my mommy's takin' care o' me

We're in San Antonio visiting my parents for the Thanksgiving holiday. Mom had grilled chicken (grilled by Dad, of course), green salad, fruit salad and rolls waiting for us when we arrived. For that I am truly thankful, especially since we are currently sans barbecue grill at home and I miss those delicious char marks.

No pics tonight, but just wait. I made three pies today to accompany the feast that Mom and I will make tomorrow. I promise pics galore. (Not that it will look much different than your feast, but you know...)

sandwiches

Lessons learned:

1. Do not go grocery shopping two days before Thanksgiving.
   
2. Do not go grocery shopping at 5pm.
3. Do not go grocery shopping two days before Thanksgiving at 5pm.

It was insane. So insane that the bumper to bumper grocery carts made me forget to pick up chicken for dinner and the turkey bacon for breakfast. The insanity crept into my bones and made me forget to take pics of dinner tonight. My brain was all "rush, rush, you've got to get it done." I wasn't like this prior to the supermarket. And I'm not like it now after watching LOTR The Two Towers. Whoa! Talk about digression. This isn't day-in-the-life-of-a-grocery-shopper. Sorry.

Tonight we had turkey sandwiches. We were supposed to have broiled chicken, but per previous paragraph you know why we didn't. Thinking about this after the fact, I realize that turkey was a bad choice. I mean, come on, what are we going to be eating for the next week? And I jumped onto the turkey bandwagon two days early? What was I thinking?

Good news was that we had green leaf lettuce. Finally! Something fresh and green. I made pita bread and hummus for lunch so we ate our sandwiches with the fresh pita. Yum! My sandwich had hummus, turkey and lettuce. I was happy enough with that flavor combo that I made myself one more 1/2 way through the movie. I mean, come on. They were in the Battle of Helm's Deep. I had to keep up my strength.

sushi

I haven't gone shopping yet. I think most of my posts start out like this, don't they? Well...

I was looking in the pantry. I guess "staring blankly" is a more accurate descriptor. All the sudden I realized "SUSHI!" I had all the makings of sushi. In the end we found out that we were out of pickled ginger and were very sad, but it didn't dampen our spirits too bad.

In our house, sushi dinners are usually three-fold.

1. Tamago Nigiri (sweet omelet sushi)
2. California Rolls (at the bare minimum we at least have the krab. like tonight)
3. Miso Soup

The tamago is a must. It is pretty easy to make and almost everyone's favorite. But to make the tamago you need dashi. Dashi is the broth that you use to make miso soup. And since I need dashi for the tamago, might as well make the miso soup while I'm at it. And since you need sushi rice to make the tamago into tamago nigiri...well, you can see how this all works out.

Tonight our roll options were krab, sesame seeds, salmon furikake, wasabi, and shrimp furikake. It was a little sparse, but with three different courses, it was still good. Hubsters was happy. I was happy. Kids were happy. (Well, except the sick one. But she was happier once she ate a slice of tamago!)

The tamago recipe is here. You really should go to an Asian Market and get yourself a tamago pan if you want to make tamago. I don't know how'd you do it otherwise. Don't buy it online if you can help it since they are more expensive. They are really cheap at a market.

I use this sushi rice recipe with good results. Tonight I had to use long-grain rice and it was okay. If you use actual sushi rice it is sublime.

I always make shiitake dashi for two reasons. Dried shiitakes last forever in the pantry. They're always ready for me. Also, my husband is not a big lover of fish and traditional dashi is made with fish flakes. I use this recipe and after I take out the amount I need for the tamago I use the rest to make miso soup. I just add two green onions, a pinch of salt, 1 tablespoon of soy sauce and 2 tablespoons of miso. Sometimes I add wakame (seaweed) and sometimes tofu. Not tonight.

I'm always so happy when I can scratch out one. more. meal. Especially if it tastes so gosh darn good.

thank heaven for friends

I wasn't feeling well. Thought I might have a kidney stone. (didn't. Thank God!) Got home from church and slept until the phone rang and our friends invited us over for beef stew and cornbread. Despite my desire to keep sleeping, I wasn't about to turn down already made dinner when I felt like...well...let's just say "not good." Thank you, friends! Thank you!

ridiculousness

Tonight is a night I DO NOT want to admit what we ate. This is a humbling post. A post that brings truth to my blog title.

