Water. Still lots and lots of water. Hopefully, since it’s warmer today, the heat won’t be on as much and I’ll have a chance to finally rehydrate. I swear our house is that Sahara, no matter how much humidity I try to put back into the air with humidifiers, etc.

Lunch: chili and almond milk.

Snack: fries. See, this is what happens when I don’t plan well and don’t grocery shop on schedule. This isn’t a good food option, and I know that. We all have those days, and as long as they’re few and far between, they’re fine. See the food challenge.

Dinner: Catfish, wild rice, cauliflower.

Food challenge: no snacks in the house. I need to hit the grocery store pretty badly.

Dinners

Monday: Shawn’s Famous Chili. Okay, so I am not sure how famous it is, but I get a lot of requests for the recipe. It’s a chocolate curry chili, with 3 different kinds of beans and several different types of peppers. It’s not really hot, but it has a great depth of flavor and heat. And, it’s made with our homemade tomatoes!

Tuesday: Fish with wild rice and roasted broccoli. The fish will depend on what’s fresh that day, and what we can afford. Thadd’s hoping for catfish, and my guess is that’ll be the choice.

Wednesday: Eggplant Parmesan over spaghetti squash “noodles”. We love squash, and roasted spaghetti squash makes a great substitute for noodles (and you get your veggies in without even trying!).

Thursday: Slow Cooker Shepherd’s Pie. It’s Thadd’s night to cook dinner, and he’s keen to try a new slow cooker recipe. I have no idea which one he’s using, so I can’t link it, but if it’s good I’ll try and get it up.

Friday: Leftovers. Thadd has to pack lunch, dinner, and snacks for school and work, so there’s no real point cooking another meal. It’s the perfect night to clean out the refrigerator.

Saturday: Thadd’s birthday out. Thadd’s turning the big 31 (okay, so it’s not usually a milestone), and we’re planning to go out. There is an awesome restaurant in town, but it’s fairly pricey. Or, there’s the amazing Thai Siam. We’re not sure which we’ll hit yet.

Don’t forget to check out my “What I Eat” series, which is continuing this week, to see how our meal plan fits into our real lives.

Related articles

• On the Menu: Jan. 16-23 (eclecticedibles.wordpress.com)
• An Ethiopian Feast! (eclecticedibles.wordpress.com)
• What I Eat, Series Launch (eclecticedibles.wordpress.com)

Lots and lots of water. It’s been really dry in here lately, so along with lots of vitamin E oil for my skin, I am going through even more water than usual.

Lunch: large mixed greens salad with green olives, shredded cheddar, vinegar and oil. Almond milk, banana, peanut butter, chocolate (1 tsp. baking chocolate powder) smoothie.

Snack: milk, toast, tortilla with guacamole

Dinner: half-bowl of chili, milk

This year, we obviously know it’s coming and can be a bit more ambitious. This weekend, we put together our seed order from seedsavers.org, and I’ve started figuring out how much we can reasonably grow and put by. Our garden space isn’t big enough to feed us entirely, but it can go a long way towards supplementing our food budget and our health. This year, we also have access to a greenhouse with warming mats to start our seedlings! And, speaking of seedlings, it’s just about time to get some of them started. By the time our seeds arrive, it’ll be perfect.

So what are we growing, and why? I’m not going to go into the planting schedule yet, as I’m still working on the rotation schedules so we can garden in all seasons; but, here’s what we plan on harvesting in what season (obviously, some of these will start in one season and carry through to another, weather depending):

Spring: Greens (spinach, various lettuces), peas. With luck, blueberries from my potted plants!

Summer: tomatoes (several varieties), beets (these will be interval planted for continuous harvest), carrots, some greens (shade planting), leeks (late), radishes.

Fall: Beets, leeks, turnips, radishes, carrots, sunchokes, Australian Butter and Thelma Saunders squashes, kale, second planting of peas, fall crop of lettuces, tomatoes.

Overwinter in the ground or harvest late/cold storage: leeks, kale, carrots, spinach, squash, beets, turnips, green tomatoes, winter radishes, and sunchokes.

We’re doing all heirlooms, and as much organic as we can get our grubby little hands on. This is a far more ambitious undertaking than last year, but I think the payoff will be worth it. We elected to do high-yield varieties of squash and peas, and the sunchokes are also high-yield as a general rule. Our goal was to do a lot of fresh diversity in small quantities we can eat at harvest, and larger quantities of limited “staples” so we have enough to actually be usable for a good part of the winter. Some things, like squash, only get better with storage (to a point, obviously), and so we are really looking forward to these. Some things, like sunchokes, store just fine in the ground (and, in fact, are made better by freezing); so, we can have the produce without taking up all of our rather limited cold storage.

