A dinner of Ooops, It's lunch.

Dinner was to be this lovely steamed Kale over a mix of brown and wild rice and a side of the blended veggie soup.  But silly me, was rushing out the door for the girl child's Krav Maga lessons and hit the keep warm button instead of the brown rice button on my rice cooker.

The mistake was noticed before I arrived home, by my darling husband.  But as he worked late, he did not arrive home early enough to fix it in time for dinner to actually be prepared in a timely fashion.  So we ate at Taco Bell - yeah bean burritos, no cheese?  Then packed the kale and rice for lunches.

The kale was cooked in the steam basket above the rice in the rice cooker with some crushed garlic cloves and some sea salt.  A nice easy meal, provided you actually push the right button.

A Somewhat Healthy Lunch

Lunch today is not leftovers, mainly because the soup I have leftover is actually on my meal plan as part of dinner tonight, and I was craving hummus.
Lunch is a roasted red pepper hummus sandwich with butter lettuce on toasted 9 grain bread from the co-op and an orange.  If I am still hungry afterwards I might make a dessert out of an apple and some peanut butter.
I am not sure if you have noticed that I keep my meals pretty simple.  The easier they are to fix, the less likely we are to eat out.  That is the bane that we really fight against.  That thing that kills our budget and our health.
The food still needs to be tasty, and needs to have variety to keep us from being too bored with it to also eliminate the temptation to eat out.  The co-op helps with that, since I have to figure out how to make meals from what they give me and it prevents me from getting in a rut of  buying the same produce over and over again.  What I buy outside the co-op is the same foods over and over.  I get my long grain brown rice, my frozen corn, my frozen peas, canned oragnic tomato products, hummus, Jif natural peanut butter (crunchy for me, creamy for the husband, the kids eat either), pasta ect.  Only rarely will I get something unusual, and that is usually something we probably would do better to forgo anyway.  With the co-op we are getting variety, and it is a healthy variety.  Food allergies make it all the more complicated with variety.  Not just our allergies, but those of close friends too.

Sunday - Breakfast, Lunch, Game Night

For breakfast we had had the sweet bread that came in our bread pack from the co-op, a fried egg and half an orange.  It was probably not our healthiest breakfast to date, but it was very yummy.  The bread had lots of dried fruits in it and was very good.

Lunch was yet more of the salad left over from Friday.  Finally finished it off though.  I might have made a bit too much of it.  But goodness we are getting a lot of lettuce from the co-op these days.  We are really not salad people.  Other ways of eating lettuce just doesn't use that much of it.  We are more prone to use it on sandwiches, as lettuce wraps and such.  I just can't figure out what to do with so much lettuce, but make salad.
We had the veg soup I made for Saturday, that we didn't get home to have, with it. The husband blended it in the Vitamix and we topped it with a bit of Field Roast vegan apple sage sausage.

Dinner was our game night at friends.  It will be last one for a couple of weeks.  But we made lemon pudding. by using a teaspoon of lemon extract instead of a half teaspoon of vanilla and then I layered some lemon slices on top.  I think next time I will add some lemon zest to it to add a bit more zing.  Maybe try a different starch.  The flour is not as effective with the almond milk as the corn starch is, and we avoid the corn starch when visiting this house hold.  So my pudding wasn't as thick as I would have liked.  The husband made walnut meringue cookies with the egg whites leftover from the pudding making.
We also took our usual hummus and a couple of the cucumbers to dip in it. 

Co-op again - Sort of like a mini Christmas every week

Yeah!  I love my co-op day.  We volunteered again,in the rain, then went to have breakfast with a friend.  We brought the eggs and used an onion and spinach from our co-op shares as well.  They provided the potatoes and tortillas. 

This pile of food represents a basic basket, a juice pack and bread pack.  We were also supposed to have a Hostess pack with more food geared towards entertaining for the Easter Holiday, but there was a bit of a mix up with the delivery and we decided to be nice and be the ones to go without.  Mainly because we are not really expecting any company for Easter and we just wanted the variety of produce.  Then after we ordered the boy was asked to house sit for some friends, which means he will be gone for most of the week. 

As I mentioned before getting home we used an onion and a bunch of spinach that was in the juice pack.  But we have:


3 bunches of asparagus
kale
broccoli
2 pineapple
3 cucumber (got extra cucumber from the friend we had breakfast with as they don't eat it)
1 beet
1 carrot
4 potatoes
1 butter lettuce
parsley
celery
onion
8 key limes
8 oranges
ginger
3 grapefruit
5 bananas
lemon
3 apples
1 loaf of hot cross bun bread (not sure what it is, but seems to be a sweet bread)
1 baguette
3 9 grain bread loaves

I still have from last week
2 heads of butter lettuce
2/3 of a head of cauliflower
5 lemons
7 apples
4 oranges
1 grapefruit
1 onion
3 garlic
1 banana
some celery

