Reworked Leftovers - Stuffed Bell Pepper Edition

Last night's lentil stew was mixed with equal parts brown rice and stuffed into bell pepper halves and topped with tomato sauce and baked at 350 degrees until the peppers were nice and tender, which was nearly an hour.
For a side we cut up 2 apples, a pear some strawberries and tossed with some blueberries and the juice of half a lemon and called it fruit salad.

There is lots leftover for lunches.  I will confess to having two peppers (BTW, that is a salad plate you are seeing, so while a large pepper, we are not talking something too huge).  I had a larger breakfast that usual and missed lunch, and was starving by dinner, which ended up late.

In other news I finally made it to the gym for the first time in two months.  I got my release from the doctor yesterday and couldn't wait to get back to some activity.   I met up with a friend and we spent a full hour in the pool.  Not swimming, but walking.  I am working up to my activities again after all.

I also weighed myself since I was at the gym and access to a scale.  I continued to loose some weight and am down a whole 27.5 lbs.  About 8.5 since my surgery in early December.  Which means that while I have lost an average of half a pound a week since joining the gym, I have been loosing a bit more than a pound a week since I went dairy free.  My weight loss did pick up after going vegetarian, but not as much as it has since going diary free as well.  Of course that 27.5, does include the fibroid that was removed, which does skew the half a pound a week average.  I think before going vegetarian, I was only loosing a pound a month.

I would like to keep my weight loss average at about one pound a week.  With the gym I want to ton, build my stamina back up and get myself active again.  I think it would be nice to take up running again.  That would be much easier on my knees if I weighed just a bit less.  And I think some other activities would be fun too.

Lentil Stew for a crazy day

Today was a lentil stew cooked up in the crock pot.  I am so glad that I had a crock pot dish planned too.  It wasn't supposed to have been such a busy day, car troubles threw a wrench in everything.  I ended up having to give the husband a ride to work at the last moment and then take his car in for repairs, that took up most of the day, before hurrying on to my scheduled doctor's appointment.  Fortunately the crockpot was already started before everything went kapoot.
 We had lentil stew over brown rice with a side of fruit.  I had a pear.

Lentil Stew

1 lb bag of lentils
1 can diced tomatoes
2 carrots sliced
2 stalks of celery sliced
1 onion chopped
1 heaping spoonful of minced garlic
half a bell pepper chopped
enough water
salt and pepper
1 vegan Italian sausage sliced (added one hour before serving)
All ingredients except sausage was dumped in crock pot and cooked on low for the day.  Water was added as needed.

Served it over some brown rice I had leftover, because I could and it was one less thing to cook on busy day.  And the side was whatever each person grabbed to go with it.  I had a pear. 

Sunday morning harvest muffins

Muffins around here are always different because we use the Universal Muffin Recipe from the Tightwad Gazette .  Today's muffin featured half whole wheat, that was freshly ground from the wheat we got from the co-op, and half unbleached white flour.  For sweetener it was half brown sugar and half honey.  And the extras were walnuts, dried cranberries, raisins and half a large granny smith apple we got from the co-op.

Our muffins are not as sweet as the store bought sort, which always seem more like cupcakes without icing than anything that should be served for breakfast.  We are going to try and make a point of eating all those apples we have left over from last week.  Very few were eaten and we got a few more this week, as well as pears, which we also have a hard time eating all of around here if I can't get the husband to take them to work for his lunch.

Some of the meals I forgot to post about

I didn't get everything posted we at this week.  Here are a couple that I managed to photograph anyway.
This the potato soup.
I cooked this in the crock pot.  It was mushrooms, onion, celery, a couple handfuls of cashews and potatoes and a carton of Trader Joe's Hearty Vegetable Broth and enough water to cover with salt and pepper.  When the potatoes were tender I put it though the vitamix until creamy.  I topped it with the Apple Sage Vegan sausage by Field Roast and some fresh chopped parsley.  It was very yummy and my favorite meal this week.


