Saturday Planning – 3/19/2011 to 3/25/2011

Planning my menus on Saturday before my grocery shopping trip is my go-to method for keeping organized and saving money by only buying what I need.

With that, here is my meal plan for 3/19/2011 to 3/25/2011, in no particular order. It’s pretty boring, since there is a lot of leftovers and I have no help in the brainstorming.

• Spaghetti
• Bean burgers, couscous, zucchini
• Finishing up leftover Indian, Thai (in freezer), etc
• Leftover Beef Stew

I’m really not feeling like cooking anything new, or anything at all right now. It’s so nice outside and I have so much training to do. Tim will be leaving, I think on Thursday, for skiing Utah… so I’m trying to just finish up as much food as we have in the kitchen. Feels good sometimes to finish up all the leftovers and start again.

I’ll probably be posting less too, or at least, not sticking to any schedule. Life is getting busy, even though I’m making it that way. It seems that between working, working out/training, and finding time to eat food I don’t have too much time for anything else.

Opposites, Old & New

This week has been mostly leftovers… which is AWESOME because the weather has decided to be amazing

These two recipes are, just as the title says, opposites of each and one is a new-to-me recipe and one is a usual one. An old dish, a new one. A vegan dish and a very, very non-vegan dish.

I found this recipe on The Food Network’s website, not on purpose though. We recently bought one of those really heavy dutch oven type pots and since we’ve only used it once so far I figured it was high time that we took it for another drive.

I found this by Googling “dutch oven recipes” and this looked like the best one. I was actually surprised at the number of recipes for breads!

It took a while to prepare this and the beef actually had to marinate over night. I was wary of the marinade since it was AN ENTIRE BOTTLE OF RED WINE with just some crushed garlic. The beef was purple! Actually very yummy and you could only taste a tiny tiny bit of the wine after it was cooked.

I consider this to be a staple dish on my menu planning since I don’t need to look at any directions (or it could just be simple… that too!). BBQ Tofu (original recipe from the Veganomicon), steamed broccoli, and Israeli couscous flavored with curry powder.

I’ve finished up a whole bottle of this barbecue sauce just from making this! We can’t grill at our apartment complex because we have a charcoal grill (boo) so this is the closest I get to “barbecue.” I bet someone in the South is dying when I say that.

So there you have it! An old dish, a new one. A vegan dish and a very, very non-vegan dish.

Quinoa Chili & the Kitty

This past Saturday night I stole another recipe from (never home) maker and made her In-a-pinch Chili… with quinoa! I’d never even thought of adding quinoa to chili before as a way to pack in some protein.

It was super easy but my only worry as I was cooking it was that the taste of the vegetable broth was very, well, un-chili-like at first. I added a lot more spices than in the recipe (chili powder, paprika, cayenne pepper, and red pepper flakes) and in the end you couldn’t tell the taste of the vegetable broth. It was just yummy chili goodness. Also, I used diced garlic tomatoes that I had in the cupboard already instead of whole tomatoes. They cooked down really nicely.

I’ve got a bunch of leftovers so I’m taking some to work for today’s lunch

Also on the agenda for today’s post, kitty pictures!
In case you didn’t know it, we have a kitty. She doesn’t really have a name… we call her Kitty or Cat. Yup, we’re creative. Her ‘professional’ name is Leeloo Dallas Multipass (or something like that) in tribute to her being orange and Milla Jovovich rocking sweet orange hair in The Fifth Element.

Vegetable Korma – Thai Style, from (never home)maker

Every week I try to include a new recipe or idea into one of my dinners. I get so bored doing stir fry with rice after stir fry with noodles that I need something new every now and again.

I had a tough time finding a new recipe this week, all the usual recipe websites were failing me in their vegetarian recipe section (don’t suggest I make roasted potatoes! that’s not a full meal!).

I found this recipe from blogger (never home)maker while going through my RSS feed over the weekend and decided that it had one the prize of being my weekly new recipe!

Honestly, I couldn’t find any flaws with the recipe!
One tip is that coriander seeds are NOT a good substitute for coriander powder, unless you plan on grinding them up before you use them. I don’t mind coriander powder, but biting into a coriander seed always feels soapy… I picked around them pretty well I also just realized now that I didn’t use any bay leaves, oops!

This was very good though, not too spicy and the coconut milk/peanut butter mix made it really creamy.

When all the veggies and chickpeas were cooking I did add a little bit of water every so often so it didn’t dry out. Served with regular white rice as the last time I tried to bake naan it was… disastrous.