I need to go to the store so very badly. I have exactly eleven cans of food in my pantry: three evaporated skim milk, two tomato pastes, four pumpkin purees, one coconut milk, and one sweet corn. And while I have many pounds of dried beans and rice, the dinner hour came upon me without any forethought on my part. I blame the kids. They wanted me to watch Beverly Hills Chihuahua with them and I decided to be a "nice" mom and agreed.

The husband was out. My first offering to the children: top ramen. I had three packages for five kids (we have a guest). They ate it all and were still hungry. Next, I tried cheddar slices (enough for two per kid), peanut butter and apples. I also threw pickles into the mix for good measure. They ate it all and were still hungry when the husband returned. We got Sonic (brown bag special for us adults and one jr. breakfast burrito each for the kidlings) and I think they could still have eaten more, but it was bed time.

Can you believe it? Ramen, cheese, pickles, apples, peanut butter and a Sonic sausage breakfast burrito.

Now you know. Do you still want to read this blog?!

golden split pea soup + brownies

I finally made the recipe I've been meaning to for the last three days: Golden Split Pea Soup from my Low-Fat Moosewood. We won't be trying that one again.

It sounded so enticing. Golden split peas, sweet potato, apples and curry-type spices. And when it's done cooking, you blend it smooth. I love blended soups! So much potential and yet fell so flat. When I gave it the final taste test it was so much worse than bland. The apples made it too sweet and I couldn't cut it. Not even by adding extra soy sauce and lime juice. It was still so mediocre I added half a brick of cream cheese. Adding cream cheese to anything is an improvement as was so in this case. But I'm sorry to say that it just made it palatable. Nothing more. The littlest dude loved it and it was good enough to have seconds, but I won't be making it again.

Luckily, I had made some brownies. Someone gave me a bag of brownie mix and even though it was a mix and even though it had hydro, I made them.

I guess everyday can't be a raving success or else we wouldn't appreciate the ones that are. (Forgive me, family, for serving you death oil!)

oatmeal pancakes

You know that recipe I was supposed to make last night? Well, it was supposed to be made tonight. Now I'm planning on using it tomorrow. That's the plan anyways. Instead we had pancakes.

Our friends had to take their son to the medical center in Houston for one of the last consultation/testing appointments for his cochlear implant. They had to leave at 6am. To accomplish this their other three children stayed the night. This meant I had to keep on six children to do their school today (we're both homeschoolers) plus fill their tummies and I have a seven-month old. It actually wasn't as bad as it sounds but I was pretty exhausted come start-dinner time.

So...we had pancakes. Five sixths of the family's favorite kind: Oatmeal Pancakes. A while ago I found the recipe here at The Family Homestead and usually make it far less healthier with all white flour and use sugar instead of sucanat. Otherwise I follow her instructions exactly. They are delicious. To feel that I put in at least a little bit of effort tonight, I made a quick little pineapple sauce for my youngest boy. He loves pineapple. (Personally, I usually eat them with plain yogurt and some maple syrup, but today I swapped chunky peanut butter for the yogurt. Tastalicious.)

Kudos for me for making dinner. No kudos for the huge pile of dishes I'm ignoring until tomorrow.

chili's

I'm so disappointed.

I had a dinner already planned out for tonight. But it was vegetarian and I was hankering for some beef. Far too easily I talked the hubbers to go out for dinner. We went to Chili's and although my cheesesteak sandwich with added avocado was good, it wasn't great. Especially considering how much it costs for our family of six to eat out. I wasn't the only one who noticed. Picky child informed me when I tried to get her to eat more of her food, "Mom, my pizza tastes like plastic, the fries are way too salty and I'm sick of drinking this too sweet chocolate milk." Although the miser in me was hoping less of her food would be wasted, secretly I was pretty proud. She's got a discriminating palate and I'm not going to complain too hard when she doesn't want to eat over-fatted, over-salted, over-processed food. It just pounded home to me what a complete waste of money it usually is for our family to eat out.

ps - We did try her pizza and she was right. Blech.

miso soup

I got the basics of this recipe from that Japanese Women book I read a while back. The author calls it "Japanese Country Power Breakfast." Tonight we called it dinner. It's really just a miso soup on steroids. Healthy, healthy steroids.

