The Back in the Swing Cookbook, 10th Anniversary Edition: Recipes for Eating and Living Well Every Day After Breast Cancer

By Barbara C. Unell and Judith Fertig

The 10-year anniversary edition of the groundbreaking and award-winning The Back in the Swing Cookbook answers the number-one question on every cancer survivor's mind: "How do I safely and smartly get back in the swing of life every day after experiencing breast cancer?" 

Completely revised and updated, this life-affirming book is full of 150 feel-good recipes that are easy to prepare, with fresh ingredients specifically designed to help breast cancer survivors get back in the swing of joyful, healthy living. Some of these include:

• Celebration Chocolate Cake 
• Pomegranate Sparkler and Aztec Guacamole with Chips
• Provencal Salmon Aioli Platter 
• Island Fish Tacos with Fresh Pineapple Salsa
• Roasted Spaghetti Squash with Tomatoes, Kale, and Herbs  

“What a concept!” says expert Maura Harrigan, MS, RDN, CSO, Certified Specialist Oncology Nutrition, and Project Manager, The Lifestyle, Exercise and Nutrition (LEAN) Study at Yale University. “Nutrition and movement: your contribution to your lifelong health. The Back in the Swing Cookbook gives you a tool kit to build a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.”
 
Sheryl Crow, songwriter, singer, and breast cancer survivor, says, “Simply put, The Back in the Swing Cookbook is more than just a bunch of wonderful recipes.  There’s so much to know about food and what fortifies our bodies and what is a contributor to well-being. This cookbook is a wonderful resource to help all of us in the kitchen, to eat great, and to combine science with great common sense.”

In addition to fabulous food and drinks, the beautiful pages include luscious photographs and fun-to-read, smart, friendly nuggets on topics ranging from genetics, lifestyle choices, and the environment to the influence of all three on living a full and happy life. Every page is brilliantly designed to nurture your mind, body, and spirit with new information not found in any other cookbook. It is a special gift of goodness to give oneself, a friend, a coworker, or a family member that will reap healthy rewards for a lifetime. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781524892272

Book preview

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The Back in the Swing Cookbook text copyright © 2023 by Barbara C. Unell and Judith Fertig. Photography copyright © 2012 by Sara Remington. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

Andrews McMeel Publishing

a division of Andrews McMeel Universal

1130 Walnut Street

Kansas City, Missouri 64106

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

ISBN: 978-1-5248-9227-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931270

www.backintheswing.org

The authors of The Back in the Swing Cookbook have made every effort to provide information that is accurate and complete as of the date of publication. This book is intended for general informational purposes only, and not as personal medical advice, medical opinion, diagnosis or treatment. The words woman and she are used when referring to breast cancer survivor because the majority of breast cancer diagnoses involve women. The authors of this book acknowledge that men can and do receive breast cancer diagnoses, and that both men and women are the audience for the information of this book.

Book Design: Diane Marsh

Food Photography: Sara Remington

Food Stylist: Erin Quon

Prop Stylist: Christine Wolheim

Artwork: Julie Barnes/iStockphoto.com

All other photos courtesy of iStockphoto.com

ATTENTION: Hospitals, medical providers, cancer centers, SCHOOLS, AND BUSINESSES

Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Andrews McMeel Publishing Special Sales Department: [e-mail].

Inspiration from Sheryl Crow

American musician, singer, and songwriter

To celebrate the publication of the original Back in the Swing Cookbook: Recipes for Eating and Living Well Every Day After Breast Cancer, Sheryl Crow graciously and enthusiastically performed a sold-out fundraising concert in Kansas City to support the nonprofit organization, Back in the Swing. In an interview before the concert that night, she shared these meaningful and timeless words. We include them here in this new 10th Anniversary Edition as a public love letter to her for raising her voice for our cause, as she has for so many throughout her legendary artistic career. We hope Sheryl’s words inspire you, as they did us, then and now.

"H i, I’m Sheryl Crow, and I’m proud to support Back in the Swing’s grassroot effort to educate and build awareness about breast cancer sur vivorship.

Simply put, this book is more than just a bunch of wonderful recipes. There’s so much to know about food and what fortifies our bodies and what is a contributor to well-being, and this cookbook is a wonderful resource book to help all of us in the kitchen, to eat great, to have wonderful meals, and to combine science with great common sense.

When I was diagnosed, one of the doctors that became so important to me ultimately said to me, ‘Try to do all the things that are normal to your life so that your life maintains some sort of support. It feels like your life. Like you’re not all of a sudden stepping out of your life.’

