Cooking Cuban

Over the past month, I have really struggled with this blog post. I wanted to start documenting some new recipes that I have been trying, but kept getting stuck on how to begin.  I guess part of my struggle is because I like to tell stories.  As I shared in the last blog post, I come from a family of story tellers.  Nothing is ever a simple one sentence answer for me.  I try to remember at times it's important to be brief and concise, but when it comes down to it, I am just naturally a long winded story teller.  As I tried to think of how to start the next blog, I kept getting caught up in having a story to retell to get things started.  As I have experimented with different recipes, I want to document them, and will; but I just could think of an entertaining way to tell you about my experience cooking amaranth.  So today, I made a Black Bean and Sweet Potato Bowl.  It was based on a black bean recipe I learned to make when I cooked a Cuban dinner for about 40 people this past February.  And just like that, I had another Hayward Adventure that I wanted to share.

In January of this year, my husband and I were part of two teams of 12 people each that ran the Key West Ragnar; which is a 200 mile relay race from Miami to Key West.  If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a Ragnar, it's a long distance race over a two day period, there is a team of 12 runners split between two vans.  The first runner starts the race, their van meets them at the end of their first leg, and runner two takes off on their first leg.  Each leg can be anywhere from just over two miles to just under 12 miles.  The first van does this for all six runners in their van, van two meets up at the switch point for runner six and seven and then van two takes off doing the same thing.  After all twelve runners have run one leg, it starts all over again with van one.  Every runner on the team does a total of three legs and will run a total of about 12 - 20 miles.  There is a little time for sleeping when your van is off, but for the most part; you get up Friday morning and start the race and end on Saturday afternoon.  It's exhausting, exhilarating and awesome.

Now, let's get one thing straight, I am not a fast runner, nor would I consider myself a long distance runner.  Up until we decided to do this, I ran one 5K race.  And after we had signed up, I managed one additional race that was a 5 miler.  Because I was not much of a runner up to this point, and was putting on a lot of miles as a beginner to train for this race, it was right after the 5 miler that I went to see the orthopedic doctor about what I thought was an ankle injury, only to find out that it was a stress fracture and I had to stop running for 6 weeks!  Thankfully, by swimming and aqua jogging, I was able to keep working out, get back to running that November and participate in one of the coolest experiences that January.  Also, thankfully, I was the runner with the least amount of miles!

We had some great runners on our team and luckily I didn't slow things down too much.  Our team finished 33rd out of 250 teams and our friends on the other team finished 27th! If you have the opportunity to participate in a relay race like this, do it. It does not matter how fast you are, it is an amazing experience that is like nothing you have ever done before.  You will be so glad you tried it. It will definitely be an adventure worth having!

We then spent the next few days in Key West eating great food and having some much needed grown up time.  We ate at some really great restaurants.  Old Town Mexican Cafe, had some great Mexican food and one restaurant that was just incredible was this little Cuban Sandwich shop right across from our hotel the Southernmost, called Ana's Cuban Cafe.  If you are ever in Key West, you have to go there.  They make a Cuban Roast Pork Sandwich and Ropa Vieja Sandwich that are outstanding.  On a side note, we went back to Key West during Easter break with the kids and ate at Blue Heaven, not once but twice; breakfast and dinner and it was outstanding, so it would be another must for a trip to Key West! Anyway, so when it was all said and done, we had a great time, missed are kids, were ready to come home, but also ready to do it again next year.

About a month after we were home, we had a Ragnar reunion party.  Since I love to cook, I offered to make all the food; the theme - Cuban food! And let me tell you, while I love to cook and have dinner parties, this was unlike anything I had ever attempted before and would certainly qualify as a Hayward adventure!  In addition to making Cuban food, I did recreate some other food from Key West that we had enjoyed while there, but the Cuban Sandwich was the cornerstone of the menu.  I found a website, 3 Guys from Miami, that had some outstanding recipes for Cuban food.  I highly recommend their website and their cookbooks.  Some of the things I made from their website that I recommend include the Lechon Asado, Pan Cubano (the only bread that should ever be used to make a Cuban Sandwich!), and Frijoles Negros.  I also made yellow rice, fried plantains, Ropa Vieja (shredded beef), Costa Maya Coconut Bread (with the changes that I posted on the website), Puerto Rican style stewed chicken (which is actually a Pinterest recipe that is really good and fit with our theme), Caribbean Sweet Potato Soup with Ginger Shrimp, and flan.  I was so happy with how well it all turned out.  And cooking a dinner party for that many people was pretty crazy.  I checked in with my friend who runs a restaurant on quantities of food per person, I made rolls on two different occasions to test the recipe, I made the Pan Cubano three times to make sure I had it down and still had a little problem with the dough the day of the dinner, but luckily, everything turned out great and my servings were almost spot on.

