Functional Foodie: Tofu Breakfast Scramble (GF + V)

News: I started a job!

Which also means that with working a 9-5, I need a hearty breakfast. And personally, sometimes I need variation from the egg-based breakfast. Enter my tofu breakfast scramble.

Stepping into my role as a Patient Care Navigator at an integrative medicine practice, I’m thrilled to fuse my passion for healthcare with culinary arts. Inspired by the dynamic duo of Dr. Roizen and Chef Jim at the Cleveland Clinic, where I interned last summer, I’m embarking on a mission to introduce culinary medicine in an accessible way – through social media. Every Friday, I’ll be sharing “Functional Foodie Recipes,” simple yet purposeful recipes designed to easily culinary medicine, making the journey to well-being a flavorful one.

Make sure to check out @princetonintegrativehealth for the full video 🙂

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My Graduation Party: Menu, Music, & Happy Rain

2023 is a big year for my family: my bro and I graduate!

My family finds any event to throw a celebration, from a birthday to Father’s Day.  Graduation parties are my favorite because it combines an academic achievement with my birthday.

WHAT WAS ON THE MENU?

As a Neopolitan pizza loving family, I searched all of New Jersey for an authentic pie.  Neopolitan pizzas are marked by their very thin center, with dough that puffs up around the sides and provides for a very airy crust. I attended food festivals and scoped out new restaurants for a slice of chewy, soft dough and San marzano pomodoro with the perfect balance of tart and sweet. Then, my mom and I found Culto Italiano, a mobile pizza truck, while strolling around Italian cafe Farinolio in my town.  Culto Italiano is run by two Neopolitan and one Roman native – and they brought excitement and laughs to our drive way.

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Granita al limone. Italian Ice, but not really. (GF + V)

One of my most vivid memories I have from childhood is when my soccer team would go to Rita’s after a game to get ‘Italian ice.” At 8 years old, I made it my mission to inform my teammates that there is no such thing as Italian ice! It was all an American ruse! They didn’t really care.

And as it turns out, I may have been partially wrong. Years later, I fell in love with granita, a sweetened and flavored slushed ice from Sicily. Instead of ice and dyed syrups, granita is made with whole ingredients, and a good fork (or blender) to slush. I first discovered lemon granita with my brother in Pozzallo, Sicily, where we ordered a cup from a cart on the street. To this day, it’s one of my favorite summer desserts – just ask Mount Granita from Cleveland!

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The Wonders of Congee (GF + V)

Chicken soup. Pastina. Noodles.

These have been my go-to dishes in times of sickness. When I was dealing with some intense allergies this week, I decided to turn to a new dish, inspired by my Qigong Instructor training: congee.

Qigong is an ancient Chinese energetic art based in the principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). To support the body, the TCM way of eating is based on easy-to-digest food that are nutrient-dense, wholesome, and restorative. That’s where congee comes in.

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Whipped Ricotta with Apple Chutney + Whole Wheat Focaccia (GF + V option)

For my mom’s 50th birthday, I wanted to do something special.  I took inspiration from some of her favorite restaurant dishes and brought them to our kitchen table. 

The first dish that I had to recreate was one that we had tried at Urban Hearth in Cambridge this past December.

On a whipped cloud of ricotta, laid a melody of sautéed spiced apples and onions.  It was simultaneously smooth yet crisp, sweet and sour. The accompaniment of a hearty whole wheat focaccia played with the dish’s sweetness in a rustic way.

When it came to making this dish myself, I had no recipe to rely on – just my memory.  According to my mom, this recreation was even better than the restaurant.

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Anthropology Fieldwork Lab: Food Waste Reflective Assignment

As my final semester, I am taking an Anthropology Fieldwork Lab on food waste on campus. This class has encouraged me to critically examine the root causes of food waste. Our reflective assignment could be anything from an essay to a piece of art. Here is my work!

As the title of my piece of art suggests, there was a lot to digest about this course.  It all starts with entering the field at the top of the small intestine, where I had to contemplate reflexivity and as Anthropologist Ashanté Reese spoke to, what “elsewheres” I brought with me; which included growing up in an Italian household and science background. 

