tomorrow's food

As I've posted before, with my new job, morning exercise class, and evening activities, I'm gone from 6:50 am until 9 pm on weekdays. I eat all my meals "out" (but not in a restaurant), so that means preparing them the night before. Here are tomorrow's meals:

At top are salads for each meal: 1 large head romaine lettuce, raw broccoli, 1 nectarine, 2 small apples, chia seeds, and pumpkin seeds, divided into the 3 salads. That's pretty much a random selection from the fridge, though the nectarine was ripe so that wasn't random. The fridge is full of apples, so random selections will usually lead to apples now that the season is upon us. At middle right is a small bottle of D'angou pear vinegar. It's yummy on salads. At bottom are 2 servings of beans & greens plus. I prepare those on the weekend and freeze in serving-size containers. I'll have those for breakfast and lunch. Then at dinner I'll have two boiled ears of corn, courtesy of house-mate--we will cook at eat them at the office. Only one week left of sweet corn season.

Here are the meals packed in bags, along with my supplements, a knife and fork, and 3 napkins:

These stack in one of my bike bags, and my exercise/work clothes go in the other bag. So far so good though I haven't had time to practice my flute. I wish I had one more hour in the day.

easy eggplant, tomato, etc dish

This varies depending on what food I have on hand, and doesn't need to be followed exactly.

Ingredients:

1-2 medium eggplants

1-2 16 oz cans tomatoes or 3-6 fresh tomatoes

1 lb mushrooms

1 onion or some leeks

a bunch of kale

a can of beans, any kind

fresh basil, parsley, chives, or dried italian seasoning

ground seeds, e.g., sesame, flax, sunflower, pumpkin, hemp, or chia (no need to grind the chia)

1 Tbsp date syrup

Chop everything up except date syrup and seeds, throw into a big pressure cooker, cook for 3 minutes, then add the date syrup and seeds. This probably works with any veggie substituted of eggplant, like broccoli and cauliflower, brussels sprouts.

Late summer beans & greens

This is similar to my usual beans but it uses harvests from the garden too:

Ingredients:

1 lb beans (any variety from Rancho Gordo)

juice from 5 lbs carrots--about 36-40 oz

water as needed--a few cups

1-2 onions

1-2 lb mushrooms, any kind (Dr. Fuhrman now says all mushrooms are good for you).

tons of collard greens (a week's worth from 6 plants!)

eggplant if there is any ripe

herbs from the garden (parsley, chives, basil)

Rinse the dry beans. Chop the onions, mushrooms and collards in a food processor--not required for onions and mushrooms but saves time and compacts them--required for the tons of collard greens to compact them. Combine everything in a big pot, and soak overnight or for several hours. Cook for 4 hours, or until desired tenderness, adding water as needed.

Note: We can tomatoes from the garden, and sometimes a can doesn't seal. I might add in one of these if there is one.

my new schedule

As I said in this post, I've started a new job outside the home, and that combined with my morning exercise class and evening activities, keeps me away from home from 6:50 am until 9:30 pm pretty much every weekday. Occasionally I get home at 8-9 pm. I really wish I could get home by 9 pm on a regular basis, because I need about an hour to prep my food for the next day. I do some food prep on the weekend: I make a big batch of beans & greens & mushrooms & onions, freezing into 1-serving portions. I also make a week's worth of smoothies for house mate, and even smaller portions of beans, greens, and potatoes to freeze for some of her meals. Then each weeknight I just have to make salads for the next day, split into three meals (sometimes a big one alone, or a small one with the beans dish). These are simple and good. Some versions are 1) lettuce, berries, edamame (or not), seeds, d'angou pear vinegar; 2) lettuce and/or kale, apples or pears, fresh picked cherry tomatoes, seeds, d'angou pear vinegar; 3) cabbage, lettuce, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, apples, pears, lime, seeds. chopped in food processor; or any other version of lettuce, fruit, seeds, raw veggies. I often throw carrot sticks and kohlrabi on top of the salad because I love them. I don't chop them because I love their individual flavors.

This works well, but sometimes when I'm out with friends and they are just getting started having fun, I say I have to go because I have to get home and spend an hour fixing tomorrow's meals. So I miss out a bit on some social stuff. Oh well. I think I can get them to adjust and realize we have to get the music jams going earlier since I leave early. :)

orange remainders

Okay, this post demonstrates how weird I've become. Here I am making orange juice for my housemate (not weird yet):

Here's the results: about 1 cup or orange juice, and the orange remainders from 4 small oranges (not weird yet):

Here's our respective meals (now it's getting weird):

I eat the rest of the oranges off their peel (i.e., don't eat the peels). I prefer this to eating a whole orange! It's fun to eat, not as intense and sweet as the whole orange, and I get to eat more. Now I look forward to making house-mate's orange juice! We might have the ideal juicer for this food because it doesn't disrupt the orange too much, just smashes it (and I purposely don't smash it all the way to leave a little juice for myself). I did a complicated calculation to determine the number of calories (measuring weights of original oranges, orange juice, and finished peels, subtracting weights of juice and peels from original, subtracting calories of juice from original orange minus peels) and determined that it's about 100 calories in the orange remainders for a 1 cup orange juice yield (4 small oranges, or 2-3 medium). It's similar to the amount of calories in the cup of juice. But it takes a lot longer to eat so the enjoyment per calorie is quite high.

hee hee

Can you find the picture of me in this post from diseaseproof?

I'll give an update this weekend about how my meal prep is going with my new gone-all-day-and-night schedule. I just had to make a few tweaks to the plan.

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.