Breakfast that can be made ahead and reheated- genius?

So Chris and I got up one Sunday morning recently and decided we wanted breakfast burritos. Mmm, so good. You just saute up some onions, peppers, mushrooms, and any other veggies you feel like having. When they are good and soft, you add some scrambled eggs to the pan to cook with the veggies. We added salt and pepper, but other good additions would be parsley, basil, you name it. Basically, just season to your liking. When the eggs were cooked (but not rubbery!) we spooned the mix onto whole wheat tortillas. We put some spinach on top and grated some Parmesan over each tortilla. We wrapped them up really tight, put them in saran wrap and then in containers to freeze, aside from one for me and two for Chris for that morning :). So not only did we have a good nutritious breakfast, but also a ready meal or snack for any time of the day.

Do you ever make breakfast burritos? What do you put in them? Are there any foods you make ahead and freeze?

There is something missing here- guess what it is....

Something green (or any vegetable for that matter)!

Chris's whole fish kick is going strong. This is trout with a toasted almonds sauce. The sauce could be healthier- it has a lot of butter in it. You melt the butter, toast the nuts, and when they look golden, you add some white wine.

But first you coat the fish in flour and cook it through in the pan with some oil. When it is cooked you put it on a plate in a warm oven so you can work on the sauce. It was so good, even though the butter and pan frying probably negated some of the healthiness haha!

The rice is a wild rice I found at Trader Joe's- I had been dying to try it.

Do you like wild rice? Brown rice? Plain old white rice?

A healthier rice pudding for once!

I know the first picture looks like wall paper paste, and the second one is just blurry. But try to imagine a really delicious rice pudding, ok?

So I love rice pudding- the really good kind that is creamy and a little sweet and the perfect base for mix-ins like fruit (dried or fresh.) But rice pudding (especially the rich, creamy tasting kind) can really stick to those areas you try so hard to keep slim.

Not this kind though! The batch above was made with rice milk (you could use lowfat or nonfat dairy milk or soy milk too), arborio rice, and a bit of honey (agave nectar works well too!) to sweeten. I left it plain so Chris and I could add mix-ins as we please. He prefers more raisins than I like, I love to throw in some toasted nuts and cinnamon. You can find the recipe here. Let me know how it goes for you if you try it! :)

Pancakes :-D

Don't these look amazing and full of juicy blue-ness? We had some blueberries we needed to use up before they started going bad. We also had some leftover toasted almonds, from that ice cream I posted about ealier. So we whipped up some pancake batter (from scratch! No Bisquick needed when it is so easy and you probably have all the ingredients in the house already, right?), tossed in the fresh berries, and voila. We topped them off with the almonds and pure maple syrup (no HFCS here, and the taste is soooo much better.)

Chris and often wake up on a lazy weekend morning, and turn to each other and say simulataneously, "Pancakes?!?!?"

What do you like in/on your pancakes?

Let's have a smoothie

I love smoothies. They are just so, so SO versatile. You can put just about any fruit in them. You can use chocolate in them to make them more of a sweet treat, you can use peanut butter to make them more filling (and delicious.) You can add green tea matcha powder- a small dose of caffeine, some antioxidants, and all around goodness. You can make them vegan by using rice milk or soymilk instead of regular milk or yogurt. Really, the possibilities are just endless. And you can pack it up and take it to go in a travel coffee cup or some other container. You can have it as a snack, or a small meal, like for breakfast. What is not to love?

This combination here (and believe me, I have many more up my sleeve to share in the future) is frozen berry medley, rice milk, Organic Midnight Moo (Trader Joe's version of chocolate syrup- High Fructose Corn Syrup free!), and some ice cubes. I generally put the ice and any frozen fruit in the blender first and press the ice crusher button first. I add softer or liquid ingredients once the hard, frozen stuff is broken up a bit, and blend or puree.

We make smoothies like this a lot, but most often when we want something filling and healthy, but we want it quickly and without much work. Like Saturday mornings when we have a lot of yard work and house cleaning ahead of us. Or weeknights when we are too hot and exhausted to make a real dinner. We definitely vary the combination depending on how filling we need to make it, or if we want more protein in it.

Do you like smoothies? What do you put in yours?

The lovely eggplant

Can anyone guess what these are? Slices of eggplant with a mix of onions, garlic, miso and honey on top. I got the recipe here. It was absolutely delicious. Even the husband raved about them!



