April Is Full Speed Ahead!

HI!!!

Scrambling to stay afloat during this crazy busy week!  Baynanza, a Girl  Scout retreat, multiple birthdays (including one BIRTH day with a brand new nephew), school field day, Girl Scout Leader Appreciation Day, and more!  This week has been PACKED!

Today I finally had a chance to slow down and  B R E A T H E.  Even though I spent some time working, I didn’t have to run anywhere and that was relaxing in and of itself!

While I worked, FabHubs was busy on his new project!

We have composted for years  and have a huge bin full of rich compost ready to go.  We have talked for years about having our own garden but have never gotten around to it.

Our lovely compost bins (made from leftover fence posts when FabHubs rebuilt sections of our fence):

A couple of months ago, Eating Well ran this article, which I left in the bathroom for FabHubs to “discover.”

Garden plan, how to get started and all!

It worked like a charm!  For the last few weeks he has been so excited about planting our own garden, and last week he went out and got some seeds…and now we are the proud owners of these two lovely plots:  Yes..they may look like dirt patches…but they are our new edible garden!  the mounds are for cantaloupe, and we also are growing carrots, tomatoes, bush beans (what are bush beans?????), corn, eggplant, bell peppers, romaine, kabocha, and pumpkin.

The kabocha, eggplant, and bell peppers are not from seeds we bought, but saved from organic veggies we ate from my weekly produce delivery.

I am very excited to see how these do!

We also like to toss the crowns of pineapples into a section of our yard.  It is amazing how they take root and grow!  Earlier this week I went out there to check on them and was amazed to find these little guys!!! SIX of them in total!  These little baby pineapples are so cute!  Can’t wait to eat them…we DEVOUR pineapples in this household!  It is one of the rare fruits that all five of us are major lovers of!

Quite a few dinners this week have been in restaurants…something very rare for us.  I think we ate in restaurants more this week than we have in the past four months!

Aside from feeling not as healthy, that also makes it challenging to use up our produce before it goes bad.

Tonight’s dinner put a major dent in our produce stash!

First, since we were so hungry, I made a snack of some raw baby carrots, grape tomatoes, and sugar snap peas, all received this past Monday in the delivery!

Crunchy sweet and delicious!  I love sugar snap peas raw.  It is such a crime to cook them!!!!

We finished these in no time…

For dinner I roasted a large sweet potato alongside a few rutabaga I also received on Monday:       Some sauteed asparagus and broccoli… And the main dish of zucchini burgers…I had several weeks’ worth of zucchini that had to be used up!!!  I still have a couple left though.

The final result…

I loved how FabHubs about ketchup on his “burgers” (he is not a fan of zucchini) and when I suggested tomato paste or sauce instead HE WENT FOR IT!!!  And afterwards said he really liked it as an alternative!

Weekend is not done yet…My Birthday is tomorrow!  A fine wrapup to a full week!

I Love Oats In A Jar!

Remember that empty jar I forgot to use last week?  Well I continued to forget to use it for oats in a jar a la Kathy and every day I would kick myself when I remembered it, as I went hunting for the almond butter to put in my already cooked in a bowl oatmeal! 

Yesterday morning the light bulb finally went off at the right time!!  YAY! 

Here was my empty jar of almond butter all ready to go!

Into the jar went half a chopped pear, a handful of blueberries, 1/3 cup of oats, 1/3 cup of almond milk, and 1/3 cup of water! Into the microwave it went for 3 minutes at 50% power and it came out like this!  Really it looked just the blueberry version of the artificially flavored and sugared up instant packets…but it was 100% natural and mostly organic!  (only the oats were not organic).

Can’t forget to add the yummy scrapings off the lid! This was absolutely delicious.

Along with my second dose of espresso for the day!  One day I will be giving this up….but not yet!

Lunch was fresh and enjoyable too!  I saw that Karilynn started a water challenge on the Losing To Win site so I decided to jump on in.  I need to be drinking four of these gigantic 18 ounce glasses a day!  (Card added for your comparative viewing pleasure)

I downed this…but then I was freezing!  So I dug into my Oh She Glows winning box (yes…that is still going strong) and warmed myself up with a yummy cup of tea!   I also snacked on an unphotographed Larabar…apple pie flavor.  This was deeeevine!

