Miss Picky Pants (known for the remainder of the post as MPP) is a grazer. She is easily overwhelmed by large portions (with the exception of cake, of course), and loves to have just a bit of as many things as possible. In a desperate attempt to have dinner out a few years ago, Mr. Little Sis and I took the twins to a Tapas joint here in our little burg.
Don’t know if you’ve ever walked 4 year old twins into a restaurant before, but I can tell you it’s the rare restaurant staff that greets this moment with true enthusiasm. Weren’t they surprised to find out that as long as they kept the bread and little plates coming, MPP and her all cuisine loving brother would be just fine, thank you very much. To be fair my little MPP, she comes by the small plate thing honestly. I love having bits on the plate to choose from , tie together, nibble on, mop up with bread. Yum. Tonight we had just such a plate. If there had been sections dividing MPP’s food, everything would have been perfecto. All of it was simple, hearty, and super yummy. Perfect for these increasingly cool evenings. A little preview of autumn’s heartier fare. The highlight of the meal, for me, was garlic mushrooms, a classic tapas favorite. The beauty of this dish is its simplicity and its versatility. Want it with rice – rock it out. Over quinoa? Keen. With pasta? Perfection. Garlic mushrooms, a foodie’s best friend. Continue reading →
We’ve had quite a week here at Lake HolyCrap. The twins started first grade on Monday and our search for a new furry friend reached its final, and extremely happy conclusion. While the kids were at their second day of school, Mr. Little Sis and I responded to the call from a lovely woman who runs an animal rescue about a half an hour from us. She thought we might be just the people for Baxter, an adult labradoodle mix. We jumped in the car immediately and it’s been love ever since.
Baxter rode home with me yesterday and I had my first experience using a mobile groomer (for the dog, mind you). I didn’t want to traumatize him by taking him somewhere else or leaving him for a couple of hours, so I found the nicest groomer who pulled into our driveway with a trailer that had everything she needed to get rid of our new friend’s matted dreadlocks and leave him much more comfortable and very, very handsome. What’s a nervous new dog Mommy to do while a stranger is tending to her new charge in the driveway? Bake, of course. Continue reading →
Ahhh summertime. No school, more free time, right?
Riiiight. Not for the adults in the house. While I love having my sweet boy around, there is less time in the day for things like cooking. And with weather like we’ve been having: mid 80’s, mild humidity, enough rain to keep everything growing… who wants to spend a bunch of time cooking? But there is fresh produce coming out of the garden, including zucchini for the first time in a few years. I just love walking in the house with the IDEA of making dinner from the garden…. but I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it.
A friend brought a dish to a recent gathering that was simply sliced yellow squash baked with a little seasoning and a touch of goat cheese sprinkled on top. It was delicious. So simple. This got me thinking about layering squash and baking it. So simple. Continue reading →
1) It’s yet another gadget to buy that sits on the counter and must be cleaned after use
2) It’s expensive to buy the gadget and the requisite pile of fresh fruits and veggies required to produce the Juice.
3) Isn’t it better to get the nutrients from the whole plant rather than just the juice?
Honestly, we have never been fruit juice drinkers perhaps due in part to the gallons of nasty frozen concentrated orange juice forced on me as a child. (I know most people like OJ – I never really did). Perhaps the orange juice tasted so bitter to me because I had placed 3 Tablespoons (an approximation) of sugar on my cold cereal and so ANYthing tasted bitter. At any rate, fruit juice in my adult household has been used as an occasional treat or purely as a source of calories and taste when someone can’t keep any solid food down. It seemed to me that smoothies made much more nutritional sense as they deliver the benefit of the whole plant.
So why am I now juicing?
Several things have changed my mind on this point but due to my stubborn-ness, or my increasingly inflexible knees that only allow me to bend so far… I found a compromise in the juicing that helped resolve objection #3.
The first thing that changed my mind was the film “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.” This is a charming film that portrays the power of vegetable nutrition to change health in a big way. The center of the film is a man who is not only overweight but struggles with an autoimmune skin disorder. We’ve got skin stuff goin’ on in this house, so I was interested that he stopped suffering from this problem after changing his diet so dramatically, including juicing.
The second thing was that since we have been juicing I don’t need as much sleep and my skin looks brighter.
The third thing that happened was the realization that my vitamins may not be all they’re cracked up to be. I mean, I read labels on everything else I buy but my tendency when purchasing supplements has been to read the nutritional content but not the source. I had some chosen brands that I trusted to ‘do the right thing’ – will I never learn? See post on Breyer’s frozen dairy dessert and decide that apparently it will take me a long time to learn!! I want food not chemicals. So shouldn’t I want food-based vitamins and not chemicals as well?