I love finding tasty foods that are dairy-free but are still really creamy – the coconut milk and peanut butter definitely accomplishes that. It’s also vegan and gluten-free, so it’s a really great recipe for everyone. Alright, except for peanut-allergies. Darn.

Links
(never home)maker Blog
Vegetable Korma – Thai style Recipe

A Tale of Two Curries

It was the best of curries….

….well. It certainly was not the worst of curries. That’d suck.

My love for curry runs pretty deep and last week I made two different types: an Indian-ish curry with chickpeas, potatoes, and spinach, which was a brand-new recipe for me; and a normal quick-and-easy Thai mussaman curry with tofu, potatoes, and carrots.

Curry with Chickpeas, Potatoes, and Spinach
I found this recipe randomly on Food.com’s website. I really wanted to try it with the sweet potatoes, but there was no way that Tim would’ve eaten it so regular potatoes were a must.

It ended up being pretty tasty! I was a bit apprehensive about the diced tomatoes, since I am really am not a fan of most tomatoes, but they cooked down nicely. It was a bit more of a dry curry compared to the Thai curry I made.

Thai Mussaman Curry
This is a commonly made curry in my repetoire of easy meals. I’ve been able to find a brand of curry paste called Maesri that I really like.

1 can of curry paste + 2 cans coconut milk + whatever veggies/protein you want. Simple. Longest part is waiting for the rice to finish cooking.

Besides being fast and easy, it’s pretty cheap too What more could you ask for? One recipe makes about six portions for us. It’s also really good over udon noodles. Not authentic, but meh… details.

I also read on Twitter today that eating curry can help prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s… now we have another reason to eat it!

Food for Thought Fridays: not all beige is bad

Happy Friday!
You always hear about adding color to you diet and how colorful food are always much better for you than bland, beige foods.

I don’t think all beige is bad and sometimes it just happens.

This past week it just happened that one of my meals lacked color. I could’ve added some bright greens with zucchini and broccoli, but those were being saved for another meal, so beige it was!

Potato pancakes (aka flat hash browns) and Quinoa

Shredded potatoes
No onions, that’s gross.
Cornstarch, Paprika, Red Pepper Flakes, Bread Crumbs.
Mix it up and fry. I used peanut oil (it just smells awesome!)

I got the recipe backbone from the Veganomicon, but when it wasn’t quite sticking together well enough, I threw an egg in there (note: I didn’t have matzo meal, so it might work better for you if you have some).

Still really good though, especially with a bit of locally made BBQ sauce ♥

I didn’t have too much time to get a lot of articles for today. I did read a lot of them, but many are just repetitive of the same information.

The Eating Rules Philosophy Summed up in Two Venn Diagrams
This pretty much sums up the best & simplest good eating philosophy ever.

Need Inspiration? Watch this Trailer – Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead
I’ll probably have to watch this when it makes its way to Netflix. I love documentaries and personal stories (the accent helps too!). I don’t know what I think about the 60 day juice diet that the narrator takes on, whether it is the healthiest way to go or not, but I don’t doubt the ability to get all your calories, but I think I would miss chewing.

Is ‘Eat Real Food’ Unthinkable?
This was my favorite article this week. I just started following Mark Bittman on Twitter this past week and have not regretted it. There are three different happenings that he talks about that have occured recently.

New USDA food guidelines: I don’t really care so much about these. I know that they play a bigger role in school nutrition, but the public doesn’t pay attention to these. Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” would’ve summed up what actually needed to be said. (I got to see him speak a year ago! Still pumped about that!)

Vegan Oprah: First, Oprah would do anything for more publicity (really, you’re taking your whole audience to Australia?). Second, as a person that flirts with vegetarianism and veganism on about a 90% basis, I hate strongly dislike the use of faux meats as substitutes. Yes, I eat tofu, but that’s the only ingredient – soy beans.

Wal-mart & the White House: do I need to say anything? Maybe. This is making me almost not like you, Michelle Obama! The idea of walking into a Wal-mart makes me uneasy and dirty feeling. I don’t want the know the lengths that they will go to in order to make ‘healthy’ food less expensive.

The end! It’s Friday! This weekend I am tasked with creating a menu of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for Thursday through Saturday night. It will have to have a veg option for me and also all has to be gluten-free for Megan. I’ll post my menu up here once I finish it

A Welcome Success – Penne with Greens

After my epic fail of a dinner on Sunday night (vegetable soup), I was ready to redeem myself with Monday’s dinner.

