Week 32 in Review

The Score
Eaters - 9     Compost - 1     Carry Over - 1

Lots of good eating this week, though many of the meals were my lunches instead of family dinners.  With one sick child, and another one busy with baseball playoffs, there were fewer sit down family dinners this week.  That freedom allowed me to play with spices and flavors that the kids aren't 100% comfortable with just yet.  Although I once again failed to get through all of the lettuce and chard, I do feel like I personally ate a lot of vegetables this week to make up for what everyone else wasn't eating. 

The Best

• I stumbled upon an amazing website of recipes this week (101 Cookbooks) and found a recipe for Otsu, a buckwheat noodle salad.  The dressing was amazing, and the recipe allowed me to use a generous portion of cilantro from the box.  Though this time around I substituted sauteed chicken for the tofu, I can see making this delicious recipe again and again with a variety of proteins.

The Good

• Over the weekend, my husband made pork tinga, which was a great hit with the kids.  The crunchy tostadas were the perfect canvas for the avocados, lettuce and cilantro from the box.

• Another fabulous lunch was a spinach salad with chicken, almonds and apples, tossed in a spicy mango dressing.  Hearty, healthy, and super tasty.

• This lemon green beans with marcona almonds dish is definitely the best preparation of green beans that I've ever made; possibly the best green beans dish that I've ever tasted!  I seriously could have eaten the entire bowl.

• Fall ingredients like pumpkin and persimmons made for a lovely, moist muffin.  Definitely got me in the mood for Thanksgiving!

 

• One simple family dinner was linguine with zucchini and mint.  Though I'm still avoiding pasta for the short term, it smelled SO good - and the kids gobbled it up.

  
The Rest

• While the lemon garlic spinach (with some mushrooms thrown in for the fun of it) was great, the almond crusted chicken was overly garlicky and really greasy (between the olive oil and nuts).

Week 25 in Review

Score
Two weeks late!

My apologies for falling off of my own program, but it has been an insanely busy couple of weeks.  Two weekends ago, we went out of town for a family wedding and were unable to pick up our box.  From there, sadly, my Year in a Box efforts went straight downhill.  With a very busy work schedule, sick kid (with a migraine 9 out of 14 days in a row), final push to finish the school garden that I've been working on, and related garden fundraiser that I needed to finish planning, meal planning and blogging sort of went out the window.  The good news is that the garden is done, and the fundraiser is happening this week.  So, back to life, back to reality, and with that, here are a few highlights from week 25!


The Best

• Not at all food related (or at least not yet), but I'm so excited that we were able to finish the school garden and open it to the students.  The kids were running around in it like it was a maze.  Up next: time to plant a fall garden in about two weeks!

The Good

• The Basil-chicken curry was delicious, but I wasn't the biggest fan of this particular Thai eggplant preparation.  Way too fishy!

• The Avocado Orange Red Onion salad was delicious: its citrus-based dressing with cumin brought all the flavors together perfectly.

 

• I was surprised by how much I liked the Black Eyed Peas recipe!  It was sort of like a gourmet version of bean and bacon soup, a favorite from my childhood. 

The Rest

• Perhaps if you like eggplant, you'd quite like this eggplant pasta salad recipe, but it didn't do much for me or the kids.  It wasn't quite broken down enough to be saucy, but wasn't firm enough to be a veggie-enhanced pasta.  It was just kind of mushy.

And then, there was the box that I skipped...

• Just in case you were curious, here's the box that I didn't document at all.  We used quite a bit of it, just not in any sort of organized fashion.

 (top) lettuce, yellow beans, sorrel, broccoli

(bottom) tomatoes, carrots, onions, red peppers, avocados, strawberries

Week 24 in Review

The Score
Eaters - 9.5    Compost - 1     Carry Over - 0.5

Back to school week in combination with birthday week was pretty crazy around this place.  Though I didn't do a good job of getting photos of most of what we ate this week, we did a fair amount of cooking and had a lot of fun as a family!  As our twins get older, it is fun to bring them more and more into the process of making the food, as opposed to just being consumers of the end product.  With that in mind, I documented our afternoon spent making their birthday dinner.  They were SO happy with the end result, and were really excited that they helped make the meal.  I see many more "family" dinners like this in our future!  Note: as you will see our twins are fraternal, but the fact that they are wearing the same t-shirt is HIGHLY unusual (they were trying to be supportive of Dad's favorite team, which sadly opened their season with a loss that day).

The Best

The well method of pasta making

Knead, knead, knead

Making rigatoni

Drying out the pasta for a few minutes

Meanwhile, carefully chopping up lots of CSA tomatoes for the sauce

Favorite sweet tomato sauce: saute 1 carrot, 1 stalk celery, 2 cloves garlic and 1 small onion (all diced) in a few Tbs olive oil for about 10 minutes; fill the pan with lots of tomatoes (whatever is fresh); after about 10 minutes the tomatoes will have broken down and sauce will start to thicken; add 8-10 leaves fresh basil, and salt and pepper to taste; run through food mill with coarse blade

Toss cooked pasta with sauce and Dad's homemade meatballs

Eat as is, or with fresh basil pesto, depending on your birthday preference

Open presents and show your best goofy face!

The Good

• With all of the tomatoes we had this week - as well as the best avocados that we've ever eaten - we ended up having a wonderful Mexican feast of fajitas, with fresh guacamole, pico de gallo, charred tomato salsa, and (for the grown-ups only) orange margaritas!

• Did I mention that our oven broke last week?  Just added to the fun.  I had to do the Kale, onion and potato frittata recipe on the stove top, which didn't fully work but tasted alright.  We also weren't able to follow the correct instructions for the the roasted Green Bean, potato and Radicchio salad.  Instead, my husband roasted the beans and potatoes on the grill, which tremendously added to the flavors!  Though I didn't get a photo, it was a delicious and quite beautiful salad.