First, I made the dashi (broth) with shiitake mushrooms from a recipe out of my Low-Fat Moosewood. Very, very good, although I add a sheet of konbu seaweed for extra yumminess. (I've also used this recipe for good results.) Once the dashi is made I added all the extras that were suggested: rice, hard-boiled egg, fried tofu, scallions, assorted cooked veggies (I had corn, carrots, celery, napa cabbage and broccoli on hand), and of course, miso. The variations are endless. If I had thought ahead I would have sprouted some mung beans.

One kid loves this. Another two tolerate it. Picky child chooses to go hungry. Oh well. So be it.

I made everyone the same size portion and when the kids got full I ate theirs. There were no leftovers. Not with me around. It was far too delicious to eat in moderation. And did I mention how entirely good for you it is? Maybe not as good for you when you eat as much as I did, but it's better than overeating on caramel brownies, wouldn't you say?

breakfast burritos

At 5pm my friend called to see if we wanted to carpool to our 7pm homeschool support group. Oops! Forgot all about it. We had to leave at 630pm and I still had to make dinner, feed baby and change/clean up since I was still in my running clothes. No time for complicated.

We had breakfast burritos: refried beans, scrambled eggs, taco sauce, sour cream and cheese. Even threw on a little of that chili-lemon sauce from the feijoada last night. They were tasty. No one complained. Definitely was lacking in the fresh fruits/veggies department but we were eating quickly enough that I didn't leave on an empty stomach. And that always makes me happy.

vegetarian feijoada

It's Brazilian and it's pronounced fay-shwah-duh. I knew you would want to know that right off the bat. Typically it's not vegetarian, but it's from Moosewood, so...

Feijoada is Brazil's national dish via the Portuguese. Traditionally it is a pork, beef and black bean stew. Ours was just the black beans. We also had steamed collards, something called Brazilian rice (just a spanish-type rice), orange segments and this tasty chili-lemon salsa stuff. The whole thing came from my cookbook.

The bean-hater child hated it. Everyone else ate their required amounts without complaint. I had seconds. (or was that thirds?) What was extra-tasty was the soup we made out of it the next day. Blended it all together (even the oranges) with a can of V8 and topped with the salsa, some cheddar and sour cream. Mmmmm...

Next time I think I'll try it with the meat. But I think I'm adding this to my repetoire. It was good and soooo good for you.

i'm thinking...arby's?

My little baby had a fever tonight. 102 degrees. She was clingy and unhappy. Cooking wasn't an option. Husband was building me a dining room table so he wasn't going to be cooking either. (He's a good cook, by the way) So...we had Arby's. To their credit, their Market Fresh sandwiches are not bad. I had a roast turkey and swiss. If I have to have fast food and I can't have Burgerville, I'll have an Arby's Market Fresh sandwich which comes with only the minimum of fast food guilt.

ps If you happen to be at Burgerville when either their chocolate hazelnut shakes or their sweet potato fries are in season...ORDER THEM!! You will thank me. You will come back here and on your knees thank me.

wienie roast

We had a bonfire at friends and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. Night off. Every once in a while I need one of those.

vegetarian shepherd's pie + salad

My first meh recipe from Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites. It's called "Another Shepherd's Pie" and we just weren't impressed. I had such high hopes with it's mashed potato layer, the veggie and kasha layer and the whole thing topped with mushroom gravy. But it just didn't deliver. I mean it was okay and all, but it just wasn't good enough to have again. I'm sad to have to say that about anything I spend a little extra time cooking, but there it is. Can't be helped.

I tacked on a green leaf salad with baby greens and carrot and was a good girl, only dressing it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

I was full, but far from satisfied.

Almost forgot. For dessert we had banana chunks dipped in white chocolate and rolled in peanuts. Yeah, they were good. Almost made up for dinner. Almost.

pizza

Pizza night. Tonight's varieties were

1. cheese
2. cheese and pineapple
3. barbecue seitan, pineapple and olive (barbecue sauce instead of pizza sauce, not seitan cooked on the barbecue)
   

I made the seitan in order to have some sort of meat-y topping. It was good enough that I'll do it again. It's super easy to make (and way cheaper than buying) and you can find recipes anywhere. I've had good luck with the one from The Vegetarian Family Cookbook. Oh! and it's pronounced say-tan. It's Japanese, you'll just have to get over the similarities to that dark lord dude.