And then the last of the chard - again.  The husband sauteed some onion and garlic and then added the last bit of chard to it.  Cooked up some polenta and layered it polenta -card-polenta in a caserole dish and baked for 10 min. at 350 degrees.  This was actually very good and our favorite way to eat the chard all week.  But really, we had chard half the week and we were rather tired of it.

We also had the "I have no idea what else to do, let's have spaghetti" dinner this week.  The girl child made garlic bread with the bread from the co-op, olive oil, minced garlic and nutritional yeast.  And I made a fruit salad by cutting up the last orange, the last few strawberries and a banana and squeezing the juice of half a lemon over it all.

Yes, spaghetti is my fall back dinner.  That and what I call my random veggie soup.  Random veggie soup is for the end of the week and I have too many veggies left over, which doesn't happen if I am actually cooking.  Spaghetti is that food I cook when fresh veggies are starting to get a bit sparse or I am feeling rather clueless.  It will also crop up the night before pizza if I get a specific request of that from the girl child.

This week's co-op bounty

Once again I got a basic share and a juicing pack, and I did some trading, because I still had celery and parsley from before and I think if I served up beets and chard again this week the family might have organized a lynch mob.  They liked them well enough, but not too close together, and it was a lot of chard last week.  I got extra potatoes and bell peppers for my trade.  I really don't know exactly what came in what.  I spent $24.50 for the total
Also only I volunteered since the girl child had a test related to her Duke TIP program and the husband had to take her to that.  I got an extra bell pepper and onion for it.  Cause I never have enough bell pepper and onion.

I ended up with
2 - 5lb bags of potatoes
2 pineapples
1 small watermelon
6 green bell peppers
6 bannanas
3 onions
3 lemons
6 tomatoes
7 pears
ginger
6 oranges
bag of carrots
strawberries
6 apples.
1 cucumber

Not feeling that this was near enough food, as we keep running out of veggies around Thursday night dinners we went and bought spinach and mushrooms and the girl child talked me into a large container of blueberries.  And it didn't help that the only greens we got was chard and I traded it away just because the family was tired of chard.

Leftover from last week was lots of apples, a pineapple that is still not yet ripe, some oro blancos from a few weeks back, some celery and a couple of potatoes as well as parsley and ginger.

I really think I need to work on increasing the veggies and reducing the fruit.  hopefully the co-op will bring back the veggie packs and I can start getting those instead of the juice packs.  I also need to figure out how to get the family to eat those apples.  The husband used to eat them, but his office is now supplying fruit to encourage healthier eating, so he isn't eating the fruit we get from the co-op.  I might need to stop eating the bread with my morning peanut butter and make it just apples if we are going to get these things out of the house.

A little treat for lunch

I picked up a carton of sweet potato bisque at Trader Joe's some time back and didn't get around to trying it until today.  It made a nice change to my lunch (something other than leftovers or peanut butter).  I a cup of soup with some toast.  It was a simple lunch, but yummy.  And enough left over to have it again tomorrow.

Savoy, Beets and Rice

Tonight was steamed savoy, rice and roasted beets.  The savoy was cooked the same way all the other greens have been steamed this week, with celery, onion and garlic.

The beets were tossed in olive oil salt and pepper and baked at 400 degrees for about 30 min and when they came out of the oven had the juice of half an orange squeezed over them.  The husband ate the other half of the orange. 

The rice was leftovers from earlier and I just sprinkled it with water and reheated it.

The savoy was another purple green.  We had several of those this week from the co-op.  I do think I need to come up with a new way to flavor the greens when I cook them.  We do seem to like the texture of steamed greens over the sauteed, but they do start to taste alike when they have the same seasoning all the time.  I wonder if just salt and lemon would go over well next time.

A typical Weekday Breakfast, Protein and Baby Steps

You might have noticed that my dinners don't always feature things that we consider a protein.  There is usually something starchy like potatoes, bread or rice involved, but no meat since I am eating vegetarian and rarely beans or nuts and such.  Breakfast or lunch is typically where a lot of my traditionally protein rich foods seem to be consumed.  But other plant based foods do contain some proteins and I understand we really don't need as much as we think we do.  I have been more concerned that we are getting enough fruits and vegetables in our diet.

