Green Soup

Breathe in, breathe out.

I finished our tax preparation yesterday, so now I can breathe ... and so can everyone else at our house!

Green soup is one of the favorite side dishes at our house.  It's a whole lotta nutrition in one serving.

The original recipe is found here.  I have mentioned green soup (here), but now it's time to share our version of this soup.

The original recipe does not call for bacon, but we really love bacon!  It is now a required ingredient.

A vegan version would omit the bacon and replace chicken stock with vegetable broth, and it would still taste good!

Slowly saute four pieces of bacon until cooked.  Add two chopped onions.  Add a glop of olive oil and about the same amount of water (next time I will not use olive oil, since bacon gives plenty grease).  Cover and turn the heat down, stirring occasionally:

Add about an inch of water to a large soup pot.  Add a large bag of kale.  Cover and cook until kale is steamed:

Rinse the kale with cold water.  Drain and repeat until it is no longer hot:

Place the drained kale in a large blender.  Add two cups chicken broth, 1/4 cup rice flour, a few dashes of cayenne or red pepper, and the bacon/onion mixture:

Puree in blender and place in sauce pot.  Cover and simmer on low before serving:

Here's one way to serve it, although lately we've been serving the soup in the smaller-size bowl (on the right):

It also makes great leftovers (note the repurposed ice cream containers):

Do you have a veggie-intensive recipe?

Paleo Meals and Future Sewing

Food first!  Can't live without it!

Liver

We like liver with onions and gizzards.  Of course, we start with bacon, cook it slowly for a long time in a large skillet, then add onions:

Then we cut the gizzards into bite-sized pieces, rinse very well, and add to the bacon and onions.  These have to simmer for 25-30 minutes:

Meanwhile, the chicken livers must be cut into bite-sized pieces, then rinsed, and rinsed, and rinsed, and rinsed  ...  and rinsed - well, you get the idea.  The livers are added to the skillet, but turned over every three minutes or so until cooked.  This picture was taken just after they were added to the skillet:

Uh, I just realized that I don't have a picture of the finished dish, but this is how we like it best.

Steak

Here is a meal from a different day - steak, herbed zucchini, and onions sauteed with mushrooms:

Soup

We found a green soup recipe in the Reader's Digest magazine, and thought we'd try it.  It turns out to be an easy way to eat lots of greens.  It tastes pretty good, too!

Of course, one must start with two whole onions, chopped, and cook them until they are almost caramelized.  Meanwhile, cut up a large bunch of kale and steam or boil it in a large pot until it is soft.  The kale is drained and rinsed until cool, then pureed in the blender with chicken stock and the onions, with a little lemon juice, salt, and cayenne.  The soup is returned to the pot to heat until almost boiling.

Above is our variation on the recipe we found - click here.

Here is a picture of our green soup, served with chicken salad made by DH:

Picadillo

I also have a nice recipe for picadillo, which could loosely be translated as Cuban chili.

Start off a Picadillo Day by filling a coffee cup half-way with raisins.  Cover that with wine or rum, then let is soak for later.

Sautee 2 lbs of ground beef with a little water added.  Somehow the water makes it easier to chop the ground beef into uniform pieces.  Drain off the water when the meat is cooked:

Add two coarsely chopped onions to the ground beef and cook until the onions start to soften:

Place the meat in a large stew pot.  To the stew pot, add the remaining ingredients as shown left to right in the next picture:

• spices in a cup - lots of cinnamon, some allspice, ground cloves, ground nutmeg, cumin, oregano, cilantro, and chili powder
• raisins soaking in cup
• chopped tomatoes with no salt (we used 2)
• tomato paste
• stuff in bowl - drained sliced black olives (1/2 small jar), drained chopped stuffed green olives (medium can), drained capers (1/2 jar)

Cover the pot and turn the heat down, and let it simmer from five to 30 minutes.

Ladle into bowls and serve with a dollop of sour cream on top of each serving.

Here's what it looks like as a leftover - and a fine leftover it is:

Sewing

My next sewing project will be pillowcases and pillowcase liners.  Hah!  These pillowcase liners will just be more white pillowcases.  Here's the fabric for the pillowcases:

A simple sewing project should re-set my mojo, since I did not enjoy the hand-sewing part of the little purses.

What do you do to re-set your sewing mojo?

Get Ready for Cranberry Season

It's almost cranberry season!

Actually, it might already be cranberry season.  Since I haven't been looking for them in the stores yet, I would not know.

It would make no sense for me to look for them, much less to buy them, if I have no room for them in my freezer ...

--- YET!

As you can tell, I don't always think of seasons as terms of weather.

For example, the orange season starts when cranberry season is at least half over.

Has "living in Florida" done this to me?

Anyway, I must get ready for cranberry season.  That means: Make Room in the Freezer!

