Roasted Tomato Summer Spaghetti

Tomatoes, tomatoes, and MORE tomatoes!!!! They are everywhere. Pouring out of our CSA box. Growing beautifully on our unruly sweet 100 tomato plant. I'm trying my darnedest to keep up! I was nervous to bring out a new recipe, because my five-year-old is being outrageously picky. He ate this!

INGREDIENTS:
2-3 cups sungold tomatoes or sweet 100's, rinsed and stems removed
4-6 kale leaves, remove stem and roughly chop
one small onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
8 fresh basil leaves, minced
2 cups great northern beans (or other white bean), drained (rinse if canned)
1 lb whole wheat spaghetti
1 cup reserved of pasta cooking water
s&p to taste

Preheat oven to 400. Bring pot of water to boil. Cook spaghetti for 7 minutes. Reserve 1 cup of the pasta cooking water. Meanwhile, place tomatoes in baking dish. Drizzle with olive and salt and pepper. Roast for 20 minutes, stirring once halfway through. Add chopped kale and roast an additional 7 minutes. While tomatoes are roasting and pasta is cooking, heat 1-2 Tablespoons of olive oil in a medium/large sauce pan. Add onions until they soften. Add beans to warm. Add garlic and basil, stir. After 30 seconds turn off heat. Add tomatoes and kale when finished roasting. Add s&p to taste. Drain pasta when finished cooking. Add back the 1 cup of water to keep the pasta from being sticky. Top with sauce and serve!

Millet, Carrots and Kale

Odin enjoyed this meal so much he showed us his sign for "more" for the very first time! What a brilliant boy we have. :) I made the millet using this same process I've blogged about before. The carrots were roasted at 400 degrees for 30 minutes with olive oil and salt. The kale was chopped and added to the carrots to roast for the last 8 minutes. Pureed some of the veggies for Odin to enjoy with his millet, while the rest of us threw the veggies into our burritos. Enjoy! Odin did.

Roasted Beet Salad

INGREDIENTS:
8-10 beets, rinsed and trimmed
1 fennel bulb, rinsed, trimmed and diced
3 scallions, rinsed, trimmed and thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup cilantro, minced
2-3 Tablespoons of sunflower oil
1 Tablespoon balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
pumpkin seeds, garnish

Preheat oven to 400. Place beets in a baking dish along with about 1/4 inch water. Cover with foil (optional - experiment and see what you like best) and roast until tender but still firm (30-40 minutes). Larger beets will take longer than others. Let beets cool. Once cool, the skins will easily slide off. Slice and add to salad.

While waiting for beets to cook and cool, Add fennel, scallions, garlic and cilantro in your salad bowl. Drizzle with oil, vinegar and s&p. Let this marinate in fridge while beets cook and cool. Add beets when ready. Serve immediately or chill in fridge until ready to serve. To serve, sprinkle with pumpkin seeds and on a bed of lettuce.

A Slow Transformation

Obviously, I like to spend much of my time in the kitchen. It's really the only place (other than a yoga studio) I can truly clear my head and feel creative. However...the actual environment of my current kitchen is very dark, dreary, and dirty (in places). We've been here for almost three years, and I have detested the nasty carpet and dark ceilings. Seriously?! Who puts carpet in a kitchen. God only knows what's in that carpet no matter how hard those lovely professional carpet cleaners worked. Every yogurt, milk, juice stain is forever soaked in. I can barely bring myself to walk barefoot. Blah.

Next off, the ceiling is a tin design. Which is cool, but it's gold (never loved) and in the darkest corner of our house. Between the dark floor, dark ceiling, and dark oak cabinets I often feel like I'm in a dungeon. So! My lovely, lovely husband has begun our transformation. As you can see above, we are painting over the tin. That light fixture is gone and will soon be replaced. And, on July 28 my extraordinary husband and father-in-law will install a new bamboo floor! (Huge sigh of relief.) I'm already feeling like I could cry. My dream kitchen is on the horizon.

Lazy Lentil Casserole

Last night, I had no idea what we were going to have for dinner. It was the night before our CSA pick-up, so nearly everything had been eaten and prepared from last week's box. I turned to lentils and rice -- the perfect ingredients for a last-minute lazy dish. I always have each in my pantry. Off to Google I went. After a quick google search for lentils and rice, I was most inspired by this recipe. I made some changes to accomodate what I had on hand, and this is what I created. We all really loved it. Honestly, it's the most simple and loved new recipes I've made in a loooooooong time. Aksel, my three-year-old, even exclaimed, "This is a yummy meal." He's way more interested in moving on from dinner then asking for seconds...but, he had more...then more. I paired it with two small heads of lettuce from our garden drizzled with balsamic vinegar, sunflower oil and salt. My husband later decided to add some blue tortilla chips, which we all gladly used to scoop up the casserole.