Most weekdays this is it.  Some toast with peanut butter and some fruit.  I prefer crunchy peanut butter, but sadly I am out and decided to dip into the husband's preferred creamy for this breakfast.

Other times it will be a smoothie, with some soaked raw cashews in it.  And if my husband gets up early enough he might cook me an egg with some spinach and onion for breakfast.  I do not cook breakfast, because I am not a morning person and might burn the house own if I tried.

Lunches will either be leftovers from dinner, a peanut butter sandwich, or some sort of quick and easy treat.

I don't have a perfect diet.  I still eat junk food (usually crackers, tortilla chips and home made carob brownies).  I still eat lots of fats, usually in those brownies, my nuts or on my roasted veggies.  But my diet is much better than it was 6 months ago.  I am consuming less sweets, no sodas, no meats, and eating more leafy greens and more vegetables in general.  Small steps seem to be working.  I am loosing weight, and not at a crazy fast rate that would make my doctor worried.  And because of my strange diet restrictions I am eating more home cooked meals which means less sodium, sugar and saturated fats.

I don't think that I need to have a perfect plan right out of the gate.  I needed a plan to make me stop hurting right away.  Which meant no meat, no soy and no dairy.  And even that I took as small steps.  I did my best to cut out the soy a very long time ago, when I realized it was causing many of my migraines, although not all of them.  Turkey got cut out a couple years back when I realized it was causing hives.  I cut out the rest of meat last October.  But for all of 2012, I have been trying to increase my vegetable consumption.  It became easier when I needed the vegetables to replace the meat I wasn't eating.  Dairy got cut in December.  And January I began to make a point of making more home cooked meals.

At the end of this month my doctor should be releasing me from my activity restrictions I have had due to surgery, and I think that adding a regular exercise program will be the next step to my quest for a healthier me.  After that, I will figure out a way to tighten up the healthy lifestyle just a bit more.  Maybe in a year or two I will know what a really healthy lifestyle should look like.  But the one I am living today is looking really healthy compared to the one I was live two years ago or even a year ago.

Kale, Potatoes and Carrots

 Back to using Salad plates, since I didn't mind this food touching each other.  We had a very simple meal, as usual.  Steamed purple kale, rosemary roasted potatoes and carrots and bread.

I did not make home made bread this time, because I was feeling rather lazy and I treated myself to a day at the Dallas Museum of Art.  It was a wheat bread from the co-op that has been in the freezer for awhile and really needed to be eaten anyway.  The girl child was happy to have it unfrozen for a sandwich for lunch to go with the leftover potatoes and carrots, which she packed in a thermos.

So the Kale was steamed in the steam basket of my rice cooker.  I included a photo of it just before it was steamed.  To be honest, it is prettier before cooking.  I just washed it, cut it up and put it in the basket and then cut up a half onion on top of that and a stalk of celery and a heaping spoonful of minced garlic and some sea salt and steamed until it looked wilted.

The potatoes and carrots were peeled and cut, as well as the other half of the onion and another stalk of celery and drizzled with olive oil and I added salt and pepper and tossed until nicely coated and put in a baking dish and then layered 4 long stems of fresh rosemary.   I really don't like the rosemary leaves in my food, but I like the flavor, which is why I layer the whole stems and then remove after cooking.

I didn't make as much of the potato and carrot mix as I had of the roasted carrots last week and I was concerned that there would not be enough  for everyone.  But the husband's office is now putting out fruit baskets in order to encourage folks to eat healthier, probably in hopes of reducing their insurance costs and the husband partook of the bounty just before coming home.  So we actually had leftovers.  The girl getting the potatoes and carrots for her lunch and the husband getting the last of the kale.  I of course will get the last of the chard.    I will never make so much chard at one time again, I don't care if it is filling all of my vegetable drawer. 

