Beautiful Food – August 2016

August is full of tomatoes and peppers – both very colorful foods.

My favorite way to eat tomatoes is in salads. Early in the month, the CSA share also included a sun jewel melon (to me the taste is between a cucumber and a melon…so I use them in salads) and scallions that went into the salad pictured below along with edamame for protein. I used a lemon vinaigrette dressing.  The lettuces are not at their best in August so most of my salads are full of colors other than green!

Of course I have so many tomatoes that I have to do other things with them besides eating them raw in salads. I am freezing the small ones whole, making salsa (some to freeze), and probably going to freeze some larger tomatoes – whole - with the top core cut out. Last year I discovered that freezing whole tomatoes in Ziplocs was the easiest for me and it was handy to take out the number of frozen tomatoes I wanted for soups or sauces.

As we moved further into August, the peppers started. I like the colorful snack peppers; they are perfect for salads because they are so easy to prepare – just cut the tops and bottoms off and chop the rest (seed and all)! I like the bell peppers too…the hot peppers not as much.

It’s easy to incorporate lots of veggies in my August meals!

Beautiful Food – May 2016

Veggies are the beauties this month – in anticipation of the Gorman Farm Community Supported Agriculture starting up the 1^st week of June. Two veggies that are available already in pots on my deck or in the front flowerbed are chives and dandelions.

I love the shape of the chive buds when they are still closed and after they open. I simply cut them up with the slim green stems in salads.

My grocery store often has largish bags of baby bok choy for $1.99. They can go into salads or into stir fry – which makes it easy to use them up while they are still crisp. The green and white color combination has always appealed to me. The contrasting smooth and crinkle texture adds to the visual appeal.

And what’s not to like about colorful bell peppers. I buy the organic ones and usually every color except green!

Beautiful Food - April

The two beautiful foods that I picked this month are from opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to food processing:

Dandelion greens are wonderful when they first come up in the spring – before they develop any bitterness. These grew in the old turtle sandbox on my deck and I cut them to use immediately in a salad. There are several plants in the sandbox that I am harvesting by simply cutting the leaves – leaving the root in place. So far the plant has continued to put up new leaves and even managed to bloom and produce seeds while I was away in Texas.

Homemade carrot cake with marmalade icing – yum. I started with the recipe from the King Arthur's Flour site. It occurred to me that before food processors, carrot cake was a lot of work; grating 3 cups of carrots is so easy with a food processor...quite an endeavor with an old style grater. I liked that while the recipe listed 1.5 cups of nuts – they suggested other ‘additions’ that added up to 1.5 cups. I used 3/4 cup unsweetened coconut and 3/4 cup raisins for my husband’s birthday cake. The homemade marmalade icing was substituted for the cream cheese icing since I am lactose intolerant. I simply poured the warm marmalade over the sheet cake while it was cooling. The cake was better the second (thirds and fourth) day because the spices ‘matured.’ Later in the month I made the recipe again for my sister’s birthday – with pecans and raisins as the ‘additions.’ I made a sheet cake with marmalade icing and cupcakes that were left plain with a tub of the cream cheese icing for people that wanted it. Some people at her party preferred the plain cupcakes…this carrot cake is that good!

Beautiful Food – March 2016

I am enjoying unadorned whole foods for snacks and realized that they have a beauty all their own. Walnuts with their convoluted surface. I always put them in a very small container so that I don’t eat more than a serving (1/4 cup).

Blueberries (partially) thawed from the freezer. There glistening purple color is quite a contrast from other foods.

Oranges are a day brightener both because of the beauty of their namesake color and their taste. I like to eat them standing at my kitchen sink watching the birds at the bird bath. I take off the skin before eating the pulp so I can chop the peel up to dry or include as extra peel in a batch of orange marmalade.

The is the time of year I begin to make the transition from foods I enjoy on cold days like soup (butternut squash curry with lots of topping: pumpkinseeds, broccoli flowerets, and a hardboiled egg) and

Breakfast for dinner (pancakes with apples cooked in cinnamon butter on top)

To foods that are best eaten cold – like the colorful spring leaves that have quite a mixture of green, purple and read leaves.

They are all part of the beautiful meals of March!

Beautiful Food – February 2016

So many good things to eat – even in the winter time. We have it so much easier than people did 100 years ago!

