Basic Vegetable Soup

2 carrots, sliced

1/2 onion, diced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 1/2 cups cabbage, chopped

1 14.5-oz. can tomatoes

1 can water

1 tsp beef bouillon

1 cup frozen cut green beans

1/2 dried basil

1/4 tsp dried oregano

1 small zucchini, sliced

Spray a large saucepan with cooking spray and saute carrots, onion and garlic over low-to-medium heat until beginning to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the cabbage and continue to saute a couple of more minutes until cabbage begins to soften slightly. Add tomatoes, water, bouillon, green beans, basil and oregano. Bring to a boil then reduce heat to a simmer, cover, and let cook for about 15 minutes, or until green beans and cabbage are cooked. Add the zucchini and cook for another 3 to 4 minutes, until soft. Serve warm.

Black Bean Brownies

I've been curious about trying black bean brownies, and today I happened across a couple of recipes for them.
http://coffeebeankisses.blogspot.com/2011/01/black-bean-brownies.html
http://kingdomfirstmom.com/2011/03/healthy-black-bean-brownies.html
Both of these people are interested in cooking without gluten, so apparently the beans take the place of the flour. I am not concerned about gluten-free cooking, but rather low-fat cooking. I'm wondering if I can make regular brownies and substitute the black beans for the shortening? When I bought my bags of black beans and white beans at the dry-pack cannery a couple of weeks ago, I overheard the lady telling someone that you can substitute cooked white beans for shortening, cup-for-cup. I've been curious to try it ever since.
I hope to experiment with this concept this week, and as I do I'll share what I find.

Menu and Shopping List

Brown Rice
Cucumbers
Lemons
Zucchini
Cabbage
Potatoes
Onions
Squash
Oranges
Spinach
Bananas
Strawberries
Lettuce
Peppers
Cauliflower
Pork chops
Fish
Frozen green beans

Monday
Breakfast: Grain Compote with fruit
Lunch: Tuna Sandwich with spinach and celery, orange
Dinner: Apple pork chops, mashed potatoes, broccoli and carrots, spinach-strawberry salad
Snacks: Apple, Popcorn, green smoothie popsicle from freezer (last week's green smoothie)

Tuesday
Breakfast: Pancake and peaches
Lunch: Vegetable Soup (see below), bread and cheese
Dinner: Pizza with veggies, strawberry-banana smoothie, chocolate chip cookies
Snacks: green smoothie, apple, popcorn

Wednesday
Breakfast: Grain compote with strawberries, apples
Lunch: leftovers
Dinner: Bean enchiladas, corn, green salad
Snacks: green smoothie

Thursday
Breakfast: pancake and peaches
Lunch: Vegetable Soup
Dinner: leftovers
Snacks: apple, orange, veggie tray

Friday
Breakfast: Grain compote with strawberries, apples
Lunch: Tuna sandwich with spinach and celery
Dinner: Spaghetti noodles with chicken-vegetable prima vera
Snacks: apple, orange, green smoothie

Saturday
Breakfast: pancakes and peaches
Lunch: leftovers
Dinner: fish, mac & cheese, carrots-broccoli-cauliflower
Snacks: apple, orange, green smoothie, popcorn

Here's the Vegetable Soup Recipe that I plan to use. I got it from Weight Watchers when I did that program a couple of years ago:
2/3 cup sliced carrot
1/2 cup diced onion
3 cups fat-free broth (beef, chicken or vegetable)
1 1/2 cups diced green cabbage
1/2 cup green beans
1 tbsp tomato paste
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup diced zucchini
Spray a large saucepan with nonstick cooking spray, heat. Saute the carrot, onion, and garlic over low heat until softened, about 5 minutes. Add broth, cabbage, beans, tomato poaste, basil, oregano, and salt; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer, covered, about 15 minutes or until beans are tender. Stir in the zucchini and heat for 3-4 minutes. Serve hot.

Cookies revised

I followed the cookie recipe, below, but this time I added a cup of oatmeal and a cup of nuts. It gave it some texture and, while they were still soft, they weren't so mushy. Very good. I've eaten too many already!

Ellen

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I'm going to post the recipe for the chocolate chip cookies from Lean and Free 2000 Plus. But before I do I want to mention that I tried that whole grain compote from the recipe in the Deseret News, using the cracked grain cereal that I bought, and I really liked it. The cracked grain cereal already has flax seed in it, and I'm not interested in buying flax seed and making it a part of my diet, so I left that out. I think I left out the orange juice, too. But I did do the cut up apple and used cut up strawberries for the berries, and raisins for the dried fruit, and I poured milk over it and ate it like regular hot cereal. I like it a lot.

