Whole foods for a whole week - dinner & dessert

Eating whole-foods-only for our supper every night has been pretty easy, thanks to my arsenal of favorite recipes.  After a disastrous try at a homemade baked bean recipe earlier this week, I realized that having a recipe that you have already made over & over, with excellent results, is a must.  Because otherwise, after all your prep and cooking, you'll have a meal that you don't want to eat and you'll be tempted to eat something quick & processed or something that comes out of a drive-through window.

With that in mind, I have a few great recipes that I wanted to share.  Most of them are vegetarian - even before this push for whole foods, we almost always had a "veggie night" at least once a week, which consisted of just a bunch of great side dishes.  I think that makes a great meal!  Here are a few of my favorites:

Roasted red potatoes from Martha Stewart.  I've been making these ever since I saw them in the Oct. 2004 edition of her magazine - they are so yummy.  Don't pass on the fresh rosemary - that's what makes this recipe so great:

Another great side dish I just tried this week for the first time was sesame broccoli.  It was much more flavorful than my ordinary boring steamed broccoli.

A few great main dishes we've enjoyed this week are:
-brown rice and black beans - this recipe is so awesome....thanks Martha!
-black bean burgers from Red Light, Green Light, Eat Right - the best black bean burger ever.
-salmon cakes - my family loves this recipe & I loved it in my pre-veggie days.

I knew it would be difficult to find desserts that didn't have any refined sugar or flour in the recipe......those ingredients are in almost every dessert that I can think of!  Raw food cookbooks offer lots of great dessert ideas, however, with this criteria - many are sweetened with maple syrup or dates or agave nectar.  One of my favorite raw food desserts are coconut snowballs from Living Raw Food.  They're basically just Brazil nuts, coconut & agave nectar.  If you don't want to roll them into balls, you can just spread the mixture into a pan, like fudge.  And, as the author of the book points out, eating Brazil nuts helps the rainforest because it encourages people to keep the trees for the nuts instead of cutting them down.....dessert for a good cause!

I also tried a new recipe that I'm really excited to share - it's sort of a pseudo-ice cream.  Frozen banana chocolate chip "ice cream" from The Best Life Diet Cookbook has a grand total of two ingredients in it: frozen bananas and dark chocolate.  I never realized that putting frozen bananas in the food processor would churn out something that so closely resembled ice cream.  I'm definitely going to be making this recipe again!

Another thing I've tried to do with dessert is actually eat it after supper (what a novel idea, huh).  I have a very bad habit of "treating" myself to dessert after the Bachsters have gone to bed.  I found that if you eat dessert right after your meal, you eat less because there's just not as much room for dessert.  So, on the special occasions that we enjoy dessert (not every day, I keep reminding myself), I'll make sure that we all share it together.

Have you been trying to eat better in 2012?  Do you have any favorite healthy recipes......do share!

-Cheryl 

Whole foods for a whole week - breakfast & lunch

I've been focusing this week on eating only whole foods & just saying "no" to the Western Diet.  I knew this would be difficult to do for breakfast.  I admit, I love pancakes and waffles and French toast!  But I also love oatmeal, so I've been eating lots of that instead.  One of my favorite oatmeal recipes comes from a book called The Kind Diet (see original Book Nook post here ).  It's basically rolled oats, walnuts, dates & apples, sweetened with maple syrup - it's so delicious!

 
DD & I always eat this oatmeal, but the rest of the Bach family prefers a more traditional oatmeal.  No problem, I say!  I use a great recipe from The New Best Recipe, a really great cookbook.  The recipe calls for steel-cut oats, a little butter, milk & water.  Simple, delicious & healthy.

Another favorite morning meal of mine is homemade granola - here is the original post with a link to the recipe.  When it's baking, your kitchen will smell wonderful!  I substitute the vegetable oil with olive oil and cut down the amount slightly - it makes it a little healthier and I can't tell the difference at all.  I love to eat mine with wild blueberries - yum.

 
You could enjoy the granola with milk, but I always thought it was better with almond milk.  Since store-bought almond milk has lots of ingredients that I can't pronounce, I'm going to try my granola with homemade almond milk this week.  There's a great, easy recipe that I've made before in Raw Food Made Easy.  If you're like me and feel guilty for throwing away all the almond pulp, you can just add some to your granola.

So, that brings us to lunch.  Lunch around here is not a very exciting meal, I'm afraid.  I usually don't cook anything (I need a break after cooking breakfast and dinner daily, right?).  So, it's been either leftovers or a salad for lunch all week.  But I do have a good salad recipe to share - it uses Boston lettuce, which is not a type that I normally buy.  But it's an easy salad to make and the vinaigrette dressing in the recipe is sooo good.  Here's the link.

