Roasted root vegetables

The easiest and best way to cook root vegetables, especially in the winter when the house is kind of chilly anyway.

Roasted Root Vegetables
1 sweet potato or yam
2 parsnips
1 thick carrot
1 tbsp honey
2 tbsp butter
1 tsp lemon juice

Combine all ingredients in a baking dish.  Roast at 350 F until vegetables are soft and slightly browned; mine took about an hour.

Israeli Couscous Salad

I finally found Israeli couscous today, in the surprising environs of my local Bulk Barn. Actually more of a pasta than a grain, I’d been wanting to try it for a while.

With cucumbers and cherry tomatoes still the freshest thing going, I didn’t hesitate to assemble this salad to go with grilled lamb chops.

Israeli Couscous Salad

2/3 cup Israeli couscous
1 cucumber
1 cup cherry tomatoes
2 tsp olive oil
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
freshly ground black pepper

1. Bring 4 cups of salted water to a boil. Add the couscous grains, stir, and let boil for 8 minutes. They should still be slightly chewy, but soft.
2. While the couscous is boiling, quarter and slice your cucumber, and quarter or roughly chop the cherry tomatoes. (It all depends on how hungry you are, and whether you’re serving it to company.)
3. Throw the cucumber and tomatoes in a bowl, top with the olive oil and vinegar, and give a good stir.
4. When it’s done, drain the couscous and add it immediately to the rest of the salad ingredients. Top with pepper and serve.

Like a pasta, Israeli couscous isn’t exactly a health food on its own. Half a recipe above costs 242 calories, or 4 Weight Watchers points. However, if it convinces you to eat more cucumber and tomato, I think that’s a good thing!

Black Bean and Summer Vegetable Salad

Black Bean and Summer Vegetable Salad

My next-door neighbour has been handing me cucumbers all month. One day we also got a dozen ears of corn, and recently cherry tomatoes have started coming over the fence from her too.

We ate this on its own as a light meal – the black beans add protein, and the corn is a starchy vegetable, so it’s almost complete on its own.

Black Bean and Summer Vegetable Salad

1/2 a cucumber
1 cup cherry tomatoes
1 ear corn, cooked (mine was leftover from a batch of barbecued ears)
1/2 can black beans
2 tsp olive oil
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper to taste

1. Chop the cucumber and tomato into quite small pieces.
2. Cut the corn kernels off the cob and add to the other vegetables.
3. Rinse and drain the black beans.
4. Add the olive oil and vinegar, and stir to combine. Add a little salt and pepper if you like.

I’m sure later in the season I’ll start adding herbs and spices to perk up the taste, but right now it tasted so fresh and delightful without that I wasn’t even tempted.

Half the recipe gives you 2 servings of vegetable for only 225 calories, or 4 Weight Watchers points. You’re also getting 7.5g of fibre, a good push towards your daily requirement. You can leave out the oil to bring it down to 185 calories and 3 points, but olive oil is good for you in small amounts like this.

Potato Salad

We’re going to a potluck barbecue tonight, and along with some burgers to throw on the grill, I’m taking a small potato salad to share. I’ve been devouring (metaphorically) the Smitten Kitchen website, reading all the back posts over the past couple of weeks; it’s the site I wish I was writing. Oh well! I’ll just point you to all her veggie recipes and you can see the delicious-looking cakes and cookies yourself if you like; I won’t tempt you here.  She heavily adapted Roseanne Cash’s Potato salad, and I’ve adapted it again, since I hate egg in potato salads.

Potato Salad

1 pound new potatoes
2 dill pickle spears, chopped (about 1/2 cup)
1 stalk celery, chopped (about 1/3 cup)
6 green onions, white & green parts, chopped (about 1/3 cup)
3 tbsp light mayonnaise
2 tsp Dijon mustard
2 tsp apple cider vinegar

1. Quarter and boil the new potatoes until cooked (ideally you cooked double for last night’s dinner). Drain and let cool completely.
2. Add everything else and mix together. Add salt and pepper if it seems to need it.

Eat a quarter of this and you’ve got just 135 calories, or 3 Weight Watchers points.

Fresh Tomato Soup, and other supper goodness

Supper tonight was, I have to admit, all the left-overs from last week’s farmer’s market haul. I had to make room for the new stuff!

The beans were the leftovers from lunch, served cold. New potatoes were simply washed, quartered, and boiled; top them with a little butter, salt and pepper at the table if you like.

The soup pulled it all together and added the bulk of the meal’s protein, thanks to the last of the cheddar cheese curds from the Thornloe cheese factory I picked up during our August long weekend trip there.