My life was really, from that point forward, about listening to what I needed, my body needed. It was about not defining my life by cancer but refining my life. I got to sort of start over and write my own foreword to my life. I incorporate what I know is great for me and my loved ones, which is eating great. And I gird myself with information and with serenity, with just healthy living, healthy outlook.

Your life doesn’t stop at cancer. It doesn’t begin at cancer. It is a moment in your life that is a part of your experience. It’s what you do with it afterwards that really ultimately winds up mattering."

Contents

Foreword viii

The Back Story on Back in the Swing xi

Breast Cancer Survivorship . . . A Decade Later xiii

Our Advice: Read, Re-Read, Repeat xv

The Back in the Swing Approach xviii

Listen to Your Body xxiv

Chapter One: Desserts 1

Chapter Two: Breakfast 39

Chapter Three: Beverages 73

Chapter Four: Appetizers and Snacks 99

Chapter Five: Salads and Side Dishes 129

Chapter Six: Soups, Stews, Risottos, and More 167

Chapter Seven: The Main Event 197

Resources 236

Metric Conversions and Equivalents 238

Menu Planning Ideas 240

Acknowledgments 244

Index 246

Foreword

You may have found n u trition counseling missing in your cancer care, as Barbara did in her cancer journey. This gap in her care led her to write The Back in the Swing Cookbook , with award-winning cookbook author, Judith Fertig, now in its revised 2023 edition. Barbara is a pioneer, seeking out evidence-based research in nutrition, exercise, and holistic care to treat the whole person, not just t he cancer.

In my work at the Survivorship Clinic at Yale Cancer Center, I have provided nutrition counseling to thousands of cancer survivors. Yet it was the survivors themselves who taught me the unique nutrition concerns of their cancer journey. Number one is the rampant amount of nutrition misinformation available which often leads to great confusion and even a fear of food. As a result, many survivors overly restrict their eating and end up poorly nourishing their bodies. There are many ways to eat well while preserving personal preferences, cultural foods, and household budgets. The focus is on an overall predominately plant-based pattern of eating, not on individual nutrients.

The Back in the Swing Cookbook incorporates these new and trusted nutrition recommendations. It helps survivors get back in the swing after breast cancer, providing the underpinnings for effective management of the late effects of treatment, such as heart disease, diabetes, and bone loss.

The advocacy and wisdom of the breast cancer survivors seen in the Survivorship Clinic led to the development of The Lifestyle Exercise and Nutrition (LEAN) Study, a healthy eating and exercise lifestyle intervention with over five hundred breast cancer participants to date. The published findings so far give a window into how a healthy lifestyle benefits the body: lowering markers of inflammation, normalizing insulin levels, and supporting immune function. It has been one of my great professional joys to walk alongside the study participants and witness the transformative power of healthy eating and exercise. Women gain a sense of control, become empowered, and simply feel better.

This new edition of The Back in the Swing Cookbook reflects key updates to the healthy lifestyle literature. The primary goal of exercise is reframed as reducing sedentary behaviors. Movement is medicine: sit less, move more. The biggest bang for your buck is Going from Nothing to Something. These are movement goals we can all practice every day. How weight management goals are established is also reframed: Body Mass Index (BMI) is not the end-all, be-all measure of health; it is too crude a measure to apply to individuals. Rather, clinically meaningful weight loss is defined as up to a 10 percent weight loss. As little as 2 percent can reap medical benefits. Also, the importance of limiting added sugars has been included. Added sugars (as part of Total Sugars) is a recommended number to look at on the newly revised Nutrition Facts labels. Limiting added sugars helps normalize insulin levels and reduce a hidden source of excess calories.

Nutrition and movement: Your contribution to your lifelong health. What a concept! The Back in the Swing Cookbook gives you a tool kit to build a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.

Don’t forget that enjoying delicious food is one of the great pleasures in life! The Back in the Swing Cookbook understands this and puts the dessert recipes first. Celebration Chocolate Cake is my favorite. Which one is yours?

Maura Harrigan, MS, RDN, CSO Certified Specialist Oncology Nutrition

Yale Cancer Center and Yale School of Public Health

The Back Story on Back in the Swing

I keep the telephone of my mind open to peace, harmony, health, love nd abundance.Then whenever doubt, anxiety or fear try to call me, they keep getting a busy signal—and soon they’ll forget my number.