INGREDIENTS:
2 Tablespoons of olive oil
3 carrots, diced
1 kohlrabi, peeled and diced (or onion)
1 fennel bulb, diced (or celery)
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup lentils, rinsed
1/2 cup short-grain brown rice, rinsed
2 to 2 1/2 cups of water
1 bouillon cube
1/2 teaspoon of salt

Heat olive oil over low to medium heat. Add carrots, kohlrabi and fennel. Measure and rinse lentils and rice. Add garlic and stir then add lentils and rice. Add water, salt and bouillon cube (I like to break it apart with my fingers as I add it to the pan). Cover and bring to a boil. Lower heat to create a gentle simmer. Simmer 30-40 minutes until lentils and rice are cooked and water is gone. Trick to testing to see if water is absorbed: gently tip pan to the side and see if water appears. If there is still water but the lentils and rice are cooked, just simmer with the lid off to help extra water evaporate.

Mango Berry Banana Smoothie

1 1/2 cups frozen mango (or peach)
1 cup frozen blueberries (or other berry)
2 bananas, unpeeled
2 1/2 - 3 cups unsweetened, plain soy milk (or other milk of your choice)
2 Tablespoons ground flaxseeds

Place all in the blender and puree until smooth. Add more soy milk to get your desired consistency or to stretch it out for one more person to enjoy!

Makes 5 1/2 - 6 cups of smoothie (enough for two adults and two children)

Cheers!

Thoughts on a CSA box

It's CSA season again, and I could not be happier. Every Thursday, we are gifted with an amazing box jam-packed with fresh, beautiful vegetables from Driftless Organics. I was inspired to write about how I used this past week's box, because many people ask how we can go through a full-share every week without food going to waste. Why so inspired this week? I was able to plow through this box in just two days. We were headed out of town for two and a half days just 36 hours after picking up our box, so I immediately attacked that box. Here is a list of the vegetables, and how I used them.

Broccoli
Garlic Chives
Green Garlic
Pea Vine
Radishes
Red Butterhead Lettuce
Red Potatoes
Salad Mix
Spinach
Yukina Savoy

Thursday
We picked up our box when we are usually already eating supper. So, just as we arrived home, I quickly threw in an Amy's veggie burger for the boys to share and started a pot of water to blanch the broccoli. Then I made a salad using half the spinach and half the salad mix along with pear, walnuts, balsamic vinegar, sunflower oil (also by Driftless and AMAZING) and freshly ground salt and pepper. The boys ate toast, veggie burger, salad and mounds of broccoli. Then off Ethan went to put them to bed as I continued on my mission.

Just after I pulled the broccoli out of the boiling water I tossed in the rest of the spinach which quickly wilted. I then pureed it and voila! Baby food. (Yes, there were bits of broccoli...but Odin loves broccoli, too). Put it in ice cube trays, and we've got spinach for several days for our Odin.

Dumped that water and started the pot all over again for a pound of whole wheat spaghetti. As the water came to a boil, I created pesto out of two handfuls of walnuts, all the garlic chives, salt and pepper, drizzle of olive oil, the rest of the salad mix (yes, you can make pesto from salad mix...you can make it from any green you want), and a cup of the pasta's cooking water. The cooking water is an excellent way to stretch the pesto with using very little oil and smoothing it out for the little ones. After the boys were asleep, Ethan and I finished the salad and had pesto spaghetti.

Friday
I was inspired to have breakfast for dinner, because this week's newsletter mentioned that the amount of potatoes was perfect for one batch of hashbrowns. I sliced the potatoes into 1/4 inch rounds, place in a pot and covered with cold water. Bring to a boil and parboil. I did this a few hours before dinner while the kids were either napping or occupied. Placed them in the fridge until I was ready to brown them. Heat one to two tablespoons of olive oil in a non-stick skillet. Add parboiled potatoes. Cover. Just before they were finished (about 8 minutes) I threw in the green garlic (chopped) and yukina savoy (roughly chopped). Along with the potatoes, we had another salad exactly the same as the night before except butterhead lettuce was the green along with roughly chopped pea vine. If you don't have pear, just skip the fruit or add berries instead! And the main dish...waffles!!! Topped with greek yogurt and pure maple syrup. My vegan-altered Betty Crocker recipe follows. I simply loved this meal.

Yes, I didn't use the radish...but they are sturdy and last long in the crisper drawer with the carrots and apples. I'm thrilled to use them tonight.

Vegan Waffles
1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 bananas
2 1/2 cups of soy milk
3/4 cup sunflower oil

Combine dry ingredients. Mash bananas in mixer. Gradually add soy milk, oil and dry ingredients until all are combined. Cook/bake as directed for your waffle maker. Extra waffles can be frozen. I used the extras for breakfast-in-the-car the next morning. (I needed to get to Grandma and Grandpa's house in record time...I needed a break!).