Back on track

Getting back into the fresh food prep.  Looking forward to the start of the CSA season in 3 weeks!

The first three are from the Eat to Live Cookbook:

Super Slaw with cabbage, apples, and beets among other things

3 Bean Mango Salad over greens

Veggie lasagna with sliced zucchini instead of noodles

This one is from the Crazy, Sexy Cancer Cookbook, and it is my favorite of the day:

Asian Stir Raw- also good over greens

And finally, my sister's favorite- the You Are What You Eat Cookbook's Shepherdess Pie in the making:

Summer goodness

Saturdays in the summer are splendid.  I simply adore seeing what is in my CSA box, and this week was a great share.  Blueberries, snap peas, new potatoes were among my favorite items in this box.

I had a rough week and hadn't used up the veggies from last week's share, so my mom and I spent today prepping a lot of veggies and cooking up some delicious food.  My mom has been a huge help to me this summer, since I'm having some health issues.  I couldn't have done any of this without her.

We sliced zucchini, yellow squash, and tomatoes, and layered them in a baking dish that had sautéed onions on the bottom.  We stuck fresh basil in between the veggies.  We baked this in the oven for a while then added a topping of ground almonds and nutritional yeast, and put it back in the oven until the topping browned.  Tasty, mediterranean type dish.  I forgot to take an "after" picture of this one.

Next, we made a cole slaw that used raw cashews as the base for the dressing, with raw ACV, water, onions, and honey mixed in.  This cole slaw is fantastic.  I've eaten several bowls already.

I get two dozen free range eggs every week, and we had 4 dozen in the fridge, so I thought some quiches were in order.  We made a bacon and cheddar quiche, and then two bacon, cheddar, broccoli, and onion quiches- one with a crust and one without.  I don't know if I was just starving today or what, but I had a couple pieces of quiche, too, and I'm contemplating another.

I have more bacon and more cabbage, so tomorrow I plan on making bacon wrapped cabbage in foil. Then I will attempt to make beet chips for the first time.  Good eating weekend!

It's CSA time again!!!!

And I couldn't be more excited!

I got two heads of green leaf lettuce, one kale, one big bunch of swiss chard, beets, broccoli, bunching onions, rhubarb, a slicing tomato, cherry tomatoes, garlic scapes, bok choi, and tangy sweet strawberries! That's the best first share of the season I've ever received!

Used the broccoli, onions, and bok choi in a stir fry.

All in a day's work

Well, it appears that all-day Sunday cook-a-thons are going to be the only way to deal with all the produce until CSA season is over.  It was nice to have all the things I made last Sunday to eat throughout the week.  I'm sure I'll be glad for this Sunday's food, too.

So, first, I chopped and washed a bunch of salad greens so that I can easily pack a salad for lunch every day.

This gorgeous red cabbage came out of my garden this morning.

I shredded the cabbage in my Cuisinart, and it was positively purple.  Can't wait to toss some of this on my salad.

I also chopped up celery, jicama, peppers, radishes, and green onions to toss into my salads.

I had bought supplies to make lasagna with brown rice noodles, so I thought I'd carmelize the beautiful eggplant and one of the onions from the CSA to add to the lasagna.

The lasagna turned out quite delicious, if I do say so myself.

This is going to be a high-cal week! Lol!

I used up all the pasta sauce for the lasagna, and wanted something to put over the spaghetti squash that I baked in the oven, so I used some lemon balm from my garden, leeks and garlic from the CSA and peppers.

I added some chopped tomatoes from my garden, and made it all into a ragout.

The ragout over the squash was yummy!

I used the rest of the CSA garlic, CSA potatoes, & CSA green beans to make this scrumptious mix.

I chopped up a bunch of mixed kinds of peppers to ferment.

Mashed sweet potatoes!  I mixed in some butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, molasses, & maple syrup.  It's like a dessert.

Everything ready in the crockpot for overnight oatmeal- oats, raisins, cinnamon, allspice, fresh grated ginger, and some of the apples from the CSA share.  Breakfast should be good.

Pretty, pretty food

CSA Share #8

What happened to my picture?

I swear I took a picture of my CSA share yesterday, but it is somehow not on my camera/phone.  Hmmmm.

It has been a busy day.  Fitting ending for a busy week.  I'm wiped out now.

Spent the day cooking.  And cooking.  And cooking.  Didn't take photos of everything, but here are some of the delicacies.

Fried green tomatoes from my garden.  These were freaking awesome.

Two batches of pickles being fermented.  CSA cukes.  

Beans and onions with bacon bits.

Cole slaw from the giant cabbage in the CSA box.

It was a bacon-y kind of day.  I wrapped some bacon around slices of the other half of the giant cabbage and baked it in the oven.  I cooked the onions and beans with bacon.  Then, I fried up a package of chicken legs in the bacon fat.  Oh, yes, I did.

Aside from the dishes above, I made some hard boiled eggs, chopped up some veggies, and peeled and sliced up beets, which are now bubbling away on the stove.  Speaking of which, I should probably go check on them. I may have made something else, but my brain is foggy and I can't remember.

Have a good week, people.

Colorful share this week

Giant Cauliflower!

CSA share #5

Contained this enormous cauliflower,

So, I made this cauliflower gratinée.  I guess I fail at being a vegan.  

Oh, well.

Help! There are veggies exploding out of my fridge!

That's how I felt this weekend, so I decided to do something about it.  Most of yesterday, and a good part of today have been taken up with prepping, cooking, and storing a bunch of food.

First, I made a bunch of spring rolls (my new favorite treat) with avocado, mango, lettuce & our own garden's mint leaves.