Since that dinner I have made black beans quite a few times, but today for lunch, I was inspired to make my own variation of the beans.  Since I started at IIN, I have taken the advice of Andrea Beaman and make large batches of brown rice and beans to have on hand for recipes throughout the week.  To make big batches of beans, just soak them overnight and then cook them in water the next day per the instructions on the bag.  I did it the other day and had a pretty large amount of beans left over making beans for a pot of black bean soup.  I had also made sweet potatoes the other night that I had cut like fries and baked in the oven with just salt, pepper and olive oil for about 25 minutes at 425 F, until cooked through. I then toss some of them with steamed green beans, sautéed red onion and mix with a homemade maple Dijon vinaigrette. I served initially with roasted chicken, the next day over greens with chopped pecans and goat cheese and now was going to use the rest of the left overs today. And yes, the sweet potato, green bean and red onion salad will be another recipe post. 

So, with black beans and sweet potatoes on hand, and the frijoles negros recipe as my base, I was inspired to make my own version of Cuban Black Beans and Sweet Potatoes for one (and a half, it was a pretty substantial serving!).  I did try to remember to measure everything but I cook by trial and error and have a tendency to go by what looks good so some of the measurements, i.e. the water and the sweet potatoes, I forgot to measure and are an estimate of how much I think I used. 

Cuban Black Bean and Sweet Potato Bowl

1 teaspoon olive oil
1/4 red onion, diced
1/2 green pepper, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon oregano
A few dashes of cumin
1 cup cooked black beans
water
1 bay leaf
1/2 - 1 cup cooked and diced sweet potatoes (see text above for how I cooked them)
salt and pepper to taste
1 teaspoon vinegar

Heat olive oil in a small pot.  Add the onion, garlic and green pepper.  Saute a few minutes, until crisp tender, add oregano and cumin.  Heat until fragrant.  Add black beans, enough water to just cover the beans, and bay leaf.  Cook until water has reduced by about 1/3 or 1/2.  Stir in cooked sweet potatoes.  Heat through.  Season with salt, pepper and vinegar.  Enjoy!

Give it a try and have your own adventure in Cuban Cooking!!

I'm sorry, did you say something?

I used to think that I was a really good listener.  But upon further reflection, I think I was confusing being a good speaker and being able to have a conversation with someone, with being a good listener.  I can talk, I have that part down.  I come from a family of talkers and story tellers.  Not professional story tellers, but if you ask any member of my mom's side of the family a question, don't expect a one sentence answer. We can turn a trip to the mailbox into a story! But while I used to think being a good speaker and being a good listener go hand in hand, I think at least in my case, I was wrong.

I shared in my first blog that I am enrolled at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  It is a one year program that trains you to be a health coach.  It takes a holistic approach to health and teaches you that being healthy is about more than just nutrition.  One of the key components of the program is the idea that being healthy includes having healthy relationships, engaging in regular physical activity, having a fulfilling career and a healthy spiritual practice.  I think this is what connected me so quickly to the program.  As a health educator, I was trained in the whole health wheel that looks at your physical, nutritional, spiritual, emotional, mental, and financial health.  So I have always agreed with this philosophy that a healthy person is more than someone who eats the right foods.  But the other components of the program, learning about a variety of nutrition theories, coaching techniques, business and marketing techniques, time management tools and organizational skills, are also important topics and techniques to being a good health coach.  As I said, I am excited about every facet of this program.  It speaks to me on so many levels that I feel that regardless of what the final outcome is after this year is over, whether I get my CEUs for CHES certification and become healthier, or if in addition to that, I create a business, I will have benefited from this program.  See my first blog for more on what all of that means!

So, why do I suddenly think that I am not a good listener? And what does this have to do with IIN? As I said, I used to think that I was a good listener, or at least I did until listening to one of the lessons in my Integrative Nutrition Program.  Linda Eve Diamond has a book on the 10 Rules of Listening.  She did a presentation on how listening skills can make you a better health coach.  What I have come to learn is that while health coaches provide some guidance, a lot of the time is spent listening to your client and asking the open-ended questions that allow the client to come up with a lot of the answers all on their own.  Her first rule, Stop talking!, she states, "you can't multi-task speaking and listening.  If you're talking, you're not listening.  This rule also applies to the talking inside your head.  If you're thinking intently about what you want to say, you're not listening to what's being said."  When I heard that, it hit me like cold water to the face. I am a culprit of the talking inside my head.  Of how I can relate this story to something that happened to me.  In my defense, I will say that it is done as a way to relate to the other person, to let them know that they are not alone in what they are going through and that I understand.  But what I have come to realize is there is a way to let the person know that I can relate to them or am sympathetic to their problem without completely turning the conversation into something about myself.

