Cooking has always been something I have enjoyed doing, especially when I get to cook for other people. When Ben and I were still just friends, he made a special trip home from college just to visit me, and I made him his favorite dinner: chicken scampi, bruschetta, and oreo cheesecake for dessert. He asked me to be his girlfriend that same day, and 12 years later we’re very happily married with three wonderful kids… you do the math. Just kidding! Well, not about the food, or the incredibly happy marriage, but I’m certainly not accrediting it to some yummy food! But I will say that when Ben and I finally decided that we needed to treat this healthy lifestyle with as high of an importance as it deserved, it was more than a little difficult for me to say goodbye to making people (especially Ben!) happy with my cooking. Don’t get me wrong, I knew I was caring for him and the girls more by doing everything I could to make them healthy, rather than just giving them food that tasted good, but it’s still not fun to lose the “great cook” title! And all of that is completely leaving out how daunting it was to actually take on an entirely new diet that cuts out all of the most common ingredients, and requires the addition of ingredients that are not traditionally thought of as gourmet grub.
Thankfully, Ben and the girls are incredibly considerate and also probably the least picky eaters on the planet! So for the first few months when all I could come up with to feed them was veggie loaded soups and salads, they never once complained and even made of how much they enjoyed the food! However, I’d be flat out lying if I said we didn’t fondly reminisce about our beloved pizza and taco nights, and maybe shed a tear or two at the thought of NEVER having them again! Don’t get me wrong, it was fun playing with raw fennel and grapefruit salads, and coming up with every kind of vinaigrette imaginable, but you can imagine how quickly that became monotonous for us all. That’s when I decided it was time to break away from all of the “diet recipes”, and just start tweaking things that we already liked, or new things that sounded good, to fit into the guidelines that we knew we needed to follow for the sake of our own health! A common pre-dinner dialogue in our house became,
“You made what healthy??”
“Yep! I’ll bet you thought you’d never have this again! And we don’t even have to feel guilty!”
But my favorite was just a few months into the new experimental dinners when Ben said to me, “I honestly enjoy your cooking more now.” Honestly, I can’t describe the joy I get from knowing that we are doing everything in our power to keep our bodies as healthy as possible, teaching our girls how important a healthy lifestyle is, and seeing my family truly enjoying their meals!
Oyster casserole falls into the “we’re allowed to have what for dinner???” category in a big way, because until you’ve done your nutrigenomics homework, the most typical thought process is that high calorie = unhealthy. So a meal that starts with butter, and ends with heavy cream, would get a pretty good laugh out of any health enthusiast. But when you study the way our bodies respond to food, the mere number of calories has absolutely nothing to do with the health content of the food. For instance, one small serving of salmon, about 4 oz., contains the exact same amount of calories as a snickers bar - I’m fairly sure these calories are not created equally! Another great example of the ‘nutritional content is greater than calorie content’ idea, is the whole milk vs. skim milk debate. While sporting significantly fewer calories than whole milk, the homogenization process of skim milk literally means that the fat molecules have been lysed in order to ensure that the leftover fat will not separate from the milk itself. What does this mean for your body? It means that your body no longer recognizes what those cells are and therefore doesn’t know how to handle them! Not only is this unhelpful for your overall health, but it can actually lead to LESS recordable fat loss, not to mention the extensive processing of the raw product removes necessary components such as omega-3 fatty acids.
Now that I’ve done my best to defend the OCCASIONAL use of high calorie ingredients like cream and butter, lets talk about all of the benefits of the oyster casserole ingredients! Once again touting dairy benefits, you’ll get a nice boost of calcium, phosphorus, B vitamins, potassium, vitamin D, and especially protein. If you’re at all curious about why I chose to include oatmeal, just take a peek back through some of my other blogs (especially last week’s cookie dough blog!) to see why oatmeal should be snuck in whenever possible! And, oysters join in with the pantheon of other seafoods that boasts loads of vitamins and especially minerals that can only be obtained from plants and animals that reside in the ocean. But let’s come to the surprise ingredient of the day, the cauliflower! Cauliflower, along with some other cruciferous vegetables, contains a highly antiangiogenic compound called benzyl isothiocyanate (BITC); this is especially important for cancer/tumor patients because it targets the vessels that have grown to, and continue to nourish, tumor cells! Even more remarkable, is that unlike most synthetic drugs that have to be taken in such high doses that they are actually detrimental to the rest of the body, BITC can be obtained in therapeutic doses just from regular dietary consumption of foods such as cauliflower! This substance is so powerful in these natural “doses”, that it has actually been studied as a chemo-preventative when consumed regularly, and early on. If that doesn’t just blow your mind then please read through that again, because I already knew it and it still gets me all jazzed up just writing about it!
Even though switching to a completely new style of cooking can be intimidating, I promise, from personal experience, it can be incredibly rewarding. Do you think I was making oyster casserole before we switched to this lifestyle? Nope. And it’s even more gratifying when you’re able to successfully pull off these less common recipes, while giving your body everything that it needs to fight off anything that might come your way! Even if you have to ask for help from your Dad to figure out where to get that added boost of health!
Oyster Casserole Recipe:
1/2 C Butter
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp Pepper
1 Tbsp Smoked Paprika
1 Head of Riced, Roasted Cauliflower
3 C Oatmeal (separated)
1 Qt Drained Oysters (reserving 1/2 C of the liquid)
1 1/2 C Heavy Cream
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
Brown butter, being sure to not let it get too dark, add salt, pepper, and smoked paprika and mix well. Add riced, roasted cauliflower and 2 C of oatmeal and mix well. Layer 1/4 of oatmeal mixture, then 1/3 of oysters into a 9x13 casserole dish, and repeat until both are fully used up. Sprinkle remaining 1 C oatmeal over the top. Mix reserved oyster liquor, heavy cream, and Worcestershire sauce, then pour over the entire casserole. Bake at 350° for 30 min and allow to rest for at least 10 minutes before serving.
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