Chocolate Chip Cookies
1/3 cup butter
2/3 cup applesauce
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup brown sugar
4 egg whites (I used two whole eggs)
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup (6 oz) chocolate chips
Heat oven to 375 degrees. Mix applesauce, butter, sugar, egg whites, and vanilla. Stir in remaining ingredients. (I then chilled the dough overnight.) Drop dough by rounded teaspoons 2 inches apart onto ungreased baking sheet (a little cooking spray is helpful). Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until light brown. Cool slightly before removing from baking sheet.

These make a soft, cake-like cookie that is easy to eat (a lot of!). I'm going to make them again and try it with an added cup of oatmeal. Or, rather, rolled grains. Hey, why not?

Whole grain cereals

I finally made it to the Roller Mills and bought some whole grain cereal. Above is the six-grain rolled cereal that includes a mixture of red wheat, white wheat, rye, oats, barley and sunflower (seeds?). It comes in a 3.5 lb. ice-cream-size bucket and costs $7.00. You can also buy it in a 25-lb or 50-lb bag, but I figured I'd try it first.

Below is a picture of the 9-grain cracked cereal. It includes red wheat, white wheat, rye, oats, barley, corn, millet, flax, and buckwheat. The bucket is the same size as the other one, but with being cracked rather than rolled it weighs 4.5 pounds instead of 3, and the cost is cheaper for $6.25. It also comes in either a 25- or 50-lb. sack if you like. I'm going to put it on to soak overnight so I can try that recipe from my last post for breakfast tomorrow morning. I'll let you know how I like it.

I wonder if you could use the rolled cereal in oatmeal cookies, and if it would taste any different or alter the nutritional value. I'm sure it's probably more expensive than just the plain rolled oats, but still, it might be fun to try.

Some Interesting Reading

The Life (i.e., Food, or "C") Section of today's Deseret News has some interesting articles about food, including this one about a book and a blog by two different authors who are interested in following the Word of Wisdom. The book is called "The W.O.W. Diet," and the blog is called wordofwisdomliving.com. Here is a recipe that is shared by Skip Hellewell, the author of the blog:

Breakfast Compote
1 1/4 cup hot water
1/4 cup cracked whole grains
1/4 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup dried fruit
1/4 cup fresh berries
1/4 cup chopped apple
1/2 orange, juiced
1 tablespoon freshly ground flaxseed
2 tablespoons chopped nuts
Honey, brown sugar, or maple syrup to taste
Cinnamon, Cardomon, vanilla, or nutmeg to taste
Day 1: After finishing breakfast, prepare the mixture for the next day by combining the hot water and cracked whole grains in a pan and place it on the back of the stove to soak. (Local whole foods store offers a nine-grain mixture, mostly cracked wheat (note from me: the Leland Mill that is near me offers this).)
Day 2: Bring the pot to a boil, add roleld oats and dried fruit. Turn off the heat and let sit for five minutes. While the oats and dried fruits are cooking, prepare two bowls by adding to each the flaxseed, crumbled nuts, sweetner and spices to taste.
Wash and prepare fruits in season, adding to teach bowl to the berries, apples and orange juice. Combine all ingredients into the bowls and enjoy.

There's also an article by the food editor, Valerie Phillips, about a food "blogger" from the 1930s and '40s named M.F.K. Fisher. Actually, her article is about a book by Anne Zimmerman, "a Utah native who has chronicled Fisher's life in a new book, 'An Extragavant Hunger: The Passionate years of M.F.K. Fisher.'"

There's also an article about the nutritional benefits of asparagus, along with a recipe for a green asparagus-potato soup. I would copy the recipe here, but if you go to the article itself, you'll see a nice picture, so I'll leave it at that. I think this might be a way for me to try asparagus and see if I'll like it this time. The only thing is, I need to find out what prosciutto is.

And, finally, here's a link to an article about having fun with food for St. Patrick's day tomorrow. One fun idea is to put a few drops of green food coloring in your children's glasses in the morning, so when you pour milk into them, the milk will magically and surprisingly turn green.

These articles were all of interest to me, so I thought I'd share them. I'm going to try that breakfast compote. I'll swing by the Mills this afternoon to pick up some multi-grain cereal, something I've been meaning to do anyway. Do you want me to pick some up for you as well?

Cornmeal pancakes

These are pooper helpers. I actually like these better than whole wheat pancakes because corn is a bit more flavorful. My kids seem to like them too.

1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 T sugar
1 cup milk
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/4 cup oil or melted butter

Then you know how to do the rest, right? This is just my regular pancake recipe, I just substituted half the flour for corn flour.
**Edited to add in the baking powder. Sorry about that. But like I said, you can just use your own pancake recipe and just do half corn meal if you are interested.

