Menu posting

I've had a few people ask me what we eat, and how I make a menu.  I am a bit of a will o' the wisp, and will hardly stick to the same thing for very long (as is evident by my leaving off blogging for many months.)  But I thought I might post some menus on here that we are currently eating- as if it were something exiting to share!!  Oh, well.  Who reads this anyway?  I usually only plan the breakfast and Dinner for each day and lunch is either leftovers, salad or some kind of sandwich. Also, I am trying to just have a fixed breakfast menu with a raw/ more healthy food option like:
Mon: Yogurt parfaits-- or just raw fruit, maybe with raw granola or cashew cream
Tues :  Eggs and toast-- or raw banana boats
Wed:  Porridge-- or a raw porridge or muesli
Thur:  Scrambled eggs/ veggie omelets-- or raw salad or smoothie

Fri:  English muffins-- or a raw porridge again
Sat:  Pancake variations -- or a smoothie or manna bread if I make it
Sun: Bagels --or a green smoothie

Generally I want my raw breakfasts to contain a lot of fruit and greens, and raw or sprouted nuts or grains.  I usually eat my porridge with a lot of fruit on top, and sometimes I just put the whole thing on salad greens.  I sometimes make my Green Smoothie Salad for breakfast which is just Arugula, mango and blueberries mixed together-- I invented it once when I was going to make a smoothie with those ingredients, but I decided to just eat is as is, and I never have made it into a smoothie.  I don't add any dressing, just chop the arugula really fine.  I've done it with other fruits and greens too, but this is my favorite combo. 

I usually make my own nut milks and coconut milk for putting on my porridge.  There are thousands of recipes out there for doing that.  I don't have a nut milk bag, I just bought a pair of nylon knee highs and use those, but they get holes easily, so I should probably get a nut milk bag.  Perhaps I will post some of my recipes I have collected and use on Ariane's Cooking Dilemma.  For this week I only planned 3 meals because we are going camping over the weekend, and one of the meals was a birthday, so not very healthy.
Here it is anyway:

Monday Breakfast:Yogurt parfaits-- I had a smoothie
Dinner:  Beets and cabbage  with Kasha

Tuesday Breakfast: Eggs and toast-- I had banana boat
Dinner: Eleanor's birthday party with Cowboy Beans, cornbread, veggie tray, watermelon, Cake and ice cream.

Wednesday: Was supposed to be muesli (cooked and raw) but I forgot to soak it last night, so it was bagels, and I had a watermelon and lime smoothie and a nectarine (should've had more greens!)

Dinner: veggie wraps with peanut sauce and leftover brown rice I have frozen.

That's it.

Mallows

I've been foraging again. I am really interested in learning about the plants that are right in my yard. I don't like it when I look at a plant day after day and I can't even name it. I like to know what I am pulling up and why. So I looked up this weed. I'm sure you know it. It has little pink flowers. It is nearly impossible to pull up. It has such thick roots that you need a shovel to remove it.

It is called a Common Mallow, and I found out it is edible, and nutritious, and the flavor is very mild. So mild compared to most weeds, that we decided it needed to be sweetened. We got the idea because it is a relative to the Marsh Mallow, which used to be the original ingredient in marshmallows. Mallows have a mucilaginous property (like okra) which makes them get a little slimy(not quite, more like foamy) when you chew on them. We found that if you coat them in sugar and chew them slowly then, if you have a good imagination, it will taste like a marshmallow (or if you don't then it tastes like grass with sugar on it--says Rich.)

The kids thought it was great. See?

We also put them in a fruit salad. It is our mallow-fruit salad. We just put in oranges, bananas, mallows and coconut-- just what I had on hand at the time. It went great with our stromboli.

There you go. We are official weed-eaters! Want to come to dinner?

Tip toe through the Dandelions

Today I did something I have always wanted to do. I made a dandelion salad out of the weeds in my own yard. It was actually really good. I made it a wilted salad, with a hot dressing and potatoes in it. I looked up a few recipes and then made it up myself with the ingredients I had on hand. I am familiar with the salads with hot bacon dressing, but I didn't want to make it that way. I am really trying to eat a lot less meat. After raising and slaughtering chickens, I know what it takes to live on meat, and I am not sure I want to live that way-- at least not so much meat. I am going to post the recipe, but not here, I will put it on my sister's blog called The Cooking Dilemma.

Organic and happy

Look how big this guy is getting. Isn't he so cute. One of the kids took this picture. They all wanted to take pictures of Everett, but I picked out the best and I can't remember whose it was. We also tried taking pictures of a few of us together. Cora took this next picture.
It's not the most flattering hairstyle for me! After I took this picture, I was trying to get a picture for my blog profile, so Cora took some more photos of me. But then I realized that I had purple lips from drinking my "Green" smoothie (which was really more purple because I added lots of blueberries to it.)



See? This is my Berry-Chardy smoothie. It has red chard in it, and lots of berries. We have been doing green smoothies this month because we have had so much sickness in the house that I am trying anything to get healthy again. I have actually developed a taste for green smoothies. I like the flavor of the blended greens and fruit.
I think it is working to make us healthy too. We have not had a sickness for a while, and all the kids finally stopped sniffling and coughing. Whatever we have had has dragged on and on forever. But Greens have so many vitamins-- including more vitamin c than oranges-- that I think we are on the mend, and I use a lot of greens in my smoothies. I don't even have a powerful blender. I just do it in my little Waring Pro. (Sometimes my smoothies are a bit chunky) I've looked up some recipes, but mostly I have just made them up with things that sound good and look good together. I made one out of romaine lettuce, oranges, fennel fronds and olive oil that was really good. It tasted like a salad.

