Yoga is not just exercise; it is a lifestyle. Exercise alone will not keep you healthy. For optimal health, you need yoga exercise combined with daily mindfulness practice, meditation, and mindful nutrition. You may have wondered what keeps the Spira yoga teachers looking so vibrant, and healthy into their 40’s and 50’s. Here is your answer in three short bullet points!
We feed our mind: i.) We meditate and practice mindfulness daily!– Check out 200-hour Self-Enrichment, 40 days, and Making Friends with Stress Workshops under “Yoga Beyond Asana” tab on our website. ii.) We read! Check out our book recommendations: https://spirapoweryoga.com/books or read our reflections: https://spirapoweryoga.com/category/reflections-from-the-mat
We exercise daily – Take a Spira Power Yoga class 3-6 times a week.
We eat right – nourishing home cooked food made from scratch!
Spira’s Soulfood blog is dedicated to giving you weekly recipes from your yoga teachers kitchen. Nothing staged, nothing artificial in our food or our presentation. What you see on this blog is what we eat at home. We cook it, we take pictures, and we share it with the community.
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Vegetables Rich, Happy Belly Pad Thai by Dora
I love Pad Thai, but Pad Thai presents lots of problems to folks with a sensitive stomach, or inflammatory conditions. But what can I say, Dora got to have her Pad Thai. Below you will find the problems presented and Dora’s solution. This way you can have your Pad Thai and eat it too! Sorry, yeah had to go there, been working long days and I am entertaining myself…
Number one problem: Pad Thai is mostly noodles, noodles that are full of starch and as a result, really mess with my belly. So to control inflammation, in this recipe I have substituted noodles for spiralized zucchini.
Number two problem: and this is a problem for even those lucky individuals with iron stomach, most restaurants make Pad Thai with sauces made up of questionable ingredients. I am one to believe that we should eat food, and by food, I mean food, not chemical compounds constructed in a laboratory, but rather, you know stuff that grows in the earth.
This recipe is loosely based on the Pad Thai recipe found in the Wicked Good Ketogenic cookbook, which happens to be loaded with, yes, wicked good recipes. I did change out some ingredients though to fit with anti-inflammatory guidelines.
Avocado oil
3-4 chicken thighs
3 eggs
Chicken broth, but you could just use water
Freshly ground peanut butter – with only peanuts as ingredients (most peanut butter is full of sugar and nonfood additives. If you cannot tolerate peanuts you can use sunflower seed butter as well.) Fred Meyer has a grinder by their bulk nuts section; it is very affordable and very satisfying to grind your nuts. You don’t have to go nuts wandering about what is in your nuts. OK I am on a roll!
Tamari or liquid aminos
Rice vinegar
Chopped scallions
Red pepper flakes
Crushed peanuts for topping
Lime juice
Finely minced ginger
Crushed garlic
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
The method:
Place your minced ginger and garlic into the avocado oil and lightly saute. By now you know me, I will not tell you how much garlic and ginger to use. Use according to taste. I used four garlic cloves and about an inch of ginger.
Once ginger and garlic are just pink add the cubed chicken thighs. I like to cube the chicken into small less than 1 inch cubes; it makes it easier to toss in with the spiralized zucchini. Once the chicken has cooked through in the garlic-ginger comingling, set it aside. Keep the oil in the pan.
Add the three eggs to the pan and scramble them up until cooked through. Once scrambled eggs are done, set them aside.
In the same skillet now empty but not washed, add chicken broth, peanut butter or sunflower seed butter (I usually add 2-3 tablespoons, but it is to your taste so feel free to experiment), also add the tamari or liquid aminos to taste (about two tablespoons for me), and rice vinegar (about 1.5 tablespoons for me). Stir it well so there are no clumpy peanut butter chunks left.
Then add the scallions, a little more garlic (I do two more cloves minced) and red pepper flakes. Be careful with the red pepper flakes, add a little, taste it, and check for heat. I went way over what I could tolerate once, it was still good, but had to add more peanut butter to mellow the heat!
Once the above mixture had a chance to cook for about 3 minutes, add back the cooked chicken cubes and scrambled eggs.
Toss it up well. Finally, add the spiralized zucchini. I use about 3-4 zucchinis spiralized at a medium or fine setting. Get in there and toss it up, you may want to cut the zucchini spirals to be shorter, otherwise it is hard to get all the goodness all around.
OK you are done, squeeze some lime on top and gobble gobble! Eat your Pad Thai with joy knowing that it is free of mystery sauce and starch.