Getting back on track. Well, sort of...

Let's face it, last week I did not do so good with the whole eating healthy or exercising thing. I have been exhausted being up all night long with sick kids. I want to get back on track this week, but I'm still exhausted. I tried to exercise this morning and I only made it through 2/3 of my workout before I had to quit. We'll try again tomorrow.
Meanwhile I made some stuffed peppers for dinner tonight and I think they would qualify as healthy so I will share my recipe with you. I tried to look up recipes but everyone wants me to put tomato sauce and or tomatoes in, but if there is one thing I'm picky about it's tomato sauce mixed with rice or potatoes. I just hate it. So I made up my own recipe using stuff I thought would taste good with red peppers. You can use whatever proportions you like. This recipe made lots of extra filling that I just put in the fridge and will probably wrap in tortilla's for lunch tomorrow. Here it goes:
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 green onions, thinly sliced
1 brocoli crown, chopped up a lot
1 large carrot, peeled and grated
1 small handful of fresh spinach chopped up
Italian seasoning
about 1 cup cooked brown rice
1 handful of grated cheese, whatever kind you like

Saute the garlic and onions in a tiny bit of oil. Add the brocoli and grated carrots and stir fry until they are tender. Add the cooked rice and continue to stir until heated through. Throw in the spinach and Italian seasoning and warm that until the spinach is wilty. Stir in the cheese. Use this to fill bell pepers that have been prepared like this:
Cut bell peppers in half and take out the stems and seeds. Drop them in a pot of boiling water and let boil for 2-3 minutes. Remove from pot and dunk right into ice water to stop the cooking process. Then they are ready to be filled.
After you put the filling in, bake them in the oven for about 5-10 minutes just to make the cheese nice and melty and enjoy!
We (I should say I) had these with corn bread and green smoothie. They were filling for me, but Wayne was starving an hour later (probably because he didn't have any cornbread or green smoothie).

What Does Clabber Mean?

When I read the instructions for making buttermilk, I noticed that the instructions say to leave the mixture sitting out at room temperature for several hours, until the milk has "clabbered." I wondered what that means, and if it has anything to do with how Clabber Girl baking powder got its name. Well, I looked it up, and the answer to both questions is just what I suspected. Clabber means when milk goes sour and curdles, and the famous baking powder got its because of the leavening action of sour milk. I'm not explaining it very well. You can read more about it here. Actually, the Clabber Girl website has some fun family activities and science experiments to do with young children, plus some recipes to try. You may like to check it out. In the meantime, I just mixed up my buttermilk concoction. My buttermilk is already five days past the expiration date, but I figure that it was sour milk to begin with, so it shouldn't matter if it's a little more sour. It had separated into a liquid on top, which I think would be a form of whey, but I just shook the carton until it was mixed up well and then used it anyway. Maybe I'll use it to make some sour dough waffles in the morning. I'll let you know!

Food Storage

Okay, I have an idea. Instead of focusing my efforts on eating more grains and legumes and fruits and vegetables and calling it "healthy eating," I'm going to focus my efforts on eating more grains and legumes and fruits and vegetables and call it "using our food storage." That shopping list that I posted from "The Mormon Diet" book looked, as Josie said, like a food storage list. Since we have wheat and oatmeal and rice, and beans and barley and powdered milk, how about if I just use those? After all, according to a booklet that we found among our stuff from the Utah State Extension Service, the Golden Rule of Food Storage is to STORE WHAT YOU EAT AND EAT WHAT YOU STORE, or, in other words, ROTATION.

This booklet gives some recipes for using food storage, which, surprise, surprise, seem to be very similar to recipes for healthy eating. Things like making your own cream soup, making yogurt and buttermilk and sweetened condensed milk, wheat berry pudding, barley pilaf, and golden harvest muffins. So I'm going to post one of those recipes on here, with the commitment to try it this week, and give a report on how we like it. Actually, I'm going to go with two recipes. The first is for buttermilk (because I have some buttermilk in the fridge that needs to be used), and the second is for cream soup (because I want to try making my own cream-of-something soup base).

Buttermilk
1/2 cup buttermilk
3 cups warm water
1 cup nonfat dry milk OR 1 1/2 cups instant nonfat dry milk
Put buttermilk, water and dry milk in a large clean jar and stir or shake until powder is dissolved. Cover the jar with a lid or clean cloth. Let stand at warm room temperature until it clabbers, about 10 hours in the winter or 5 hours in the summer. After it clabbers, store in the refrigerator. Save 1/2 cup to mix buttermilk next time. Buy commercial buttermilk occasionally for a fresh "start."