I had to use up some veggies, some of which were stored in the freezer, and others in the vegetable crisper in the refrigerator.  Here's what I managed to use up in the last two days:

• Two quart bags of cubed eggplant
• One small bag of cut broccoli
• One quart bag each of sliced zucchini and yellow squash
• The rest of the celery, cut into one-inch lengths
• The rest of the carrots, cut into one-inch lengths
• One bag of sliced rhubarb

I used up all the veggies by making an Indian-style dish.  We had half a bottle of a simmer sauce, which became the basis of this dish.

I steamed all the eggplant and set it aside.  Then I steamed the carrots a few minutes before adding the rest of the veggies to the steamer.

I placed all the steamed veggies into the large stew pot.  I placed the simmer sauce into the VitaMix blender and added about eight ounces of raw cashews, a can of coconut milk, some curry powder, and a couple dashes of salt.  After the cashews were fairly well chopped, I added the sauce to the veggies, turned on the heat, and simmered them for a little while.

There was such a huge quantity of vegetables that there were leftovers:

Even hubby, who declares that he "can't stand" eggplant, thought the dish was quite tasty!

I had been wanting to use up the rhubarb for a while.  The only way I knew to use it was in a pie, but I didn't want to make a pie.  I searched my RSS reader for a rhubarb recipe, and found a rhubarb and berry dessert sauce recipe (click here).

I bought a bag of frozen, mixed berries to go with the rhubarb, and made this.  It also tastes great with vanilla ice cream (ask me how I know!).

I will have to poke through the freezer again to see if there's anything else we can take out - and use up - before I can go buy some cranberries to keep in there.

And what, you may ask, will I DO with those cranberries?  Something I did with them
last year (click here for the recipe):

FYI, after cranberry season comes orange blossom season.  YAY!

One-Pot Dinners

One-pot dinners were made for me.

If I could just throw everything into one pot and call it dinner, I would.

I made the veggie tonight.  It was kale.  I threw everything into the big pot, forgetting that I was supposed to saute the bacon and onions first, not all together.  It took a while for the kale to defrost.

I'm surprised that I bothered  remembered to cut up the bacon  - before I cooked it.

Also in that pot were several pats of butter and about half a cup of coconut water.

The only reason I make kale occasionally is because we need to eat more veggies, and kale packs a real nutritional punch.

Hubby tolerates it.  Cousin likes it (I think).  I love it.  Well, these statements are only true if bacon is included.

Food preparation would be so much easier if all I had to do was throw stuff in.  That's what I like about making smoothies.

A Weed Smoothie

No, I don't mean That Weed, silly.  I mean This weed:

Chickweed is prolific in my yard.  In fact, in Florida's wet season, chickweed grows much larger than you would suspect from the picture.

Here is a picture of chickweed growing in my yard in February, so it's not very thick:

I know that it's a very nutritious herb, even though it's most commonly known as a weed.

Click on this sentence for more information about the nutrition and benefits of chickweed.

Here's a picture of chickweed taken in April, which was dry this year, so it's not very big here, either:

Here's a picture of it in June, just as it was starting to get bigger:

After harvesting and freezing, here's what it looked like when I pulled it from the freezer.  For reference, the bag shown is gallon size:

My basic smoothie recipe is to place the ingredients in the blender in the following order:

• something green - spinach or mild herbs
• something wet - coconut water or iced tea made with stevia
• three apples - pared and quartered
• spices - apple pie spice or cinnamon or fresh ginger pieces

Here are the assembled ingredients in our VitaMix blender:

Here are the blended smoothies:

This is very tasty.  The chickweed makes it milder and less bland than a spinach smoothie.

Making Green Tea

We make iced green tea by the half-gallon, and here's how we do it.

We start with a 16-oz steeping teapot from Amazon (link in the picture):

Then we throw in one heaping scoop each of green tea and dried stevia leaves.  Each heaping scoop is just over half of a 1/4 cup measure:

We get our loose tea and dried stevia leaves from San Francisco Herb Co.  Link here for tea, and link here for stevia .

We heat up some filtered water until it's boiling:

After the water has stopped boiling, we pout it over the tea and stevia, and set the timer for nine minutes:

Meanwhile, we add two or three inches of filtered water to a half-gallon pitcher.  When the timer goes off, we hold the teapot over the pitcher of water, and press up one side of the bottom, which lets the tea escape:

My husband makes his tea first and adds more filtered water until his pitcher is 3/4 full.  He also adds some ice.  Then he heats up more water, fills the teapot again, re-using the tea, and sets the timer for 13 minutes.  When the timer goes off, I prepare my tea in the same way, filling my pitcher about 2/3 full.  We leave our pitchers out on the counter until the tea has cooled a bit before storing in the refrigerator.