Not sure about the interviewer, but the birds like the girl child

Lunch today was leftover salad and home made bread from last night.  My daughter had an interview at the Zoo for a volunteer position, so we headed out on the train right after lunch and ended up at Spaghetti Warehouse for dinner.  I felt sort of bad that we were out so late, because I had made a soup in the crock pot for dinner, but it will be lunch for tomorrow.
Before I forget what I put in it:
2 potatoes
the carrot
last week's celery
fresh parsley
fresh basil (grow this myself)
half an onion
last week's 2/3 head of cauliflower
half a bulb of garlic, cloved peeled and put in whole
a carton of Trader joes Hearty Vegetable Broth
Water to cover

I think I will blend it and maybe crumble some vegan sausage over it for lunch tomorrow.

Treats with a Family Game Night

Tomorrow morning is co-op pick up, so this is my night to try and use up stuff.  Sometimes it can be a bunch of random leftovers, but we did that last night.  Tonight was mostly lettuce leftover because we really don't eat lots of salads around here.  So I attempted to make it a bit of fun.

We had the layered salad again.  This time I used onion, celery, the last of the leafy green lettuce, about 1/3 of a head of cauliflower, frozen corn, and some walnuts with the usual mayo and freshly ground black pepper.
We also had some baked asparagus with it.  This time I squeezed the juice of half a lemon over the asparagus when I pulled it out of the oven.  Otherwise it was the usual minced garlic and olive oil.

I also made a home made bread from the last of the dough leftover from the kids making pizza earlier in the week.  The dough was getting a nice sour dough scent to it, which means it was going to make an excellent loaf of bread.  That was the thing I did to make dinner seem extra yummy even though I made other dishes very similar to things I had made earlier in the week.  Granted the salad was a little bit different and I added the lemon juice to the asparagus to change up the flavor a bit.
And then we were all wanting a dessert.  I had a graham cracker crust in the pantry that I never got around to using and decided to make use of it in a banana pudding since Nilla wafers are out of the question with the dairy allergies in the house.  I just adapted my Great Aunt Martha's general pudding recipe by using almond milk, had the girl child slice and arrange a couple of bananas.  BTW the pudding recipe is crazy easy.
3/4c sugar
3T flour or corn starch
1/2t salt
2 1/3 c almond milk
3 egg yolks
1/2 t vanilla
Basically you whisk it all together and then put it on the stove to cook while stirring gently until it thickens.  With the almond milk it thickens real suddenly with more lumps, but that is fixed with another whisking before pouring into the container of choice.
Now you can make this pudding a chocolate with 3T of cocoa powder or a coconut with 1/2c of dried coconut.  The cocoa you would add at the same time you add the flour/corn starch.  The coconut you add while you are stirring.
And then we played cards as a family for a bit while the meringues were cooking.  Cause yeah, I wasn't about to let those egg whites go to waste.

Pasta Salad and Steamed Broccoli

So far this week we have kept to the meal plan.   Wednesday was home made pizza, sorry I forgot to take photos and blog about it.  Everyone had their own.
Thursday here is simple steamed broccoli and a pasta salad.
The pasta salad consists of some of the fresh broccoli, celery, onion, frozen corn, canned black beans and some canned sweet peas.  I do not buy sweet peas, but when the boy moved back in, he brought several cans with him, and I figured that they needed using.  I prefer frozen, especially in salad forms as the color is nicer and they are not as salty.  The dressing is just a bit of mayo and black pepper so that it barely seems to glaze the pasta. 

At this point I am reevaluating my menu plan and am thinking that maybe cooking tonight might be a bad idea.  I have lots of pasta salad left over, tons of lettuce and some curried veggies still.  The pasta and curried vegies are actually making up my Thursday lunch now as I write this.  I also have bread dough from the pizza making taking up a lot of space in my fridge too.
I think I might make some home made bread so that folks think they are getting something special, boil a couple eggs and start chopping some veggies and do a salad bar night instead.  Folks can top their salads as they see fit.  And have the leftovers on the side.

I will you know how that goes.

Baked Asparagus and Salad night

The asparagus got a little overcooked tonight.  It was girl scouts night, so once again the asparagus was prepped and the husband baked it.  This time instead of spreading my pre-minced garlic over the asparagus I just tucked in some peeled garlic cloves.  I really prefer the preminced for this, made a world of difference in the flavor.
The husband made the salad.  It was just leafy green lettuce, celery and broccoli and we each topped it with the dressing of our choice.  I went with the champagne vinegar dressing from Trader Joe's.  It was okay, I really liked it better mixed with the pesto.  I think next time I will go for the honey mustard.
We cooked up 3 bunches of asparagus, just like the last time, but there is half of it left over.  Last time I had 4 spears left over.  I really think it was the difference in the garlic more than it being slightly over cooked that made the difference in how popular it was this evening.