So in not reading or investigating the actual ingredients in my vitamins I have been consuming things that are probably better not consumed. This is the article that got me feeling stupid about not reading the labels. Now to be fair, I don’t know how good the science is behind their claims but they make too much sense for me to ignore. When it comes to food I like to say, “If it wasn’t grown, raised and/or harvested from clean, natural conditions…. Don’t eat it!” The same should go for my vitamins. And do I really need vitamins if I am juicing? (Still working on that but certainly I don’t need TOXIC vitamins.)
So enough about why I have begun… here’s my knee-saving compromise.
I juice and then use the juice to combine with some kale or spinach and berries and a little banana and make a powerful smoothie. Jam packin’ the nutrients in there Baby! You got your nutrient dense juice and you got your fiber-rich smoothie with even more nutrients. Never thought I wanted to be dense (see above article about Breyer’s again), but in this case dense is great.
Here’s this morning’s pile of produce:
There’s a lot of vitamins in that pile. Have to throw in one apple to ease the bitter for my son. He still doesn’t like the juice, but hey – health doesn’t always taste good goin’ down.
So, since my son prefers his juice naked – no extra kale. I pour his glass off:
Kapow! One beet with greens is a whole lot of color going on.
Then I put 2 large handfuls of kale, some berries and 1 frozen banana in the blender. Add the rest of the juice…
And blend it into a powerful purple purveyor of plenitude. Abbondanza! Future supplements will be plant based – and most of them will be pourable as well.
Most people juice tons of greens and I am looking forward to having lots of swiss chard from the garden to boost the amount of greens in the juice. Guess that’ll combine with beets to make brown juice. I will have to start working on alliterations with the letter ‘B’.
There is no better time for eating than summer – or well, late spring through early fall. Okay, so there’s a lot of good time for eating, but my point (and I do have one) is that there is nothing so wonderful as the riot of flavors and colors that fresh produce bring as the weather turns warm. My garden (which I’ve not shared much about this year) is going swimmingly. The potato patch is insane. I’ve got kale and chard coming out of my ears and the tomato plants look promising (knock on wood and anything else that will help).
Some plants have not liked the unpredictable weather (the peas are struggling this year and the bugs ate all the beans) and I’m dealing with a new wildlife threat. It seems that my geriatric dog was more threatening than I supposed and now that he has left us for the great beyond the neighborhood deer have found (and leapt into) my garden. One bold little doe had a great, and very large, salad of strawberry leaves and chard before we scared her away. I’m testing various repellent measures and will let you know how it goes. For the moment, she seems to be favoring my hostas over my berries and I like that just fine.
Despite the intruder, I’ve picked about 12 pounds of strawberries in the last 6 days. Yes, I said 12 pounds. For some quick practical math – organic strawberries are currently going for $4 a pound at my local Wegman’s. I spent $0 on my strawberry patch this year. $0. I mulched with dry leaves late last fall and have only sprinkled some organic slug deterrent – okay so I’ve probably spent .50. I’ll round it up to $1 for fun. My 12 pounds of organic (and awesome tasting) strawberries would have cost $48 at the market. I got them for $1. I grant you I bought some strawberry plants a couple of years ago, but I’ve harvested every year. We’re well into the gravy zone. I thought I’d share some strawberry info with you so you can pocket $47 worth of free and super healthful organic fruit too. We’ll start with WHY strawberries are awesome, then I’ll talk gardening. If you absolutely don’t want to grow strawberries, skip past the gardening bit and read about storing your berries so you can take advantage of summer’s berry bounty (and lower prices). Continue reading →
I know I talk a lot about sauces, which of course makes me very saucy. And here’s proof of the familial sauciness which abounded at the beach!
How come Little Sis is taller than me? She’s wearing high flip flops…. Yeah – that must be it!
Shoes or no shoes…. and there was a lot of no shoes during our week at the beach, we ate really well. We didn’t go out to eat. We took turns cooking and it was so delightful to plan, share and partake of a week of delicious healthy food with my wonderful family. I wanted to do something special for them (Little Sis made an incredible plant-based, gluten free birthday cake for me- she is so wonderful!!) and so I prepared ahead of time to cut down on prep time. In so doing, I have discovered a new (to me) spice mix and sauce that promise to dress up many healthy, veggie-heavy meals in the future.
We went North African one night and I want to share the tabil (a spice blend) and the harissa (which I found a great shortcut for – as we are a little short on North African sauce stores in my neck of the woods) that made the dish so special. Continue reading →
Some of my favorite meals are simple. They are often not the meals that I choose to serve to guests, I guess the show off comes out in all of us sometimes…. or lots of times, however, simple is so important to a majority of what I cooked when I first started cooking…. and before I started trying to show off in a blog ;-). As Little Sis and I have been writing the Baby Steps series, we have discussed that there are recipes that are ideal for people just getting into cooking. These are SO important, because biting off more than you can chew can discourage further cooking… but hopefully not further eating. I have written about sauces in the past because they are the difference between Blah and Bingo! And Bingo will help you and your family stick with some healthier recipes.I much prefer “Bingo!” to “Do I really have to eat all of this?”
