Hotel food prep

I tried out a new method of food prep while on road trips.  It's to follow Jeff Novick's fast food method.  Here's my setup:

That's an electric burner, a big pot, a wooden spoon (not shown),  2 containers of go-go brown rice, a can of tomatoes, a can of beans, and 3 lbs of veggies.  It's not exactly the ratios Novick recommends but it's what I thought would work well for 2 day's worth of food.  I thought the 3rd lb of veggies wasn't going to make it in the pot, but it was greens and they cook down nicely.  Just mix and heat.

Here it is dished out into 4 big containers for myself and a small one for travel companion.    I added different spices to each one:  curry, italian, creole, and Mexican.  how fun is that?


Then I made a couple of salads.  I also baked a couple of potatoes in the microwave.  And prepped some oatmeal and banana and almond milk and cinnamon and for fun, fenugreek.   fenugreek smells like maple syrup.   so if that works, it's a healthy way to get that flavor with no added sweetener besides the banana.  It's soaking overnight in the fridge, so it will only take a couple of minutes to cook up in the microwave in the morning.

I found a great salad dressing at Whole Foods today (my last stop there for a few weeks--now I wish I had gotten more!).  This has no oil or sugar.  It has 40 mg of sodium per 2 T.  That's acceptable to me.  This is so convenient!

Now I'm ready for some mountain biking tomorrow!

Ann Esselstyn's Lovely Collard Wraps

I'm a sloppy cook and a sloppier presenter.  Even so, these turned out great.  I used this recipe.   I made this hummus.  And I didn't have carrots but I had some mushrooms, so cooked those up real quick on the stove and added them.   Here they are with everything added:

Then I rearranged to the sliced peppers and cucumber so I could fold lengthwise:


Then you slice them up sort of like sushi:



I ate it with corn on the cob.  It was a great meal!

Easy delicious healthy hummus

I'm kind of stealing this from the E2 Extra website with some changes.  But it's so basic, I hope it's okay.

Ingredients:
2 cans unsalted chickpeas, drained, but save the liquid!
3 cloves of roasted garlic
juice of 1 lemon
2 tsp ground cumin (or if that seems too strong, start with 1 tsp and you can add more later to taste)
1 tsp low-sodium tamari (or soy) sauce (optional)
liquid from the can, to desired consistency
paprika

Roast the garlic in the oven, 375 for 20 minutes (just put them unpeeled, uncovered in a little pan).   Let cool.  Squeeze out the gooey insides into your blender (smells great!).  Add the lemon juice, some liquid from the can (start with 1/4 cup), the cumin, the tamari, and about 1/4 of the beans.  Blend until very smooth.  Add all but 1/4 of the beans, blend until smooth, add liquid if you want it less thick.  Then add the last of the beans and blend to desired consistency.  If you want a smooth base with a few chunks of chickpeas, blend some.  If you want it all smooth, keep blending.   Spoon into a bowl and top with paprika to make it look pretty.

I've become such a salt wimp that even 1 tsp of the tamari seemed too much.  So I think I'll go without it next time.  Or go down to 1/2 tsp or 1/4 tsp just to get that little flavor.

Weekend cooking

I did some experimenting this weekend and went overboard with maple syrup in the process.  okay, lesson learned.  Even when you do everything else right, the maple syrup in excess is still a problem as I'm feeling the creaks in my joints.  :)

Yesterday I made mighty muffins (without the walnuts and raisins).   These are good and don't have an excessive amount of refined sweetener in them.  So I would say I can repeat these in the future.  They remind me of banana bread.  However, I made the full recipe and ate too many of them both yesterday and today.  But it looks like it would be really easy to make 1/6 the recipe in the future.  I'll do that!

Today I made blueberry-spelt pancakes which I topped with gallons of maple syrup.  Boy was that good--of course because of the gallons of maple syrup.  The pancakes on their own, I'm not even sure what they tasted like.  The batter tasted kind of yucky actually.  Now I still might consider doing this in the future too, on special occasions and with only small amounts of maple syrup.  But I don't think I'll desire it for a while.

I was very much looking forward to real food again tonight.   I made Kichadi.  It was great!  I added 1 cup of fresh corn to the recipe.   I also had a fresh corn on the cob with it for dinner.

Tomorrow I will have more kichadi for lunch, and Ann Esselstyn's lovely collard wraps for dinner, along with other delicious healthy stuff.  Yeah, I prefer that stuff.  Nice to know.

Today's food

I had to leave kind of early this morning so breakfast was just snacking while preparing lunch:  a few blueberries, some cabbage and spinach, apple peels (from food prep).

Since I had that ketchup experiment in my head, I had to have a burger and fries to try it out.  So for lunch I had:

potato "fries".  Do those look good or what?  seasoned with Penzey's mural of flavors and onion powder;

Collard wraps.  1/2 burger in each + ketchup + mustard and "pickles"  (cucumber + dill + d'angou pear vinegar).

and cooked cabbage + apple + cinnamon.  Here it all is.  What a great lunch!

Dinner was the vegetables and pasta.  What a great dinner!

pasta and vegetables

This is based loosely on Cathy's Pizza Pasta recipe, but I don't really think of it as pizza and I used different vegetables.  I think of it more like a pasta primavera or ratatouille.  I liked the idea of fresh basil and nutritional yeast--that worked really well.

Here are the vegetables I used, which is just what was in the fridge:
onion
red fry pepper (like a red bell pepper)
celery
a little leftover mushrooms
a little leftover green bell pepper
eggplant
zucchini
broccoli

I fried up the onions, bell pepper and celery (the cajun trinity), added the others as I chopped them, added a little water when needed.   then added

1 can of tomatoes

simmered for about 10 minutes.  then added

some frozen corn
basil leaves (mine were frozen and I just crumpled them, about 1/4 cup)
1 tsp nutritional yeast

cooked for another 10 minutes.

I cooked up some organic einkorn whole wheat rigatoni pasta.   I like it.  It's very hearty.  I think I'm a little sensitive to wheat or gluten, but I understand if you only have slight sensitivities, these "ancient" versions of wheat (this has not been hybridized) might not be a problem.  So I thought I'd experiment and see.  So far so good.

I ate half tonight and will have the rest for lunch tomorrow.   Yum!

Cathy's Ketchup

This is really good.  I wrote a post yesterday on an instant ketchup that is definitely good in a pinch.  That got me curious to try Cathy's recipe.  It's really good.  I thought the apple would make it not taste like ketchup but it's great.  I didn't have lemon so I used fancy-pants apple infused balsamic vinegar.  I suspect that's even better!  

Now the only problem is, it makes more than I need for a day or 2, and what if it gets old before I'm done with it?  I decided to divide it into two bowls and freeze one.  I'm not sure how it will be after thawing.  I'll find out soon enough!