Saving Vegetable Water

Tonight I cooked green beans by blanching them for a minute in boiling water, straining them, putting them into a serving bowl and mixing them in the bowl with melted coconut oil and salt.

In my old days, I would just toss the water that I use to blanch the beans. Now, I save that nutrient rich water in the fridge or freezer for three reasons.

1. The water has nutrients that I boiled off the beans for the sake of a tender bean. I want to eat those nutrients in another dish if I can.
2. I just made a quart of vegetable broth with zero extra effort. It's not fancy but it works.
   
3. I am saving water because I am not throwing the boiling water down the sink drain. I am going to reuse it in another dish.
   

Enjoy the beautiful beans out there this summer!

How does a health conscious mom handle a weekend getaway?

For Memorial Day weekend Zack, Mikey, and I went to Dillon Beach (our view) a cold, windy, and beautiful Northern California beach. When I go out-of-town with my son and husband, we keep up with our healthy eating. If everyone is charged up on junk food, there is sure to be behavior problems. I've seen the behavior change in Mikey with my own eyes. He is a great control group.

So, I keep everyone balanced by feeding them real food. Vacation isn't an excuse for me to feed Mikey processed yogurt sticks, gold fish, or sugary cereals. That means no special treats because special treats can really be over done. And why can't a special treat be a beautiful red strawberry? Here is how I do it.

Instead of buying everything new from the grocery store on the way to the beach, I packed what I already have in the kitchen into a cooler and three canvas bags. The only two items that I made ahead of time were granola bars and a casserole.

After packing the pantry and the refrigerator, I only had to buy milk, eggs, meat and drinks at the grocery store. This means that most of the food that we ate this weekend is on the weekly food budget not the vacation budget. And it didn't go bad while we were away.

Here's a list of what I pulled from my pantry and refrigerator:

Snack Food
Homemade Granola Bars
Corn Kernels
Canola Oil
Raisins
Dates

Lunch
Peanut Butter
Honey
Bread
Cottage Cheese
Ricotta Cheese (Mikey packed this one not sure if we'll use it. See pic.)
Cheese
Tortillas

Breakfast
Oatmeal
Granola
Flour
Syrup
Tea
Coffee

Dinner
Pasta
Homemade Pesto for pasta dinner
Radishes
Turnips
Homemade Rice Casserole

We had enough to eat and more.

Here is One Day of Meals

Spelt crepes for breakfast.
Rice casserole and Sausages for lunch.
Cottage cheese, Mikey bars, and watermelon for snack.
Steak, Hog Island oysters, homemade potato fries for dinner.

Three Tips for Straw Cup Users

I just wrote a post about straw cups on my SFGate blog. Click here if you're interested in reading it. I am pretty happy about my discoveries.

Stainless Steel Scrubbing Pads

Until recently used S.O.S pads as my tough scrub pad. They work great but after one day they rust. I would maybe get two uses out of one pad. Now use these scrub pads in the picture. I found them at Lucky's. They work as good as S.O.S and last forever. The package has two and I'm still using the first; it has been weeks. They clean the same as S.O.S pads but don't rust. Best of all, I don't have to save them for special occasions. I'd always wait for the really tough pans before breaking out an S.O.S pad from the top shelf because there are only six in a big box. That's six to twelve washes. So, I'd pick my washes carefully. That game is over. I am so happy to be using one less disposable item.

One chop at a time

Sometimes cooking can feel so overwhelming. When I have writer's block in the kitchen, I just take it chop by chop. Sometimes I will stop after that first onion and that's okay.

Today, I didn't feel like cooking anything. The dishwasher still had to be unloaded and the breakfast dishes were in the sink. The kitchen was the last place that I wanted to spend my nap break.

I like to do my cooking when Mikey takes his nap. Today, one hour into his two hour nap, I hadn't done anything to prepare for dinner and had zero energy. Mikey and I were going swimming in the afternoon so if I was going to feed my family dinner, I had to come up with a plan now. In this frame of mind, how did I end up with two lentil and rice casseroles, potato leek soup for eight, and pasta with homemade tomato sauce before 7pm?

I started by chopping an onion. I decided to start with the lentil and rice casseroles. I cut the onion. I thought that I'd only have the energy to do this one task. I figured at least I'd have one less thing to do tonight. But I kept going. Now with the hardest part of the recipe done, all I had to do was throw the rice and lentils into the baking dishes and cover them with stock. I finished and put them in the oven. Unfortunately, they require 1.5 hours of cooking and we were leaving for the pool in one hour. I decided that I would keep moving ahead and just turn off the oven before we left and turn it back on when we got home. Mikey would be up any minute, I kept moving forward. I chopped the leeks for the soup and softened them in butter and olive oil on the stove.

"Mama, mama!" Mikey cries from his bedroom.

I turned off the stove. The leeks were done.

When we got home from the pool, I boiled water for the pasta. The casseroles weren't going to be ready in time. Mikey was already yelling, "bread, bread" over and over. When he gets bored of that he moves on to tinkering with everything in the house that he knows is a "no, no." It's shocking the mess that he can make in the 20 minutes that it takes me to get food on the table. This is why I do most of the cooking at nap time.

While I was waiting for the pasta water to boil, I washed and cut up the potatoes for my soup and covered them with broth in a saucepan. The potatoes boiled while we ate our pasta with the leftover tomato sauce and freshly grated raw parmesan cheese. While Zack got Mikey ready for bed, I took a hand blender to the soup and it was done before I went to snuggle and sing songs before bed.

Phew! Another successful day.