Menu Monday: Cauliflower Cheese Soup

I was scowering my Mom's large collection of cookbooks a few weeks ago, looking for some new recipes to add into the rotation with my new, fabulous, totally different regular diet - lotsa' produce, protein, and DIFFERENT carbs - because, well, you know how boring it is to eat the SAME thing over and over and over and over.....   ANYway.  I found some great ones!

This is one of them (for which I had to get my hot little hands on an immersion blender... hooray new kitchen gadgets! Thanks, Mom!)

Cauliflower Cheese Soup, from Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Food Revolution

Ingredients:

• 2 carrots
• 2 celery stalks
• 2 medium-sized onions
• 2 cloves garlic
• 8 cups cauliflower florets
• olive oil
• 1 3/4 quarts chicken or vegetable broth
• salt & pepper
• 8 oz cheddar cheese
• 1 tsp English mustard (I had Dijon mustard, so that's what I used)

Directions:

Peel & roughly slice carrots.  Slice the celery.  Peel & roughly chop onions.  Peel & slice garlic.  Cut cauliflower into 1/2 inch slices.  Grate the cheddar into a bowl and put to one side for later. 

Put broth in saucepan & heat until boiling.

Put a large saucepan on medium heat and add 2 tbsp olive oil.  All all your chopped & sliced ingredions and mix together with a wooden spoon.  Cook for approximately 10-15 minutes with the lid askew, until the carrots have softened but are still holding their shape, and the onion is slightly golden.


Add the boiling broth to the vegetables.  Give the soup a good stir and bring to a boil.  Reduce the heat & simmer for 10 minutes with the lid on. 

To serve your soup:
Remove the pan from the heat.  Season with salt and pepper and add the cheese and mustard.  Using an immersion blender or liquidizer pulse the soup until silky smooth.  Divide between your serving bowls and grate over some nutmeg, if you like. 

Lovely topped with some lightly fried crisp bacon.

It was SO SO SO SO SOOOOOOOOOOOOO good!! And makes, as you can imagine, a nice big batch, so I had it...most days last week while trying to recover from my death-cold. (Having a cold at the same time as your four-year-old is...not pleasant. 'Cause I don't know about you, but the secret to MY recovery is SLEEP, and I CAN'T sleep if the kid is up on and off on and off ALL FRIGGIN' NIGHT, EVERY night. It was brutal.  Mr. Man finally caught the cold, but Little Miss is better, so like, he gets off easy! GAH! What is WITH that??)

Okay, that's Menu Monday (plus a mini-rant - you are welcome!) and...time to plug into Netflix and lose some brain cells! O:-)

Menu Monday: Chicken "Parmesan"

One of my FAVOURITE things about having married my husband...is my mother-in-law's SUPER easy, delicous recipe for chicken parmesan hahahaha.  It's SOOOOOOOOOOOO good.   It has become one of my absolute favourite meals, one of my favourites to cook when I have company, and a couple of my friends' must-not-miss meals at my house.  hahaha  It was also a cheat meal back in detox days - YUM!!

Here we go!

Chicken Parmesan

Ingredients: 

• boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 3/4 cup bread crumbs
• 1 tsp Italian seasoning or 1/2 tsp oregano + 1/2 tsp basil
• butter
• lots of shredded mozzarella cheese
• parmesan cheese
• can of spaghetti sauce

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 

Melt butter in large frying pan. Meanwhile moisten chicken with water and shake in bag with breadcrumbs and seasonings. Place coated chicken in pan and fry in the butter until brown (both sides).  Place chicken in a baking dish and cover with mozzarella cheese.  Cover with spaghetti sauce (if you have more than five pieces of chicken you may need another can of sauce, FYI).  Cover AGAIN with more mozzarella.  Top it off with parmesan cheese (fresh grated or the shake-shake-shake kind) :-) Place in oven and bake for 45 minutes or until cheese is browned and bubbly.

like this!

Mmmm...fresh from the oven! YUM yum yum!

Serve with (whatever you want) spaghetti noodles.  You can use the excess sauce (if you used a large enough sauce to chicken ratio - 3 chicken breasts to one can of sauce works pretty well) from the pan on top of your noodles OR..I LOVE to add a yummy white sauce to my noodles so that when I put my chicken on top I end up with a scumptious orangey/pink mixed mess.  It's SO SO SO yummy! 