We served the eggplant with some leftover spinach couscous, in order to use it up. But the recipe suggests serving over brown rice and a fried egg with the yolk still runny. We exchanged the brown rice for the couscous but did take the advice of serving with the fried egg. So good, in a very unexpected way.

Now you know how I feel about fried eggs (or zuppa zuppa eggs. Or dippy eggs.) They demand toast in order to dip in the egg, right? Well, Chris had brought home some of Panera's amazing Three Cheese Bread. To die for.



I had leftover eggplant and couscous at work the next day. Love food that works as leftovers, don't you?

I scream you scream... well you know how it goes

Chris and I don't smoke. We barely drink any alcohol. We don't do drugs. But our one real, true vice- one that is just unavoidable- is ice cream.

We try to buy healthier, more natural kinds. The fewer ingredients, the better. We don't buy low-fat or non-fat kinds- they just don't satisfy the craving, you know? And we figure if we don't do it often, buying full fat ice cream is ok. We have found some really good ice cream made from soy and rice milk that we really loved, but nothing beats Haagan Dazs or Ben and Jerry's.

Except maybe making your own. Above are two ice creams we made ourselves. The first is called Aphrodisiac Ice cream, I guess because the ingredients could be considered to have that effect. Aside from the cream part, it contains figs (mmmm, fresh figs), honey, and toasted almonds. I don't think the original recipe called for the honey, but it just compliments figs so well!

The second flavor you see above is Green Tea Ice cream. It came out just... ok. The recipe calls for six (six!) eggs. Since I had never made the recipe before, I followed it exactly, and the end result was very.... eggy. It is still ice cream and not green tea scrambled eggs, as some reviewers found, but next time around I will definitely cut back the eggs to three, maybe four.

Neither one of these treats is anywhere near lowfat, and eating too much of it could result in thighs that do resemble scrambled eggs in texture. But, we don't make ice cream often, just as we don't buy it often. But when I get the urge, I sure am glad I have my Cuisinart Ice Cream maker!

Have you ever made ice cream? What is your food vice? Do you have a hard time indulging only once in a while?

Drunken fish

I know, I know. You are sick of seeing fish. I probably should have just named this blog "Fish, fish, and more fish." Or maybe "A WHOLE lot of fish" would have been more apropos. But bear with me here.

This is tuna, once again.

Chris wanted to try something he remembered from when he worked at the Mediterranean restaurant Ayhan's on Long Island. They sauteed onions until soft, and tossed in red grapes cut in half (so they don't burst open, haha.) There was some more to the seasoning, but we season to taste, and it is usually on a whim. Once the onions and grapes are cooked a bit, he added a splash of red wine.

At the restaurant, this sauce would have been for chicken, but as we do not keep chicken in the house anymore, Chris had to improvise with seafood, so he used tuna steaks. We served the fish on a bed of spinach couscous with some pignoli nuts.

Normally I think white wine is better suited to seafood than red, but this came out pretty good- very tasty! Plus, it made for a very colorful meal.

What is the most interesting thing you have cooked/eaten lately?

Frittata is so hot- ah...

When we are in the mood for eggs, we usually go with over easy ones, where the yolk is still dip-able. But we feel there is no point to making this kind of egg when you have no bread/toast- you know? So, when we want something quick and easy, like eggs, and we have no bread in the house we sometimes make an omelet (or frittata.) These are great because they are tasty both hot and cold, you can use up excess vegetables in them, and you can put a slice between pieces of bread for a quick and filling sandwich.

This one was made by sauteing onions, garlic, and zucchini in olive oil until soft. Whisk eggs (we used 6 eggs for this one) in a bowl with salt and fresh ground pepper, then pour the eggs over the vegetables. Let the eggs cook and firm up around the vegetables (we put a cover on the pan to speed up cooking and make sure the top got cooked as well), then turn the pan over onto a big plate. We sprinkled pignoli nuts on top (since we love them so much, haha).

How do you cook your eggs?

P.S. I call sunny-side up and over-easy eggs "zuppa zuppa" while Chris calls them "dippy eggs." Do you have a funny name for them?

Homemade energy bars

Fruit in it's natural state is the ultimate, perfect grab-and-go food. But it's nice to change things up, no?





That there, my friends, is a raw, vegan, homemade energy bar, not unlike Larabars. The difference is that mine were much cheaper to make.