I enjoyed stir fry slaw this month. It was a quick meal-in-a-bowl for a winter lunch. I simply stir fried apply, broccoli and frozen cranberries in a skillet…added a heap of savoy cabbage and some sliced smoked turkey…added a bit of General Tso’s Sauce at the end. The red of the cranberries and apple skins adds just the right spark of color.

Hearty soups are also a favorite for winter lunches – another meal-in-a-bowl. This month I made mushroom soup. It is easy to make and beautiful too!

• Cut up fresh mushrooms, sautéed in a little olive oil.
• Put in beef bouillon and water…dried onions…ground up dry roasted soy beans (I just processed them in my small food processor)…soba noodles.
• After it cooks about 4 minutes add almond milk.
• After the soba noodles are cooked (it usually takes a total of 5 minutes, but read the package) – pour into a bowl…drizzled pumpkin seed oil…and scatter some pumpkin seeds.

This is a high protein soup with mushrooms, dry roasted soy beans, and soba noodles.  The drizzle of pumpkin seed oil – dark and rich – and the seeds on top add to its appeal.

Now for a snack: blue corn ships with hummus. I like the color contrast. It is very easy to eat too many so I always prepare the number that I want to eat on a plate – and don’t go back for more!

Egg casseroles are becoming my favorite beautiful food to make, enjoy for one meal…and then several more. I usually make the 4 serving size and include whatever is handy in my refrigerator. The baking dish I use is the perfect size and has a lid so I can easily store the left overs in the refrigerator. Note: I am lactose intolerant so am using non-dairy products, egg casseroles can obviously be made with milk and cheese.

The general recipe for this one:

• Whisk together 4 eggs and a scant cup of almond milk.
• Add broccoli (processed in a food processor), dried parsley, dried onion (and any other seasonings desired). Whisk.
• Cover bottom of baking dish with non-dairy cheese substitute. Pour egg and vegetable mixture over the cheese.
• Sprinkle pumpkin seeds on top.
• Bake for 15 minutes at 425 degrees F and then for 30 minutes at 350 degrees F.

The green and yellow/gold colors are cheerful on a winter’s day – even if it is very gray outdoors!

I really am enjoying the cook that I’ve become... or maybe what I truly enjoy is evolving the way I prepare food to appeal to the taste buds and the eyes! The other requirement is that it be good nutritionally too.

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 06, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Tranquil Oil Paintings Reflect Peacefully Ripping Water Scenes – Gives me an idea for a photo project. And this one does too: Seeing the Trees through the Forest: Vestiges of Ancient Woods

7 Easy and Delectable Vegan Quick Breads – Goodies in winter!

Joyful Portraits of Centenarians that are Happy at One Hundred – Hurray! To be happy and 100!

This Is What 17 Different Foods Look like Growing in Their Natural Habitats – All these images are ‘beautiful food’!  The majority of these do no grow in Maryland (except in conservatories)…and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cashew tree even in a conservatory.

America’s Broadband Improves, Cementing a “Persistent Digital Divide” – Rural areas are still problematic….maybe stratospheric drones and balloons will be deployed.

Why the calorie is broken – It turns out that the concept of ‘a calorie’ is not a clear cut as we expect….that there are lots of ways the amount of energy we get from food can be changed. In general – the processes or cooked a food is, the more energy we get from it!

The Scientific Outreach Gap – This was a study done in the UK but the same is true in the US and it isn’t that the public is not interested. My daughter has volunteers for outreach events for astronomy and astrophysics for the past few years and the events have been well attended – almost overwhelmingly so.

Beyond Half Dome: Five Yosemite Sites – Adding to the places I’d like to go (eventually)

The Mycobiome – There has been a lot of research on the human microbiome but most of it, so far, has been about surveys and studies of bacterial species. There are fungi that are there too…and research about them has just started to appear in papers in the past 5 years.

Evidence-based health care: The care you want, but might not be getting – Yes! This is what I want but it seems very hard to get. The study was specifically about hospital settings but it matches my experience everywhere in the US health system. The survey revealed that things like ‘quality’ and ‘safety’ was at the top of the priority list…but how is that achieved without being ‘evidence based.’  I think what is being measured is not skewed toward the patient but to what is easiest to measure (and that could actually be detrimental to the patient).