Pinterest, the food edition

I've been pinning so many recipe ideas on Pinterest, that I thought I'd better make a separate entry for the food stuff.  Here's a link to my I did it board for the recipes.

Here's what I made today:

Sweet Corn & Quinoa w/ Honey Lemon Vinaigrette.

This is definitely the best tasting quinoa recipe I've ever tried!  So tasty!

Sweet Potato Cauliflower Soup, also very delicious:

I had some organic uncured hot dogs, so I made the kids a hot dog octopus and sea serpent sitting on a sea bed of corn.  They thought it was cute.

These stuffed avocados are so easy and so delicious!

Updated 5/22:

I haven't been doing too much from Pinterest lately, but here are some of the things I took to my scrapbooking weekend a couple of weeks ago:

Cheesy Tex Mex rice.  The original recipe didn't call for ground beef, but I added it for more protein.  Robin and I gobbled this up for lunch on Saturday.

This was my tray of rainbow veggies to go along with the pepper octopus in the tzatziki dip, of which I apparently forgot to take a picture.

I'd say my fruit kabobs were the biggest hit of the snack table.  They were pretty yummy.

Updated 6/4/12:

Yesterday was a cooking day.  I made lots of food, but only a couple of things from Pinterest:

Another round of Cheesy Tex Mex Rice- it came out a little differently this time.

Cheesy quinoa breakfast bars- with spinach and green onion.  Pretty good.

Sweet and spicy cucumber salad, but I added some turnips that I got at the farmer's market.

Updated 6/29/12:

Banana, Pineapple and Coconut Milk Popsicle.  The coconut milk really cuts the sweetness of the banana and pineapple. Very refreshing!

Updated 7/5/12:

Cabbage wedge, draped in bacon, wrapped in foil, and baked.  Make this now!  It is so delicious!

Updated 11/9/12:

Raw Thai salad- I adapted it a little from the original recipe.  I put sugar snap peas, peas shoots, cilantro and fresh mint into the food processor and pulsed until they were chopped.  Then I used the food processor to grate a zucchini. I mixed all that together, and added lime juice (couldn't find tamarind), a little agave and a little rice vinegar.  Topped with sliced cucumber and mango chunks.  Very fresh and alive tasting!

Updated 11/10/12:

These are collard green rolls.  I changed the recipe slightly, using regular hummus instead of sweet pea hummus.  So, inside the collard leaf is hummus, quinoa cooked in vege broth, arugula, red peppers, and cucumbers.  Very good.

This is a zucchini "pasta" salad.  It has sliced zucchini and yellow squash,  parsley (recipe called for basil, but I forgot to get some), baby tomatoes of different colors, chopped pistachios, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and a tad of kosher salt.

Updated 1/19/2013

Creamy Avocado Vinaigrette

Banana, oatmeal, yogurt and almond breakfast smoothie

Updated 2/9/13

Acorn squash stuffed with apples, chestnuts, and leeks.  Very fall feeling.  And very yummy.

Crash hot sweet potatoes.  Mine did not come out as pretty as the ones on Pinterest.  They taste good, but I think I'd need to double the amount of spices to get them how they looked on Pinterest.

Updated 2/11/13

Oatmeal Banana Walnut Raspberry Chocolate Chip Bake
Before

All baked- Soooo good!

Quinoa, Black Bean, Avocado salad

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming

So, it has been about 3 weeks since I last updated the homeschool portion of my blog, and during that time, we got back to our regular school schedule after our 2 week unit study on Colonial America and 1 week of spring break.  We are going full steam ahead to wrap up the remaining weeks of school.

Language Arts:


We finished reading Sentence Island, which ended with a lesson in misplaced modifiers and choosing your words carefully to make your written sentences sound nice.  We analyzed a few more sentences, and the kids are really starting to understand the construction of the English language.

We haven't learned any new poems, but we've been practicing all the old ones.

They've been reading Sees Behind Trees by Michael Dorris for book club.  We had a book club meeting today:

In spelling, they learned words with ei sounding like long a.  This week they worked on homophones and learning which spelling had which meaning.

I got a little bonus picture on Andrew's copy assignment:

In handwriting, they have learned upper case J, K, L & M.  

We are still listening to Inkspell in the car- haven't really gone on any long trips, plus this book is like 18 discs long or something!

Math:

We moved ahead in Math U See and have completed Lesson 27.  Only three more lessons left in Gamma!  We've also done flash card practice, Kumon Multiplication books, timed tests, Kumon Geography & Measurement books, and Multiplication Mosaics.

