Cooking with Holly

This weekend I visited my friend Holly.  Holly has colon cancer and gives me permission to share her story in hope that it will help others.  She is so brave and positive about her journey, and I am in awe of her!  In comparison, I was a big crybaby with my pesky little cancer.  She knows she will beat this thing and go on to help others brave cancer with good eating and positive thoughts.  Holly formerly ate a lot of fast food.  When she lived in NoVa near me, she ate fast food several times a week, and sometimes even more than once a day.  Anyway, she's had a good sized tumor removed and a chemo port put in, and will begin 6 months of chemo. in a few weeks.  Definitely a daunting experience all around and she is a young mother with small children so please pray for a good journey and outcome for her.  She is already excited about talking to people at the chemo center and hearing their story - what a gal!  If I ever get chemo., I hope someone like Holly is there!

I would be lying if I didn't admit to the tiniest bit of joy for a really good pressing reason (her cancer) to share my plant based diet with her.  I know that's really terrible but Holly will be okay with my saying this because we enjoy a lot of laughts between us and she is completely transparent about her journey.  I've been criticizing her food choices for years, but let's just say there's a bit more buy in now. So this weekend we cooked and cooked and had a great time. We made my chocolate kid friendly smoothie with spinach and then we made a fruit veggie smoothie with blueberries and more spinach.  I had her do most of the hands on work so she would be comfortable doing it herself.  Her daughter liked it so much, she ate her dad's serving of the chocolate version and went on to drink some of the other as well.  Holly has a Ninja blender which does okay but still leaves particles of food unprocessed.  It didn't seem to bother her, so it doesn't matter.  It turns out her husband is a smoothie master, even owns a book, The Everything Green Smoothies Book http://www.amazon.com/The-Everything-Green-Smoothies-Book/dp/1440525641.  She turned her nose up before but now is under strict orders to share one of his smoothies each morning.  She is fortunate to have him help her start her day with great nutrients!

We also baked a spaghetti squash (split in half faced down on a baking sheet with 1/2 inch of water 350 for 1 hour - a first for both of us, and topped it with a marina sauce, made from my Thrive cookbook.  We had it for lunch and it was delicious.  Then we assembled my favorite White Bean with Kale soup and adapted it for the crockpot.  For those meat needer/eaters among you, add some sausage, chicken or ground turkey as Holly will do for hubby.  Lastly we steamed up some cabbage, lightly seasoned with salt and pepper.  We'd had some at a Japanese restaurant the night before and all the ingredients needed to replicate the Asian taste were in my cabinet back home, so I took home half the head of cabbage - uncooked of course.  More on how that works out later.  

Cooking together is a lot of fun and a great way to combine the effort and reward as this type of cooking is labor intensive and time consuming.  Holly has a great vegan cookbook called Clean Food by Terry Walters http://terrywalters.net/books/ which I highly recommend and Kris Carr's new book, Crazy Sexy Kitchen arrived in both our homes last Saturday.  It is a beautiful book with color pictures, interesting recipes and great vegan eating tips. http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Sexy-Kitchen-Plant-Empowered-Mouthwatering/dp/1401941044