Saturday, January 30, 2010

weekend cooking

I love doing food prep on Saturday. This is the day I take my car to my exercise class (instead of biking), then stop at the grocery store and buy tons of food. Today I spent $200. $200! Well, for two people for one week for delicious organic produce, it's not so bad. Actually that's not the whole bill. During the week I buy a bag of spinach and a few boxes of berries every day. Today I made 8 smoothies (4 batches of 2) for housemate, and 7 green sludge smoothies for myself. I froze them all. Then I made a pot of beans and froze them into five 2-cup containers for Mon-Fri. Today's beans were fabulous. I cooked a leek and a couple of parsnips separately, then blended them and added to the beans. This added creaminess and a nice flavor. And as usual, I cooked the beans with lots of fresh veggie juice. Yum. I bought the parsnips because they are one of the few local veggies we have left in Wisconsin this time of year. They are good. The first time I tried them I didn't like them but now I do.

Now I'm set for the week. My brekky will be green sludge and a small box of berries. Lunch will be beans, veggies, & seeds. What's nice about this is the veggies can vary every day: steamed, lightly steamed or raw broccoli, cauliflower & carrots; raw bok choy (this is good raw!); kale or collards; brussels sprouts; etc. This takes about 15 minutes to prepare including prep and using a pressure cooker. And dinner will be my favorite spinach salad right now. This salad takes 2 minutes to prepare. So I'll have easy meals with lots of greens for a busy week. That seems to be my groove right now.

Oh, the only problem today is I ate too much. There was some leftover from each smoothie and the beans were just too tasty. Next time I will have to try to eat less of everything else because I love eating the leftover smoothies while I make them.

4 comments:

Darryl said...

We had a big cooking Saturday, too, as usual. Normally I shop early at four or five stores before we cook, but today we were snowed in. We had stocked up, though. I made three tubs of salad, enough for the week, and we made enough sauces (including your famous pea sauce) for our cooked vegetables for most of the week. We still had three Delicata squash, so we baked those. We were low on ground flaxseed, so we ground two pounds and put them in the freezer. Pressure cooked chickpeas and made a chickpea-red lentil-sweet potato soup with onions, celery, and tomatoes. And a big batch of sweet potato apple bake, plenty for the whole week. Also a batch of tomato and avocado salad dressing. I'll probably make some smoothies tomorrow night--- I usually just make three days' worth for me, Laurie makes hers daily.

kneecap said...

Wow, how did you do that all in one day? It would be fun to visit you guys for a week and eat all these meals! Thanks for sharing. Those meals sound great!

How much snow did you get?

-barb

Darryl said...

Well, there are two of us, and we carry on multiple tasks at ones. We both do most any task, although I do more of the chopping and Laurie does more of the skill tasks, like spicing and matters of timing. I've got a nice collection of sharp knives that work pretty well. We clean up on the go, so we never get a big mess piled up. It's fun, although I wouldn't want to do it five days a week. My hat's off to professional cooks, they have a lot of skill (a heck of a lot more than I do), and it's hard work.

We had 8 inches here, first there was a lot of freezing rain, then sleet, and the next day the snow. At least we have power--- in the December 2007 ice storm, we lost it for 3 days. That was memorable.

kneecap said...

HI Darryl, sounds like a fun Saturday! I know you live in Oklahoma, do you mind saying where? My grandparents lived in Shawnee so I visited there a lot over the years. I also did some work in Lamont, OK back in '97. :)
-barb