veggie mania

Last week I was frustrated when I took 2 hours to prepare my next day's meals.  So I decided to cook a big pot of veggies on the weekend so I wouldn't have to cook them every night.  Then I just have to make my salads for the next day and that doesn't take too long.  Well, I kind of went overboard with the veggies.  Holy cow.  I had 2 pressure cookers going at once, followed by two more batches.  I didn't take pictures as I didn't get started until late so was trying not to dawdle too much.  Here's what I put in the veggies:

• less than 1/4 cup each of purple barley, rye berries, black rice, and buckwheat.  Cooked these up separately in a regular pan (not pressure cooker), starting with the barley, then adding the rye berries and black rice, then the buckwheat (in reverse order of cooking time).  I added cinnamon of course.   
• collards from the freezer.  we still have last summer's batches.  they still taste okay.  one more is left in the freezer.  then we'll just wait for the garden to produce again.
• 2 onions
• 3 different kinds of mushrooms
• chives from the garden
• canned tomatoes (1 16 oz) from the garden
• asparagus
• 3 broccoli heads
• a head of cauliflower

That made 12 servings, defined as the bowl size I freeze them in.   I hope they freeze and thaw okay.  I left out a few for the first few days of the week.  maybe they will last through next week too.   I think this was about twice as much as I want or need to make at once so next time I will buy less veggies and it won't be such a production and I'll have one week's worth.   

Bucket o' veggies

Sorry the picture is out of focus.  I made a bunch of cooked veggies for the week.  I filled two large pressure cookers full of veggies.  They cooked down, but this is a large bowl too.  These veggies fit into 6 2-cup containers and went into the freezer.  They taste quite good.  Here's what I put into pot #1:  eggplant, broccoli, cauliflower, yellow zucchini, green zucchini, red bell pepper.  In pot #2 went an onion, a bunch of collard greens, and mushrooms, topped with some dried herbs du province and fines herbs.  After they cooked up, I added 2 16-oz cans of tomatoes.  The tomatoes came from the garden and that contributed a lot to the delicious taste.  The collards were just a bit bitter so I added some lemon juice.  I was surprised how good the final result tastes.  I guessed well what veggies and herbs to use.  The only problem is I tend to overcook veggies in the pressure cooker.  Well, the greens pot was just right.  Next time I will use a lower setting for the veggies pot.   I drank the broth leftover from the tomato jars and steaming to reclaim the vitamins lost in the water.   It was good.  I look at it like drinking a rich cup of tea.

I also prepped beans which I'll cook tomorrow.  I juiced a 5 lb bag of carrots (about 36 oz) and am soaking a lb of beans overnight in this juice (in the refrigerator).  Tomorrow I'll make a pot of collards, onions and mushrooms, and add those to the beans after the beans cook.  I'll divide into bowls to freeze for next week.  Then I just need to make a salad every day.

This is pretty much my standard meal plan.  I'm following an easy guideline, Dr. Fuhrman's GOMBBS acronym:  Greens, Onions, Mushrooms, Beans, and Seeds/nuts (in the salad).   The extra B is for berries which I eat a few times a week.  I add other fruit to my salads this time of year:  apple, orange, pomegranate seeds.  It's the same as the post I wrote here, without the asian pear.  I might have a small bowl of frozen cherries and mangos for dessert when I get home from work.

kale with peanut/sweet potato/bean sauce

Ingredients:

1-2 bunch kale

1 bunch baby bok choy (optional)

1/2 onion, coarsely chopped

1/2 large sweet potato

1/4 cup raw peanuts

1-2 cups beans

Bake the sweet potato (1 hour, 350 F), cover the cut half with foil. Boil the peanuts for an hour. Cook the kale and onion (few minutes in the pressure cooker, or 10-20 minutes steamed). Blend the peanuts and sweet potato with cooking water (from the kale). Combine everything. It's like a kale stew. It's very yummy.

Steamed veggies

A really easy side dish, or mix beans in to make a whole meal.

Ingredients:

Veggies--whatever is in your fridge or garden, whatever is in season, etc. Examples: broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, brussels sprouts, beets.

1-2 Tbsp Ground up seeds (e.g., sunflower, hemp, flax, pumpkin).

1-2 Tbsp flavored vinegar

Steam the veggies in a regular pan until desired consistency (10-20 minutes) or pressure cooker for 2-3 minutes (I love the pressure cooker!). Mix the liquid at the bottom of the pan with the ground up seeds and vinegar, pour over the veggies. Add beans if you want to make it a main dish.

refrigerator soup

This is the soup you make when you are leaving town and don't want your veggies to go to waste so you throw them all into a pot. It was really good. Of course, it will vary, depending on what you have.

Ingredients:

whatever is in your fridge and pantry. I used:

2 patty pan squash

3 carrots

2 small eggplants

1/2 sweet potato

1 cup green beans

1 head broccoli

1 head cauliflower---cut into about 4 big pieces, not small

a bunch of tomatoes (1-2 lbs?)

a couple green bell peppers

2 cups dried white beans--soaked over night and cooked in pressure cooker for 10 minutes

(or cook 3-4 hours on stove, or 2 cans of beans already cooked)

juice of 1 lemon

herbs from the garden: parsley, basil, chives, cilantro

corn (optional)

1/4 cup sesame seeds

1/4 cup hemp seeds

First I cooked up the beans and let them cool (I was doing other things). Then I cooked up the vegetables in the bean juice in the pressure cooker. It just turned into a soup. I took out the big cauliflower pieces, put them in the blender with 1/4 cup raw sesame seeds and 1/4 cup hemp seeds. Then added that back to the soup. That made it a nice a creamy soup. It seemed to need something else so I added a little less than 1/4 cup nutritional yeast. I chopped up the herbs and added that. Then it was really good. I froze it in big bowls (below). I look forward to eating it when I return home. I will probably eat it with greens. Note, I would have added frozen corn to it and it would have been a nice "chowder", but I have been getting tummy aches lately when I eat corn (I always overeat corn so that's probably why). Our corn is so sweet, you probably wouldn't need the nutritional yeast flavoring--or maybe it would be good too.

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.