Recipe Report - Roasted Sweets & Greens

I found this recipe in the October 2011 issue of Better Homes and Gardens. You can also find it here: http://www.kitchenmonki.com/recipe/Roasted_Sweets_Greens. It's on the bhg.com website, too, but I needed to log in to access it, and I just refused. I chose this recipe because it packs 6 grams of fiber and 4 grams of protein into a 236-calorie serving, and because I love sweet potatoes.

The recipe took about 45 minutes to make. The arugula was expensive (close to $4 for a box) and I think the recipe would have been just as good with spinach or parsley, frankly. DH was wildly enthusiastic about this dish, and would have gladly eaten the whole pan by himself. DS wasn't that impressed, although he ate a good-sized serving, too. I didn't think I liked it much, but then I caught myself going back for more. All in all, if you want a filling, tasty side dish to make up for a lightweight main course, this is it. After a serving and a half, I had little room for anything else.

By the way, counting my calories and upping my exercise has paid off in a big way already; I have lost 17 pounds. I feel like I'm peeling myself like an onion (at 15 pounds lost, I was back to 2007 when we moved to Indiana from overseas; at 17 lost, I'm the weight I was in 2003 when our daughter was a seventh grader and our son was eight). I'm trying not to set any impossible goals, but 20 lost would be a nice start. Anyone interested in committing to a life of eating what your body needs instead of what it wants might want to check out myfitnesspal.com. It has been a godsend to me; I have the app on my iPhone and enter every single thing that I eat every day.

Where did the summer go?

What a summer! Lots of stuff happened, some of it really good, like the visit by my friend Michelle from New York (shown with yours truly above at Spring Mill State Park) and our trip to Chicago together, some of it really not good, like the four days my mom spent in the hospital (she's better now, thankfully), and some of it just busy, busy, busyness brought on by trying to keep up with volunteer commitments and life in general.

DD had two guests in August; her boyfriend (who has been described in this blog before--tall, handsome, Lithuanian, and now so hairy that her friends have dubbed him "six foot Jesus"), and her former host brother from France, an adorable boy who doesn't speak much English, but when he does, the accent is pure foie gras. When she ran out of stuff to do with them (or food to feed them) in Bloomington, she brought them home to the old jail, which I loved. We traveled around the southern Indiana countryside, we ate, we went out to restaurants, we ate, we cooked up great food in the kitchen, we ate... Did I mention that we ate?

And now time to pay the piper. I avoided getting on the bathroom scale until everyone was back in school and the fun and craziness were over, but on Friday morning I ran out of excuses and faced the music. Not good. Really not good. So now I'm trying hard to get it all back off. I've vowed to work out every day and limit my calories until I can bear to look at a photo of myself in a color other than black. I've appointed DD my "accountability coach" so I won't have to bore you with the details. Wish me luck.

I Broke the Knitting Jinx

Some time ago I donated several pieces of woven cotton to a woman who makes bonnets to sell in our museum gift shop. In return she gave me, among other things, a knitted cotton washcloth. I had never understood the passion some people seem to have for knitted washcloths until I took this one to the kitchen and employed it in place of the sponge for washing dishes. It had a nice diagonal pattern that created just enough friction to get the dishes clean, and I just loved the feel of it. Unfortunately I have used it so much that it's looking pretty stained and ugly, so I'm not going to show it to you, but I will show you the new washcloth I was inspired to knit as a result of how much I liked the gifted one.

Oops--I'm getting ahead of myself. What I wanted to explain was, I haven't knitted anything for a while. That teal bulky sweater that you may remember from several years ago now is the reason. No matter what I do with that bulky yarn, it doesn't work and I rip it out again. I refuse to buy any more yarn until I use that up--I paid $100 or so for it, on sale, and my failure to come up with a winning design mocks me every time I look in the sewing room closet. So I putter around in the kitchen, as you know, and work on my little translation, and play Spider Solitaire, now that Lent is over, and in general accomplish very little at home. Until yesterday.

Yesterday was really hot--95 or so. Here in the old jail we don't have central air conditioning, which is pretty inefficient, anyway, and most of the time that's not a problem, but yesterday the heat was just beastly, so I spent the afternoon sitting under the ceiling fan in the living room knitting a washcloth in a corner-to-corner design called a "diagonal bee stitch," similar to the one I was given as a present. I found the pattern here: http://hakucho.blogspot.com/search?q=diagonal+bee+stitch+

The yarn, a high-quality worsted-weight cotton, was left over from some long-ago project; I love the color as much now as I did then. I have a nice hot pink in the same yarn and I think I'll make a second one when time permits. I love the way this one turned out, and I'm crossing my fingers that the knitting jinx is broken and I can make a few more interesting things in cotton before the weather turns cold and I can tackle that teal Blue Sky bulky for the last time.

Recipe Report - Garden Veggie Linguine with Cilantro Pesto

The recipe appears on page 161 of the May 2011 issue of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. I have been wanting to make it for some time, but there has been a shortage of cilantro in the grocery stores in our town (honestly, I looked at all four and the farmer's market). I finally got to make it tonight, and it was well worth the wait. In the meantime I reintroduced the boys to fresh oranges and zucchini, which I had to buy a couple of times waiting for cilantro to appear.