The Salad Bar

This was Sunday lunch.  We haven't been eating out much, because trying to find something to eat out that is worth the cost, the hassle and taste yummy is sometimes a bit of a chore.  But there are times, like trying to fit a meal in between obligations away from home, that you just really have to do so. If the weather had been warmer, I might have suggested the family pack a picnic instead.
We went to Jason's Deli, since we know we can get a dairy free bread for the girl child there.  I went with the salad bar and just crossed my fingers that the honey mustard dressing didn't have much in the way of soy for me.  

The salad bar had a very nice selection.  I got a variety of greens, some broccoli, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, bell pepper slices, peas, hummus, sunflower seeds and almond slices and yes an egg.  I am not vegan  I, on occasion, have an egg. 

Bean Burritos, Rice, and Leftover Chard

The chard did not get finished off, so was reheated and served again.  But I had made a lot of chard.
This was another collaborative meal, since it was girl scout meeting night.
I cooked the pintos with some onions in the small crock pot (which is a 1.5 qt crock) and started the rice in the rice cooker and made the guacamole (avocado, chopped onion, minced garlic, lemon juice, salt and diced tomato (some of the grape tomatoes we still had left from last week's co-op share))

While I was out playing cab service to the girl child the husband got home from work and made the burrito filling which he informs me was to saute some onion and garlic in oil, then add beans that had the liquid strained off and mash them as he went.

The rice was taken from the rice cooker and a bit of lime juice added as well as some chopped fresh parsley.  The husband really liked the rice, I wasn't real thrilled with it.  But then he ate his inside his burrito, and I prefer my rice eaten by itself.

The tortillas are whole wheat tortillas from Central Market.  I warmed them with a damp paper towel in the microwave, since I had been storing them in the refrigerator. And my burrito was filled with just the beans and some Pace medium chunky salsa.  And I dipped it in the guacamole.  Once I realized how good the guacamole was with it, I sort of wish I had put it in the burrito.  My husband had 2 burritos with everything in it.
 The girl child ate before her meeting with a frozen no cheese veggie pizza, which she then spoiled with adding pepperoni to.

Chard, Potato and Adult Fruit Serving

Not my best pic.  But I can't retake it, cause I already ate it.
Baked potato with salsa, sauteed chard and a strawberry margarita (the husband and daughter had strawberry-banana-almond milk smoothies)

The chard was the most time consuming part of dinner.  We had 4 beets with greens still attached (the chard).  I cut off the greens and put the beets back for a later meal.
I separated the the leaves from the stalks.  Chopped the stalks, added a stalk of celery and a half onion chopped.  While the husband sauteed this with some minced garlic I started cutting the leaves up.  To cut the leaves I stacked them, rolled them and sliced.  It took several rounds of this.  And then we added the leaves to the stalks and cooked until they were nicely wilted.  The potatoes were baking during this process.

It is so sad that I do not own a real margarita glass and am drinking a very nice margarita from a plastic cup.  But so many of my glasses have broken that I am refusing to buy any more until we actually move, with the assumption that more will break in the moving process.  I am also not letting the family use my Nortaki Colorwave dishes until we move for the same reason.  They already broke my platter and all my mugs and Nortaki no longer makes the pretty grey since they now have the darker graphite pattern.

Produce Co-op and a Quick Masala Burger Lunch

Produce this week was lovely.  We got the juicing pack as well as the basic basket again.  The whole family volunteered - that would be 3 of us.
Juicing Pack
Kale
Beets with chard leaves still attached 
Celery (which we traded for extra beets, just to get the chard)
cucumber
parsley
apples
lemons
limes
oranges
ginger
carrots


 Basic Share
bananas
oranges
apples
lemons
peppers (although our location was short again and we chose to go without once again, last time I do that, I do like the peppers)
savoy
potatoes
pineapple
strawberries
onions
avacados

Extras we got for volunteering
I chose a bag of potatoes, the husband chose a box of strawberries and the girl child chose avocado.

We didn't get any other extras this week, so that was $24.50 for all that beautiful produce.  The pineapple isn't going to be ready to eat any time soon.  Actually based on how green it is, it might not be ready until next week.  But we have plenty of other fruit.  We still have a couple oro blancos and a couple oranges from last week as well as celery from last week, which is why I traded away this week's celery.  That and we just love chard.