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Arizona: Art Reflected in Nature

In my trip to Arizona, I was trying to attribute a word to explain creating something and then seeing it in nature, which made it eons before me?  Co-creation surfaced.  I suppose you can create something – art and even a friendship – in part because the foundation for its construction was created before an instantaneous moment or event. 

It’s a tender sharing process. 

Thank you Arizona for showing me how my creations were here before me!  Humbling. 

My Epic Winter Dinner Party: Le Menu, Music, and Other Musings

I’ve always dreamt of throwing a dinner party.  According the Cal and Janice of Beacon Hill’s Elegant Findings antique china shop, it’s in my future.  They also predict that I’ll be married in 2 years, which sounds unlikely. 

Regardless, my graduation marked the perfect occasion for my ultimate epic dinner party.  I invited some of my closest Tufts friends, consulted many blogs for recipes, and crafted a melodious playlist for a farewell night.

WHAT WAS ON THE MENU?

After good company, good food is a crucial aspect of any gathering.  Luckily, my very talented friend, Ari, pitched in to help in more ways than one.  If you’re ever doubting your compatability with someone, cooking together is a telling test – and as we’ve established before, we make a stellar team.  Just like any meal, a balance of carbs, protein, and fats in a party menu are essential for me.  

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Anthropology Fieldwork Lab: Food Waste Theoretical Memo

As my final semester, I am taking an Anthropology Fieldwork Lab on food waste on campus. This class has encouraged me to critically examine the root causes of food waste.

Throughout our exploration of food consumption behaviors, one of the prevailing themes that surfaces is food as a relationship.  People engage with food in a deeply intimate way, investing emotions, socialness, time, and money in planning, expecting, cultivating, provisioning, cooking, eating, and ultimately dispensing it, in one form or another.  It is simultaneously an extremely personal, yet sometimes taken-for-granted, relationship.  My memory harkens back to Prof. Stanton’s imagining the personification of the refrigerator, crying for attention.  Pieces by Evans, Martínez, and Larkin have been guiding forces in this relational framing of food and individuals in the broader context of agribusiness agendas.  After stewing over these anthropologists’ arguments and the transcripts and discussions of my classmates, I radically integrate this relationship as a cycle of abuse, sometimes unbeknownst to the victim themself. 

 

Figure 1.  A work in progress: my attempt at blending Evans and Martinez’s perspectives of food as a relationship with the stages and characteristics of the cycle of abuse. 

My figure attempts to visualize this relationship in the three stages of an abusive relationship: honeymoon, tension building, and acute explosion.  When creating this schematic, it was difficult to discern who is the victim and perpetrator.  In general, I associate the victim with consumers, inspired by how Martínez argues that people’s conception of waste is synonymous with failure and disrespect, writing that “when people and places become associated with waste, they may be seen as waste themselves, disposable and superfluous, reduced to zero value” (346).  This is helpful in paralleling how in being associated with waste or abuse, victims are zeroed and therefore de-humanized.  While not the central focus of my memo, it is worth noting that the Earth is a victim of this abuse as well.  At times, however, the consumer can also be a perpetrator.  Most glaringly, I think of how my faculty interviewee said, “I tend to abuse prepared foods to be honest with you [due to convenience and ease].”  The perpetrator can be food as a singular ingredient, as memorialized by my eggplant field notes, or as one of Chung’s interviewees said: “I found a, like, a molding zucchini—like it was turning *black*. Um, I didn’t know that that could happen. I was a little scared.”  This demonstrates an Acute Explosion of an ingredient going bad, with the victim feeling understandably “scared” by the transformation of a once-seemingly-innocent zucchini.  Expanding beyond a singular ingredient as an “abuser”, it is important to zoom out to identify other potential “perpetrators”.  As Princess Diana said about her impending divorce in her notorious BBC interview, “There were three of us in this marriage.”  The third entity in this marriage is infrastructural agribusinesses – corporations so humongous and omnipresent, to the point that we as consumers oftentimes do not even recognize them.  In fact, many times, victims do not even identify the perpetrator as an abuser, unconscious of their coercive behavior.

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