This is a really simple recipe with a great end product. It’s vegetarian, since we added some cheese, but can easily be modified to be vegan (no cheese) or even sounds good to me as neither with a little spicy sausage crumbles or bacon.

Penne with Greens

about 2 servings

Ingredients
4 ounces dried penne pasta
2 tablespoons olive oil
Greens of your choosing – I used two bunches of kale and three baby bok choy.

Optional seasonings: red pepper flakes, garlic… whatever you’d like. Personally, red pepper flakes are not optional.
Optional topping: freshly grated parmesan

1.) Cook pasta. While waiting for water to boil, wash/chop greens and let dry a bit.
2.) Don’t start to cook the greens until you have put the penne in the boiling water.
3.) If using fresh garlic, saute garlic in one tablespoon of olive oil until fragrant and then add in your greens.
4.) Stir fry greens in the olive oil and add a little bit of water. Once cooked to just before your liking, add in the other tablespoon of olive oil, red pepper flakes, and other dry seasonings. Stir fry until done.
5.) Serve over pasta with grated cheese, if desired.

Saturday Planning – 2/6 to 2/12

Planning my menus on Saturday before my grocery shopping trip is my go-to method for keeping organized and saving money by only buying what I need.

With that, here is my meal plan for 2/6/2011 to 2/12/2011, in no particular order.

• Penne Pasta with Greens
• Vegetable Soup (recipe forthcoming!)
• Potato Pancakes
• Yakisoba with veggies (broccoli, carrots, etc)
• Leftover Lasagna

Today is yet another Saturday filled with running around. We’ve got to go to the food co-op, Whole Foods, and Great Harvest… then out to Novi to Running Fit to pick up my race packet for tomorrow morning. At least I’m not nearly as nervous about running outside now as I was a few days ago. High of 32F tomorrow!

Also, I’m meeting up tonight with my friend and previous university roommate, Bryan, and we’re going to Tuptim Thai for dinner We sort of lost track of each other for the past year or so (it sucks being so busy even when you live in the same city!) so I’m excited to get to hang out with him again.

Now I’ve got to make up the grocery list (the meal list is so much more fun!), ride the bike for a while, and finally get this day started

Irish Lamb Stew – a picture recipe

In the beginning of last month, Tim and I went to an Irish cooking class at Hollander’s in Kerrytown. We already made a variation of the scones a few weeks ago and decided that we should make the lamb stew at some point as well.

The recipe is from Rita at The Sage Dish. If you have a the chance you should definitely take one of her classes – very good teacher and everything she makes is very delicious and not too complicated to make at home.

Irish Lamb Stew

makes about 8 servings

Ingredients: lamb, onion, potatoes, carrots, parsley, thyme, salt, pepper, water.

Start to layer! Sliced potatoes first…. (make sure to season with S&P!)

…then half of the lamb….

In goes half the onions and carrots…

another layer of lamb

one more layer with the rest of the onions and carrots

and finish up with chunks of potato!

It’ll go in the oven at 250F for ~3-4 hours, until the meat is very tender and potatoes and carrots are cooked through.

The Results…

Super good! The lamb didn’t quite fall apart like it did when we had it in class (perhaps she had a different cut of meat) but it pretty much tasted the same, especially the liquid. When we make it again I’ll let it cook for longer, we just didn’t have as much time as we had planned for on Sunday.

Two of our friends joined us for dinner and brought some brownies, ice cream, and hot fudge to assemble dessert

…and also brought a sweet board game to play after dinner! I lost

I really enjoy getting to cook dinner for people and actually hang out when I can. Usually we are too busy or our friends are too busy to do anything. I guess that’s what happened when you stop being in university, right?

Saturday Planning – 1/30 to 2/5

Planning my menus on Saturday before my grocery shopping trip is my go-to method for keeping organized and saving money by only buying what I need.

With that, here is my meal plan for 1/30/2011 to 2/5/2011, in no particular order.

• Potato Leek Soup with Rosemary Tomato Scones
• Stir Fry with Brown Rice
• Tofu Scramble with Pasta Sauce (last week) and Kale
• Irish Lamb Stew
• Leftover Lasagna

I’ve got a TON of running around to do today! Farmer’s market, Food Co-op, Whole Foods, Great Harvest Bakery…..

Oh! And to try to counteract some of the plastic waste that creeps into my life, Tim and I are attempting to make bagels this weekend. This should be interesting.

How do you prepare to be able to still cook good meals on weeknights? I’ve been trying to cook up as much food as possible ahead of time, but anything that has to do with fresh veggies is definitely made the night of.