We made our grocery list and fixed a quick lunch, which involved actual convenience food.  We had Trader Joe's Masala veggie burgers with avocado and a side a fruit.  Hubby joined me with the veggie burger, but the girl child decided she really did want one of the meat burgers we had for her. 

Steamed Greens and the Small Kitchen Appliance

Tonight was a simple meal of steamed greens, sauteed squash and brown rice.  What made this really easy is the rice and greens cooked together.  Originally it was supposed to be steamed Kale, but I had a small amount of spinach and a small amount of baby broccoli left and I just added it to the steam basket too.

I cooked my rice in my rice cooker, because if I actually try and cook rice on the stove, I always manage to ruin it.  I am just not that attentive of a cook to handle something like that and I hate boxed instant rice.  A brown rice has a nice nutty flavor that makes it something interesting to eat instead of just filler fluff that instant white rice is.

In the steam basket on top of the rice cooker I had all the green stuff I mentioned coarsely chopped as well as a quarter of an onion diced and a couple spoonfuls of minced garlic (I would have just used a couple whole cloves if I had them) and some sea salt.  On the right is a photo of what my steam basket of greens looked like before it steamed.

Once again I had to be away from the home to pick my daughter up from an activity, so I had the squash and onion sliced for the squash and asked my husband to saute it when he got in.  He used coconut oil for the saute.

I guess with me showing me using my rice cooker, I should probably confess something.  I really like kitchen appliances.  My rice cooker, my crock pots (yes I have 2) and my Vitamix are the coolest toys ever.  My husband is just as bad with his waffle iron and bread maker (although I make most of the bread in the oven and it never sees the bread maker).  I also have a Kitchaid mixer we got when we married nearly 14 years ago, that is still going strong and it has been put through the wringer.  Especially in those early days when I was still making breads that needed to be kneaded and we didn't have a bread maker.
Not all of our appliance purchases were a great idea.  I hate the George Foreman Grill with the multiple plates.  We were killing blenders about every 9-12 months until we finally broke down and got a Vitamix.  Okay to be fair, we inherited our first Vitamix and managed to kill it in a year's time, but it was a 30 year old Vitamix.  And sometimes the old fashioned cooking tools are the best.  Our favorite skillet is an iron skillet that belonged to my great grandmother.

Weight Loss Update - Habits

Still haven't gotten batteries for my wii, but made use of a friend's wii and weighed myself today.  Next month I will start back to the gym, since my activity restrictions will be lifted and I can start weighing myself on the scale there.
While weight loss has not been my primary reason for drastic diet change, I did join a gym about this time last year to try and get healthier.  I needed to loose a great deal of weight, and my doctor had recommended I do so.  Upon joining the gym, with no change in my diet I lost about 7 lbs in 6 months.  Then put a few more right back on when school let out and I couldn't make it to the gym for my water aerobics class regularly.  Then I had my medication change and had to make some dietary changes and lost 11 lbs, putting my total weight loss at 14 lbs.  Lost the 5 lb fibroid for a grand total of 19 lbs in a year.
Since my 2 week check up after my surgery, (the check up was almost a month ago, the surgery was almost 6 weeks ago), I have lost another 7 1/3 lbs.  During this time I have also given up dairy.  I haven't been doing much in the exercise department due to my activity restrictions, which I am on for a couple more weeks.
I haven't been eating this super restricted diet either.   I have been eating yummy foods.  I have been having oils on my foods.  I have been having carob brownies (not chocolate because I can't taste the stuff due to migraine meds), I have been eating until I am stuffed.  As you can see from the things I have posted in the last week, bread and pasta have featured heavily in my diet, but so has peanut butter.  I have made a point of having a higher ratio of veggies in my meals, but not really sacrificing the things I love.
I am not sure how much vegetarianism has been a factor in this weight loss or how much of it has been no sodas, and avoiding things I am allergic to, or just not eating out as much.  I know that what we eat in restaurants are rarely as healthy as we would fix at home cooking from scratch.  And convenience foods often have things in them that we wouldn't think to put in foods we were making at home.  Or it all could just be, being conscious of what I am putting in my mouth.
I understand that a variety of eating plans have worked towards making people healthier.  Often it seems to be about figuring out your personal food issues and how to deal with them best.  I do know that I had developed a habit of sweets since marrying my husband, who really likes his sweets.  And since changing my eating habits, I have lost interest in having sweets on a regular basis.
I think for me, it seems that just making new habits has helped me break some of the bad habits that were causing me issues.  Now that I have had a couple months to really focus on changing my eating habits, to a point that most of the time it really seems easy for me, maybe I can start to focus on changing my activity habits just as soon as my doctor tells me it is okay.  I think I want to take up Yoga as well as have my pool time.  I also think I might like to take up running again.  Once upon a time I was a runner.  I didn't like the 5k run around city streets sort of runs.  I was on the orienteering team in high school.  But I have been seeing some cool obstacle course sort of runs that look like they would be fun to start training for.