I sliced it up and sauteed it with some salt and pepper. Now I'll be honest, it won't fool anybody. But if you think of it as its own thing instead of a meat substitute, it's tasty. Suffice it to say, nobody complained about the seitan. Now the olives on the other hand...

mushroom-polenta pie + salad

I'm loving my Mooseweood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites. It is right up my alley cooking-wise. Tonight we tried out the mushroom-polenta pie. A darn tasty dish. Although I think it should have kale in the name because there's just as much kale as there are mushrooms. Kids ate it, one loved it. I had seconds.

You make a pot of polenta, put it in a baking dish then put the sauteed onion, mushroom, kale mixture on top, sprinkled with parmesan and bake. I served it topped with a quickly-made tomato sauce and a tossed green salad. With the sauteeing and polenta-ing and baking and chopping and salad-spinning and sauce-simmering (and not even counting the serving that I pureed in the food processor for the baby) there were waaaay too many dishes to clean, but it was good enough that I'd wade through that dish pile again to get another serving.

fried soba noodles

Fried noodles is one of my standbys. Tonight I made it with soba. The veggie stars were baby bok choy (love this stuff!) and Indian eggplant. They are tiny, little tangerine-sized eggplants that tend to be much more tender than the giants you find in the supermarket. I also threw in an onion, a couple carrots and some Napa cabbage. I made up a sauce with fresh ginger, garlic, kecap manis (or sweet shoy sauce or sweet soy sauce), oyster sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil and a few drops of fish sauce. Throw it all together and you get a dish that can fill two big and four little tummies, plus some for lunch tomorrow. The kids usually put sweet chili sauce on theirs but I love mine with sambal. (Indonesian chili sauce with a kick! Move over Tabasco, you ain't got nothin' on sambal.)

Almost forgot! Fresh pineapple for dessert.

take out

I was sick. I had enough gumption to make soup for lunch, but dinner rolled around and the answer was to have hubberoni take the reins. This always means pizza. Everyone was happy. They were all happy for obvious reasons and I was happy because I could stay in bed playing the PSP. (Takes my mind off the ache-y body.)

leftovers

Sometimes it's just nice to eat what's already there.

chicken noodle soup + pumpkin custard

(This post has been inserted after-the-fact.)
Somehow Friday's dinner was lost. Spouse-man checked out the blog and noticed that I hadn't posted Friday, yet Saturday and Sunday were very obviously there. Leftovers and sickness drained my memory and neither of us could remember what we had eaten. I checked the camera and sure enough there it was. I had used the leftover chicken bones from the yummy roasted chicken dinner the night before and made some really, really good soup. Sure it looks a lot like this meal, but it was so much better. The difference using roasted chicken makes is phenomenal. I just took the bones and any leftover scraps, covered them with water and boiled for an hour or so. Added carrots, a sauteed onion, garlic and macaroni noodles. (Oh! and thyme, as well.) It was perfect.

For dessert I made these low-fat pumpkin custards. (Really just skinny pumpkin pie without the crust.) I snatched the recipe from my new cookbook. For being low-fat it was good. Yes, it needs the qualifier "for being low-fat."

Scorecard:
soup, 10
custard, 5

roast chicken + roasted veggies + salad

I had a couple chickens and decided to roast them. I found a recipe in my binder that I had apparently used before (it had notes in my hand, mostly about starting at 450 then after 30 minutes flipping it and cooking it the rest of the time at 375) but have no recollection of it. It sounded good so I went for it. It's a rub with salt, sugar and a bunch of pumpkin pie-type spices. (cinnamon, allspice, etc) Since we're trying to lower fat, I pulled all the skin off the little chicks before rubbing them down with their spice mix. In the end this turned out great since the meat itself was flavored and quite tasty. At the same time I roasted some onions, carrots and potatoes that had been tossed in oregano, olive oil and salt. (recipe from the latest addition to my library) We finished the meal off with a tossed green salad.