~Edith Armstrong

Everyone has a story about a moment in time that changed the course of her life. Indeed, the story of Back in the Swing USA began with one of those moments.

It was a hot Wednesday afternoon in August 1998 when I finished my last radiation treatment for breast cancer. I just naturally assumed that I would get the follow-up care at my cancer center clinic to put me back together again. I thought that the clinic would provide that care or direct me to those who do, as would a doctor after you get your leg set when it’s broken. Routine stuff to get me back in the swing, as I put it, and help me recover from the side effects of the surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments.

I also just assumed that the personalized medical care that I was getting would continue in some sort of after-care posttreatment plan, giving me the prescriptions that I needed to prevent or end the physical side effects, such as: damage to my heart, fatigue and joint pain from chemotherapy; hot flashes and dry skin from medication; skin damage from radiation; lymphedema from surgery; weakening of my immune system; and bone density loss from all of the above, just to name a few. Again, these routine side effects were known as the normal, predictable aftermath of the experience, based on my particular primary cancer treatment.

But instead of giving me a plan to put me back in the swing, my cancer clinic gave me my walking papers.

Come back in three months for a follow-up visit and scans, I was told when I had finished my last treatment.

So what do I do on, well, tonight, or tomorrow, or next Thursday? I innocently asked. And how about Friday and Saturday, and the rest of every week until then? How do I improve and protect my health and reduce the risk of cancer recurrence . . . how do I get back in the swing?

The silence of my health care team spoke volumes. These nationally recognized medical professionals had cared for me to this point but didn’t address the effects of the treatment that they had given me. It was if they were pushing me off some sort of cliff, without a parachute of any kind. These people knew what they had done to me, so to speak, and knew about my recent medical history, but it was standard care at that time not to treat anything other than the cancer.

It just didn’t make any sense to me: the people who knew best what had caused the new medical issues I was experiencing (weight gain, lymph

edema, joint pain, muscle aches, bone loss, fatigue, sleeplessness, anxiety, and hot flashes, just to name a few) were not offering any plan to help me recover from them.

Where can I go to receive my personalized, comprehensive medical instructions for getting back in the swing of my life? I asked myself. And would it be possible for every breast cancer survivor to be able to do so, regardless of where she received her primary treatment?

A Dream Comes True

The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

Along with a team of passionate, fun-loving, dedicated volunteers, I founded the grassroots, nonprofit organization Back in the Swing USA® in 2000 to fill the void in patients having access to personalized, comprehensive clinical breast cancer survivorship health care, education, and medical research.

Our name is our mission. Back in the Swing points consumers and their physicians to the one universal reason that every person with a diagnosis of cancer chooses to get treatment, why she goes to the doctor, and why she suffers the surgeries and insults to her mind and her body: To get back in the swing of life, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, for the rest of her life.

Back in the swing of life is where every woman wants to be the moment after she is diagnosed . . . and where she wants to be every day thereafter.

Breast Cancer Survivorship . . .

A Decade Later

As a leader of a National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center, I have enthusiastically supported and facilitated the development of clinical cancer survivorship care. This book is an essential, evidence-based compilation of what it means to provide that kind of comprehensive survivorship care—up-to-date information, support, and empowerment—that everyone deserves and needs for optimum health and well-being.

—Roy Jensen, MD, Vice Chancellor and Director of

The University of Kansas Cancer Center

As someone who has been committed to providing evidence-based care to breast cancer survivors for over twenty-five years, I look at the past decade as a real change in how we treat and manage breast cancer: Transitioning from harsh treatments with varying outcomes to our current era of targeted therapy and treating individuals based on the genetics of their tumor, with fewer negative effects and improved outcomes. This shift has provided our families, friends, and all grateful patients with the opportunity to extend their quality and quantit y of life.

The role of The Back in the Swing Cookbook promotes this mission of supporting breast cancer survivors from the vantage point of the whole patient and the complex nature of factors associated with a diagnosis and the treatment of breast cancer, along with the other unique factors to each breast cancer survivor. I feel lucky to have played a role in supporting the groundbreaking work of Back in the Swing since 2000 in bringing tools to cancer care teams, survivors, and caregivers, fulfilling my role in caring for those at high-risk for or diagnosed with cancer. This updated book provides an additional tool in our toolbox that can support our goal of getting back in the swing.