I was still hungry though, so before long I broke out the organics to fix myself a gorgeous salad.  Butter lettuce, escarole, Roma tomato, daikon radish, scallion, carrot, red bell pepper, chopped mushrooms, and a reheated piece of kabocha! I am out of my beloved peanut dressing and didn’t have time to make any fresh (which I want to do) but I remembered I had this in the fridge. I bought it a while back but didn’t really like it…so I decided to try and doctor it up to make it into a salad dressing.  I added some agave and fresh organic lemon juice. Isn’t this lemon just gorgeous! I ended up with this!  It was passable but just okay.  I need to tweak some.I finished off lunch with this!  Yummy.  Not organic and only 60% cacao…low on the healthy scale for chocolate.  But the cranberries, blueberries, and yum factor made up for it, right?

After a lovely day of fun and fresh eats….dinner was far less than rewarding.  We had a pot luck at our boy scout Court of Honor ceremony (awards banquet).  To FabPreteen and my great disappointment, there was no salad and no veggies!

The best we could do with no meat was some mac and cheese (that was really good); past salad; and some other undisclosed fettuccini that I ended up giving away.  I had some yellow rice that I picked the chicken out of as well. 

At least there was dessert!  (no photos though).

I definitely need to remember to start packing dinner for FabPreteen and myself to these potlucks!

On another note, my organics arrived today!  (yes I know it is Wednesday, not Monday but better late than never!)

Stay tuned to see what deliciousness I got!

My Very “Producive” Week In Review

Ugh..that was  bad, wasn’t it!  Sorry!!

Here I was going to blog about how I  used my produce box all week…and then I pulled a disappearing act.

This week I went into overdrive and became overwhelmed….and it just didn’t happen.  By evening I was tired and just couldn’t summon the energy and creativity to blog.

But the food part and pictures did happen  so I can put together a quick recap! 

Monday:

All fruits and veggies from my produce co-op except the carrots, (organic from Costco:

Homemade coleslaw, Asian style vinegar based dressing

  

I dragged this thing out…it is at least 18 years old and I haven’t used it probably in 10 years…but it worked!

     

Roasted tater chips…sweet and russet!

   

Final dinner was a huge helping of the coleslaw to fill me up, the homemade potato chips, and a Boca Burger on an Arnold Sandwich thin with totally processed American cheese, and organic onion and sliced cucumbers.

      

Dessert was yummy mango…not quite ripe enough though so it was a little tart.  These two were chunked and shared between the four mango lovers.   Mangos are not on FabHubs approved fruit list!

  

Tuesday:

Oatmeal with almond milk, leftover mango, cinnamon, and almond butter.  I had been craving this!  Obviously only the mango came  from my delivery!

A snack of local Florida mandarins…I didn’t even know we grew mandarins in Florida!  We loved these…a lot more than the blood oranges that came last week.

  

Lunch was a tempeh wrap.  I have never tried tempeh before!  It was really good and is a definite repeat.  I put it on a flatout wrap with some more sliced cukes,  green leaf lettuce, and grape tomatoes.  I rounded it off with a large helping of my Asian style  coleslaw…very healthy, low in fat and very filling!

    

Sorry for blurry picture!

Dinner….

While looking  for a recipe to use my collard greens, somehow I found this perfect recipe!

Perfect because oddly enough…I pretty much had all of the ingredients for it!  I had bought  the Field Roast vegetarian sausage when we went  camping a few weeks ago with the Boy Scout troop…but because they ended up having some vegetarian MRIs  I never used it and it was at the point where it really needed to be used…or else!  It wasn’t apple sage…it was Italian…but I didn’t care, it still fit the bill!

     

From the produce box I pulled into service some garlic, red bell pepper, red onion, and collard greens.  We were out of whole wheat pasta so I just used what we had on hand.

          

Dessert!  Dark organic Green and Black chocolate and organic raspberries.

 

Wednesday:

Around here, week was getting crazier so pictures are sparser!

For breakfast I mixed Fage 0% Greek yogurt with the last of the razzies, some bananas, some Granola To Go (about 1/4 cup sprinkled), 1/2 TBS almond butter, and a drizzle of Agave nectar.   Yummy…but I did miss my oatmeal!

For dinner I wanted to use up the  broccoli before it went bad, some more potatoes (I have a major back up of those right now and need to use them!) and the eggplants.

I ended up roasting the eggplants over charcoal to make  baba ghanoush…I took pictures of the process but they seem to have left!