Here is one recipe that turned out great. We call it Green Ambrosia:

Green Ambrosia

4-6 Dates

1 Orange

1 bunch curly endive (frisée)

1 Tbsp extra virgin coconut oil

The coconut oil gives it a tropical flavor, and the dates sweeten the endive just enough. When I add oranges I peel them with a knife just barely under the orange part so that I can leave most of the white pith on. That part of the orange has a lot of bioflavinoids which help to assimilate the vitamin c better into your body.

I had an interesting experience the other day. I have been doing Bountiful Baskets which is a produce co-op that orders large quantities of produce and you can buy it at wholesale prices. I usually only buy the organic basket which comes every other week, but this week they had Organic mangoes for sale by the box, and I wanted to get some so I ordered the conventional basket because I had to buy that in order to get the mangoes.

Well, I noticed a most interesting thing. When I brought the box into my house it smelled like the fertilizer aisle in the gardening store. Yuk! I thought things would be better if I washed the produce, so I filled a bowl with soapy water and washed all the food. After it was washed I realized that it still smelled like fertilizer. I think that because it is fed on chemicals that it smells and tastes like them too. I never realized it until now because we have been eating mostly organic for so long. The apples smelled the worst!

I am glad we eat organic-- and even more glad that we can raise some of our own food! And make it too.

Because I am such a foodie I have to show off this picture of some homemade sourdough cinnamon raisin bagels I made.



Oh, YUMMMMMMMMM!

This is definitely one of those foods that are so much better fresh and homemade!

I Buy Raw Milk...

Doesn't that sound like I'm confessing a sin? Maybe it is sinful, because the creamline on my milk is some times 1/3 to 1/2 the milk. And I get it cheap, $2.50 a gallon, and delivered right to my door. I get it from a lady with 2 Jersey cows who lives about 20 miles away and comes into town once a week. Of course, some days it doesn't taste so sweet.

Last week because of the thaw they were probably out in the pasture, and I think that is when the milk gets a little grassy tasting. But, I have discovered that I can make butter with the cream, even when it isn't sweet, and use it in cooking, and I don't notice the taste. So today I made some butter. It was a good day for butter because I made bread too. Not just any bread. Perfect bread.

I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but... toot-ely- toot... I've found out the catalyst to making a crusty loaf of whole grain sourdough bread that doesn't break your teeth when you try to eat it. I've tried a lot of things. I've followed La Brea bakery's explicit 40 page instructions, I've used baking stones (I even bought one of those big, thick stones that you are supposed to leave in your oven all the time), spritzing, brushing with water, refrigerating, , etc, but I have only succeeded in making rocks. Then someone mentioned to me the other day that they bake their bread in a dutch oven. I had a ceramic lined dutch oven that my mother gave me for Christmas one year, so I tried it in there. But I baked it with the lid on the whole time. It came out good, but not crusty.

Last Saturday, Rich was heading to the Antique store where we had sold a table, and I asked him to look for dutch ovens. He came home with a real antique pot that has such an old look to it that I am storing it on my mantle when not in use. That may not be very often. It makes perfect crusts. I have found that if I make up my dough the night before and let it rise in the pot all night, then form it into a loaf in the morning, rise again and bake half the time with the lid on and half off, then it comes out wonderful.

Can you just hear the crackle when I push on it? Cora laughs at me every time I ask her that.

Today's bread was part rye. It costs me p-e-n-n-i-e-s to make. It is flour and salt. Nothing more. Except "crusty." He is our resident sourdough start. An important part of our family.
We love him.

Wouldn't you like a slice?

Quoatmeal

Today at breakfast I made some oatmeal, but I mixed in some Quinoa flakes that I had purchased for a recipe. Cedric said that it should be called quoatmeal. I thought that was cute.

I am baking bread today. I am supposed to do it on Tuesdays, but I forgot to start my sourdough on Monday, so it got bumped to today. Today is my housecleaning day, so you would think we would have made up for it yesterday, but we didn't. I still have a mental block about cleaning that I need to get over, and it came back when I had the excuse of pregnancy and new baby. I think I can handle a little bit more cleaning than just the daily stuff now. I just need to convince myself that I can.

My mom has been talking to me about this Happiness Project she is trying to do. I keep saying uh-huh, and shrugging it off because I don't want another project. But I was thinking about it yesterday after talking with her on the phone, and wondering if I should consider doing some "goal setting" to give myself a kick start again. I can do something for a month can't I? Or even a week if a month sounds too oppressive. In scouts we are supposed to have a monthly focus at our meetings, so I can focus on one virtue for a while. I was thinking about health and fitness because I have not been thinking about that at all after gestational diabetes. Last night as we all knelt down to pray as a family, while Rich was waiting for everyone to come he started doing some stretches for his back because it was hurting after shoveling snow. I thought about how I could do 10 minutes of stretching every evening for a month, and that wouldn't kill me.

So is this a commitment? I guess it is as good as any commitment. I will write about how it goes.