More Carrots, More Bread, and Some help from the Husband

Tonight's meal was rosemary roasted rainbow carrots, garlic roasted Brussels sprouts and homemade bread.
The carrots were a mix of carrots I had.  The purple, white and yellow were part of this week's co-op share, the baby carrots and orange carrots were some I had purchased from the store while the co-op was on vacation that I had leftover.  I added a half an onion cut up, salt and pepper and drizzled with olive oil and tossed until it was all nicely coated and put in my 9x13 glass baking dish and laid 4 long sprigs of rosemary on top.  While I was gone with the girl child husband put in in the oven on 400 degrees and baked until tender.

The bread was made from the same batch of dough as the pizza crust and baked just before I headed out the door to take the girl child to her Krav Maga lesson.

And the Brussels sprouts the husband made, but I understand was just minced garlic and olive oil baked at the same time as the carrots until tender.

I will confess that I don't normally like Brussel sprouts and didn't really expect to like these, but I had 2nds.  I think we finally found a recipe for them that is really good.  My husband has always been fond of this vegetable, and it is the one that I didn't like.  My daughter, who we had to make eat 2, ended up going for a full serving for her 2nd and 3rd helping of them.

My husband confessed that he had not been looking forward to this particular meal, because it didn't sound interesting to him, but in the end he found it very yummy and satisfying.  I think I over ate on carrots and sprouts.  Despite the massive amount of carrots I cooked, we barely had enough leftovers for my husband to have something to pack for lunch the next day, because we all enjoyed it more than we had expected.

BTW, most of our meals are being served on salad plates.  I am not having a giant hunk of bread.  It is actually a fairly small piece of bread.

Lunch Out at Genghis Grill

I had a coupon for a free bowl at Genghis Grill for my birthday, which was earlier this month.  It seemed like a nice little treat to get out and away from some of the recent upheavals around here.  I really like how they have made some changes to fit with folks dietary needs.  It has been about a year since I ate there, so the special little cards for vegetarians and a space to write your food allergies on was nifty.  And I like how they now have the sauces labeled with the allergens in them.

I realize my little bowl looks rather pale.  There really is spinach, broccoli and bell pepper in there.  But I got rather enthusiastic with the pineapple and water chestnuts, which I don't usually buy to cook with at home (pineapple usually gets eaten raw at home).  I had the dragon sauce and brown rice with it.  I splurged and had a sweet tea instead of my usual water, but my second glass was water instead of having a refill.  I just felt weird going in and spending nothing on my lunch since the food was free, and it has been awhile since I had a good sweet tea.  And it was a very good sweet tea.

Spaghetti Night becomes Pizza Night

  Around here I make home made spaghetti sauce, mainly because is it easy and I don't see a need to buy the premade sauce with all the stuff in it that we might be allergic to or I can't pronounce.  Granted my sauce is different every time, because it is dependent on what is in the house.  It is made in my small crock pot, which helps with the easy part.
The base:
1 can organic tomato sauce
1 can organic tomato paste
1 can organic diced tomatoes (we like a chunky sauce)
half an onion chopped
1 heaping T minced garlic
1 T dried Italian seasoning
pinch of crushed red pepper

Options based on what we have
fresh basil
mushrooms
bell pepper or sweet peppers
Field Roast Italian Sausage
zuchini
nutritional yeast
egg plant

This week's is fairly simple because I have only a bit of bell pepper and basil for extras.