So far, whole foods week has been very good.

-Cheryl 

Pretzels

It's January.  It's cold.  It seems like the perfect time to make some homemade pretzels, don't you think?  Which is exactly what we did the other day!

I don't make this recipe very often because there is some time involved (mostly waiting for the dough to rise).  But what I love about it is that it's pretty easy to do, and you only need two main ingredients: flour and a packet of dry yeast.  Well, those two things and mustard.  I must have mustard with my homemade pretzels!

I was so happy to have a little helper in the kitchen when I made them.  She was so excited to roll the dough and make it into pretzel shapes:

 
Roll them, shape them, let them rise about 15 minutes more, bake them & then you're set.  Warm, straight-from-the-oven pretzel goodness, topped with coarse salt or cinnamon sugar (it's a toss up in our house which is best).

Pass me the mustard, please!

-Cheryl

{Vegetarian} Thanksgiving

I have really come to appreciate Thanksgiving over the years.  As a child, it seemed sort of boring, nothing more than a dinner.  No presents, no special songs, no real decorating.  But now that I'm an adult, I really love the simplicity of the holiday.  Maybe it could use a special carol, but I would add nothing more.  Getting together with family and loved ones just to have a simple meal and give thanks.....it's just perfect as is.

We had DH's family over at our house this year, but it ended up being a smaller group than expected.  But it was a lovely day, and after the meal we all just ended up sitting around, chatting for hours.  It was so nice!

This was my 2nd Thanksgiving as a vegetarian and I must admit that Thanksgiving Day is the only day of the year where I re-think eating veggie and consider getting a big 'ol plate of turkey.  My DH is a wonderful chef (no really, that's what he does for a living) so he is always in charge of the turkey when we host the holiday.  And it smelled wonderful!  However, I didn't budge, and still enjoyed a fantastic, vegetarian meal.  I think the key is to have lots of delicious veggie options - and we did!  I made a tasty walnut-herb stuffing that everyone seemed to love - it got a lot of compliments.  The recipe is from Martha Stewart  (I modified the recipe & used vegetable stock instead of chicken).  I usually skip stuffing altogether, but this year I had a second helping of it!  We also made mashed potatoes (DH made them and they turned out way better than mine ever do) & cranberry sauce.  Our family brought Brussels sprouts, green beans and onions and sweet potatoes with marshmallows.  Everything was so delicious!

Our 6-year-old was especially helpful, setting the table and doing little tasks for us to help get ready.  As her reward, she got to eat her meal on one of the "fancy" plates:

Little Dude found a quiet moment to sit by the fire and look through a book:

Here's a shot of the best pumpkin cheesecake ever.  I think it's going to be my Thanksgiving staple from now on - wherever I go, it goes.  The recipe is from The New Best Recipe and it is soooo good.  In fact, I had a piece for breakfast this morning (blush).

Isn't that one of the best things about having Thanksgiving at your own house......the leftovers!

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, too!
-Cheryl

Homemade apple goodies

Did you see this post from a few weeks back about our trip to the apple orchard?  We only have one apple left from our half bushel (20 lbs) that we picked that day.  I couldn't resist baking up some of my favorite apple recipes with all those apples!

The first thing I made was an apple pie.  The recipe is from one of my favorite cookbooks, The Best Recipe.  I think it's a must with vanilla ice cream (Little Dude actually ate only the ice cream, so I ended up eating his, too):

Next, I made one of my absolute favorites, apple crisp (one of the best recipes I've found is from marthastewart.com).  Vanilla ice cream is also a must with this recipe.  I should have made a double batch - it was gone in no time!

We also treated ourselves to apple slices with store-bought caramel dip.  Quick, easy and yummy!

The Bachsters love muffins, so I tried the chunky apple muffins from marthastewart.com.  I added an extra apple to the recipe, since we had so many.  DH said he thought these were really good, and snatched the last one up before I could get to it!

I think I'm going to slice up that last, lonely apple and eat it with peanut butter - what a yummy snack on a beautiful Fall afternoon!

-Cheryl

Strawberry picking

To kick off our summer break, the Bachsters and I went strawberry picking earlier this week.  It was a nice cool morning when we left for the farm and we were well-equipped for our adventure: sunscreen, water bottle and big appetites.

It amazes me how big the strawberry fields are.  It's like they go on forever (get it.... forever.  Strawberry fields.!?).

Look at all 3 Bachsters, hard at work.  I felt bad because they actually did most of the picking, I took all of the pictures.

After a while, the heat started to rise and it became clear that it was time to go when my oldest exclaimed, "can we go, I'm dying."  Yes, that's the cue to leave.  But it's hard to just walk past all those perfect berries, so on the way out of the fields, my 5-year-old and I couldn't resist getting a handful here and there.

