Exciting News!

I am very excited to tell you about a collaboration I am now doing. My friend Stephanie over at 3SquareNutrition and I have decided to team up once a week to bring you tasty food with health benefits you can actually use. Stephanie is an old friend who is studying to be a dietitian, with an expertise on food allergies, and we bonded over our gluten free lives. Well that and what a small world this is.

We will be collaborating once a week; we will take a vitamin, nutrient, or ingredient and I will give you a few recipes that are easy enough and delicious on this site, while she will tell you all about why it’s good for you and tell you all the science-y part. You will also get the nutrition information for what I make on her site.

We would appreciate any support in this, and hope you will tell your friends and family to follow our sites. I will still have my normal posts with beef, pork, and ranting, but on Wednesdays, you will get a cleaned up, healthier me.

Are you ready?

Are you excited?

I am!!!!

This week, we will be talking about Magnesium. Magnesium is good for heart health, and has many wonderful qualities that you can learn all about over at 3SquareNutrition, I’m here to show you how to get it into your system.

The two biggest sources of magnesium are spinach and Swiss chard.

Let’s start with spinach, shall we?

We can do a nice spinach salad. It’s easy, healthy, and delicious!

I have to say, this looks pretty good.
Take your spinach, about a cup, tear off the stems, and give it a good wash, and dry it. Make sure it’s dry, so the dressing sticks to it.
Then slice up some strawberries, probably should go ahead and wash those too, and add them to your spinach. In a separate bowl, mix up your vinaigrette. You can use which ever oil and vinegar you’d like, I used these:

But if you don’t have a central market near you, you like something else better, or you just want to be different, go for it! Just remember, one part vinegar, three parts oil, and a half a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, to help the emulsion, and whisk away. Now, take a tablespoon full of your dressing, and put it in a bowl with your spinach and strawberries and toss all together. This will coat your leaves, but you will actually eat less dressing. The best part now? You will have extra dressing left over, so you can make this again with your leftover spinach and it will be even faster to make.
Now crumble a little feta on top, and you have a delicious, salad. Yes, this would be even better with some bacon on it, but I figured since we are talking heart health here, it’s best to leave it off.

Now on to the swiss chard. It’s pretty.

First things first, you need to caramelize an onion.

If you don’t have onionzilla available at your store, go ahead and use two. Slice them up, and over low heat in a half tablespoon of olive oil, let the onions start to brown. If you can cover them, this will speed up the process. You want them to go from this:

To this:

Start cutting up your chard. You will want to remove the stems,

Stack the leaves, roll them up and slice them. When your onions are good and caramelized, deglaze the pot with some white wine, and then add your chard, some salt, and cover. You want to wilt the chard, and you will get about two servings out of this.

Another ingredient high in magnesium is halibut. I’m going to start this recipe off with a disclaimer. I don’t like fish. I know it’s good for you, and I know I SHOULD eat it, but I don’t. In fact, in high school, my parents tried to get me to eat orange roughy once by telling me it was diving chicken. They like to tell people that I fell for it and ate it, but 1) I saw the package, and 2) I was 15 and not that stupid. I will say that I made this, I ate some, and it wasn’t bad. The captain, does like fish and wishes I made it more often, and was very pleased with this.

First, I made a strawberry-kiwi salsa. This was one kiwi, about seven strawberries and half a jalapeÃ±o (you can leave this out if you want) diced and put in the fridge to hang out and let the favors make friends.

Take your halibut steaks and dry them off, and rub them with a little olive oil and a little salt, and grill.

Now to put it all together, just spread about two spoonfuls of the salsa on your fish and enjoy!

Now I know, some of you are out there thinking, this is great and all, but I’m honestly not going to go to the trouble of all this cooking, even though it’s not that much, and the longest cooking time, is caramelizing the onions, yet you still want to add a little magnesium to your diet.
Here is a breakfast idea for you.

You can take any pancake or waffle mix, I use a gluten free one called Maple Grove Farms.
You can do two simple things to add magnesium:
1)replace the egg with flax seed. Take a table spoon of flax seed and grind it crush it, whatever, and mix that with three tablespoons of water and stir until it thickens. This is the equivalent to one egg.