Dinner

This is a good time of year to have oriental yams for dinner.  There isn't any fresh local produce to tempt me away from the yams just yet (sweet corn season is a few months away!).  The California veggies are good so I have them too.   This is one of my most favorite meals ever (beside my lunch potatoes and my breakfast grains), so I've been having this most nights.   As I described in this post, I cook a big pot of veggies every few days and distribute it into 2-cup bowls for lunch and dinner (lasts me 2-3 days).  I cook up a baked potato and yam every night or morning to have for lunch and dinner.   I just eat the oriental yam plain.  It is sweet like dessert.  It needs nothing else.  I eat the skin first so I can enjoy the inside all by itself.   yum yum yum.  The veggies are great too.   Here was last night's dinner.  As with lunch, I was too lazy to make a proper salad so just ate the Romaine leaves, which were quite good:

Today's included some blackberries for dessert.  My plate of veggies was bigger than usual because I had some leftover after serving up tomorrow's and the next day's into their bowls.

weekend cooking

It's fall and my food choices are changing with the season.  It's winter squash time!   Here's what I'm planning to try this week:

And that's just for lunch and dinner.  I'm thinking sweet potatoes for breakfast.  I made a huge pot of soup using veggies from the garden mostly.  This has white lima beans, purple barley, onion, eggplant, collard greens, leeks, mushrooms, 2 cans of garden tomatoes, broccoli, and italian spices.  I froze it into several containers to eat during the week.  I still have some containers from my last batch of soup so I can have some variation.  Here's my plan for the week--don't know if I will like it, I'll know tomorrow--brekky will be sweet potato topped with bean soup--I'm usually hungry after exercise class.   Here's an example from today's lunch:

This also has banana, fresh ginger and cilantro.  It tasted quite good.  

Lunch and dinner will be salad (cabbage, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, seed mixture, vinegar) topped with squash, soup, apple, and pomegranate seeds, and probably some fresh ginger.  The squash I'm hoping will be easy to prepare, just baking in the oven.  I'll microwave it to heat it up.  I have no idea what this will taste like, but I expect it will be pretty good.  I mean, almost any mixture of veggies and fruit and greens tastes good.

Here's a quickie large salad I made tonight:  cabbage, spinach, romaine, broccoli, then some pomegranate seeds, seed mixture, and fruit-infused vinegar.

Here's one of my most favorite treats.  I ate this yesterday while making house mate's smoothies.  It's just frozen mango, frozen blueberries, and a little d'angou pear vinegar (optional).  I love this.  It's easy to make thoroughly enjoyable food out of simple ingredients.

Creamy Orange Sweet Potato Sauce

This is so decadent tasting, it's hard to believe it's both healthy and easy!  I had it with steamed kale but I will have to think of other things to eat it with!   It reminded me of Hollandaise sauce.  It even looked like it because I used an oriental yam, which is yellow.

Ingredients:
1 medium sweet potato
2 Tbsp pignolias (mediterranean pine nuts)
1/2 cup fresh squeezed orange juice
1 Tbsp riesling raisin vinegar

Peel the sweet potato, cut into cubes, and steam or pressure cook until tender.  Blend everything including cooking water in a high-speed blender until really creamy!  Pour over something.  Here it is with steamed kale:

I bet this would be good with asparagus!   Do you have any other suggestions?

creamed vegetables

Yum!   This is good.  I made some kale and sweet potato sauce for dinner tonight and had way too much sauce so added it to tomorrow's veggies.

Ingredients for sauce:
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and chopped
some cauliflower (1/4 of a head?), chopped
2 Tbsp black fig vinegar
1-2 Tbsp pignolia nuts (or walnuts or cashews or any favorite nut or seed)

Veggies:
Whatever you want!  I had on hand:
broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, red cabbage, onion, and mushrooms
A cup of beans would be a good addition too.

Herbs or spices:
I used what is growing in my garden:  dill, basil, cilantro, and rosemary.  I'm not a good judge of spices and herbs, but I thought the dill added nice flavor.

Steam or pressure cook the sweet potato and cauliflower (separate from the veggies).

Steam or pressure cook the veggies.

Blend the sauce ingredients in a blender.  Pour over the veggies and stir up.

I will have this over lettuce.  Sounds weird if you aren't a nutritarian but lettuce is a great grain substitute.  Here are tomorrow's meals all ready to go (have to leave early to meet colleagues at a working breakfast and then to my job).  The creamed veggies on lettuce are at bottom left and right.   Normally this time of year (summer) I'd have a bunch of sugar snap peas and kohlrabi too but the store was out today.

butternut squash/apple bake

This is really a version of Dr. Fuhrman's sweet potato apple bake, but I tried it with butternut squash instead of sweet potato, since we get the squash locally for much of the winter.

Ingredients:

1/2 large or 1 medium butternut squash

2 apples

2/3 cup raw cranberries, fresh or frozen

1/2 cup raisins

2/3 cup orange juice (I used mandarin oranges)

1/2-1 tsp cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Cut the squash in half lengthwise, and dig out the seeds and stringy stuff. I found scraping it with a knife first frees up the stringy stuff, and then a spoon can remove it. Peel the squash. I recently got what I think is called a t-peeler. This worked great. Here's a picture showing the t-peeler at top left, and the chopped squash:

Next, peel and chop the apples. Combine everything in a baking dish. Cover with foil. Bake for 1 hour, 15 minutes. In the last 15 minutes, add the cinnamon and remove the foil to toast it a bit.

I forgot to take a picture of the finished project. Here's a picture of a version with sweet potatoes instead of squash:

Note on modifications: I recently tried this with beets and squash and didn't like it as much. It's better just with the squash!

Sept. 22

brekky: smoothie from the freezer (thawed overnight). then I made more for the next few days and froze them. I nibbled while making them, on the pumpkin and sunflower seeds too.

lunch: Veggies and Sweet Potato Sauce: This was really good and I whipped it together in 30 minutes total: For me I cooked up brussels sprouts, and a very small eggplant for 1 minute in the pressure cooker (PC). For housemate I cooked up potatoes in the other PC for 1 minute. Then to mine I added yellow summer squash, sweet potatoes and frozen sweet corn and cooked for another minute. To housemate's I added frozen corn and peas and cooked for another minute. Then I took out the sweet potatoes from my PC, put them in the blender with walnuts and fresh pomegranate juice (I just cut a pom. into pieces and smashed it with my hand-crank juicer) and made the sauce--oh, I should have added some blueberry vinegar. I poured that over our veggies into two big bowls which we shared with a visitor working with me today. He loved it.

Dinner: I ate it backwards but liked it this way. Started off with a ripe peach (dessert). Then had a bowl of lentils from yesterday. Then a salad from lettuce, tomatoes, orange bell pepper, and green bell pepper. All the ingredients were from a local farm or my garden so it was really good and didn't need dressing. I just added some d'angou pear vinegar. I actually like ending with a salad. When I end with fruit, I just want more. It's opposite to what Dr. Fuhrman recommends which is to start with a big salad, the idea being to fill up on that, and eat less of the more high-caloric food.

I didn't exercise today so I didn't get very hungry. I had coughing fit last night and couldn't get to sleep. I hope I sleep better tonight. The cold is almost gone except for the cough.