History:

Quite a lot of exciting stuff happening in the world during the times we are studying!  We learned about Captain James Cook's three voyages and the establishment of the penal colony on Australia.  We learned about the French Revolution.  We read You Wouldn't Want to be an Aristocrat during the French Revolution, which was a hit because of the drawings of people carrying around pikes with the decapitated heads of the unfortunate victims of the guillotine.  Boys!

Andrew's narration of the meeting of the Tiers États and the storming of the Bastille.

We learned about Catherine the Great becoming the Empress of Russia after many years of living with her husband Peter III and being controlled by her mother in law.

Science:

We read some library books about chemistry:  The Magic School Bus Gets Baked in a Cake, DK Eyewitness Chemistry, and we are still reading The Periodic Table: Elements with Style.




French:


We've begun to learn the subject pronouns and have reviewed numbers to begin learning to tell time in French.  They also have played some of the French in 10 Minutes a Day games on the computer.


Latin:


They learned latine dictum, historia est vitae magistra, and repetitio est mater memoriae.


Music:


They've been practicing "When the Saints Go Marching In" on their recorders, and it's almost recognizable!  They practiced a few other songs, too.




Health:


They did a worksheet on the parts of the digestive system.  Then, last week, I made them research something in the Usborne Science Encyclopedia.  They could choose any topic they wanted, as long as it had to do with human health.  Here's what I got:

P. E.


The weather has been so beautiful, that they've been playing outside quite a bit.  We also have gone to a couple of different playgrounds.

Art:

Last, but not least, we did Lessons 16, 17 & 18 in Artistic Pursuits.  They talked about mixing colors and drawing characters from imagination.  Here are some Super Mario characters the boys drew:

And here are some "cave paintings" that they did.  Ed had a whole story behind his, but I don't remember what it was.  Andrew's is of a wooly mammoth attacking some gorillas.

Pancake-palooza

Eddie came up with the idea of making a whole bunch of different kind of pancakes, and talked me into agreeing to make them.  So, that's what I did this morning.

We had:

Lemon pancakes
Cranberry pancakes
Raisin pancakes
Cinnamon swirl pancakes
Apple pancakes
Banana pancakes
Pancakes with maple syrup in the batter
Plain pancakes, and
Popcorn pancakes (Yes, you read it right, popcorn pancakes)

I actually popped a few kernels to add to the pancakes.  As I suspected, these were not as tasty as they originally sounded to the boys.

Here are the finished popcorn, cinnamon swirl and plain pancakes.

Here are all the fruit pancakes.

Here's the proud mastermind behind the multi-type pancake breakfast.

Juice Fast

I'm starting a juice fast today, because I've let the sugar take over again, and I've got to clear out my system.  I'm going to try a 10 day juice fast à la Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.  And who knows, maybe I can keep it going longer than that.  In any case, I thought I'd start a blog post showcasing all the wonderful juices I get to drink.  I'm making a big batch in the morning, storing it in the fridge, and drinking about 12 oz. of juice 4 times per day.

Here is day 1:

This contains granny smith apples, beets, ginger, carrots and a whole bunch of red kale.   Tastes pretty good.  I can taste the chlorophyll from the kale, but the sweetness of the carrots, beets, and apples and the tanginess of the ginger make it palatable.

Day 2:

I should cross post this one on my Pinterest post, since I did get the recipe from Pinterst.

This one is called Green Lemonade and contains lemons, green apples, celery, parsley, mint,  and fennel.  It's tart and salty tasting.  Definitely a change from the sweetness of yesterday.

Day 3:

Well, I didn't make it all day, yesterday.  I had a bowl of steamed cauliflower when everyone else was eating the dinner that I cooked.  It's really hard to be on a fast while still having to make food for everyone else.  I figured a bowl of cauliflower was not really going to throw things too far off, so I'm not worried about it.

Here is this morning's juice:

This is pineapple, oranges and grapefruit.  I decided to have a glass of just this for breakfast before I added the veggies.

Here is the above juice with spinach, red kale, ginger and carrots added in.

Day 4:

Yesterday was very rough.  I had promised the kids that we could go to Olive Garden with Grandma, so we went.  I ended up eating some salad, but I asked them to leave the dressing off, so I ate some lettuce (iceberg, so it didn't even seem like lettuce to me :P), tomato, black olive, red onion, and a little bit of grated parmesan.  It tasted absolutely delicious to me, I'm not gonna lie!  There was no way I could have sat there and watched everybody eat.  I was very hungry yesterday.  But, that's all I ate.  I drank the rest of the juice when I got home and went to bed early so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore.

Today, I wasn't hungry at all when I woke up, and the kids and I went to the store to get groceries.  I'm all loaded up on organic produce for the next 6 days of juice.  I made the following juice when we got home, and I'm sitting her sipping on it while I decide where in the heck I'm going to put all this produce!

