Never Eat the Same Meal Twice

By Sulana Stone

Tweak your taste buds—tweak your life! It’s holistic. Everything’s connected. Eat food that’s exciting and your love life takes off. Finances soar. Thrilling job offers pop up.

It’s the ripple effect. Alter one part of your life and you affect the rest. One change creates dynamic waves that transform other aspects of your world.

Take falling in love for instance. When we’re in love, life’s exhilarating and easy. We don’t get hungry—we forget to eat. We don’t get tired—we skip sleep. Situations that used to feel like “problems” don’t bother us. Physical aches and pains go away. Why? It’s the transformational energy of excitement. When one part our life is cookin’, all the other parts heat up.

Ever notice how stimulated you feel when you take an unusual route to work? Or clean the house in a different way? Or jog on a newfound path? You feel more alive. And, that aliveness gives a booster shot of energy to the rest of your life! When you vary the way you do a routine, it shakes things up and lifts your spirit.

Attracting Prosperity

Joy! Aliveness! Exhilaration! These qualities are magnets for love and money. People are attracted to us when we’re happy. Soulmates can feel our spirit and find us. Opportunities and resources flow to us naturally.

You might not be falling in love at this moment or breaking a sweat on a new jogging path. But you can spark that same life-transforming enthusiasm by feasting on fun cuisine. When you eat a wide variety of foods that bring you pleasure, that pleasure carries over into the rest of your life.

Never Eat the Same Meal Twice

A playful way to break old, boring patterns of living is to consume an ever-fresh array of delicious and invigorating food. It doesn’t matter if your cuisine is deli take-out or homemade eat-in. You can easily create hundreds of soul-satisfying meals to sink your teeth into using this practical key: change only one ingredient. 

It’s simple. Add only one type of nut, fruit, vegetable, seasoning or other flavoring to vary the taste and texture of your meal. Then by using any single dish as a foundation, you can invent almost endless variations that taste completely different.

Let’s use basic chicken salad as an example of how easily you can design an assortment of delectably diverse dishes. The basic salad consists of chicken, mayonnaise, onion, salt and pepper.

9 Lip-Smacking Tips for Creative Eating

• Saucy sauces. Add a dab of yellow mustard to the basic chicken salad. Then try raspberry mustard. Or brown mustard. Another time, create zest with some Thai peanut sauce. A dash of hot chili or taco sauce ushers in a hint of Mexico. There are, literally, hundreds of distinctive-tasting sauces waiting to titillate your senses.
• Fruit punch. Punch up the taste using only one type of fruit per dish. Apples, mango, blueberries, pineapple, papaya, seedless grapes or mandarin oranges go great in chicken salad. Dried fruits like dates, raisins, currents and cranberries are a snap to add. For a hint of fruit, blend in some natural jam that’s made with just fruit, no sugar.
• Umm, spicy. Experiment with using only one herb or spice at a time per dish. Explore the distinction between fresh and dried herbs in terms of the pungency and strength of flavor. Play with the amount of herb or spice used. Too much can overwhelm the salad. A little bit adds interest. Want an exotic twist? Sprinkle in some curry.
• Veggie bites. Change the variety of onion—red, white, yellow, even scallions.  Include raw or roasted green, red, orange or yellow peppers. Add crunchy intrigue with celery, jicama, snow peas, water chestnuts or sugar snap peas. Toss in some chopped olives or pickles. Use out-of-the-ordinary varieties of olives—like black, Greek, Kalamata. Include capers, kernel corn, black beans or artichoke hearts. Garnish the top of the salad with diced tomato, sliced zucchini, shredded carrot or sautéed asparagus. Alfalfa or bean sprouts jazz up the dish. Stuff an avocado with your tasty mixture. Nestle the salad in assorted types of greens.

The combinations are infinite. The flavors are mouth-watering. And inventing a new dish each time is a breeze. Remember the ripple effect. You’re breaking out of stale, old eating patterns in order to bust out of stale, old living patterns!

Ready for more exciting ways to fire up your enjoyment of life?

• It’s cheezy. Top off the chicken salad with cheese. You have a myriad of cheeses to choose from. There are over 10,000 types of cheese in the world. Some cheese is smoked. Some cheese comes infused with herbs, nuts, wine or vegetables. As a non-dairy alternative, try veggie or soy cheese. Pop your yummy delight under a broiler for a toasty taste.
• Oodles of noodles.  Invigorate your salad with any one of the many varied shapes, flavors and colors of pasta. Pasta comes in a wide array of herb, spice and vegetable variations. Assorted forms and hues provide a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach.
• Wheat treat. Craft a sandwich with your chicken dish. Even regular supermarkets offer a huge selection of breads, rolls, tortillas, pita or cracker bread. Or pick up some exotic bread at a bakery. Make an open-faced sandwich and lightly toast the whole shebang for a great taste. Skipping wheat? Try spelt bread or toasted rice cakes. (Alert! Rice cakes toast quickly!)
• Oh, nuts. Raw or roasted pumpkin, sunflower, sesame, or poppy seeds make fun toppings. Toss in a few nuts. Raw or roasted cashews, almonds, walnuts, pistachios or pine nuts are crunchy goodies.
• Brown rice rules! Cook brown rice in advance and refrigerate it for easy use. Hot or cold, sprinkle brown rice on the salad or mix it in. Brown rice compliments most flavors and has lots of  “staying power.” Brown rice gives you lots of energy that keeps you going and going and going!

Up Your Fun Quotient

Having fun in one area of life is contagious. Why not tickle your taste buds with delicious feasts? And watch the rest of your life percolate with excitement and fresh opportunity.