Stir Fry

Tonight was a simple stir fry over brown rice.  It consisted of lots of cabbage, carrots, some onion, bell pepper and pineapple with coconut aminos for the sauce. 
I am so happy to have found the coconut aminos for my stir frys.  I have missed soy sauce.  While this isn't exactly a soy sauce, I seem to be able to use it like it is.  It has a much milder flavor.

I really should have done a double batch of rice, for the girl child finished off all the born rice and now there isn't any for breakfast in the morning or lunch.  But we still have veggies left.

Co-op Bounty and Quick Sunday Lunch

This week I went ahead and ordered 2 shares of produce because we just never seem to have enough veggies since going vegetarian.
We did trade with a friend our green beans for some extra sweet potatoes and cucumber.  Yes, those really are some big cucumbers and sweet potatoes this round.

We got
2 bags of apples
2 cabbages
2 cauliflower
7 cucumber
5 HUGE sweet potatoes or yams
10 tomatoes
7 Asian pears
16 bananas
2 lbs of strawberries and  2 bunches of radishes with greens.
We did still have a couple tomatoes, carrots and potatoes left from last week as well as 2 pineapple and apples just because, due to some hectic scheduling we ate out twice.  If I had made the meals planned for those nights we would have run out of food.

Anyway after picking up produce on Saturday morning we headed to a friends house for a breakfast and piano lessons for my daughter.  Here we shared some of our apples, we also brought eggs.  Our hosts provided field roast, tortillas and lots of veggies.

Then I went on to a day long reproductive justice event and had lunch there.  The husband and kids had hamburgers and leftover potato mushroom soup.

Then we had a gathering at a friend's house where I brought a pineapple and more apples to share.  It was a lovely potluck event with veggie spaghetti, salad, cupcakes and such.

Sunday Breakfast was whole wheat pancakes, before heading out for errands.

Then for lunch we had Field Roast vegan hot dogs, fresh pineapple and some more potato mushroom soup.  Yes, I made too much of this soup.  But it has been making a very nice side dish.  And all I had to do was put some potatoes, mushrooms, onion, celery water and salt in a crock pot and cook until the potatoes were tender and then blend until smooth and add some pepper and more salt to taste.

Sunday dinner was game night with some friends and we took a couple of those huge cucumbers, the makings for strawberry margaritas and a huge tub of roasted pine nut hummus.  It went well with the vegan Indian food they made us and the bell pepper slices to also dip in the hummus.  I am glad I purchased a second tub of hummus for the home.

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.