Homemade "Cream" Soup Mix
2 cups powdered nonfat milk
3/4 cup cornstarch
1/4 cup instant chicken bouillon
2 tablespoons dried onion flakes
1 teaspoon basil leaves
1 teaspoon thyme leaves
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 cup instant rice
Combine all ingredients, mixing well. Store in air-tight container until ready to use. Equivalent of 9 cans of soup.
TO SUBSTITUTE FOR 1 CAN OF CONDENSED SOUP: Combine 1/3 cup of dry mix with 1 1/4 cups of cold water in saucepan. Cook and stir until thickened. Add to casserole as you would the canned product.
Variation: Add a 4 ox. can of mushrooms, undrained, as part of liquid for cream of mushroom (10% fat)

Fiber energy bars

Yes, I tried yet another fiber recipe. It also turned out good, which is why I'm posting about it, but my kids still don't really care for it. However, after trying all these things using all whole wheat, I think I can now start making bread using 100% whole wheat. At least my kids love my wheat bread, although I've never done it with all whole wheat before. I recently switched to hard white wheat instead of hard red, and we like it a whole lot better.

Anyway, the recipe for these bars I found here, but I think you could very well use your own basic bread recipe to do this. I never would have figured that you can just use a basic whole wheat bread recipe and turn it into fiber bars, but they have instructions for how to do just that, along with a bunch of other fun ideas, if you scroll down the page a ways. I'm not going to re post the recipe here because I followed it pretty much exactly except I had no wheat gluten or lecithin however I did use the optional egg which I believe has lecithin in the yolk? Oh, and I omitted the salt, but that's just because I was using salted peanuts. I even ground some flax seed in my blender and it actually worked! I've never dared do that before.

So Mom, you can try some when you get here, I have plenty! By themselves they are a little bland unless you bite into a raisin or something. Kind of like eating a plain piece of raisin bread. They aren't very sweet. They would be delicious with butter and honey on top. This morning I used two of them to make an egg sandwich for breakfast and it was delicious. This is a recipe I will definitely use again. I think it will grow on my kids. Oh speaking of my kids, for two of them I told them it was a bagel and spread cream cheese on it and they ate it.

Today's lunch

Okay, so yesterday's dinner actually did fill me up, for quite a long time. And then when I got hungry, around 9 p.m., I was really hungry. I took your suggestion to heart for lunch today, Josie, and added black beans. All I needed was a little salt, and this was actually a really yummy lunch.

In entering yesterday's food intake into the food journal on fitday.com, I came up with 2,688 calories. 74% of that was carbs, 17% of that was fat, and 9% of that was protein. The percentages sound about right for the diet I'm trying to follow, and I'm going to have to trust that the number of calories is okay, too. I mean, it's what I seemed to need to feel satisfied, and, while that number is not a "dieting" number, it is within normal limits, I think, so I will call it good. FYI, the only fats that I intentionally added to my diet yesterday were some butter on two pieces of bread (for my evening snack--remember I got hungry?), and the peanut butter on my PBHoney sandwich for my morning snack. No milk (not even on my oatmeal yesterday morning), no eggs, no meat.

Today, on the other hand, I used the milk that is going sour in the fridge to make our pancakes, and I'd like to say that it helped them be fluffy like buttermilk pancakes, but I can't say that for sure. Anyway, they were good with peaches on top, and a glass of water for a beverage.

As far as having more energy and being able to run and not be weary and walk and not faint, I had a hard time on our walk this morning. Maybe it's because I didn't go to sleep till after 10:30 last night, was up once in the night, and woke up around 4:30 this morning. Or maybe it's because I was hungry from not eating enough protein yesterday. Anyway, I was struggling with my energy level, and was still breathing hard even after we'd been home and showered. Eating breakfast is when I started to feel better. So that's something to be aware of.

Just sharing!

Seconds

But I still didn't feel totally satisfied. So I got me another baked potato (I had baked about eight of them, so there was plenty more), and decided to open a can of corn and have a little of that as well. And, what do you know? All of a sudden I was full. No meat, no butter, no dairy. Hmm. I wonder how many calories? I'll enter it on fitday.com and get back to you on that.

Tonight's dinner

Baked Acorn squash packed with brown rice, a baked potato, and some broccoli. Will it be enough? Will it be too much? I didn't want to put butter or other fat on the vegetables (thankfully I've never cared for sour cream on my potato, but I do like butter), so I decided to experiment with some seasonings. I used plenty of salt, along with some onion powder and garlic powder, on the potato and the squash and rice. Broccoli I can eat plain. It was pretty good!