Steamed Potatoes with Chicken, carrot, zucchini and dill medley.
All ingredients, but chicken, from our garden. Similar sized zucchini and carrot cut into 'coins' and then cooked with olive oil and dill in a fry pan until tender. NOt sure what prompted me to add a ton of dill to this mix but it is SO good.
Picnic in the porch
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Coconut Curry stir fry:
-frozen chicken strips
-Beans form garden
-Frozen carrot, pepper, baby corn, snow pea, water chestnut mix
Ingredients steamed with coconut milk and curry powder.
Toby mostly are the rice, but also didn't turn up his nose at the stir fry. YUM YUM.
: cold rice dressed with vinegar, formed into any of various shapes, and garnished especially with bits of raw seafood or vegetables
I'm not sure what prompted me to want to make sushi. I had tried it for the first time while at college, after years of squirming at the idea of raw fish - I didn't realize that that's not what Sushi truly is.
Raw fish is a delicacy and an aspect to sushi, but the word sushi actually means seasoned rice. After that base you can literally pair anything you want with it.
I had made a friend online who is a chef and we had talked about getting together to cook something fabulous, because I was just tapping into my foodie side and wanted to learn everything.
I had decided, for whatever reason, that I wanted to learn to make sushi rolls because it was always something that seemed too intimidating to try on my own.
Needless to say that get together never happened, but here I sat with this bug in my brain about desperately wanting to learn how to make sushi rolls. I finally ended up watching endless youtube videos about how to make it, went and bought everything I needed, gritted my teeth, and decided I was going to do this.
It's surprisingly hard to find a good 'how to' sushi video. I watched a lot and took bits and pieces form each one. I also read the comments under the video for critique. This one is pretty easy to follow, although when I make it I leave about a 2 inch 'edge' on it instead of the 1 centimeter that she does here.
Ingredients bought! Organic sushi nori (toasted seaweed sheets), yellow and red pepper, cucumber, imitation crab strips (which I later found out contain egg because I'm dumb and didn't read the ingredients to begin with), and sauteed shitakii mushrooms.
Success!! Red pepper, cucumber and mushroom rolls; and yellow pepper, cucumber and crab rolls.
And mini sushi for Toby to try! For this I cut a piece of nori in half and then made the sushi the same way.
I handed Toby a fork, but then he wanted to know what the funny stick things were that I had, which were clearly more exciting than his fork. So I handed them to him...
...And he actually made them work!....sort of...
The first few he put in his mouth he promptly spit out because the taste of the nori was new to him. I ended up picking a few apart for him so he could eat the pepper and the cucumber and the rice. By the end I think he ate a few whole pieces.
I had been missing eating spicy foods, mostly because a lot of commercial things like that contain onion, but also because during my pregnancy I couldn't eat spicy foods without getting major heartburn. I'm not huge on 'hot' spice, but I like spicy flavours, like curry, and up until now I had been keeping my food rather bland.
I had been doing a bunch of research into cooking with spices and herbs that have healing benefits, with the intent of making food taste good without using salt, which I was trying to not pile into my toddler. But I also wanted to be able to enjoy what I was eating without wanting to use a ton of salt an an example and for health.
I got in a curry mood one night and added some to the rice I was making. Not a lot, just enough for flavour. I added basil and garlic to my frozen vegetable mix for a bit of a 'sweeter' mate to the curry. And then I made hamburger patties that I had found that didn't have any additives or spices, but also didn't taste like cardboard. Not much of an 'organic' meal, but it was something new for Toby!
Toby eating it.... well, at least the hamburger.....
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Chicken stir-fry with Oregano and Cumin
Fries
President's Choice frozen grilled chicken strips, with frozen mixed veggies. At the time I was all about FAST and dinner time is NOW because when dinner time is mentioned, toddler wants food instantly. This is where I started using a lot more cumin too, which goes really well with chicken and pork.
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After Toby's proclaimed love for Baba Gannouj I started looking up some recipes so I could make my own, because most packaged varieties contain either mayonnaise or sour cream.
Recipe: 1 large eggplant
1 can chickpeas, drained
3 cloves garlic
3 Tbsp tahini
dash of sea salt
1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tbsp fresh chopped parsley
Slice eggplant in half lengthwise and roast in 400F oven for approx. 45 minutes, or until soft. Allow to cool slightly, then scoop out inside of eggplant, leaving skin behind
In food processor, combine eggplant and remaining ingredients, except oil and parsley, until smooth. Slowly incorporate oil until well mixed. Mix in parsley by hand.
