Older Bolder Life

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the Older Bolder Life Vegetable Wednesday 4 July: Grill-Charred Green Beans with Homemade Harissa

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We have a friend down in Austin, an uber-talented chef by the name of Libby (she runs a very popular catering business down there); we actually met Libby one summer given the confluence of a couple of passions we share: cooking great food and fly fishing.

Libby bestows on we mere mortals great recipes now and again – like this Grill Charred Green Beans with Homemade Harissa she sent us a few years back.

We happen to share another passion with Libby, that being a love of interesting and spicy foods from other cultures; this quick and easy riff on harissa paste that you can whip up at home quite easily is a great example.

Green beans are a great side year round and this has become one of our favorite preps; seemingly everybody we’ve ever served it to has pestered us for the recipe.

And if you don’t have a grill basket yet, this recipe may be the very excuse you need to pick one up…

1 medium red bell pepper
3 medium Fresno chiles
1 medium jalapeno chile
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp kosher salt
1 + 2 tbsp good olive or avocado oil
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp ground cumin (or more)
1/2 tsp ground coriander (or more)
Good salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

2 lb fresh green beans, tipped and trimmed

Start by roasting/charring the peppers on the grill, under the broiler, or over a gas flame until soft and charred. Throw the peppers in a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let them steam for 12-15 minutes.

When they’ve steamed, peel off the charred skins, stem and seed, then chop coarsely and drop into your trusty food processor along with the minced garlic, and 1 tsp salt. Pulse into a coarse paste and scrape down the bowl.

Now add the the oil, lemon juice, coriander, and cumin until smooth; season to taste with salt and fresh ground pepper.

Toss the trimmed beans into a bowl, drizzle with the remaining 2 tbsp of oil and stir to coat all the beans. We like to now grill (in a grill basket) over fire on the grill, though you can also char in a cast-iron skillet (or other heavy skillet) on the stove top. The objective is to grill the beans, picking up some char and blistering, until they’re perfectly crisp-tender.

When the beans are done, toss them back in the bowl you drizzled them with oil in, drizzle the harissa over and mix well. These are great warm or at room temperature too.

Enjoy.

Five Quick Unconventional Stress Management Tips

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Just this past week I’ve been asked by a family member dealing with a burst of stress-inducing life circumstances about stress management tips “besides all the easy ones like exercise, meditate, try yoga, take a walk, or sleep more…”.

We’ve ended up talking about a number of options, but these were five six off the list that resonated the most.

Recalling Happy Memories

Reminiscing about enjoyable, positive, or happy memories, in this study damped cortisol rise and reduced negative affect in response to a stressful stimulus. Finding your happy place, even if just for a few moments, is probably useful.

For me at least, that means time on one of the great freestone rivers of the West, like the Gallatin above.

Spend More Time in the Sun

Those of you who are living a Primal lifestyle have already learned to embrace more time in the sun (with of course adequate precautions for high risk exposure areas like your sun and face), though there’s a fair amount of research documenting improved stress responses, mood, and sleep with more light exposure.

Bump Up Your Vitamin C Intake

There’s a fair amount of literature supporting the role that vitamin C plays in augmenting the body’s response fighting oxidative stresses; for over a decade behavioral sources (like this Psychology Today article from 2003) have suggested higher intake of vitamin C (with resultant higher serum levels) plays a useful role in maximizing our stress response.

Laugh

Norman Cousin’s 1979 book, Anatomy of an Illness, is a must read and brought to light the impressive powers of laughter. Perhaps I’m missing something these days, but many of the people we run across in daily life perceive they don’t laugh as much as in years past. Here’s a great recap from the Mayo Clinic detailing the short-term and long-term benefits of laughter if you need a refresher on some of the science of laughter.

Shake a Leg (Dance)

While not a research article per se, here’s a very interesting spin on Dancing and the Brain from Harvard Medical School’s Department of Neurobiology; from the article –

…Scientists gave little thought to the neurological effects of dance until relatively recently, when researchers began to investigate the complex mental coordination that dance requires. In a 2008 article in Scientific American magazine, a Columbia University neuroscientist posited that synchronizing music and movement—dance, essentially—constitutes a “pleasure double play.” Music stimulates the brain’s reward centers, while dance activates its sensory and motor circuits…

Have Another Piece of Dark Chocolate

Recently presented research from Loma Linda suggests that higher cacao levels in dark chocolate have demonstrable positive impacts on cognition, mood, memory, immunity, and more. They focused on cacao concentrations in chocolate of 70% or more, and while the data is “early”, it’s encouraging. ‘Nuff said.

