A Girl's Gotta Eat

I've been trying to cook most of our meals lately even though we're swamped but we have picked up take-out a few times. We're lucky there are places nearby where getting vegan and relatively low fat food is easy. Our choices lately have included veggie burritos at Chipotle's Mexican Grill (which is no longer associated with the "Golden Arches" so I wish people would quit telling me how evil I am for eating there), veggie sandwiches at Subway, and veggie no-cheese take 'n bake pizza at Papa Murphy's .

However, cooking at home accomplishes several other things besides just filling our bellies: it's generally healthier and includes more organic ingredients, it's cheaper, and it helps reduce the amount of food left in the house that will have to be moved. The downside is the time it takes to cook from scratch and then clean up the kitchen....which is why we've ended up eating the take-out here and there.


Pasta is a fast and easy carbohydrate to cook for a hearty meal, so it shouldn't surprise you to see that it has featured in a number of dinners lately.


My shopping trip a while back to the new Asian store in town gave me vegetarian ramen-style noodles. These were wonderful in an Asian soup with fresh veggies.


With some chilly days lately, soup has been an easy and appealing option for meals. Last night, I made this hearty soup using carrots and sweet potatoes from the CSA share as well as frozen organic green beans. The little meaty-looking things in this and the previous soup are faux beefy bits from the Asian store.


And, of course, pasta can be used in plain ol' spaghetti dishes. Whole wheat noodles provide a bit more energy and bulk than cheap processed spaghetti.


It's important to keep on top of the weekly CSA share so the produce doesn't pile up in the refrigerator. The soups above were filled with CSA veggies, but not everything from the share can go in a soup.


After several weeks of getting loads of oranges, I juiced them all to use in tasty orange bread.


Cleaning out the garden is another step taken towards prepping for the move.

Our own purple broccoli! I can't remember how I cooked it, but we did enjoy it.


The Brussels sprout plants never produced so we harvested the leaves and cut the plants back almost to the ground. After blanching the leaves, I dehydrated them with three different seasonings (salt, chile powder/salt, and cumin/salt). Tasty for snacking.


My sweetie harvested all of his ripe peppers a couple of weeks ago. These came from plants that he nurtured through the winter on our patio or in the house. Since clipping off the ripe peppers, many of the plants have bloomed and some have even set new fruit already. This picture shows the veggies that will go into some homemade escabeche (pickled peppers).


Here is the cooked escabeche. The recipe can be processed in a hot water bath but I only had enough to make this small jar so it went right into the fridge.


No time to post recipes but I probably wouldn't make these dishes exactly the same next time anyway. While I want tasty food, the focus lately is primarily on using up what I can from the refrigerator, freezer, and pantry. When moving, I usually strive to use up almost all of the food in the house before loading the truck. We won't be doing that this time due to our emergency food supplies, but we're using up quite a lot of it - not a bad idea since the emergency stocks need to be rotated anyway. Hopefully we can get a new garden going by fall to help replace what we've eaten.