What to do with all those strawberries when we returned home?  Strawberry juice for starters, eating them right out of the box with the little friends from 2 doors down, a perfect topper for Mama's homemade granola, and most definitely strawberry shortcake (recipe from Favorite Comfort Food: Classic Favorites and Great New Recipes):

In fact, it's just like last year.  I think we have a new tradition, here!

-Cheryl

Soup's On!

I love homemade soup.  It's so yummy and wholesome and much better than canned soup.  And it's really not difficult to make either.  Lately, I've been making a few different kinds of soup because the weather around here has been kind of cold & rainy....perfect for soup!

The first soup I've made recently is one of my favorite recipes, lentil soup from Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys.  When I first spotted this recipe, I thought it sounded good but sort of boring.  I was so wrong.  This recipe adds just the right amount of salt to make it tasty, but not at all salty.  It's even better as leftovers!  This is one of the best soups I've ever had!

 
Next up is a mushroom soup.  This recipe can be found on the back of Wolfgang Puck's boxed vegetable broth, found at grocery stores.  There is a similar recipe on his website (found here) but it's not vegetarian like the one I use.....but it is a very similar recipe.  Easy to make, healthy, yummy.  My family doesn't like this one as much, but I love it, so that's more for me!

And finally, my vegetarian chili.  I have a friend whose Mom calls chili "chili soup" so because of that, I think I can include it in the soup category!  This is a recipe that I've tweaked from the one that came with our crock-pot.  I used to make it with ground turkey breast in my pre-vegetarian days & it's good that way too.

Here's the recipe:
3 cans of diced tomatoes, chili style
3 cans of beans - (1 each: dark kidney beans, light kidney beans, black beans)
2 6-oz. cans of tomato paste
1 green pepper
1 onion
Ground spices - chili powder, ancho chile powder (mild), New Mexico chile pepper (mild), guajill chile pepper (medium) & chipotle chile pepper (hot)
Cheddar or cheddar-jack cheese & Saltine crackers, for serving

To make: Drain the beans & add them and the diced tomatoes to crock pot.  Chop green pepper into a thick dice and onion into a slightly finer dice and add them to crock pot.  Stir in one can of tomato paste.  If chili isn't thick enough, add more of the 2nd can, a little at a time until it's reaches the thickness you want.  Add spices - more of the mild, & just a little bit of the medium/hot spices.  Stir it all up.  Cover crock pot & let cook on high heat for a couple of hours.  Reduce heat to low & let cook for an additional 3 hours.  Don't open the lid while it's cooking!  After the 3 hours on low heat, open lid, stir & taste.  Add more spices or salt if needed.  If peppers & onions are still too crunchy, cook chili longer.  If it's to your liking, turn off heat & let sit for about 15 minutes before serving.  To serve, put chili in bowl & top with cheese - let sit until cheese is melted.

When I used to make the turkey chili version, I would thoroughly cook ground turkey breast in a skillet & then add it to the chili mixture, instead of black beans.

It's a really basic recipe that you can tweak to your liking.  DH added wasabi last time I made it & he said it was great.  If you make it, let me know how it turned out!   

What's your favorite soup to enjoy on a cold day?

Cheryl

A plethora of pumpkin treats

This time of year, I can't help but make homemade pumpkin goodies.  And I've been cranking them out lately!  Here are a few of the pumpkin desserts & dishes I've made this Fall:

This is the pumpkin bread I mentioned a few posts ago.  It is so yummy - and the recipe makes 2 loaves, which makes the Bachs happy.  I just finished the last of it this morning, with cream cheese on it.  So good!

These are pumpkin pancakes!  They are really easy to make and smell wonderful as you are preparing & cooking them.  I've been making these so much lately that one of the Bachsters said "pumpkin pancakes, again?" the other morning.  It was said as a comment & not a complaint, because no one ever complains about pumpkin pancakes for breakfast!

I modified this recipe for rigatoni with pumpkin and bacon to make it vegetarian.  It's still really great & is one pumpkin recipe that I really look forward to making every Fall.  I stock up on a few pie pumpkins because I know I'll want to make it more than once.

All of the above recipes are from Martha Stewart.  Thanks Martha - these recipes are keepers!

Pumpkin ice cream is also on my Fall must-have list, but I can't make it at home since my ice cream maker broke.  Last year on my birthday, I treated myself to pumpkin ice cream at Jeni's - I think I just might make that an annual tradition!

What pumpkin treats do you enjoy in the Fall?  Let me know, as I am always on the search for excellent pumpkin goodies!

Cheryl