So, to be a good listener, we need to talk less.  Sounds pretty simple, right? Try it.  The next time you have a conversation with someone, or someone comes to you with a problem, fully listen to them.  Put down the smart phone, turn off the TV, fully listen to them.  Check yourself when you start putting thoughts together in your head on how you are going to relate this story back to an experience you had, just listen.  When you ask questions, make sure they are questions about finding clarity in what the person is telling you.  You may find that it's harder than you think, at least it is for me.  I didn't realize that I am not always a good listener.  I have become so used to multi-tasking that I think I can do it all, and then find myself realizing that I only heard part of what someone said to me.

Another area that I need to work on is being a good listener is when meeting someone for the first time.  I always say, I am so terrible about remembering names.  I am now wondering if this is another poor listening skill.  So I am going to actively pay attention when I am being introduced to people from now on, make a point to repeat their name after it is said to me, and see if I still struggle to remember names.  Then I can determine if it was just another case of poor listening skills or if I need to take some ginkgo biloba!

The fact is, there are many organizations and business out there with their online advice about active listening, that it proves to me two things.  First, I am not alone.  Secondly, we really need to spend more time listening and less time talking!

This is actually one part of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, seek first to understand, then to be understood.  Imagine if we spent more time seeking to understand before seeking to be understood.  Imagine seeing this on any of the cable news programs! Can you just imagine a cable news show where the host invited someone to their show and then actually took the time to understand the differing point of view instead of cutting them off all the time?  I think it says something about the society that we have come to live in.  We see it in our news, on reality TV shows, on all forms of social media, everyone is just trying so hard to be heard that everyone screams over everyone else and we just get louder and louder and louder, with less understanding, less compassion, less listening.

So I'm trying.  This is my own personal Hayward Adventure to become a better listener.  I will try to follow Linda Diamond's 10 Steps.  And I will try to seek first to understand and then to be understood.  It will make me a very good health coach, but more importantly, it will make me a better mother, wife, sister, daughter, and friend.

It all started with a blown tire...

Actually, Hayward adventures; i.e. crazy experiences in my life, started long before a blown tire, but that was the first time I really coined the phrase.  Let me take a step back, I am almost 40, mother of two very active boys, Thing 1 is 11 and Thing 2 is 8, and wife to an amazingly, funny, kind, loving and intelligent man.  I have a great family.  They make me laugh every day.  And I mean that.  Do they drive me crazy? You bet! Do I get mad at them? Absolutely! But at the end of the day, we have a pretty great family that I love and adore.  When people meet my family, my oldest son is always compared to me and my youngest is always compared to my husband, and on the surface, that would be an accurate observation.  But the great thing about watching your children grow and develop is you learn that they truly are a great combination of both parents, and that makes them individually unique.  Thing 1 may be a lot like me, but I see so much of my husband in him too.  And Thing 2 is so much like my husband, yet there is some of my genetic code in there too! One way Thing 2 is just like me, his desire to control all situations.  And when he can't control the situation he has a pretty short fuse, also like me.  It's something that I am working on for myself and trying to help him with as well.  It's hard for personalities like ours to come to terms with the idea that you can control nothing but yourself.  But we're getting there! One thing I have been working on a lot this year is staying positive.  When a controlling personality feels out of control, you can get negative pretty quickly.  I read some different things about the Law of Attraction and Positive Psychology and decided to put it to work.  If I could focus on the positive aspect of things, I still may not be in control of everything in my life, but I could still find ways to look at the situation as funny, an adventure, or a life lesson and keep things positive.

My reason for creating this blog stems from a new adventure of my own in which I am embarking.  I recently enrolled in a program through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  My primary goal of the program was to learn nutrition theories to help me sort through all the hype out there and figure out what was going to work for me to be healthy.  I like the set-up of this program as it is online, one year, a very thorough curriculum and I can earn continuing education credits for my CHES status (Certified Health Education Specialist).  What I have come to realize in this short month since enrolling is this program is going to open my eyes to so many things and really be a positive experience for me.  I wanted to blog about it with the hopes that it will continue after the program is over.  I had actually started a blog several years ago about cooking that I post on very sporadically.  I could have just used that blog for this, but it was called "For the Love of Food" and I wanted this blog to evolve to something more than just food.  Additionally, if I ever do decide to make something out of this like part of a business, I recently discovered that there is a cooking school called "For the Love of Food" in my geographic area and I thought that could get complicated.  So I have been wracking my brain for weeks trying to come up with a name for my new blog that accurately summed up what I wanted to talk about and was a reflection of my personality.   And then it hit me.  The kids and I had a saying all summer that was perfect! And it all started with a blown tire.