White sauce: equal parts (unwhipped) whipping cream and FRESH grated parmesan cheese, and a pat of butter.  Cook and drain the noodles, and then add the cream, cheese, and butter, and stir.  That's IT and it's AWESOME. (Stole it from Better Homes and Gardens "new cook book" or whatever it's called. hahaha

And now I have laundry to fold. :-)  Cheers!

Menu Tuesday: Chinese Chicken Salad

Okay, so this is one of my FAVOURITE meals.  It's SO SO SO good.  And while you can make all sorts of arguments against it's health value, it always results in my eating a GIANT amount of cabbage, onions, it's FRESH made, not full of preservatives and all whatever garbage (you know, all the garbage that was in last night's Kraft Dinner meal....) .... it's DELISH. (I tend not to share food I don't find absolutely delicious...that just seems like it would be mean! Here! Here's this meal...it's kinda' crap...)

Here we go: Chinese Chicken Salad

Ingredients:
1 can mandarin oranges, drained
1 head Chinese cabbage (Nappa, or you could use Romaine lettuce)
1 bunch green onions, chopped
1 package noodles, crunched up (use the noodles from a package of Ramen, or some other uncooked chow-mein type noodles)
2 tsp sesame seeds
1/3 cup almond slices
cooked chicken breast, cut up in chunks, as much as you want in the salad
DRESSING -
1/4 cup vinegar
3 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Directions:
Brown sesame seeds and almond slices in 350 degree oven.  Let cool.  Combine dressing ingredients in a  saucepan and bring to a boil.  Pour into a jar and let cool.  Before serving shake well.

Break up Nappa cabbage and mix with all other salad ingredients.  Toss with dressing and serve immediately.

*make it even healthier for you by substituting in xylitol or stevia for the sugar in the dressing, gluten-free soy sauce, or rice or some other type of dry, oriental noodle for that extra crunch without the wheat, gluten, or whatever your intolerance may be for.

Easy and fabulous. My two favourite things in food.

Enjoy!

Pre-tossing

Tossed and ready to eat!

Menu Monday: Garlic Roasted Potato Wedges

HELLO! Hello, hello hello.

I know, I know. I'm ALL over getting back to blogging and then...it just stops.

I HAVE A LIFE, people!  hahaha

Honestly, between school, Mr. Man being out of work (waaah!), Little Miss, and just, BLAH! I've found finding the time for ME that I want/need to get things like blogging, reading, crafting, whatever (even checking my TWITTER has gone to the wayside - it's SO SAD! hahaha) difficult to find.

Which isn't to say that I'm NOT taking time for me. I'm just, doing different things with it, maybe?  Like I painted my kitchen cabinets (white) and half the walls (I need Mr. Man to do some repairs on the other half before I can paint the rest...but the finished section looks amazing, so the whole finished kitchen is going to look FABULOUS, too).  I nixed Little Miss' playroom, moved all her toys and movies and everything to the basement which I turned into a 'family room,' and the 'play room' is now my massage treatment area!  AND in anticipation of starting my massage practice later in the year I joined Scentsy so I have full access to their amazing products - I have a warmer going in my treatment room and LOVE LOVE LOVE it (not to mention two in my living room, one in the kitchen, a scent pack in the bathroom.... my house always smells AMAZING.)  And kickboxing, of course.

Anyway, here I am today.  HOPEFULLY, as my family works out this...weird/difficult time in our lives I'll figure THIS little part of mine out and YES be here regularly.  Because I LIKE posting and rambling on about nothing.  I just have a place to dump my brain out without making my poor Mr. Man wish he could bash his head through the wall because my motor mouth won't stop running and running and running.... ;) (don't worry -he's never said that's how he feels....I just imagine that's how I'D feel sometimes if I were stuck married to me! hahaha)

So, all that blah de blah blah aside, guess what day it IS today?  That's right!  It's MENU MONDAY!

Today, I cooked for my bud, who turns a whopping FOURTEEN YEARS OLD tomorrow.  She rocks my socks, and usually crashes at our place for dinner and FHE (family home evening - we hang out as a family + extras) on Monday nights.  She loves it when we have steak because she and her mom don't get around to steak very often.   So we had steak, with fried onions, mushrooms, and green peppers, steamed cauliflower, and then these FABULOUS potatoes that my mom gave me the recipe for YEARS ago that I never got around to actually trying until sometime last year - I think I thought they were outside my skill-set...which they totally aren't.

And so, without further ado.... GARLIC ROASTED POTATO WEDGES

FRESH out of the oven - YUM!

