Vegan Mofo Edition of What I Ate Wednesday: Cancer-Fighting Foods

Good morning! I hope your week is going well. This is my 2nd post for Vegan Mofo 2012 (you can read the first post here). As I mentioned on Monday, my theme this year is Cancer-Fighting Foods in honor of my recent diagnosis with thyroid cancer and the treatments I’ll be going through over the next few weeks and months.

Since it’s Wednesday, I’m doing my post today in the format of “What I Ate Wednesday,” where bloggers post a food journal of a day’s worth of food. For me, it’s everything I ate yesterday (Tuesday).

I started off the morning with a super easy breakfast dish of rolled gluten-free oats, chopped apple, cinnamon, unsweetened soy milk, pomegranate juice and ground chia seeds. It was inspired by a dish we had a Dr. Fuhrman’s Getaway. The best part is that it doesn’t require any cooking, you just stir it all together the night before and, voila!, here’s what you get:

I use about 1/3 cup of oats in my serving and about 3/4 of a cup for Alan and you can eat it cold or put it in the microwave to warm it up. I got a good workout in yesterday morning (great for stress management!) and then had this for lunch: kale salad topped with onions and beans and served with a side of watermelon:

I think we are finally at the end of the watermelon season here in California, I am sooo sad to see them go! My kale salad had a dressing of almond butter, unsweetened soy milk, dates, red chili flakes, lemon juice and some vinegar. I also threw in some chopped cabbage with the kale since I’m trying to maximize my cruciferous veggie intake:

Hello, bad breath!

Yesterday afternoon I had to do some major catch-up on my class. I have been in e-mail contact with my professor about my upcoming surgery and she has been so understanding that I might be late in some assignments depending on what my recovery is like. It’s a Nutritional Epidemiology class for my masters degree that I thought was going to be really hard, but it turns out it’s not too much work AND I’m really liking it so far!

I had a special surprise show up on the doorstep yesterday afternoon, too. Some special friends (you know who you are…thank you!!!) sent me this awesome vegan basket from The Vegan Store. How unbelievably sweet was that?! It definitely brightened my day, I mean, who doesn’t love gifts? Plus, my birthday is coming up in a few weeks so I am considering this as an early b-day present as well.

Roxy was interested in this cookbook that looks so up my alley. Gosh, I’m wondering if Alan could make me something from this after my surgery? He couldn’t hurt himself or anyone else by cooking something with only four ingredients, could he?

I can’t wait to try this, either:

The Booda Butter is supposed to be good for scar treatment, so I think I might use it for that purpose once my future incision heals.

Dinner was a tofu burger and steamed broccoli. I used my Ultimate Tofu Burger recipe that has sunflower seeds and nutritional yeast, but I added mushrooms this time since they are supposed to be cancer-fighting:

Overall, it was a great food day and I felt good about my choices.

Before I go, I just wanted to say thank you for the really insightful messages many of you left on my post from Monday regarding the mourning of the loss of my thyroid. I never really thought about doing anything other than crying about it, but I love the idea of thinking about it as less about something being taken away from me, but more about me letting go of something that has run its course and needs to be given peace. I’ll be working on that process over the next week or so.

I hope you have a great day. Tell me, what’s your favorite cancer-fighting food or recipe?

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