It is usually served with some garlic bread.  Which is whatever bread we have.  This week is obviously special because we have a baguette from the co-op.  I make a mix of garlic and olive oil and spread it on slices and toast it.  Before my no dairy days, we even added a bit of Parmesan.  Maybe I should start using some nutritional yeast, it has replaced the parmesan in all other recipes nicely.  And a side of salad or fruit.  This time it will be fruit, because there was no lettuce in our co-op shares and I don't actually like lettuce enough to buy it if it doesn't come in my shares.

Ah, but the Pizza you ask?  Well, I take the leftover spaghetti sauce and thin it with some more tomato sauce and it is now pizza sauce.  I make a basic bread dough from my Artisan Breads in 5 min a Day cookbook, for my pizza dough, and everyone gets to make their own personal pizzas.  I get some onion, bell pepper, sun dried tomatoes and spinach - no cheese.    And we each get to choose a side of fruit.

Usually the pizza rust would be whole wheat, but I couldn't find my sifter.  And I grind my own wheat in my Vitamix.  I will have to to talk with the girl child about putting things away in their proper place.  It does seem like a lot of bread in my diet.  I wonder if I need to do something about that.

Planning a meal around Avocado and Carrots

The Avocado from the co-op was very soft and really needed to be eaten now and there are just lots of the multicolored carrots to be eaten.  So that is what focused this meal plan.

Brown Rice
Black Beans and Corn
     (Crazy easy and involves 1 can of black beans rinsed, 1 can of corn drained, some salsa and warmed).
Homemade guacamole (both avocados, 10 of those grape tomatoes chopped, minced garlic, salt, juice of one lemon)
Mexican Carrot Slaw (shredded 3 carrots of different colors, juice from 2 key limes, 1/8t of cumin and 1/4t cholula sauce)  This wasn't our favorite it was more of a relish than a slaw, but when mixed with the guacamole was very yummy.
Served with a side of corn tortilla chips.
I had orange juice for a drink, because it is a rare treat to just have a juice.  Usually it is water for dinner and maybe a hot tea for an after dinner drink.

There is a bit of everything left over, so it will be featured in lunches the next day.  Although the girl child is having meat she brought home from her grandparents for her lunch and the husband is having red beans and rice that features sausage that he also brought home from his parents.

On the other hand, the husband ordered a copy of his results from his physical so he could fill out a survey for the health insurance.  I read it.  He is now getting strong encouragement to go vegetarian from me.  His overall cholesterol isn't too bad, but the bad cholesterol is high and the good cholesterol is low.   He already should be going dairy free from being lactose intolerant, but hasn't been very motivated despite living with 2 females that have dairy allergies.  Of course I wasn't very motivated and I had an outright allergy myself.

The Co-op

I have been involved with a veggie co-op off an on for years.  The first one was difficult to work with my schedule for various reasons.  But my new one is wonderful and we participate most weeks and even volunteer about half the time.

What is cool about the co-op is that I get a great deal of fresh produce for a real good price  and it forces me to try new things.  We also get to order other things besides produce, but what is offered changes from week to week.  We usually get bread from the co-op as they have a dairy free and soy free 9 grain that is yummy.

We have been introduced to things like purple carrots, oroblancos, fresh artichokes (yes I have eaten artichokes, but never actually cooked them until I joined the co-op).

What is interesting about having the co-op, is that I don't have to or get to decide what produce I am getting.  I get what I get and I have to figure out how to make meals around that.  One of my standbys for the end of the week, is to throw all the leftover veggies into a crock pot and cook it up into a random veggie soup.  It works better some weeks than others.

This week we ordered a basic share of produce, a juicing pack (although I plan on using it for just eating or smoothies) coconut oil and a bread mix, because I thought I should try something other than just the 9 nine grain bread for once.