Older Bolder Foundations: Unclutter Your Brain and Lower Stress

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One of the most indelible learning moments for me during my medical school years happened during a lecture by a charismatic, stand-up-comedian-level-funny, uber-intelligent and articulate child psychiatrist (whose name unfortunately escapes me as a pen this) as he taught us basic concepts about the neurobiology and neurophysiology of memory.

[He happened to be an enormous man, claiming he weighed “well north of 300 pounds”, had a precocious three year old child he affectionately referred to as “the monster”, and to our loss, was the only African-American lecturer we enjoyed that entire term.]

Your Brain, Short Term Memory, and the Seven Marbles

His premise during this particular series of lectures was that as humans at this stage of historical development, most us of can grasp no more than seven “items” in our active short term memory.

He likened the concept functionally to having a cardboard toilet paper tube positioned between our ears, long enough and of sufficient diameter to hold seven fairly large marbles, each marble representing a nugget of information that is actively stored in our short term memory.

Add another marble (nugget of short term information to remember) into one end, and yet another marble on the other end is pushed from the tube, and unless effectively captured and stored away, just might be lost forever.

He went on to walk us through the fairly complex theories underlying the conversion of short term brain storage to longer term or permanent brain storage, but offered we budding medical students a challenge, a challenge that remains pertinent to this day for just about everyone walking the planet.

The challenge (he riffed on the Mission Impossible theme of “your challenge should you decide to accept it”): continually sort through the huge amount of noise we encounter during a given day or week, pick out the items/nuggets/thoughts/concepts worthy of keeping, and “file” them in either short or long term memory so that we can act upon them intentionally, at the right time, and in the right place.

Far easier said than done; and this was back in the day before email, smart phones (hey, it was the early 80s so there weren’t even any cell phones on hand), PDAs, or really even personal computers.

Chasing Those Marbles and Other Exercises in Futility

As many of you have, I spent parts of the next twenty years utilizing some of the best and most accepted tools of the day chasing those marbles, valiantly trying not to lose any despite what seemed to be an increasingly complex and faster moving world.

I’ve personally been at various times a very devoted list maker, user of various organizers modeled along the classic Day Timer (in fact, there’s one sitting on a nearby office shelf right now), various PDA devices, and (allegedly) smarter phones with bells and whistles designed to make life organization a snap.

As many of you, I’ve found some of these systems to be quite useful but none fully accomplished a critical primary objective – that being a system to capture all those thoughts and ideas, some of which are damned fleeting, popping up and vanishing in a flash, to be dealt with at a later (more expedient or appropriate) time.

Finally, I found that running a very busy spine-focused medical practice and two other family businesses at the same time was simply beginning to overwhelm my abilities to track “all the marbles”, and often those marbles were rattling around in my head at night, interfering with rest and recovery, and occasionally an important marble would fall out, roll away, and be lost forever (or at least until some deadline popped up I’d forgotten about…).

It doesn’t matter what stage of life you’re in, what you do for a living, what your educational background is, or whether you’re a young parent of a growing family (probably the hardest job in the world by the way) or the CEO of a multinational conglomerate – at some point you’ve had too many marbles banging around in your head too.

Collect Those Marbles, Get Them Organized, and Manage Your Stress

Ironically it wasn’t until over 20 years later than two different mentors, at pretty much the same time, introduced me to a concept that has allowed me (along with thousands of others) to collect those marbles, get them more or less organized, and even more importantly, decide which ones need attention now and which can wait until later.

To really work, something like this must have a provision to allow you to capture everything floating around in your head, on your desk (whether you a have a literal or digital inbox), in your email queue, and/or wherever else you happen to have items piling up that need your attention.

There are several approaches out there that provide the structure to accomplish this somewhat tall order, and they’re quite good at getting it done.

