori sandwich and it was tres', tres' delish!  I loved it so it definitely gets an A so don't let this picture turn you off too much to give it a try. 

Here's the spreadsheet for the recipes:

Name	Category	Diet	Day	Page number		Rating
Vanilla Blueberry Shake	Shake	Fat Blast	eight	128		D
Red, White and blue berry salad	Salad	Fat Blast	eight	166		B
Kreamy Chipotle Salad	Salad	Fat Blast	eight	136		A
Kreamy Cucumber Soup	Soup	Fat Blast	eight	146		A
Zucchini Noodles	Dinner	Fat Blast	eight	160		C
Pineapple Cilantro Shake	Shake	Fat Blast	nine	124		B
Cucumber Guacamole	Dip	Fat Blast	nine	158		B+
Cabbage Salad with Cucumber Miso Dressing	Salad	Fat Blast	nine	131		C
Garlic Bell Soup	Soup	Fat Blast	nine	142		A
Celery Almond Pate'	Dip	Fat Blast	nine	158		A