This stuff is delicious. DS couldn't get enough of it. I made it with fettucine instead of linguine. The noodles end up covered in spicy olive-y goodness, and the carrots, oranges and zucchini offer individual taste sensations that complement the noodles and cilantro well. I cut the salt in half and didn't miss it at all, and I used Grey Poupon mustard instead of dry mustard, which I don't use enough to justify keeping in stock. The recipe is relatively cheap to make. It's a bit of a calorie bomb (518 calories a serving), but could be dinner all by itself, so we'll definitely be making it again.

If you don't subscribe to Better Homes and Gardens, the recipe is also available on-line at the following address:

http://www.bhg.com/recipes/from-better-homes-and-gardens/better-homes-and-gardens-may-2011-recipes/#page=12

Blame the weather

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted anything. I have lots of excuses--it's fundraiser time at the museum again, and DH and I have been working on a house that we will put on the market this spring. It's out in the country about fifteen miles from our old jail, and once there we don't come back quickly, as you might imagine. Even though he has been doing the lion's share of the work, I have kept busy there, too. Today we finally got the kitchen cabinet doors back on (after taking them off, removing all the hardware, shopping for new hardware, applying several coats of new paint, and putting all the hardware back on). We're one tile backsplash away from finishing the kitchen, hooray!

In the breaks between regular life (work, laundry, cooking, etc.) and fixing up the other house, I've been going through the motions of the spring-to-summer transition here at home, but I haven't been inspired to do anything interesting. I bought new cushions for the porch furniture (you may remember that the old ones were lumpy and faded and basically only suitable for napping cats), but now I hesitate to put the new ones out because Mr. Fuzz and his friends will just make a mess of them.

I did have a very good time the other day pulling up dandelions with the Fiskars Weed-Eater and transplanting the tomato plants. There's something about puttering around outside on a sunny day (we haven't had many of them this year, unfortunately). Maybe that's why I'm not getting much done. It's not that I'm procrastinating, indecisive, and unmotivated. It's the weather, right?

Braised Peas with Scallions and Lettuce

Ever on the lookout for new ways to serve green vegetables, I marked this recipe in a recent issue of Better Homes and Gardens and went out to shop for ingredients. In the meantime, my sister-in-law ended up in the hospital for a few days and I took her a stack of magazines to read, including the one with this recipe. I hunted for it on line and was happy to find it here:

http://www.bhg.com/recipes/printRecipe.jsp?recipeId=R160253&adCategory=null&catref=rcbhg1

I didn't even start dinner last night until 8:15 or so, after choir practice, so I needed something nutritious that could be prepared quickly. I put a package of salmon fillets in the oven, set DS to preparing whole wheat macaroni and cheese, and started chopping green onions and romaine lettuce. Dinner was on the table in a half an hour and the new recipe proved very tasty, an excellent vehicle for serving green vegetables, including the season's very first harvest of fresh mint from our yard. The picture shows how it looked in the pan; it looked even better next to the orange of the salmon and the yellow of the macaroni and cheese, but I was too hungry to think about taking another picture.

This recipe is by British chef Jamie Oliver, whose "Food Revolution" has sparked more than a little controversy on this side of the pond. Jamie crusades to make school lunches healthier, occasionally putting himself at odds with budget-strapped school systems and frankly, people who just don't want a guy with a chopping knife and an English accent telling them what to do. Not having been much of a fan of peas as a child myself, I'm not sure how this recipe would fare in an Indiana school cafeteria, but DS liked it, praising the tangy flavor, and he backed up the praise by eating two or three helpings. The nutritional content is impressive: 142 calories, only 5 grams of fat, 4 mg of cholesterol, low in sodium, carbs and sugar, a decent level of fiber and protein and 55% of your recommended daily allowance of vitamin C. Two thumbs way, way up!

Tomato Redux

Faithful readers may remember our tomato debacle of a couple of years ago when my well-meaning DH managed to kill the plants that DS had spent the whole spring nurturing from seeds. Last year DS, stubborn like all the men in my family, refused to have anything to do with plants, but this year there were signs of a thaw, so I planted a variety of tomato seeds in twenty-two pots using some potting soil I bought at Lowe's. DS got eleven of them for his east-facing window and the west windows of the kitchen got the other eleven. We already had the pots, so all I had to buy for this venture were seeds and soil, so I spent less than $10 total.

It took a couple of weeks for the first seedlings to appear. The potting soil is very loose and every time I pour in water the soil floats up and rearranges, which can't be good for the seedlings. DS had already proclaimed the entire enterprise a dismal failure before the first telltale loop of green appeared in one of the pots. We now have more than twenty tomato plants. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for another bumper tomato crop here at the old jail. DS is starting to show some interest, but he leaves the watering to me, and we are both watching DH closely to make sure he doesn't decide to "help."