One afternoon a couple of weeks ago I was at Wegmans, minding my own business, looking through the nice display of huge heads of cauliflower and searching for the perfect head that was destined to come home with me.

I noticed a woman checking out my head (talking about the cauliflower head here) as I approached the produce scale to get my bar code sticker. She commented on how beautiful it looked (I was hopeful she was talking about the head attached to my neck now…) She then told me how much she loves cauliflower. I agreed and we went on to discuss the various ways we like to eat cauliflower… steamed, raw, roasted or standing on our heads (cauliflower or otherwise), we’ll happily eat it.

This lovely stranger then went on to describe a cauliflower pie recipe that she loves and makes frequently. She told me this recipe has a crust made with shredded potatoes and the potato crust is filled with sauteed cauliflower and cheese. From her gestures and movements I could tell she wanted to write the recipe down for me, but then suddenly with excitement she said “It’s in the Moosewood Cookbook! Do you know it?”

Sort of. I knew that The Moosewood Cookbook was from Ithaca, New York – a city about 2 hours from here. That was all I really knew of it though, I’d never looked through it or had even seen it for that matter. I told my Cauliflower Sister that I would look for the recipe online and thanked her for the idea.

I’d almost forgotten about this conversation until this afternoon. Today while visiting a girlfriend and perusing her collection of cookbooks, I spotted The Moosewood Cookbook! The cauliflower conversation came flooding back as I snagged the book off the shelf. I flipped to the index and sure enough, there it was! Cauliflower Cheese Pie.

And my inspiration for tonight’s dinner was born.

It turns out that all the recipes in The Moosewood Cookbook are vegetarian! I had no idea! It was originally written in 1977 and is based on the cuisine of The Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca.

While all the recipes are vegetarian, most of the recipes contain large quantities of cheese, eggs, milk and butter. I took the original Cauliflower Cheese Pie recipe and made some tweaks to make it slightly healthier and a little lower in fat and calories.

Here’s my adapated version of the Moosewood Cauliflower Pie Recipe that I made tonight.

Crust:

1 large sweet potato, peeled (optional) and shredded. (I swapped out white potato.)
1 egg, beaten
1 small onion, shredded

Pre-heat oven to 400 F. Add shredded potato and onion to beaten egg, stir well to combine. Grease 9 inch pie pan and form potato mixture into crust. Bake crust for 40 minutes.

Filling:

4 – 5 oz shredded cheese
1 medium cauliflower, cut into small florets
2 cups of spinach, trimmed and washed
1 glove of garlic, minced
1 small onion, diced
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup vegetable broth
2 eggs
1/4 milk (I used plain, unsweetened almond milk)
thyme, basil, paprika

In my version, I swapped out 3 tablespoons of butter for 1 Tablespoon of olive oil and a half cup of vegetable broth. Add olive oil, diced onion and minced garlic into a pan and sautee until soft. Add herbs and spices to mixture and stir well until veggies are well coated.

Add broth and cauliflower to pan and cover, cooking for about 10 minutes. Add spinach to pan and cook for 5 minutes. The original recipe didn’t call for spinach but I wanted a little bit of green in this pie!

The spinach reduces down to almost nothing when cooked so don’t be shy throwing a couple handfuls in.

In a separate bowl beat two eggs and add milk, set aside.

When the crust is ready, remove from oven and reduce oven temperature to 375 F.

Layer half of the cheddar cheese on the bottom of the cooked crust.

Top with cauliflower/spinach mixture.

Sprinkle remaining cheese on top of veggies and finally pour egg/milk mixture over the entire pie.

Bake pie at 375 for about 35 minutes.

Time to eat.

My math tells me this entire pie contained 1302 calories. Cut into 6 slices, 217 calories per slice. I expected it to be much more so this was a pleasant surprise.

I thumbed through Moosewood Cookbook while the pie was baking and I can’t wait to try more the recipes in this book, so many great ideas! I snagged another book from my friend Tara’s house when I was there too, oh boy I’m gonna be busy.

Dear Stranger From Wegmans,

Thank you so much for recommending this recipe to me! It was delicious and nutritious. It was a lot of work, but well worth it. In fact, I think I might even make this for our main course at Thanksgiving while our carnivorous family members dine on turkey. Even if you only complimented one of the two heads I had with me on that fateful day, I am grateful for our short conversation. I liked your head too.

Your Truly,
Two Headed Mama

• Strawberry Shortcuts
• Stay at Home
• Raw Deals

The Skinny: On Losing Weight without Being Hungry-the Ultimate Guide to Weight Loss Success by Dr. Louis J. Aronne and Alisa Bowman.

