weekend cooking

I started a new job on campus (doing the same thing as before, just not working from home anymore); and I'm gone from 7 am until 9 pm every weekday. yikes! (Don't worry, that includes fun in addition to work). So I'm trying to work out my food prep. I think it involves a lot of weekend cooking. Here's what I tried out this weekend.

First I had a snack because I was hungry after yoga:

These are some of my favorite foods: frozen mangos, romaine lettuce, carrots, and sugar snap peas.

Then I made housemate's smoothies. Here's a gigantic bowl of fruit, mostly frozen, with a bunch of fresh grapes. I kinda went overboard on the fruit but that's okay, it just turned into 13 smoothies instead of 10. We have a visitor coming this week so I made extra.

Next I assembled yummy beans in carrot juice. I tried out my new juicer. Housemate was irritated with me for getting a new juicer since I already had a good one. But I sure like this one. It's easy to use, smaller than the old one, and easy to clean up. Here's the juicer in action:

Then I couldn't resist playing some more so I tried out an apple. First slice (using an apple corer/slicer):

Then juice. Here's the juice from one apple. The apples are local, fresh, and yummy:

This is just a treat. Whole apples are healthier because they have all the fiber.

Okay, that was Saturday. Sunday morning I put the beans on to cook and went to church. Sunday afternoon, the weather was too nice, so I went biking. Then Sunday night it was time to make the veggies. The garden is overflowing with collards so that was the main ingredient, but it also included kale, swiss chard, eggplant, lots of herbs, onion, and garlic. Here's some of the produce left, after most was processed in the food processor:

I seriously used a ton of collards, so the only way to fit them in was to chop them tiny with the food processor. I just chopped everything with the food processor, because it was fast and it compressed the food more. This was a ton of veggies! At left is my big pot and at right is housemate's---she has much fewer veggies, and some potatoes added in. Oh, and this was before all the greens were added to my pot:

While these were cooking I made tomorrow's salads. I forgot to take a picture: romaine lettuce, yummy fresh strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and kiwi, and a few pumpkin seeds. I'll add D'angou pear vinegar when I'm ready to eat them.

Now time to assemble the veggies: the cooked greens&veggies, the cooked beans, some canned tomatoes (from the garden), and just a bit of date syrup (leftover from the smoothies):

Put them in the freezer (joining the smoothies):

Here's tomorrow's food in the fridge:

oh yeah, that's housemate's spritzer in the back. Ignore that. For brekky and lunch I'll have salad, cooked greens, and my favorite raw veggies: carrots, sugar snap peas, and kohlrabi. For dinner, sweet corn & mashed avocado and salad. I'll have something similar every day. The salads and raw veggies I'll prepare every night for the next day, and the cooked stuff will come out of the freezer. We'll see how this works.