Today's juice is carrots, cucumbers, celery, ginger and red pepper.  This is really tasty.  Not too sweet, not too sour.

Day 5:

I made it through yesterday with only the juice!  Hooray!  Let's see how I do today on the weekend . . .

Yesterday, I found a mango that I meant to include, so I juiced it and added it to the afternoon juice.

Here's today's juice.  It's called Green Energizer Bunny.  I got the recipe off the web, but I added a spare pear that I had lying around.

This contains apples, cucumbers, lemons, kale, spinach, celery, fennel, ginger, romaine lettuce and a pear.   This might be my favorite so far!

Day 6:

Well, I almost made it the whole day, yesterday.  I made it through cooking dozens of pancakes and making up lunch plates, and seeing what they wanted for dinner.  However, in the evening, I told them they could watch a movie down the basement with me while I did laundry.  Of course, they wanted snacks.  I was pretty hungry and was actually starting to get a headache, so while I got them some snacks for the movie, I made myself a very small salad.  It had a handful of baby spinach, two baby carrots, two green onions, a couple slices of orange bell pepper and a teeny drizzling of flax oil and raw apple cider vinegar.  I ate it and drank the last of my juice.  I was still pretty hungry after that, but I took a bath in epsom salt water and went to bed.

Here's todays juice.  It's called The Green Carrot, but it actually looks a little brown to me.

This juice has lots of spinach and lots of carrots, along with cucumbers, celery and apples.

Day 7:

Yesterday was another successful all juice day!  I'm 3 for 6.  Not bad for my first attempt at this, I think.  The secret to not being hungry is to rush around trying to clean the house and put away all the junk that's been piling up for weeks.  I was too busy to think about being hungry!

Today's juice:

This is the Orange Carrot.  As it name states, it contains oranges and carrots.  It's so bright orange that it almost looks fluorescent in real life.  It is also so sweet that it kind of tastes like candy to me.

Day 8:

I made homemade chicken noodle soup yesterday.  (If you're reading this, Mom, I did save some for you.)  When the mom of the baby I watch came to pick up her daughter, she commented on the good smell.  The kids were excited about having my soup and exclaimed about how I make the best soup in the whole wide world.  So, I couldn't resist.  I poured a ladle full of just the broth into a bowl and drank it.  Big mistake.  It did not sit well at all.  Apparently, the digestive tract is not happy with chicken fat after 7 days of fruits and veggies.  Lesson learned.

Today's juice looks absolutely revolting.  Ed says it  looks like gorilla barf.  I think it looks like I scooped up some dirt from the back yard and stirred it in some water.  Thank goodness I didn't choose this recipe for one of the first days.

The contents- red cabbage, lots of Swiss chard, apples and ginger.  Cabbage contains a surprising amount of juice.  It's a shame I didn't take a picture of the gorgeous purple of the plain cabbage juice.

Day 9:

I made it through yesterday with just the juice.  Okay, that's not entirely true.  I accidentally popped a baby carrot in my mouth as I was preparing a salad for the husband for dinner.  I had chewed and swallowed before I even realized what I had done.  Force of habit, I guess.

Today's juice I'm calling Salad Bar in a Glass:

This juice contains beets, carrots, celery, plum tomatoes, parsley, jalapeño peppers and radishes.  I can't say that I'm particularly fond of the radish juice taste.  I added a shake of salt and pepper to this one.

Day 10:

Ugh!  Yesterday was the worst!  NEVER JUICE RADISHES!  I could barely drink the juice.  I forced myself to drink it, because I didn't want to waste all those expensive organic vegetables, but I could only stomach 3 small glasses of it.  I poured the rest down the drain.  I mowed the front and back lawns yesterday after the baby left, so I was starving, and made myself a salad of baby spinach, romaine lettuce and a few slices of orange bell pepper with a little raw apple cider vinegar and flax oil.

Today's juice is fabulous, though!  This was a good one to end up my first juice fast.  I really have to think about what I'm going to eat over the next few days, though.  Have to ease back in.

While this looks eerily similar to yesterday's juice, the ingredients are quite different.  This one has sweet potatoes, carrots, red pepper, beets, apples and oranges.  Delicious!

I think I can give a summary of how this has gone.  It was much harder in the first few days.  I thought about food a lot.  But as the days wore on, my stomach got used to being empty and didn't protest.  I still got hungry during the day, but the juice satisfied the hunger.  I'm not as bloated as I was when I started.  I didn't weigh myself when I started, but I did weigh myself a few days ago, and I'm down 5 pounds from the last time I remember weighing in.  So that's nice.  I can feel that my clothes are beginning to get more loose.  Also nice!