My mentors happened to walk me through the concepts espoused by David Allen of Getting Things Done fame; if you’ve not found a structure to use that allows you to clear your head (or desk, or inbox, etc), organize and prioritize the (likely) big list, and then assign a task or action (prioritized of course) to start actually getting done what needs to get done – then give it a look. (One thing I love about GTD is it’s not built around a software program you need to buy, and can be implemented using a wide variety of approaches. I happen to use a very good multi-platform software tool designed by a third party – OmniFocus – but it’s not essential to the process.)

The key point is this: life is busy, and there’s a lot of noise in terms of distractions and demands on your time. If you don’t have the best tools, and (of course) choose to use them, you’ll find yourself distracted, discouraged, unproductive, and unfocused. Collect those marbles, prioritize and sort the actions they demand, and you’ll find yourself energized, sleeping better, and living with more intention and focus.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find the system that works for you.

More to come, and keep chasing those marbles.

the Older Bolder Life Salad Sunday 1 July: 1015 Tomato Salad

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Here’s another long time family favorite salad we find ourselves reaching for now that tomato season is in full swing – 1015 Tomato Salad.

The 1015 of course refers to the sweet onion born and bred here in Texas, though I can assure you this dish will be just as delicious with whatever sweet onions you might reach for, whether they be Maui, Walla Walla, or Vidalia. (Brand me a traitor, but after growing and tasting them all over the years, I still think nothing beats a Walla Walla onion.)

The grandmother we sourced the recipe from used to drizzle a teaspoon or so of good raw honey over the salad before serving, but we’ve grown to savor it without; try it both ways if your current routine allows and see what you think…

1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved (grab some mixed colors)
1 pound various ripe tomatoes, trimmed, cut into wedges
1 small Texas 1015 (or other sweet onion), thinly sliced, start with 1/2
1/2 cup fresh basil leaves, torn into small pieces
1/3 cup fresh chives, cut into small pieces (1/2 inch or so)
3 tbsp EVOO or avocado oil
1-2 tbsp good white wine vinegar (perhaps even more)
Good salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Optional: Drizzle of good honey (no more than 1 tsp)

Prep the tomatoes, onion, and herbs; combine in a bowl with the oil of choice and vinegar (drizzle with the honey if using). Stir it up to ensure all the tomatoes are well coated and season to taste with the salt and pepper. Adjust the vinegar and amount of onion to suit your clan.

Cover and throw in the fridge if not using immediately; don’t make more than 4 hours ahead or the tomatoes will soften too much…

Enjoy.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know (Links and Stuff) 30 June 2018

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Top of the Fold

Questioning the Role of Insulin in Alzheimer’s Disease. Keep on eye on this one…

Links and News That Caught Our Eye

Are drunks more creative at solving problems? Maybe.

Stress and sperm quality; looks like prolonged stress decreases sperm motility.

Does your birth month affect your lifetime disease risk? This one deserves some pondering…

No surprise here, but indeed loneliness is bad for your heart.

A stampede of meatless products headed your way? (By the way, have just read a shocking take-down of some of the meatless foodstuffs world, verifying some information for a later post…)

Toddlers are consuming too much sugar.

Ironically, mindfulness mediation appears to be demotivating. And the comments, vitriolic as some might be, are perhaps the most entertaining aspect of this NYTs piece. (Tangentially related – I often wonder how much putting away your damned phone would improve one’s mindfulness?)

Recipe Roundup (Ours)

South Sound Curry Coconut Chicken Satay

Tasty Quick Dills

Quick Jalapeno Tomato Table Salsa No. 3

Barbary Coast Lamb Kabobs

ME’s Cauliflower Salad

Versatile Vinegar and Oil Dressings

Bunless NOLA Burger

BeBe’s Curry Mayo and Dip

Tomatillo Avocado Salsa

the Older Bolder Life Friday Feast 29 June: South Sound Curry Coconut Chicken Satay

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Several years ago my lovely wife and I had the opportunity to spend a couple of years out along the southern shoreline of Puget Sound; it’s beautiful country, and despite it’s well-deserved reputation for rain, we grilled every month of the year, rain or shine.