Ingredients:
4 large red potatoes *
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
2 tsp fresh garlic, minced
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper

Directions
Heat oven to 425 degrees. Cut potatoes in half lengthwise, and then each half in four, lengthwise.  Place in pot and cover with water.  Bring potatoes to a boil and cook until just tender.  Drain.

Melt butter and mix with other ingredients.  Add potatoes and coat.  Put in a 13x9" pan.  Bake for 10 minutes, turn and bake another 10-15 minutes, until brown.

*I never use large or red potatoes - I'm too lazy to bother with large potatoes, so always just grab a bag of smallish potatoes, and then cut them lengthwise in quarters.  Also...I don't bother to turn them.... O:-)

THESE. ARE. SO. GOOD.  And a wonderful, natural source of carbs instead of some crazy processed whatever.  Just, you know, don't eat ALL of them yourself 'cause there's a whole whack load of butter in there....  

Okay, that's that!  Between massaging yesterday, kickboxing today, and now typing on my lap my forearms have HAD it, so I'm....going to fold some laundry... hahaha

Cheers, all!

Say hello to MENU MONDAYS! Beef Vegetable Soup

Hi ho, everyone!  Well, everyone who is kind enough to take however long it takes to read one of my long-winded blog-ramblings to visit and read the latest ramblings I have.... I don't pretend to think there are too many of you, so "everyone" is a very select group of folks...

I totally lost myself in that non-thought.  What am I here for??

OH yes.  Welcome to: MENU MONDAYS!


So, I'm pretty jazzed about this - I've been thinking, honestly, for months to start doing this and then, obviously, never did.  But then I've found it so relatively easy recently to share DAILY what I'm eating that I figure, YES! I CAN do this sometimes!  hahaha

Basically, when I eat something absolutely fabulous, I'll take a picture, post it, and share the recipe.  Sound good??  It does to me, but I'm kind of NUTS about food, so....

FIRST UP: Mom's Best Ever Beef Vegetable Soup

Not my best ever food picture, but I took it on my phone, so let's all be sufficiently impressed, yes? Fabulous.

First thing you have to know...this is really easy to make. And DELICIOUS.  And my mommy used to make it. She may still (why wouldn't you??)


Ingredients: 
1 lb ground beef
2 cups chopped onion
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup thinly sliced carrots
6 cups water
3 tbsp beef bouillon, or 2 oxo cubes
1 28oz can diced tomatoes
1/2 cup pot barley (or pasta stars or some other such thing - I use pot barley)
2 bay leaves
2 tsp each chill powder and basil
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1 7.5oz can tomato sauce
1 or 2 cups green beans (can use 2 14oz cans, a small bag of frozen, just as long as they're cut up)


Directions: 
Brown ground beef in large pot.  Drain off fat.  Add onion, celery and carrots.  Stir and cook 5 minutes.  Add remaining ingredients except green beans, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 50 minutes.  Add beans, cook until heated through.  Discard bay leaves.

This one I made up earlier in the day, simmered for the 50 minutes, and then left Mr. Man in charge of chopping up, adding, and cooking the green beans.  Soooo.....the beans were a little on the long side O:-) and a little on the crunchy side.  hahaha BUT I happen to love green beans so it was still pretty fabulous.  Just cut them up however you like them, and make sure they're heated through so they, you know, go with the soup!

Even Little Miss ate it.  Which is saying something.

MMMMMmmmm....chiiiiilli.....

I know, I know. Another boring food post. I KNOW!

But, you're keeping me accountable, so get over it. hahaha

And I HAD to tell you....

I don't really like chili. Never have. Every time I go to a big event where they're promising food and surprise, surprise, they're serving CHILI.... well, I stock up on the rolls. I mean, I eat the chili but it's never ever been a favourite.

Hot dang, did I make delicious chili last night! hahaha MMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmm!!! I think this recipe I stumbled upon is for SURE going in our collection of favourites! AND it's another crock-pot wonder, so BOOYAH easy to make!

Once again, from Better Homes and Gardens Biggest Book of Slow Cooker Recipes, I present to you.... Vegetarian Chili With Pasta

1 15oz can garbanzo beans (chickpeas) rinsed & drained
1 15oz can red kidney beans, rinsed & drained
2 14oz cans diced tomatoes
1 8oz can tomato sauce
1 large onion, finely chopped (1 cup)
1/2 cup chopped green or yellow sweet pepper (I used red 'cause it was on sale)
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 to 3 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp dried oregano, crushed
1/4 tsp ground red pepper (optional)
1 cup wagon wheel or elbow macaroni (I used whole wheat bowties)
(optional - we opted out) shredded cheddar cheese

In a 3 1/2- to 4- quart slow cooker combine beans, undrained tomatoes, tomato sauce, onion, sweet pepper, garlic, chili powder, oregano, and red pepper, if desired.