So I have:

   

I snacked on this with some of Mary’s organic crackers that I received from Oh She Glows Angela in the box of fabulous goodies I won from her!

OMG!  I am in heaven with these crackers…they are so crisp and crunchy and flavorful  and I immediately read the package to find out if they are Canadian only or American because I want to buy more of them!  I was hugely relieved to see they are made in California!  I will be hunting these down in Whole Foods!

  

For dinner we had the baked potato which I smothered topped with a little in light sour cream and cheddar cheese (I know!)   The lemon was for the broccoli! 

And to my complete horror,  I am having a complete brain blank here and have no idea what that other stuff is that I put on my plate that I am sure made my husband give me “the look” that I get when I serve my no meat meals!  I will have to show the picture to FabTeen and ask him…he will remember for me!  Thank goodness for kids!

(HA!  Update here and I didn’t even need the kid for it!  After squinting hard at the photo for a while, I remembered all by myself!  They are homemade bean burgers…which were not the best I have made but they were palatable.  And yes…I definitely, absolutely got the look!)

Thursday:

Thursday I finally broke out the kabocha squash.   I have received two of these in my boxes and have yet to use them!

If it weren’t for Heather, who eats these fanatically when she is not eating almond butter, I would have never known what to do with it! 

It is something I never would have bought…it looks ornamental!  But because I have been “hearing” about this for weeks, when it showed up in my box I was pretty excited!  (Yes, I know…excited about a squash, pretty pathetic!)

Hmm…I had some more “done” photos of these but they must be hanging out with those missing pix of the eggplants on charcoal!

At any rate…I am in LOVE with this squash!  It is so sweet and yummy and I loved it prepared this way and it totally reminds me of something else I have eaten…boniato maybe?  Although the skin is different…..don’t think so…but I don’t know!  I ate it skin and all.  I loved the crunchy skin on  the sweet, soft flesh…it was so perfect. 

We had dinner:

A salad I threw together with more veggies on their last legs, begging to be eaten, a nekkid Boca Burger, the last of the broccoli sprinkled with a little parmesan…and the Kabocha!

And I kept going back for more and more and more and more kabocha.

and we watched Survivor, and then CSI, and then I hit the kabocha bowl again!

   

I have one more kabocha to enjoy…and  then I need to hunt some down!  After I thank Heather of course!

Friday:

Was a day of complete lunacy where I had one activity after another from the moment I woke up until I  got home after 9 p.m.  Bake sale, Girl Scout activity, picking up kids, driving kids….it was nonstop!

No pictures!  Dinner was 1 slice cheese pizza and a bottle of water at the Girl Scout activity!

Saturday:

The madness continued!  Girl Scout caroling at a local nursing home, then a memorial BBQ (didn’t eat anything there) then a big family Hanukkah dinner!  Didn’t get in until well after 1 a.m.!   (Geez!  When did that become late?  Probably after the second child!)

Still no pictures!

I  passed on the brisket (which upset my sister terribly!!!) and filled my plate with salad,  also avocado salad, and delicious homemade latkes!

Sunday:

Finally!  FabHubs wanted more latkes and since we have a ton of potatoes to use up that is what we had at breakfast! 

Camera was still sleeping though!  And the day was another one on the run…so no pix at breakfast!

Off to yet another Girl Scout activity!  FabPreteen ate pizza…I waited for dinner though.

Dinner was another avocado salad with avocado and red onion from  the box, tossed in balsamic with a little S&P.  Very simple but very good!

  

More tossed salad, again to use up veggies before I get my  refill  tomorrow!

Brown rice:

And a coconut/peanut tofu stirfry!  I had some green onions that were starting to go mushy and they fit  the bill perfectly in here! First time I have ever pressed  and pan fried tofu…it was good…not great but good.  Need to tweak the seasonings here…..(soy sauce, peanut butter, garlic, coconut)

      

And that is my week in review!  I did a great job using up my fruits and veggies from this week…and  even most of what I had piled up in the fridge from previous weeks!

Still left from last week and before are two mangos, two bananas, 2 lemons, 1 kiwi, salad, 3 zukes, more collards, a bunch of fresh spinach, some fresh herbs (I seem to have trouble using these up!), white taters, yams, and a kabocha! 

Sounds like a lot but relatively speaking it is not and will be easy to use!

The fridge actually looks kind of empty and ready to receive tomorrow's delivery.

The clock just struck midnight and I am off to bed!  Another busy busy day tomorrow.