We truly enjoyed the bountiful seafood available on the coast, but also the very, very good Thai and Korean cuisine we found in abundance. One recipe we fairly quickly folded into our regular rotation was this Curry Coconut Chicken Satay; we fiddled with several recipes until we came up with a version that suited our palates and (importantly) was quick and simple to prepare, easy enough to set up for a weeknight cook.

You’ve probably read before that Thai dishes seek to stimulate every single one of the taste senses in each and every bite; this recipe accomplishes the task and is Primal/Paleo compliant to boot (note a touch of brown sugar is optional, and does add a tiny hint of flavor to the final product).

If you’re a satay fan, bet this one ends up in your summer rotation…

1/2 cup full-fat coconut milk
1/4 to 1/3 cup fish sauce
4 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 tbsp good curry powder (to taste, Madras if you’ve got it)
1 and 1/2 tbsp fresh ginger, minced
1 and 1/2 tbsp cilantro, minced
2-3, scallions ,white and green parts, minced
3 lb. boneless, skinless chicken thighs or breasts, sliced into 1 by 3 inch pieces
Optional: 1 tbsp brown sugar, packed

Bamboo skewers, soaked for 30 minutes

Stir the first seven ingredients (everything but the chicken) together, mixing well, then add the chicken pieces, using your hands to combine well and making sure every chicken piece is coated. Throw in the fridge (a large resealable bag works wonders here) for at least an hour, but far better in the 6-8 hour range or overnight.

When ready to cook, fire the grill, drain the chicken and thread it onto the soaked skewers.

Now sear the chicken quickly over a hot fire, turning once, about 90-120 seconds per side. Move to a medium-hot / indirect heat area of the grill and cook for another 2-5 minutes (depends on thickness of the slices and how hot your fire) until cooked through.

Pull and serve hot with your favorite peanut sauce and perhaps a Thai cucumber salad.

Enjoy.

Older Bolder Foundations: Is Everything You’ve Been Taught About Macronutrient Partitioning Wrong? Probably. (Part 3)

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Let’s wind up this whirlwind tour of macronutrient partitioning with a look at the role fat plays in your food plan and a key closing thought. Scroll down below (or click) to read Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them.

Getting to Your Best Macronutrient Partitioning: Fats

Fats, despite growing evidence to the contrary, continue to be broadly demonized by many in the traditional health and nutrition world (see current recommendations from the American Heart Association for example); not only that, we’re constantly implored to utilize the very fats that are in reality shockingly bad for us – namely the highly-oxidized, chemically-modified, PUFA-dominated franken-oils lining most supermarket shelves (again, see the AHA link above).

The good, healthy fats (butter and ghee, coconut oil and coconut products, animal fats, olives and olive oil, and avocados for example) provide a host of benefits and can be enjoyed, within the bounds of common sense, with two primary goals in their consumption: balancing out your daily caloric needs as your primary fuel source (after establishing your carb and protein requirements) and making your food taste good (yep, much of the flavor you savor in your food comes from fat).

[And yes, we’ll being taking a detailed look at what makes ‘good fats’ far better for you in detailed posts down the road. If you’re currently exploring the issue and want to dig deeper (no pun intended), pick up a copy of Dr. Cate Shanahan’s book Deep Nutrition for a dive into the science underlaying the fat recommendations here and across much of the wellness literature today.]

Balancing out daily caloric needs is the key take home point here and points to a critical principle that continues to fly in the face of conventional wisdom – that point being that the human machine (our metabolism) runs optimally on fat as its primary fuel source, not carbohydrates. There’s a plethora of literature espousing this Fat Paradigm (here’s a seminal article from Phinney, 2004), and we’ll be looking at the topic in much more detail a few weeks down the road.

Practically speaking, once you’ve reacquainted your metabolic machinery with the reality of burning fat as a preferred fuel source (which conceptually isn’t that difficult to do), fats become the variable in your food plan allowing you to accomplish all sorts of things. Things like rational, consistent weight loss or fueling high level functional life or athletic activities.