Cover; cook on low-heat setting for 4 to 5 hours or on high-heat setting for 2 to 2 1/2 hours.

Cook pasta according to package directions; drain. Stir cooked pasta into bean mixture. Serve in bowls, and, if desired, sprinkle with cheddar cheese.

Nutrition Facts per serving (makes 5 servings): 273 Cal, 2g total fat (0g saturated fat), 0mg chol., 868mg sodium, 53g carbs, 10g fibre, 14g protein. Daily values: 57% vit C, 13% calcium, 22% iron.

Day 2.5

Wanted to tell you how it's going, a whopping not-even-three-days-later. hahaha

So Tuesday, before I posted, I did all sorts of searching for some new, yummy, 30-day-plan-to-lifestyle-kickstart meals. And HUZZAH I found some!!

Here's a quick run-down of the plan/mindset behind everything (which you can find in full detail here) - BASICALLY, you eat HUGE amounts of produce. hahaha Aaaaaand that's about that! No, really, though. I was SUPER skeptical when we were talking about it and planning...the plan hahaha, BUT then I thought about it - what's the recommended daily intake for fruits/vegetables per person per day? Like, oodles, right? 6-7 or something like that? (I really don't know off the top of my head.... Oh, nope! I just looked it up here: 7-8 for females, 8-10 for males (unless over 51 then you just need 7 servings). Alright, fine, so yay. 8 servings.

Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhhh......I LIKE fruit & veggies. I, regularly, do NOT eat 7 servings per day. No way. Maybe 2-3? Maybe? I mean, if I remember to grab an apple out of my fruit bowl and ingest it in a day I'm having a super-good healthy day, right? Now I have to remember to do that SEVEN TIMES????

So, basically, the PLAN teaches you how to make doing that EASY, and in so doing you get better portion control of everything else in your healthy diet!!

For 30 days you eat...LOTS of vegetables, fruit, legumes. White meat/fish once per day, red meat ONLY once a week, and at least once in the week you have a meatless day. GASP HORROR! What about PROTEIN! Um, hi. Chickpeas are one of my "new" FAVOURITE things. Just for an example. :)

At the end of 30 days your body, taste buds, whatever, is adjusted to this fantastic way of eating, and if nothing else you've added a bunch of delicious, vegetable-rich meals into your repertoire, making it easier to stay properly balanced.

OH yeah, and your body's a little busy going WHAT-the-heck-are-you-doing-to-me, and you shed some fat mass. Huzzah bonus!

Okay, so Tuesday, I did up the meal plan and kicked off with a new meal we'd never tried before. DELISH! Loved it! And I'm not going to lie, I was kinda' skeptical about this one.... (sorry the picture's not like, pro-quality. I took it partway through the bowl when I realized just HOW MUCH I was enjoying my dinner)

Recipe from "Better Homes and Gardens Biggest Book of Slow Cooker Recipes" (yes, that's right - it's a crockpot meal, so you dump it together HOURS before dinner, smell it all day, and then VOILA delicious dinner! HOORAY!)
Eggplant-Tomato Stew with Garbanzos - garbanzo beans and chickpeas are the same food. Usually they are stocked along with canned beans or in the Mexican foods section of grocery stores.

1 medium eggplant, peeled, if desired, and cut into 1/2 inch cubes
2 cups chopped tomatoes
1 1/2 cups sliced carrots
1 15oz can garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
1 15oz can red kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup sliced celery
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 cups vegetable broth or chicken broth
1 6oz can Italian-style tomato paste
1/2 tsp dried oregano, crushed
1/2 tsp dried basil, crushed
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 bay leaf

In a 5- to 6-quart slow cooker combine all ingredients. Cover; cook on low-heat setting for 8-9 hours or on high-heat setting for 4 to 41/2 hours. Discard bay leaf.

Nutrition facts per serving: 227 Cal, 3g total fat (0g saturated fat), 0mg chol., 1,231mg sodium (depending on your broth - mine would be less 'cause we used Epicure's vegetable soup base), 44g carb, 12g fibre, 13g protein. Daily values, 176% vit A, 38% vit C, 8% calcium, 18% iron.

YUUUUUUMMMMM!! And it made OODLES (6 servings) so...I'm definitely eating it for lunch today.

Bore you with more later! :)