Over the past decade, breast cancer survivorship care has not only become the standard of care for some but also a gap in care for others. As we continue to try to develop comprehensive and scalable models of survivorship care, there are ongoing barriers and opportunities to establish this standard of care. To start with, we want to establish who we define as a breast cancer survivor to help align breast cancer survivors, caregivers, and cancer care teams, so we are all on the same page:

A breast cancer survivor is anyone with a diagnosis of breast cancer, including ductal carcinoma in-situ, invasive, or metastatic breast cancer. This definition is inclusive of anyone living with or through breast cancer. Although we acknowledge that not everyone resonates with this definition, it is important to recognize that this term was coined decades ago and meant to serve as a way to collectively talk about a community and support their ongoing medical and psychosocial needs.

My medical colleagues and I, along with the passionate leaders and volunteers of Back in the Swing, feel lucky to have been at the forefront of establishing a standard of care for breast cancer survivors since 2006, when we officially opened The Breast Cancer Survivorship Center at the University of Kansas Cancer Center. As one of the first, comprehensive programs in the country, we continue to evolve the way we envision and deliver evidence-based survivorship care. Several of the lessons learned include the need to integrate survivorship care at the time of diagnosis and conceptualize the patient from a comprehensive point of view, taking into consideration a person’s overall medical condition, age, and type and effects of cancer and its treatment, all within a model of shared decision-making. What is important to our survivors regarding their health care and quality of life is important to us.

With the birth of this ten-year anniversary of The Back in the Swing Cookbook and the ability to provide updated information and evidence, we are enthusiastic that you will use and share this informative book with everyone. We thank you for the opportunity to share our experience and research with you and those you love.

Jennifer R. Klemp, PhD, MPH, MA

Director, Cancer Survivorship, The University of Kansas Cancer Center

Our Advice: Read, Re-Read, Repeat

This friendly road map to creating your own definition of eating and living well each day is the book that Barbara was looking for when she was told that she had breast cancer. It would have been impossible to write this book then, however, for one simple reason: Evidence-based recommendations for creating and sustaining a daily back in the swing lifestyle and environment were not part of the recommended standard of care for every cancer survivor until the twenty-first century. So now, for the first time in one beautiful place, these recommendations are yours to savor every day.

In these friendly, smart, and satisfying daily recipes for living the good life, you can easily digest what researchers have discovered about 1) genetics, 2) lifestyle choices, 3) the environment, and 4) the influence of all three. Many of the pages introduce you to unique, delicious, and good-for-you food and drink. And many of the pages are filled with information and inspiration that sometimes relate to a recipe on the neighboring pages and often are just tidbits to savor in no particular order:

Who knew?

Q & A format of empowering facts explains why the unprocessed foods in each recipe provide so much goodness.

Would someone just tell me . . .

Reports contributed by Katy Harvey, MS, RD, LD, CEDS, on the impact of nutrition and lifestyle on primary and secondary cancer prevention, as well as women’s health issues and emotional eating.

Professor Positive

Summaries on the evidence-based connections between our emotions and physical and psychological health.

I knew I was back in the swing when . . .

Statements written by breast cancer survivors who finished this sentence on Back in the Swing surveys. On the upswing sections are also gathered from these surveys and express real-life examples of ways to find joy and humor in the moment and the greater good in life’s experiences. Each demonstrates the power of social support in avoiding dwelling on negative thoughts and stimulating healthy brain chemicals by opening your mind to new possibilities.

Treat of the Day

Prescriptions for enjoying the beauty and serenity of sunshine (don’t forget the sunscreen!), entertainment, rest, and relaxation to help keep your body, mind, and spirit functioning at their optimum level.

Did you hear the news?

Scientific research that has led to lifestyle recommendations to help prevent, or reduce the impact of, weight gain, bone loss, cardio-toxicity, fatigue, joint pain, depression, and anxiety, as well as other predictable and treatable common side effects of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery.

Energy Balance and Calories Out

Practical ways to balance calories in through food choices and calories out through exercises that get you moving every day—walking, aerobics, yoga, running, weight-resistance, and bicycling, for example. A balanced lifestyle also strengthens your bones, heart, and immune function.

Our advice? Read, re-read, repeat! Find something salty, if you’re in the mood to be awakened. Or experiment with one of our calming exercises or meditations, to enjoy along with a cup of tea. When you’re feeling adventurous, strap on your apron and take a recipe that you’ve never tried before for a ride. And reading an essay about nature just might be what gets you cooking on a certain day, when feeling connected to your body, mind,