Food logs feb. 3 and 4

Yesterday's food was
Breakfast at 9 am before heading off to teach a class:  banana.  I wasn't hungry but knew I would be later.  snacked on carrots while fixing lunch
Lunch at noon:  baked sweet potato, big salad (lettuce, red bell pepper, flax and sunflower seed, 1/2 grapefruit, d'angou pear vinegar and 1 T blueberry juice)
Dinner:  greens from yesterday mixed with lentils from a few days ago;  big salad--same as lunch

Today's food is
Breakfast:  snacking on carrots and apple skins and raw cabbage while fixing food (and peeling apples obviously)
Lunch:  I took a baked potato, cut it up into pieces, tossed with smoked paprika, broiled in the oven for about 8 minutes, and added a serving of the lentils from a few days ago.  The potatoes smelled like barbecue as they toasted.  Pretty yummy for a quick meal!  See pictures.  Oh, then a big salad (lettuce, red bell pepper, flax and sunflower seed, 1 small orange, d'angou pear vinegar and 2 T blueberry juice).

Dinner will be:  chickpeas and banana and cinnamon (try it and see what you think!); cooked cabbage and apple.

Notes:
1) I had to move my exercise time to attending a 4 pm class instead of 7:30 am like before.  This will take discipline but I just have to treat it like a religious requirement and the habit will take effect.  An unexpected benefit of this is that I won't be snacking in the afternoon because I don't like to exercise on a full stomach.  To fit my schedule and desires, I will extend my eating window to 10 hours.  I like eating something around 9-10 am, and dinner will be closer to 6 pm now and that's fine.
2) The co-op has had good bananas lately so I couldn't resist getting a few more.  That's why I cooked up the chickpeas because that's a nice treat to me, chickpeas and bananas.  I cooked up 1/2 lb of chickpeas and divided into 4 portions to go with my 4 bananas.
3) I cooked up 2 apples and a small head of cabbage and some cinnamon in the instant pot pressure cooker (1 minute then slow release--actually this overcooked it a bit, so either do 2 minutes and quick pressure release or 1 minute and maybe wait a few minutes and then release--but it's still good, hard to ruin it).  I put this into 3 bowls for the next few days.
4) I'm eating more beans than usual.  Normally I would just have 1 serving but I wanted the chickpeas and bananas, and the lentils are still hanging around.
5) I'm thinking next week I will make beans and rice of some sort.

a different soup every day

Today I made a sort of "soup base" that I can season differently on each day to make a different topping.  I thought that would be a fun thing to do this week.  I cooked up 1/2 lb of lentils (black beluga from timelessfood.com), a chopped onion, minced garlic, 1 Tbsp coconut aminos, a large peeled carrot--not chopped or cut--and strained liquid from 2 pints of tomatoes.  I put these in the instant pot pressure cooker and cooked for 8 minutes.  Then I took out the carrot and blended it with the tomatoes and 1 date, and added that back into the "soup"  (more like lentils and sauce).  So that is now my lentils and sauce base.  I dished this out into 7 1-cup bowls to eat this week and season however I want:  chili, Indian, curry, Italian, etc.

For my main meal around 1 pm, I seasoned one dish of the lentils with chili powder, cumin powder, smoked paprika and cilantro, and poured that over a baked potato.  It was delicious!

Other food today was
Breakfast:  cooked broccoli and cauliflower, raw carrots

Dinner:  I was going to make my usual salad.  Then I made some salsa for my partner to have during the Superbowl.  This was a pint of tomatoes with juice drained, a small chopped carrot, a portion of a red bell pepper, very little onion and garlic, a couple of slices of an orange and lime, all blended in a blender, with some cilantro added afterwards.  I didn't have any fresh cilantro so made use of some dried.

It tasted good so I decided to just dip my romaine lettuce leaves in that for my salad.  That was good.

I also ate the rest of the orange, it was a small cara-cara navel and tasted good.

I also finished off the broccoli and cauliflower and ate more raw carrots.  Dessert was some frozen banana slices and cherries.  This tastes like ice cream to me.  It was so good I had to have another bowl of frozen bananas and pomegranate seeds.

lentil mushroom barley soup

I made this up today and it was very good. No need to follow this exactly, as it's hard to ruin lentils.

Ingredients:

2 cups dry lentils (I like to mix them up, used 1 cup brown, 1 cup green)

8-16 oz shitake mushrooms (I didn't weight them. Note: I chose shitake because Dr. Fuhrman says they are healthier than button, crimini, and portobello)

1/2 cup hulled or hulless barley

2 carrots, chopped

an onion or leek, chopped

1-2 cloves garlic, chopped

1 cup celery juice

1 cup carrot juice

2-3 cups water (add as needed as soup thickens)

1/2 tsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp oregano

1/2 tsp thyme

a little cayenne or chipotle pepper/powder to taste

Throw everything in a pot and cook for an hour or until lentils and veggies are tender. Add water as needed if soup gets too thick. The celery and carrot juice adds just enough flavor to keep you from thinking it needs salt or heavy spices.

Lentils and greens soup

This is easy and flexible with amounts.

Ingredients:

~2 cups red lentils (other color is fine too).

1-2 onions

2-4 cups carrot and/or beet or celery juice

Then add water as needed

a bunch of collard greens and/or kale, chopped in a food processor so you can squeeze even more in.

juice of 1/2 lemon

a little cilantro or other herb (e.g., chives)

1-2 tsp curry powder if you like it (I prefer without)

1-2 tsp cumin powder if you like it

Cook up everything except the lemon and fresh herbs for an hour or so, until tender. add the chopped herbs and lemon at the end. If you are using dried herbs, add them add the beginning instead of the end.

super easy lentil soup

2-3 cups lentils (any kind, or mix them up)

1 onion

1-2 cups carrot and/or beet juice

several cups water

some cilantro, chopped (optional)

1-2 Tbsp flavored vinegar (optional, today I tried riesling raisin)

rinse the lentils. add everything together, cook it all up for an hour or so. at the end, turn off the heat, add the cilantro and vinegar if desired.

aug. 4

brekky: 1/2 musk melon, 2 carrots, a grapefruit, 2 Tbsp sunflower seeds

Lunch: corn on the cob + avocado butter, and a dish of veggies+greens+beans. This would have been really good but I burnt the lentils. I didn't follow the instructions for my pressure cooker--didn't add enough water to the lentils. I didn't realize they were burnt at the bottom until I had mixed everything in and cooked some more and was dishing it out. oops! So the sweet flavor of the beets and carrots got lost in the slightly burnt flavor. It would have been a great meal, and instead it was just okay. It was all local food except the lentils: eggplant, zucchini, kale from the garden, beets, carrots, onions, lentils, and basil, chives and dill from the garden. Here's the garden haul before cooking:

Our first tomato! We sliced it and ate it as is. That's the herbs on the left and kale in the middle. The lentil veggie mixture wasn't too bad so I went ahead and ate it for lunch and dinner. I'll probably have the rest at lunch tomorrow.

Dinner: 1/2 musk melon, 1/2 small orange, 3 carrots, some salad greens, and leftover veggie-lentils. oh, and I figured I needed more seeds so I had 2 Tbsp hemp seeds.