The beginning of this summer, we took the kids on vacation to Bermuda with my parents.  It was amazing! We had a great time.  Our first full day there, we decided to rent mopeds to travel around the island; non-residents are not allowed to rent cars.  So we take our lesson, strap on the helmets, my husband and my dad each take one of the kids on the back of their mopeds and away we go.  I was nervous at first, but was doing well.  We were about 20 minutes into our ride to our first sightseeing spot, St. George's Parish and Fort St. Catherine, when I felt my moped slow down and wobble, then there was a loud POP!, followed by more wobbling and me not being able to control the steering.  Luckily, we were not on a busy street, I didn't panic; I quickly pulled over and started blowing the horn to alert the rest of the family.  My husband was behind me so he pulled over right away and my parents quickly realized something was wrong and back tracked to us.  The only bad thing in the entire experience was that the boys got pretty freaked out by it.  In order to convince them that everything was fine and we would all be okay, I said to them "Guys, just think of it as another Hayward adventure!" And really, that is how I looked at it too.  Everyone was okay, the company we rented the mopeds from sent us a replacement and 30 minutes later we were back on track.  We saw a really cool naval fort, drove around St. George, had a nice lunch, and then headed back to our hotel and the kids hit the pool.

The next day we head out again, this time a shorter ride to the Botanical Gardens and the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art.  It was a beautiful morning and a nice ride.  The whole time though, Thing 2, on the back of my husband's moped, which is right in front of me, is constantly looking back, checking on me.  When we got to the gardens he told me he was worried about me, and wanted to keep an eye on me.  My heart melted, but I assured him I was fine.  After our morning at the gardens and the art museum, we thought of heading to the aquarium and getting lunch but decided the skies were looking a little dark and maybe we should head back to the hotel as the aquarium was in the opposite direction.  We weren't 2 miles down the road when, you guessed it, the heavens opened up.  I am not talking a light shower, I mean we were drenched to the point that it looked like we went swimming in our clothes.  We pulled over for a moment, but decided, either way we would get wet, so we all agreed, take it slow, mind the turns and get back to the hotel.  Again, I told the boys, "Just look at it as another Hayward adventure!" It changed the attitude from one of worry, to one of laughter and ease.  Everyone made it back, we were fine and we all had another great moped story to share.

Our third day brought yet another adventure, one wrong turn, a trip through Hamilton, another wrong turn and all of us getting separated from each other with my mom and my husband with Thing 1 getting lost.  Luckily, the island is pretty small, and when this all happened we were close to the hotel.  My husband and Thing 1 quickly found their way back to the hotel and then my husband and dad went back out and found my mom within 15 minutes and again we were all safe and sound.  As my husband left Thing 1 and Thing 2 with me at the hotel and headed out with my dad, Thing 1 turned to me and said, "Well, here we go, another Hayward adventure!"   By the end of day four, when we had to turn our mopeds in, we were all sad to see them go.  We knew we only had one more day on the island and had so much fun.

When I tell the story of our Bermuda vacation, several people respond with something like "if that had happened to me, I would have been terrified to get back on, if I had been stuck in that rain, I would have been miserable, etc." But what I learned is that things happen that are completely out of our control and how we choose to react to those situations are what we have control over.  I wasn't going to stop the rain from coming, I wasn't going to stop the tire from blowing, and I wasn't able to control the confused sense of direction that seemed to ail my family by driving on the other side of the road and their protective nature that made them want mom and I in the middle instead of letting me lead as I did know where I was going! But what I could control was how I reacted to it.  It was an adventure.  And yes, things could have gone terribly wrong in all of those situations, but they didn't.  And had I reacted with negativity while my kids were watching, they would have likely reacted the same way.  So now, instead of looking back on a trip that really did have a lot of mishaps as "that terrible trip to Bermuda", they look at it fondly and say laughingly, "oh my gosh, remember when we were riding the mopeds in the rain in Bermuda? That was so fun!" And "another Hayward adventure" has become the catch phrase of the summer.  Every time we went somewhere this summer, if a situation presented itself that was a little outside of Thing 1 or 2's comfort zone, I would hear one of them say, "Well, it's just another Hayward adventure." And if both of my boys can go through life looking at new experiences in that way, I think they'll do just fine.

I hope that I will be able to share all sorts of "Hayward Adventures" here, large and small.  I also hope that our adventures, whether they are a traveling adventure, trying a new food, experimenting with a new cooking technique, life experiences, new fitness experiences, etc. that I will be able to look on them positively as "Just Another Hayward Adventure!"