This one had some issues, so I decided to gobble it up first.

Then I made a brown rice & bean, tex-mex kind of salad.

But- to use up the bulk of those exploding veggies, I made veggie fritters for the second time in a month.  These are definitely NOT low cal, but they are soooooo yummy.

I took a bunch of kohlrabi, some carrots, some broccoli, some green beans, some snap peas, some parsley, an onion, garlic scapes, and possibly some other veg that I've forgotten.  I chopped up a giant bowl full of veggies and then ran them through the food processor in several batches.  A couple batches I pureed pretty well, then I left a couple of the batches a little more chunky.  I poured those in a mesh strainer over the sink and pressed them to drain out some of the fluid.  

I put the pureed veggies in a big glass bowl, and mixed in enough eggs and gluten free baking mix and almond meal to make it stick together and look like this.

Then I poured some olive oil in the frying pan and let it heat up a bit.  Then I dropped scoops of the batter into the pan and flattened them out with the back of the spatula and fried them until they were dark brown on both sides.  These are very delicious, especially with a little Goddess Dressing drizzled on top.

To placate the picky people, I also made a pot of my homemade chicken noodle soup.  It does smell really tasty.

I also washed, chopped and bagged 4 heads of lettuce for easy use in salads.  Now I'm tired and don't feel like doing anything else!  Lol!

Pretty good start to the new season

We've had a good early growing season around here, so the produce is looking amazing fairly early in the CSA season.

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4
I have never seen such a huge kohlrabi in my life.  Looks like more  veggie fritters are on the menu!

First CSA share of the 2013 season

Mom's eggs, cherry tomatoes, green onions, red and green leaf lettuces, bok chou, kale, and kohlrabi.

Not Pinterest food!

Trying to clean out the fridge today, so I made this stuff for my lunch.

Blanched asparagus, with a shallot/lemon dressing I just whipped up and mashed parsnips.

Juice and Smoothie Recipes

For my BFF, who shall remain nameless, because she's not fond of internet exposure:

I present a link to my Juicing and Smoothie Board on Pinterest

http://pinterest.com/lynnique/juicing-and-smoothies/

Enjoy!

Lunch!

Tuna salad made with green onions, carrots, celery, parsley, dijon mustard, and a bit of vegan mayo.  Layered on romaine leaves with sliced avocado and pea shoots.

Cancer Sucks

Well, I'm finally up to sitting at my computer after missing 2 weeks of my life.  For anyone who doesn't already know, I had an emergency hysterectomy on Sept. 30, and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  I had a rather large tumor on my left ovary.  It's stage 1C and had only spread to the other ovary, so that is good news.  I find out on Friday about chemo and whatnot.  Here's a photo of Nellie and me, celebrating the pathology report with soup and salad at Tomaydo/Tomahdo.

My sister took pictures of my CSA shares while I was down for the count, but I haven't downloaded them to my computer, yet.  I was able to take my own photo of this past Saturday's haul.

Good thing I've been eating lots of veggies.  Seems like that will give me a leg up on getting through chemo and beating this thing.

Maybe next week I'll feel like catching up on the school stuff.  We actually did a medium amount of school work today.  I think next week may be back to normal.

CSA Share 16 and Kid Food

Lots of good stuff this week- first time for carrots and sweet potatoes, a purple pepper, broccoli, more apples . . .

Here's some of the stuff that I made from last week's share:

Tomato, basil and mozzarella w/ olive oil, salt & pepper

Haven't made one of these in a while- used the lettuce and added gorgonzola cheese, dried cranberries and walnuts, with balsamic vinegar and flax oil.

Omelette with sweet orange peppers and green onions

Green beans w/garlic & bacon tossed in with some chicken, spinach & fontina sausages from TJ's.

This is Gillian McKeith's Shepherdess Pie.  I took a picture before covering the rest with mashed sweet potatoes so you could see all the yumminess inside.  This is one of my favorite fall dishes of all time! We served it for a dinner with Nellie's friends, along with greens dressed in a homemade vinaigrette.  For dessert, Nellie made baked apples with vanilla ice cream, caramel sauce and chopped pecans.  It was a truly scrumptious evening.

In a desperate attempt to get the kids to branch out and eat some different things, I let them pick recipes from Ed's Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cook Book.  The recipes in there are not exactly what I'd call healthy, but Eddie really loves that book, and at least it got them to try some new things.  

This is called Farmhouse Breakfast pizza.  It's pizza dough with scrambled eggs, hash browns, cheese, bacon and ham on top.  Andrew's side only has cheese, bacon & ham, which he picked off and ate sans crust.  Maybe he's on a low-carb diet.

Another dish Ed picked out was stuffed baked potatoes.  We used many of the same ingredients from the breakfast pizza for these.   I have to say, this was one of my favorites.  Mighty delicious and meaty and salty.  

Ed also chose Caramely  Apple Breakfast Muffins, which he proclaimed to be the best muffins in the whole wide world.  Not gluten free, so I couldn't verify his claims.

Andrew chose Monster cookies for one of his recipes.  This involves baking chunks of candy in cookie dough.   Most of Andrew's recipes involved chocolate of some kind.  Don't know where he gets that gene from. ;)

Ed experimented with some hard candies in his and found out that they don't really work too well in Monster Cookies.

 The recipe experiment was a good one, since it got the kids thinking ahead and planning meals.  They had to provide me with the shopping list for their recipes, and Andrew found out the hard way that yes, you really do need to include every item on the list, even if you don't understand what it is, or the recipe won't work.  I made them do most of the recipe prep and cleanup themselves, too.