We’re also going to move some of our “cold storage” around next year. Squash prefer slightly warmer, drier temperatures than, say apples; so, we’re going to store them in another area. Our once concern is that our cold storage won’t be cold enough, which has actually been a problem this year. While I appreciate the warmer winter both from a personal stand point (I don’t like the cold much, hence I moved south) and a financial angle (our heating bills have been about half what they were the last few years), it is taking a toll on the apples. We’re going to have to sauce them out soon.

I spent a lot of this weekend going over two of my favorite books: Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables, and Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation. There is a bit of modification that goes on for us, since both books (especially the latter book) is written with the general assumption of a colder climate than Virginia generally has. The hardest part of cellaring here isn’t, as in the north, the worry of freezing–it’s the worry of spoilage due to warmth.  But, both books are very useful for anyone who is interested in putting up food. The Root Cellaring book in particular is a great resource for cold storage methods (did you know hard squashes need to be cured before they get put into cold storage?), duration food can be expected to last, what you should and should not store together and why, and all kinds of other neat stuff.

I’ll be doing a layout and schedule soon, and I’ll post them here. I’d love to see your gardens, your planning methods, and your storage hopes and dreams, too!

If anyone watched her show and seriously thought “Wow, she is the picture of fitness and health I aspire to,”  the very least of our problems is Paula herself.

Do I think it would have been great if she had, instead of becoming a spokeswoman for a diabetic medication, decided to change her diet and lifestyle and share that on her show? Sure, that would be great.  But, it’s not what she gets paid to do. It’s her personal life–she has no obligation to share what changes she is or is not making with the rest of the world. There is power in celebrity, but just because there is power, there is no obligation to expose your life for the “greater good.” We all have things we struggle with, and we certainly don’t all open each and every one of those personal things up to the rest of the world. Simply because she is a celebrity is no reason for us to expect her to do so, either.

Paual Deen is not a menace to society. She’s a woman who gets paid to cook interesting things on television, end of story. The problem is that people are sitting on their arses watching that much TV in the first place, that our nutrition education is horrible, that we feed our kids appallingly bad foods that set them up for obesity and type 2 diabetes, and that our food system is so broken it’s hard to know where to begin fixing it. These things are menaces to society. That our nutrition education system is so poor that someone would watch a cooking show hosted by a clearly-overweight woman using ingredients that are often very unhealthy and think “Gee, I bet that’s good for me,” is a menace to society.

If one cooking show host is more powerful than our nutrition message in this country, then it’s not the show host that is the problem, folks.

Turn off the TV, go to the gym, and the come home and cook a healthy dinner. Then, volunteer at a school garden, help your elderly neighbors cook a meal, ask your sister to go for a walk, write your representative about GMO/GE labeling, plant a garden, Occupy Monsanto. Do something, for heaven’s sake, to counteract this woman’s influence, if you really think she’s that big of a problem.  See, Paula Deen crisis averted.

Thank you for your patience and support of the SOPA/PIPA strike. Please take a moment to call or email your representative, and tell them to oppose these two bills.  Sites you know and use, including craigslist, Wikipedia, Google, and many others–not to mention personal blogs like this one–are all at serious risk of being blacklisted and pulled down if this legislation passes. Censorship becomes not only a probability, but a certainty.

Lunch: leftover sauerkraut, cabbage, and potatoes.

Snacks: banana with peanut butter, glass of raw milk.

Dinner: beef stroganoff over spaghetti squash.

Other: glass of red wine.

DINNERS:

Sunday: Sausage, saurkraut, whipped potatoes. This is one of Thadd’s favorite meals, it’s quick, and we were busy.

Monday: Beef stroganoff over spaghetti squash. I‘m still working on cutting wheat, and most other grains, down. We don’t eat piles or anything, but I’d like to get down to only including them in dinners every other week or so. Hence, the spaghetti squash. This works well as noodles, and it adds a rich and complex flavor to the dish.

Tuesday: Bacon lentil soup. Thadd’s cooking on Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester, so this is his dish.

Wednesday: Pork Roast with roasted acorn squash and apple-onion hash. Crock pot for the main course. It’s a busy day for me.

Thursday: Thai peanut noodles with tofu. Thadd’s never made this before, and wants to give it a whirl. We’re using rice noodles, which we don’t do often because they’re expensive, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it comes out.

Friday: Leftovers. It’ll be time to clean out the refrigerator.

Saturday: Meatloaf with roasted potatoes and a veggie.

Don’t forget to check in for “What I Eat!” to see how our meal plan goes, and what m daily food lifestyle looks like from the inside!