[As an example, I have a client who wants to loose roughly 40 pounds (at a very sustainable rate of 1.5 lb/wk), and we’ve dialed in her comfortable carb intake at about 60 g/day and protein in the neighborhood of 90 g/day. With her calculated BMR (based on LBM and adjusted for activity) 2150 cal/day, it’s a simple calculation to subtract her carb+protein intake derived calories from her BMR, along with the calorie deficit to produce the desired weight loss, to see that she needs about 800 cal/day from good fats, roughly 88 grams. An easy-peasy plan to derive and accomplish.]

For many breaking out of the carb-dependent paradigm can be a challenge, but once you’ve personally experienced the power of changing over to fat as your preferred fuel source, a whole new world of possibility opens up.

Getting to Your Best Macronutrient Partitioning: Seek and You Shall Find

In summary, your best macronutrient partitioning plan isn’t one that comes from the benevolent USDA, the American Heart Association (or just about any other traditional medical “association”), or from the fitness guru (and Instagram celebrity) online who promises a foolproof, customized meal plan for just three easy payments of $39.99.

Your optimal macronutrient partitioning plan…

…is at any point in time unique to you and you alone, though there are useful generalizations available to serve as jumping off points when reshaping your approach to food and nutrition,

…is going to be fluid (flexible), changing as your body composition and metabolic health improves,

…is going to be fluid (flexible), changing as your physical and metabolic demands change over time, perhaps even from day to day,

…is most likely going to built around the concept that the bulk of your daily calories will come from fat (good fats!), less from protein, and minimally from carbohydrates,

…will likely vary seasonally,

…will likely become so intuitive you don’t really even think about it from day to day,

…and will likely benefit from an annual or bi-annual “tune up” or “reset”, as in a period of nutritional ketosis for example.

Your challenge, should you decide to accept it, is to find that optimal macronutrient partitioning plan that fits your life today, and learn the skills to adjust it when life throws you a curve ball, or you just feel the need to push your limits out a little further.

Read. Study. Ask questions. Experiment with your own N=1 clinical trials. Need help along the way? We can help, as can a number of excellent health coaches only an email or call away.

the Older Bolder Life Vegetable Wednesday 27 June: Tasty Quick Dills

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With farmers market season now in full swing, if they’re not in already, it won’t be long before you’ll be seeing stunningly fresh pickling cucumbers showing up. Great in salads, cucumbers star in quick pickles too.

We’ve been putting up various fermented dills as part of our fall pickling routine for years now, and diehard pickle aficionados will argue that there’s nothing quite like an old-school, pucker-your-lips, sour dill pickle painstakingly fermented and processed. I even posted about these on our fly fishing blog last fall –

…While I wouldn’t argue that fact, after an early August conversation with our friend Chef Libby in Austin, during which (among other things) she extolled the virtues of quick pickles, we’ve been quick pickling all sorts of stuff of late.

These quick dills have surprised everybody we’ve shared them with, in that they’re packed with great dill flavor (get really fresh dill frond and seeds), perfectly acidic (the sour that makes you pucker) without being too much so, and crunchier than fermented dills (without using alum as a cheat too).

Personally I think they’re far better with a bit of heat from the addition of several good peppers (long and skinny chile de arbol peppers work particularly well), though they’re good without the extra punch…

A child’s-play-easy ten minutes of effort here will make you look like a genius this next week.

1 lb pickling not-too-fat pickling cucumbers, trimmed, sliced lengthwise into quarters
2 large garlic cloves, peeled
1/2 C fresh dill fronds and stems, washed (or a bit more)
1 C filtered water
1/2 C white vinegar
2 T pickling or kosher salt
1 tsp (generous) fresh dill seeds
1 tsp (generous) coriander seeds
Optional: Hot peppers of your choice, try Thai, serrano, a split jalapeno…

Gently heat the water, vinegar, and salt, stirring until the salt dissolves. Remove from the heat to cool.

Scrub, trim, and slice the cucumbers; then prep the garlic and peppers if using.

Assembly is a piece of cake – pack a quart jar with the dill fronds and stems, garlic, then the cucumbers and peppers.

Sprinkle the dill and coriander seeds into the jar, then pour the cooled liquid over to within 1/4 of the top. Cover, leave out at room temperature for 3-4 hours, then throw in the fridge.

They’re not quite ready by the next day, but try one anyway; they’re good by the second day, getting better for the next 7-10 days.

Enjoy.