I highly recommend the chicken. It was tastiness.

ps - Sorry for the crappy pictures as of late. I really need a better lighting system and since the sun goes down so freaking early nowadays...you're stuck with sucky pictures taken by flash. But hey! let's just be thankful we get pictures at all, right?

rice balls + tokyo salad

I still have a few recipes I want to try from that Japanese book I read. Tonight I tried the author's rice balls. It was actually a simple recipe. Take hot-from-the-pot, burn-your-palms-off rice and shape it into a ball. Poke a hole in it and put in some filling, then reshape it. Take 1/4 of a sheet of nori and wrap it around one half. Use another 1/4 sheet to wrap around the other half. The end. That's it.

We used salmon (from a can, bleh) for half of them and bonito fish flakes soaked in soy sauce for the others. Next time we're gonna nix the salmon, and fill 1/3 with the fish flakes, 1/3 with some krab and 1/3 with some dried Japanese apricots. Hubby, who spent three months in Japan in high school, also wants me to try some sweet red bean, too. Despite our dislike of the salmon, the rice balls were a success and loved by everyone.

I took leftover salad from last night and tossed it with the dressing from the author's recipe for Tokyo Salad. (rice vinegar, brown sugar, sesame oil) Meal complete. Oh! And for decoration, we got to eat with various stormtroopers and droids aimed at us. Nothing like a peaceful meal at gunpoint...

onion soup + salad + bread

I'm trying to cook lower fat. In doing so, I headed to the library for some reference materials. I found the Good Morning America Cut the Calories Cookbook. Now I'm usually not someone to go for gimmicky stuff like this but our local library is rather small and I wanted to go home with something rather than have to wait for an interlibrary loan hold to find itself to my hands. Tonight I tried the Carmelized Onion Soup sent in by a chick from Bakersfield, California. Part of the recipe was a lemon-corn chutney which I would have tried had I all the ingredients. It also called for some French bread. I made one batch of my pizza dough with 1/2 whole wheat flour and formed it into a french bread shape, complete with slashes cut into the top.

The recipe calls for the soup to be brought to a boil and simmer. This proved visually disastrous since my milk separated. Fortunately it still tasted good. I threw a tossed salad together and topping my soup with a butter and parmesan-topped broiled slice of bread, called it a meal. Pretty good even if it was an ugly sight to behold.

pizza

Another pizza night. Tonight we had one cheese, one pineapple and one bbq bison and olive (bbq sauce instead of pizza sauce, browned ground bison and sliced olives). Oh! and the dough was 1/2 white, 1/2 wheat.

overpriced and undernourished.

I was starving. I had to leave my family at the soon-to-be bonfire before the wienie roast since the menfolk were having a few troubles getting a substantial fire going. (Even with the help of a leaf blower the whole fire was possibly not going to happen until right before I left.) My friend and I were having our monthly meet-up at a halfway-point Starbucks. That's why I had to do it. I bought a Turkey Sandwich out of that coffee empire's cold case. I was going to stop at Panera Bread, which I love, but I missed the exit and I just wasn't in the mood to backtrack. So an over-priced, decently-flavored-because-of-the-extra-fat sandwich was my dinner. (I also had a pumpkin latte which, to me, was the real star of the meal.) It was that or fast food and I couldn't go there for whatever reason. Not much else to say.

pumpkin waffles

I was going to make pizza but things kept happening and suddenly I found that with trick-or-treating and all, there wasn't enough time. To keep with the day's theme I decided to go with pumpkin waffles. They aren't as pumpkin-y as I would like, but they are a tasty bite nevertheless. (The recipe I use is from Vegan With a Vengeance.) My favorite topping is plain or vanilla yogurt with maple syrup drizzled on top. Maple and pumpkin were meant for each other. Now as far as having a sweet dinner knowing of the mountain of sweets that we would extract from our neighborhood later was probably not the best choice. At least it had whole wheat flour, right?

p.s. - a little trick: You know those days when you're out of milk and have no meat to make dinner? Or you wanted to make those cookies or muffins but there weren't enough/any eggs? Those are the days to pull out a vegan cookbook. They don't eat those things anyways so you're bound to find a non-egg, -milk, -meat solution. And a good cookbook will have recipes that are pretty delish. That's what I do anyway. Hope it helps.