Related articles

• On the Menu Oct. 30-Nov. 7th Edition (eclecticedibles.wordpress.com)
• On the Menu: Jan 7-13th (eclecticedibles.wordpress.com)
• On the Menu, Sept. 19th Edition (eclecticedibles.wordpress.com)

While I love this cuisine anytime, I find it especially appropriate for winter. Many dishes use winter-friendly foods like potatoes, carrots, hardy greens, onions (which form the backbone of most dishes), and dried legumes. I kept this in mind when selecting dishes for our latest feast.

I started off by grinding fresh spices for the berbere. I doubled the recipe (below), and saved the extra dry spice mix in a jar. To turn it into a sauce for the recipes that called for it, I added canola oil (half cup) and red wine (1/4 cup) .

Berbere Spice Mix

1 tsp. fenugreek
1 ttsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
1 tbs. dark chili powder
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 tbs cayenne pepper
2 tbs paprika
1 tsp black pepper

On low heat, combine spices in small sautee pan and roast for 7-12 minutes, stirring constantly, until spices are aromatic and change color slightly. NOTE: Do not stick your head over the pan, and turn on a fan or open a window.

I had my spice mix, and it was time to move on to the cooking. First up was Doro Wat.

I use this recipe, but I don’t marinade the chicken. Instead, I do everything as directed, then throw it in the slow cooker for several hours. Why? Because I only have so much room on my stove and in my refrigerator, and this frees things up so I can do several other dishes. I also always make a double batch, since it tends to be one of the most popular dishes.

While things were simmering for the doro wat, I set the onions cooking for the gomen:

This is a process. It takes me about an hour-and-a-half to get them where I think they’re perfect, but it’s worth the wait. Gomen is essentially collard greens, but even people who don’t like collard greens often like these:

I use the recipe as a base, but add s0me cream, which makes it kind of a cross between gomen and yegomen kitfo, and also spice it with about a 1/2 tsp. each of allspice, tumeric, paprika, and ginger.

Once the doro wat was done and the gomen underway, I started the shro wat (there’s no real variation to that recipe). I love the peanut butter and tomato sauce combination present in much African cooking, and here it’s paired with butternut squash (pumpkin works just as well) and other vegetables. This and the gomen are very easy to make vegan or vegetarian. Once done it, too, goes into a crockpot to hold until dinner.

Like many types of stews, much Ethiopian stew gets better as it sits, and this is true for pretty much all the dishes I made today.  This dish, called aleecha, is full of carrots, potatoes, and cabbage. The linked recipe is good, but I double the tumeric and add a tablespoon or so of berbere, as I tend to like more flavor:

Another favorite of mine is atar allecha, a warm, spicy pea dish.

Peas just don’t look good on film; or, at the very least, they never look good on my digital camera regardless of my settings. They’re green, mushy, and kind of uniform, which makes for a fairly boring picture. Fortunately, the taste isn’t boring.

The last dish for dinner was zigni, a very spicy meat dish. Unfortunately, none of my photos turned out; but, trust me, it was yummy. It’s also very, very spicy, so I tend to mix it with the gomen or aleecha before I eat it.

Ethiopian isn’t eaten with utensils, it’s eaten with a stretchy bread called injera. Thadd makes this using this quick recipe The traditional recipe takes much longer, and is made with teff, which we don’t have reasonable access to; but, this is a really good version, too.

To serve, each person gets a plate, napkin, and several pieces of injera. In the center of the table, we place two serving trays lined with injera, with several scoops-full of each dish around each tray and a few spoons. People move a bit of whatever dishes they like to their own plate, rip off a bit of injera, an then use the bread to pick up and eat the food. It’s a lot fun. Generally, we’d serve a mock-tej (we can’t get a real one at anyplace nearby), but we didn’t do that this time, instead opting for water.

Why, you ask, are there no photos of everything all served up on cool platters? Well, I’ve promised Thadd I would not blog all of our dinners, or be rude to guests and make them wait while I snapped photos of everything. What I did do, however, is put a quick plate together for my lunch:

(You can click over to flickr and hover over the photo to see what is what.)

There’s a pile of leftovers, which is pretty darn exciting for me. I could eat this stuff for weeks.

FOOD CHALLENGE: Getting enough calories in before teaching spin, but not eating within an hour of teaching (so I don’t vomit). This isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Snack: Glass of milk & boiled egg before spin. To-go almond milk & pb shake after (I made this up at home, because I had errands to run after class). 2 small slices GF/DF zucchini bread. Almonds.

Lunch: Taco salad.

Dinner: 2 bowls Tuscan Kidney bean soup.