empowerment | Gotta Eat, Can't Cook

Posts Tagged ‘empowerment’

September 16th, 2024

Blog, Empowerment, Food & Health, How To & Tips

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Gotta’ Eat, Can’t Cook: Empowering Yourself Beyond the Kitchen

Gotta' Eat, Can't Cook is all about providing the skills you need to empower yourself in the kitchen and beyond.

3 primary concerns determine your quality of life: what you eat, how regularly and rigorously you move your body and how you manage stress.

To illustrate that point, even though the photo below is fairly current, this is what we humans (homo sapiens) looked like 10,000 or so years ago.

Up until 10,000 to 12,000 years ago we homo sapiens were all hunter gatherers.

10,000 years is nothing relative to the 10 to 20 million years it took for us to develop as hominids (early forms of humans) from primates or even the 200,000 to 300,000 years since we started to develop as “modern man”, or homo sapiens, that we are today.

Now, fast forward to more “current” times. 10,000 – 12,000 years ago, we were all nomadic hunter gatherers. That meant we had to move our bodies – almost always a lot – to find or hunt for food. At the same time, we had to manage stress to survive periods when food couldn’t be found or avoid being eaten by the same wild animals we were trying to kill to eat to keep us alive.

The fact is: our bodies are still hunter gatherer bodies that developed over millions of years. I joke that despite food that’s now available 24/7/365 in developed communities around the world, we haven’t yet become “homo couch-us potato-us”. That means our hunter gatherer bodies still require foods that promote life, regular and vigorous movement (aka, exercise) and techniques to manage stress so that we can think and behave clearly when life demands it most.

This site is about providing you with the skills you need to empower yourself to make the foods your body needs on your own. Like I’ve mentioned before, no one, no matter how well intentioned or influential they are to you, can empower you. Empowerment comes from within. That means only YOU can empower YOU. And this site provides picture book and video guidance and support to help you do just that in the kitchen – and beyond – because real empowerment begets more empowerment.

Ha! Then there’s the fun of it all. That’s up next!

January 24th, 2024

Anti-Inflammatory Foods, Anti-inflammatory Recipes, Blog, Cycling Food, Fitness Food, Hiking Food, How To & Tips, Running Food, Salad Dressings, Salads & Salad Dressings

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Instant 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing Picture Book Recipe

Last post mentioned work I’ve just started with AARP (American Association of Retired People) and Eastway Rec. Center in Charlotte, NC, to help senior citizens empower themselves in the kitchen to make life-promoting foods.

The first recipe we made together was the Instant 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing shown below, which is just as incredibly versatile as it is easy to make.

First, a quick back story. The first time I ever made this recipe was with a group of fellow veterans who were turning their lives around through Veterans Incorporated (Vets Inc.) in Shrewsbury, MA. One of the guys in the group, a fellow Navy veteran – and terrific character, chimed in when I listed the seven ingredients I intended to use: garlic powder, salt, ground black pepper, mustard, honey, vinegar and oil.

“Why do we need the added salt and sugar? A lot of guys here have diabetes and/or high blood pressure. We don’t need that _____(4-letter word for “stuff”)!”

I get blunt beautifully and had to agree about the added salt and sugar. But this was the first recipe I was rolling out with these guys and first time I’d ever met them. My inner thought: “Fine, I’ll cut the salt and honey – but, boy, this dressing’s gonna’ taste like crap.”

I quickly made the dressing and asked the guys to taste a spoon of it full-on before I tasted it myself. The stunner? They loved it – and so did I.

Not only does this dressing taste great (most important), but it’s also incredibly versatile. As shown in the few sample pictures below, it goes great on any kind of warm or cold salad, over cooked vegetables, meat, chicken, fish, pasta, rice – imagination is your only limit.

Here are the ingredients needed to make this salad dressing. You’ll actually see six ingredients below because I often use two different types of vinegars for added flavor, which you certainly don’t have to do.

Click this link or any picture on this page for a complete step-by-step picture recipe that includes information about the sourness of different vinegars and why this recipe is considered low in both salt and sugar.

January 15th, 2024

Blog, Empowerment, Salads & Salad Dressings

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Helping Seniors Empower Themselves to Make Life-Promoting Foods with AARP and Eastway Rec.

I’ve written this here before, and it’s entirely true; only you can empower yourself. Sure, others can help. But the best anyone else can do is provide you with the skills you need to empower yourself because empowerment comes from within. You have to feel it, own it. Once you do, ha!, you’re off to the races!

I’m now 65 1/2 years old, a legitimate senior citizen. And I’ve just started working with AARP to help fellow seniors learn the skills they need to empower themselves to make quality of life-promoting meals on their own though a program we call “Gotta’ Eat Smartly” at Eastway Rec. Center in Charlotte, NC.

To pull back a bit to the bigger picture, even though we’ve just begun, the program’s intent is to start locally, right at Eastway, to develop a proof of concept that connects directly with seniors and shows positive results. Those results include growing participation and seeing how seniors actually apply the skills they learn at our live in-person sessions and at home.

Once we do that, we can then replicate those same skill-providing techniques and use them more widely throughout central North Carolina and beyond. Like throwing a stone in a pond, it’s all about creating an enthusiastic splash that ripples out and connects with as many people as possible by providing seniors – and eventually others – with the skills they need to make life-promoting foods, foods that our bodies and mind need to function as effectively as possible, give us the foundation to live the best quality of life possible – and taste killer good!

Regarding flavor, the next two posts will show the two recipes we put together at Eastway last week: Instant 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing…

…and Pear Avocado Salad.

More very soon. Promise!

June 22nd, 2023

Blog, Empowerment

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Only You Can Empower You!

There’s no way around it; you are the only person who can empower you because real empowerment doesn’t come from without, it comes from within. The best anyone else can do is provide you with the skills and tools you need to empower yourself. After that, it’s up to you to internalize what you’ve learned until you feel, know and behave fully empowered, which is both life changing and the most “eyes open, head screwed on tight” way you can contribute positively to life across the board: your personal relationships, your work, your community and much more.

The purpose of this site is to provide you with the skills you need to help empower yourself regarding the three foundations that make us who we are: what we eat, the need to move our bodies deliberately and rigorously and how we manage stress, with an emphasis here mostly on that first foundation, what we eat.

I look forward to interacting with you and continuing to share fully flavorful, quality of life-promoting step-by-step picture book cooking recipes…and much more – and having a lot of fun doing it!

Any questions or suggestions, just pop me a note at bruce@gotta-eat.com.

Best always,