So while preparing a delicious, but not overly simple recipe from Amanda at Good Clean Food I was so impressed with the tofu marinade that I knew it was destined for other uses besides the Gingered Greens with Tofu that she shared. And if I lost you at the tofu, fear not…. what you choose to marinade or stir fry is between you, your doctor and the animals in your life 😉 Although I will say that tofu gets a bad rap with folks who’ve never tried it, the truth is that it takes on the flavor of what it is cooked in, AND there are ways to change it’s texture if you don’t like it as is (see notes at the bottom).
So do check out the recipe above…. and do check out this marinade because it is very simple and I’m going to add just afew ingredients to it the second (or third time around to make a VERY easy stir-fry. Continue reading →
I’ve had this idea brewing for a little while… a pot pie that I could eat (given my dietary predilections). Well, okay, I’ve been thinking about pot pie generally for a VERY long time. When I was in high school my Mom would occasionally offer up a Mrs. Budd’s pot pie from the grocery store. High times indeed. I have long been smitten with the pot pie. I was reminded by my husband that while pregnant with the twins pot pie was one of a very few foods I actually made him go procure for me at strange times (pineapple and watermelon were some of the others). Even now that I don’t eat a lot of what goes into most pot pies, I can still be brought to a slow drool (attractive, right?) with a picture of a pot pie (as a good friend in Boston who can attest to – she unknowingly tortured me with a photo from Harrow’s Chicken Pies, but I digress).
The lovely thing about being somewhat obsessive about pot pies is that a passable pie crust is not nearly as hard as everyone would have you believe, and let’s face it, the crust is really a good part of what awesome pot pie is all about. So yesterday I decided to throw Ms. Picky Pants a bone and construct the perfect pot pie for my daughter with the delicate palate – pre-appproved foods only in this baby. A quick look around the fridge provided the ingredients list (the benefits of cooking extra felt once again). So here it is, my leftovers pot pie! Continue reading →
Buckwheat, eh? A little skeptical? Buckwheat my friends, is a very cool plant, and a versatile little workhorse of a grain. It used to be much more popular and still is commonly found in Eastern Europe as a cooked grain and porridge and is also found in Asia in buckwheat noodles. Buckwheat pancakes and crepes are common worldwide. And yet, it seems that many folks have not embraced this funny little triangular grain. I am woman enough to admit that I was a buckwheat naysayer. Didn’t see the point, so many other more familiar grains available. But buckwheat really is interesting in a number of ways that I think make it merit a second look. Continue reading →
What could be better on a chilly day than a hot bowl of tomato soup? I have an answer to that – on a chilly day, the only thing better than a hot bowl of tomato soup is a hot bowl of tomato soup that is waiting for you, nearly complete, when you walk in the door with two pool-soaked “freezing cold” six year old swimmers.
I should confess that as a child I was never a tomato soup eater – the ever present Campbell’s soup can didn’t do a thing for me, but Mr. Little Sis was a huge fan. I was always happy to simply eat the grilled cheese that usually accompanied a great bowl of tomato soup. As my love affair with the tomato became a permanent state, however, I’ve given this simple dish another chance. In the past I found that creamy versions usually were my preference, but in more recent days, I’ve avoided creamy soup. What to do?
I was confident someone on the vast internet had conquered the creamy tomato soup with no cream conundrum, and lo and behold, I was correct. I stumbled onto a recipe that uses beans to thicken, fortify, and give soup some body. Being the me that I am, I took the recipe to heart and promptly began changing it to meet my increasingly particular standards. 😉 The result was a creamy and flavorful soup that was warming to the toes, each bite full of tomato goodness. Smoked paprika evokes roasted goodness and smoky warmth. So flavorful, and so perfectly simple. Continue reading →
Buckwheat, eh? A little skeptical? Buckwheat my friends, is a very cool plant, and a versatile little workhorse of a grain. It used to be much more popular and still is commonly found in Eastern Europe as a cooked grain and porridge and is also found in Asia in buckwheat noodles. Buckwheat pancakes and crepes are common worldwide. And yet, it seems that many folks have not embraced this funny little triangular grain. I am woman enough to admit that I was a buckwheat naysayer. Didn’t see the point, so many other more familiar grains available. But buckwheat really is interesting in a number of ways that I think make it merit a second look. 
my sister's pantry 