The Skinny. Another book with skinny in the title. It practically leapt off the shelf and into my hands at the library while perusing the New Books section. I actually picked this one up a few weeks ago but was thinking about it on my run this morning and wanted to write about it.

This is a weight loss/diet book. After briefly thumbing through the pages while I kept my children from running through the adult portion of library like wildebeasts, I decided it was likely to still have some value. I checked it out, practically guaranteeing the library at least $.25 in late fines.

The author talks about 2 phases to his diet approach. Phase 1, which lasts about 3 – 4 months, consists of getting all your carbs from complex carbohydrate sources, namely, green vegetables. You get one serving of starch at dinner, and it still has to be a complex carb, like brown rice, whole wheat pasta, quinoa, etc.

Meh. Not for me.

On to Phase 2. The duration? The rest of your life. He says you can still have bread, fats, sweets, etc, but to eat them LAST. The first part of your meal should be a large serving of green veggies. Jillian Michaels talks about this too on her radio show, calling it volumetrics. Basically, you fill your stomach with foods that are less calorie dense, like green vegetables. THEN you can eat fats, starches or something sweet at the end of your meal. The idea is that you stretch your stomach sooner on less calories, which releases leptin, the satiety hormone, and ideally eat less of the foods that are more calorie dense.

With any advice I get, whether on nutrition, exercise or parenting, from a book, a blog, a magazine or a face to face conversation, I tend to treat it like a buffet: Take what you like and leave the rest.

So while I don’t follow this plan exactly, I have definitely increased the amount of green vegetables I eat, replacing grains and starchy vegetables for more green vegetables. I’m not one to put a lot of rules on the order in which I eat things, but I like the idea of stretching my stomach, releasing leptin and feeling fuller sooner with less calories. Basically, I just make sure plate is chocked full of vegetables.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now and I’ve noticed two dramatic changes.

1. I have A LOT more energy on my runs. It is AMAZING. It actually took me a while to put two and two together. I thought it was just a fluke until I looked back at what I had been doing differently. In the past I’ve always had good runs and not so good runs, feeling tired and just wanting it to be over. Lately, every run is a good run! I feel fabulous the whole time and feel like I could just go forever. (Thus why I started thinking about this today on my morning run.) I’m sure my days of not-so-great-runs and workouts are not gone forever, but I’m impressed with what this has done for me so far.

2. Cravings for sweets and starchy carbohydrates are practically non-existent. I’ve struggled with this on and off these last few months, especially over the winter. But since I’ve upped my non-starchy vegetable intake, I can’t believe how much I’m NOT fighting the urge to dive head first into the cereal box at night, and thinking less about food between meals and snacks.

Think: adding spinach to smoothies, replacing sweet potato fries with large piles of steamed veggies, salads as big as my head. Eating vegetables is most definitely not a new concept, but consciously choosing the right vegetables and the general order that I eat them is doable. And completely worth it! I’m still eating starches and grains (I’m not giving up my oatmeal, corn, carrots, wheat bread, chocolate!) but just eating less of it, mainly because I fill up on vegetables first.

So that brings me to my morning run. It wasn’t raining when I got up, just overcast. I scrapped my treadmill plans almost immediately and opted to run outside instead.

6.24 miles in 49:32, with an average pace of 7:56.

Skinny Bitch suggests eating only fruit for breakfast. Jillian says to always eat something before you work out, which I don’t always do. While the idea of eating ONLY fruit for breakfast makes me want to run screaming into the night, as I would rip right through that and be hungry again in 5 minutes, I decided to combine these two ideas this morning and ate some watermelon while catching up on emails and sitting at my desk for a half hour before heading out on my run.

Once home and cooled down, it was cereal all around for breakfast this morning.

Into my bowl:

Half a small container of 2% Fage
3/4 c (or so) of Kashi’s Heart to Heart
1/2 a sliced banana
A few spoonfuls of sliced strawberries
A sprinkle of homemade granola
A pour of unsweetened vanilla hemp milk

Into Maxine’s bowl:

Yes, YOU!

Heart to Heart and vanilla soy milk.

And to my right:

Ava’s bowl? Wegmans brand cheerios and vanilla rice milk, a dish of strawberries.

That’s right, I have at least 4 different kinds of milk in my fridge at any given moment. Hemp milk? Almond milk? Rice milk? Soy milk? Cow’s milk? I’ve got them all!

Sorry green veggies, I’m still eating grains for breakfast. At least for now.

• A Healthier Moose