Larabars are typically $1-$2 apiece. While I think they are definitely worth the money you pay for them (they have only 3 or 4 ingredients, are raw, vegan, and organic, they give you a serving or two of fruit and sometimes nuts, and they are crazy high in fiber and offer a good amount of other nutrients), I do not have that kind of money to buy them and eat them on a regular basis, so I buy them as treats or if we are going to be on a long road trip.

But now that I have made my own and I was successful, I may not buy them even then. I found some recipes here and here, but I really only used them as a guide. I didn't want to get to the point (as I often do) where I find a recipe and go on a crazy hunt for crazy ingredients of which I had never heard (which happens a lot lately.) I wanted to use things I would have in my own kitchen at any time. Bars like this are easy to experiment with in that way, and isn't that what cooking should be anyway?

So basically I find dried fruit and pulse it to form a paste, adding some water to help it along. You still want it to be dry though so that it holds the bar shape easily. For this bar I used dates (Larabars seem to use them as a base in most of their bars) and prunes. Prunes are slightly less expensive, have less sugar, and more fiber and potassium than dates. But dates have an awesome sweet taste- they're like nature's candy. So, I pulse the dried fruits together, and once it is paste-like I throw in other stuff. I used pecans, dark chocolate pieces and cocoa powder for the bar shown.

Sorry for not including actual amounts- like I said, it involved some experimenting to get to the right consistency.

Once I had everything mixed together, I lined a pan with wax paper and dumped the mix in. I cut another piece of wax paper to lay on top and pressed the mix down to even it out and flatten it. Then I put the pan in the fridge to get the soon-to-be bars cold and hard. After a few hours, I pulled it out, and used a sharp knife to cut into it into bars, but I left the wax paper on- both sides. It acts like a wrapping, making the bar portable. I keep the bars stacked in a tupperware container in the fridge where they are easily accessible so one can reach in, grab one and go. They make a good, high energy, high fiber breakfast, or an anytime snack for when you need sustenance but you don't have time for a meal.

Chris and I loved them, and a friend who had one seemed to enjoy his as well. Since they were a hit, they didn't last long. But that's ok, that just means I can experiment with different flavors. Chris suggested apricots for a future trial- sounds good to me!

Apparently you can buy date paste ready-made, but I haven't found it in any grocery stores yet. I checked Giant and Trader Joe's. I read somewhere that it can be found in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Stores, but here in Phoenixville, I doubt there are many of those. So for now, I will be making my own paste.

Do you like to have grab-and-go food on hand? Do you buy it, or make your own?

I love corn

This is a typical dinner for us. The first dish may look like vomit (at least Chris thought so), but rest assured it TASTED fabulous. We sauteed onions, garlic and mushrooms until soft in olive or vegetable oil. Then we laid salmon fillets in the pan and seasoned everything with a tiny bit of salt, fresh ground pepper, red pepper flakes, and we tossed in some pignoli nuts (yum.) We covered the pan and waited for it to whistle, signaling it was done. (For whistling pans, check here. The are really good, heavy pans, can be great for healthy cooking and eating, and if cared for properly will last a lifetime- making up for the high cost.) When it was done we plated it over some cooked amaranth and raw baby spinach.

Chris decided he isn't a huge fan of amaranth. It kind of has the consistency of porridge if cooked too long- much better if left with a bit of crunch to it. I think I read somewhere that amaranth is related to spinach, which I could believe, because it kind of smelled like spinach when we were cooking it. You boil it and watch for the right consistency, kind of like you would with pasta or rice. It didn't come out as good as I would have liked, but I haven't given up totally on it.

The salad was simple and fresh. Just more of that baby spinach, sliced tomatoes, and uncooked corn. The corn gave it some crisp sweetness. It was frozen from a bag and thawed so I can't even imagine how much better it would have tasted if we had in season, local corn to use. After this salad I decided I love corn, even more so when it is raw. I will admit that it does not offer as much nutrition as a lot of other vegetables, like broccoli or carrots. But it does have plenty of fiber in a 1 cup serving- 17% of your daily value, and only 132 calories.

Do you like corn? What's your favorite vegetable? Do you eat a lot of fish? What kinds? :)

P.S. When using pignoli nuts, be careful not to overdo it- they are pretty high in calories (915 in 1 cup), fat (93g!), and saturated fat (6.7g!) This is not a nut you would necessarily want to snack on, like walnuts or almonds. But they have good flavor and add a lot as a garnish, or in pesto, in different pasta dishes, etc.