A Healthy Cooking Frenzy Part Two

I knew I wanted dinner to be meatless.   LOL…when I was serving it, FabHubs kept asking where the rest of dinner was.  He ate it but didn’t go back for seconds.  When we have meat dishes he will usually finish up ALL of the meat….seconds and thirds…whatever it takes!  Remember…he is gifted  with one of those metabolisms…he could eat a whole cake and it wouldn’t show!

We had gotten a lot of interesting veggies in our last two produce boxes and I had a lot I needed to use up.  So I decided to make a giant balsamic veggie roast and throw in whatever I had, or could fit!

I put in:

Sliced mushrooms, some halved cherry tomatoes, chunked up carrots, chunked up onion, a whole bunch of garlic cloves (Oh Yeah!), half of my little sugar pumpkin, two absolutely GORG purple potatoes, broccoli, and  I think that was it!

Look at this potato!

And remember this pumpkin I meant to use up last week but didn’t?

Well FabTeen chunked it all up and it looked like this!

  Aren’t those colors just GORGEOUS!

And then we decided to dress it with balsamic and olive oil.  I put about 1/8 cup of balsamic, and then topped it off with 1/8 cup of olive oil.

We tossed all the veggies into a huge bowl and then dumped the dressing onto it so it wouldn’t all pool in the bottom of the pan.  We stirred  and stirred until the veggies were well-coated (this was some of my directing part!  Remember, I wasn’t cooking tonight!)

And into the oven at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes, stirring every 10-15 minutes.  This was the result:

Boy…look how much color gets cooked out of them! 

Then the Indian spice rice….Oooohhhh this was fantastic!  Normally I find recipes I like and then adapt to whatever I have, but for a rare change I actually followed this one!  It came from Enlightened Cook and I know I will be back to her site!  We did use Basmati rice instead of brown…although I do love brown rice.  I know I will buying brown Basmati when I run out of what we have on hand now.

FabTeen did this one all by himself…I only found and printed the recipe, he did the work! 

This has all sorts of very healthy spices in it, including SuperFoods  cinnamon and turmeric, as well as raisins.   It also  has caramelized onions and raw cashews.  I probably could have eaten the whole bowl!  Guess what I am having for dinner tonight!

My dinner plate:

Finally, to finish off the little sugar pumpkin, we decided to roast it.  I wanted to make savory, but we found this recipe for sweet and I was outvoted!

For us it didn’t come out great…it needs some tweaking.  Next time I would lower the temp from 400 to 350, especially since we had thin  wedges.  The sugar sauce was overdone, and the pumpkin was a little underdone…but we ate it nonetheless.  More superfoods in the pumpkin and all of the spices.  I did do a little squirt of canned whipped cream I have had in the fridge for a while, since before embarking on my whole food path but after Weight Watchers.  It really made a difference in the palatability of the pumpkin  wedges.

Our version:

Mixing  the spices  and melted butter:

Adding it to the pumpkin wedges (sorry, a little blurry):

Our roasted pumpkin wedges:

My dessert plate: 

I can’t believe I have gotten so excited about veggies!  What is this world coming to!!!

Superfood Pumpkin Creativity

Don’t know why…but today turned into a pumpkin kind of day.

I started the day out with a Green Monster.  I was craving pumpkin in it…but was too lazy to deal with it so I just made a simple, regular drink….with spinach, banana, almond milk, Chocolate Superfood for a change, and 1 TBS flax meal.

I was pretty full after this and was thinking I could hold out until lunch….but that was not to be!   The hunger started creeping up on me by 10 and I knew I needed to eat something.

I started out with pumpkin oatmeal, and finally broke down and opened the can.  I put 1/3 cup oats, 1/3 cup vanilla almond milk, and 1/3 cup water in a bowl with 1/3 cup pumpkin.  Remember, this is the pure pureed pumpkin, NOT the pumpkin pie filling!

I popped it into the micro for 3 minutes at 50% power ‘cuz I didn’t feel like dealing with the oatmeal pot to clean afterwards.   When it came out I dumped on top a whole bunch of pumpkin pie spice (not measured…just a lot),  1 TBS raisins, 1 TBS walnuts pieces, and  1/2 TBS Agave syrup.   The vanilla I had added to the pumpkin milk (see below) smelled so good, that I dumped a bunch in here too (maybe 1/2 to 1 TBS….a little more than I meant to!)

It was still missing something so I mixed up 2 TBS of Chocolate PB2.   I would have liked regular old almond butter in it, but I didn’t want to use the points and the Choco PB2 has only 1 points for 2 TBS.  That did it and my oats were perfect!

Now I have also been craving a pumpkin latte lately, and had been researching recipes on how to make it myself, naturally.  I had found some recipes that used pumpkin puree in them and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to use up some more of the puree.   So using this recipe as a launching pad, into a pan went 1/3 cup vanilla almond milk, 1 heaping TBS of pumpkin puree, a large amount of pumpkin pie spice (again, a very very generous sprinkle…no measuring), 1/2 TBS Agave nectar, and 1/2 TBS vanilla. 

Even though I am not Latin myself, growing up in a Latin community I have learned lots of Cafe’ Con Leche tricks, and one of them is how easily milk will foam when it has been heated.  It works much better when heated in the micro and then whisked afterwards, but this  would do just fine.

I mixed all the ingredients together (and ended up dirtying the pot anyway that I had saved from the oatmeal!) and then when it was hot whisked until foamy.  I poured it into my cup and poured some good hot strong coffee in with it.   Aaahhh….pumpkin fix satiated.

Of course I still have this little guy to cook who came in my organic produce box on Monday.   I can’t decide what to make from him….kids want pumpkin pie (surprise!) but I was thinking of cutting him into wedges and roasting him for dinner.  I will see….

Total points for breakfast was high today though at 8.5 between the Green Monster, pumpkin oats, and pumpkin latte.

And finally for now I leave you with this:

FabTeen was eating her breakfast (which I had her make herself today as I was running late) and then apparently grabbed the camera I tend to leave lying around (handy), and snapped a picture of it.  She came running to me with the picture and said, “Mommy…this is a healthy breakfast, right?” 

Coming from Little Miss Queen of Junk Food I felt a glimmer of hope for her future eating habits bubbling inside!  I think I might be doing something right!