Juicing Pack
beets (trades for some extra grape tomatoes for the girl child)
celery (also traded for extra tomatoes)
lemons
limes
oranges
apples
kale
spinach
carrots (my college age son took those with him, since he was visiting over the weekend as well as some apples and oranges)
ginger
cucumber

Basic Share
Strawberries
celery
apples
oranges
bananas
brussel sprouts
avocado
oroblancos
grape tomatoes
rainbow carrots (orange, white an purple ones)

The first thing I got to make with this was smoothies using an apple, a couple of oranges, a banana, strawberries, and spinach.  It was very yummy.

Now to figure out what to do with all those carrots, that doesn't involve popping them in the crock pot with a roast.

Why Vegetarian

Why at the age of 40 am I going vegetarian?  It seems a bit crazy, even to me when I try to explain it to friends and family.  It isn't a completely new concept for me, I tried it after my daughter was born and I was nursing, before discovering that all those migraines were related to the soy I was consuming.  Growing up and spending the summers with my grandparents meant eating mostly vegetarian meals during the summer, just to deal with the fact that the garden was taking over our lives.  And I was the grand kids that loved veggies.  Asking me to at nasty stuff like fish or beans with pork in it was another matter, but I loved sweet potatoes, turnips and spinach even as a very young child.

A few months ago my doctor put me on a migraine medication that caused my tastes for certain food like substances to change.  Anything carbonated began to taste like cleaning chemicals.  So sodas were eliminated from my diet.  Then I suddenly couldn't taste chocolate.  You have no idea the disappointment in treating yourself to a raspberry chocolate truffle cake and biting into it and it tastes like grout.  Upon eliminating the majority of the foods that most people would consider vices - my preferred sweets and sodas, I became more sensitive to my food allergies.

In my case I am allergic to soy and dairy.  I was diagnosed with my dairy allergy as an infant when I couldn't keep food down and cried all the time.  My family strongly believed in the "you will grow out of it" and began giving me dairy just as soon as I was off formula.  The soy issue cropped up when I started school and was first introduced to soy products in my school lunches and began having migraines at the age of 6.  That went undiagnosed until I was in my late 20's and they were testing my son for ADD, and it turned out to be a soy allergy.  When we eliminated the soy, we also nearly eliminated my migraines.

Well here I was at not yet 40 one night and I thought I was having a heat attack.  I was scared.  Then it became obvious that it was the worst case of gas I had ever had.  I began to have this reaction any time I had red meat.  I had already been getting hives any time I consumed turkey and itching with any sort of poultry.  And as a young child already established that I didn't like fish (except shellfish, which my daughter is allergic to).  I don't actually seem to have this reaction to grass fed red meats, but that stuff is expensive and other forms of protein are cheaper. I can only assume that my strange reaction to meat is a result of them feeding the animals soy, a known issue for me.  And after going a couple months without eating the stuff, smelling it cooking makes me feel like I need to pull out the toilet bowl cleaner.    I realize that the reason it smells like feces is that feces gets it's smell from the dead blood cells, but once that smell connection was made it can not be unmade.

So there you have it.  The reason I am going vegetarian is a combination of allergies and I am probably slightly crazy.  I just started this particular crazy journey in October and have already lost several pounds.  I finally went dairy free at the beginning of December, just before having surgery, and my face, hands and feet suddenly became much thinner.  Seems they have been swollen for years because of my allergy.

With my blog I hope to share how well I am doing with my new diet.  Talk about how things are changing with my body, energy levels ect..  And most importantly how I am dealing with getting meals on the table.  Because with a dairy-free, soy-free vegetarian diet, there are not a lot of eating out options.  I also live with a husband that says he wants to go vegetarian, but hasn't really made any strides towards it and a nearly 12 year old girl who specifically says she doesn't but hasn't made any effort to actually eat meat unless it is put in front of her (and who never ate meat until she was 3 even when it was offered to her).  And the girl child is allergic to dairy and shellfish and the husband needs to avoid dairy and soy for health reasons as well.