Different types of tea turn out with different colors.  It took us a while to figure out how we like it.  My husband likes his tea strong and sweet, while I like mine weaker and not as sweet.

Do you make more than one cup of green tea at a time?

Packaged Foods not always Convenient

I recently bought a package of pre-cut kale because the bunches were not available.

I should have remembered from previous experience that these bags tend to be full of stems.  What you see here is half a bag of kale that I had already blanched (boiled for just a minute or two).  I let it cool before I removed the stems.  That's what I get for being in a hurry:

I hope I don't forget this lesson again!

Have you ever found a "convenience food" that was not so convenient?

Sewing and Eating, More of it

Yesterday I made a sample napkin holder.  I had intended to make it in the style of these baskets on Debbie's blog, and I drew the pattern here:

After thinking about it and discussing it with my cousin, who I invited into the creative process, I changed how I wanted to do it.  The calculations are shown here:

The sides are made from the long strip which is folded at the top.  This strip encloses plastic canvas pieces.  The bottom is a double layer square of fabric which is attached to the bottom of the sides.  The bottom encloses a piece of craft foam.  I cut the fabric pieces and did the sewing, while my cousin cut all the plastic pieces.  Here is my first napkin holder for the kitchen:

Even though St Patrick's day was yesterday, we had a very St Paddie's day breakfast today.  The crust of the quiche was nut meal and egg.  The quiche filling was eggs, spinach leaves, and sea salt, blended.  There was cheese sprinkled on top, but it got cooked into the quiche.


The biscuits were made from this recipe.  They are made with mostly eggs and coconut flour, and they are very good.  This was a mostly paleo meal, except for the little bit of cheese:

Today, I went out with DH to buy a step ladder, and we had burgers at Steak n Shake - no fries, no bread, no cheese, but all the other condiments!  Then we went to JA's to get buttons and a zipper.  We got a small pack of very sturdy buttons for the next time I need to replace buttons on his shorts.  We got a 30" light-weight nylon zipper so I can make a cover for the wedge pillow I bought last weekend.

After that, cousin and I laid out in the sun to get our natural Vitamin D and to sweat out the toxins.  The day is not yet over!

Sewing and Eating

We all know that sewing requires food, the nourishment that gives us the strength to sew, right?

Here's what we had for supper tonight -- pork country-style ribs (which DH grilled with his special sauce), steamed asparagus (topped with butter), and a cherry tomato salad (I found the recipe here).  This is a very Paleo meal (at least to my understanding) because it contains only "real food" -- no grains, no processed carbs, and no chemicals:

Here's a light-weight knit I bought on sale at JA's a couple days ago.  I bought 1.5 yards of this sale fabric, and with 40-percent off (plus tax) it cost me approximately $12.50.  I think that's pretty good!  It will become a top of some sort.  Isn't it pretty?  It will go with all my purple and fuchsia pieces, and maybe even some red or black pieces:

I hope to get back to work on my skirt soon.  You believe me, don't you?  Most recent pictures of the skirt are here.

I also plan to make an actual container to hold the paper napkins that sit on my kitchen counter.  I want to make a short basket based on Debbie Cook's Ikea-style bins.  Look here to see what I mean.  DH doesn't know it yet, but he will help me make this.

If DH want another set of custom sheets like you can see here, we have to find a very good price for extra-wide fabric, which is usually called quilt backing.  I still have to write the tutorial for making sheets, but you can click here to see the instructions that are with the pictures.

As if there weren't enough projects in the planning stage around here, we bought a huge wedge pillow at BB&B (with a coupon, of course!).  It comes with a flimsy pillow cover, but we prefer two pillow cases on all our pillows.  When I get around to making this pillow cover, I will share the instructions.

Doggies Gone Paleo

The dogs "went Paleo" before the people did at our house.  Here's Marco:

... and here's Sarge:

We looked for grain-free dog food, and finally found it at our local Ace hardware:

The dogs love it.  Marco Polo, the older dog, gets more energy from this food than he did with grain-filled dog food.  Besides, since when did dogs harvest grains to eat?

"Mommy, why are you just standing there and not letting us inside to see what's cooking?"

Eat Paleo, Wear Red, and Sew a Little

Here's a picture of a typical type of dinner we eat on the paleo diet.  This was from one night earlier this week.  It was basically a roast and a catch-all of vegetables that had been cooked in the crock pot:

Where I work, many people choose to wear red on Fridays, in support of our troops.  It's a habit that would be hard for me to break.  Here's the outfit I wore today -- M5893 with a thrifted shirt worn as a jacket:

Last, but not least, I sewed the lower skirt pieces to the middle skirt pieces.  I pressed each seam flat, first on one side ...

... and then I pressed the other side ...

... then I pressed each seam up:

I also trimmed each seam by about half:

The next step will be to topstitch each seam from the right side, but I will save that for a later day.