Fresh Tomato Soup

2 tsp olive oil
2 gloves garlic
1/2 small onion
8 or 10 fresh Roma tomatoes, chopped (mine worked out to 3.5 cups when chopped)
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 tsp dried basil (by all means substitute 1 tbsp fresh – I didn’t have any)
2 tbsp flour in 1/4 cup cold water
1/4 cup cheese curds

salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat the oil in a largish pot and add the garlic, minced, and the onion, chopped up.
2. Add the stock, tomatoes, and basil, and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes.
3. Use an immersion blender, if you have one, to blend the soup in the pot. Otherwise you can use your blender, but you should let it cool a bit first, and then put it back in the pot to warm back up.
4. Mix the flour into the water until there are no lumps, and add to the soup. Let simmer for five minutes – it should thicken up a little.
5. Divide the cheese curds between two serving bowls. Ladle half the soup into each bowl.

The beauty of the cheese curds is that they melt into those lovely toothsome strings that you get with proper poutine. You can, of course, just slice up some cheddar and add that instead – mozzarella would probably be good too.

Each serving is 193 calories, or 4 Weight Watchers points. You get an impressive three servings of vegetables for that.

EDIT:  It’s Saturday now, and I just heated up the leftover soup from last night; the two servings were a bit too generous, even for us.  Even though my usual reaction to “stir in a spoonful of plain yogurt” is “ugh, no thanks”, I just did it; and it’s great!  It adds some creaminess and adds a bit of a tang, without adding that overpowering plain-yogurt tang.  I do wish that I’d peeled my tomatoes, though – I hate those little bits of rolled-up skin.

French Beans

French beans are very much like regular green beans, but you can recognize them by their thinness. When you taste them, you’ll notice a difference too.

I haven’t posted any recipes yet, because to be honest, we haven’t had anything I could call a ‘recipe’ without laughing at myself. The first time we ate them, Will and I just washed them, put them in the microwave for 1 minute, then ate them in front of the TV with our fingers while watching the Olympics. You wouldn’t have thought it would substitute well for popcorn, would you?

Today I had them for lunch, with this ridiculously easy cooking method that I also hesitate to call a ‘recipe’.

Sautéed French Beans

2 tsp butter (or olive oil if you like)
1 large clove garlic
1 slice onion (or shallot cut up fine, or green onions chopped)
1 pound french beans

1. Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the garlic, minced, and the onion, cut into quarters and broken apart. Leave it on a fairly low heat so the butter doesn’t burn and the white stuff doesn’t brown.
2. While that’s cooking, prep your beans by washing them and cutting off the stem end.
3. Throw the beans, still wet, into the frying pan. Pop the lid on for about eight minutes. Stir them once or twice.
4. Either eat them hot out of the pan with your fingers, or let them cool and eat as a salad the next day.

Sharing this with someone gives you each 1 Weight Watchers point (for the butter or oil), plus two servings of vegetables.  If you’re counting calories, it’s 118.

P.S.  Artistic note: please cut your onion slices skinnier than I did, so your onion bits don’t end up looking like albino earthworms.

Farmer’s market haul

Nothing new today – just repeats of previous good stuff.  I did, however, note how much I paid for everything; all this for just $21!

• 1/2 dozen ears of corn, $3
• pint basket of edamame, $3.33
• quart basket of french beans, $3.33
• 2 summer squash and 3 zucchini, $3.33
• 3L basket of peaches, $8

Although it has seemed decadent to go to the market and spend $30 just on fruits and veggies, the odd thing is that going to the market means we don’t have to go buy groceries.  We go through milk so quickly we buy it at the corner store, without triggering a trip.  In fact, I just checked our VISA card transactions, and we’ve gone to the grocery store only twice this month, and spent just $55.09 between the two trips.  That’s pretty amazing, considering how often I normally go when I’m at home.  I guess with eggs from the market and meat from the freezer, everything else is taken care.

Edamame

I was thrilled to see edamame (young soybeans in the pod) at our farmer’s market on Thursday, so I’m embarrassed to admit that they’ve sat in the fridge for a week now. It doesn’t seem to have hurt them one bit, though.

I won’t bore you with a written-out recipe for edamame; I boiled them for 8 minutes, sprinkled them with salt, and am now gloriously wading through the whole bag for lunch!

The nutritional information I’ve found seems to be for shelled edamame, but when it’s served in a restaurant as an appetizer it’s always still in the pod. I measured a cup of pods, and the beans from that worked out to 1/4 cup.

So, measure out yourself a generous *two* cups of pods, and for 47 calories (1 Weight Watchers point) you get 2g of fibre, 4g of protein, and only 2g of fat. Fat in a vegetable? This one plays in the “meat and alternates” category too, plus I’m sure you’ve heard that women approaching menopause should add more soy to their eating. This is the tastiest way I’ve found.

Grilled Zucchini

Simple and good. This is our favourite way to use up the small baby zucchini you invariably see in the supermarket these days – whatever happened to the big ones our mothers grated up into zucchini loaf? Are they a purely homegrown phenomenon?

Grilled Zucchini

2 baby zucchini (the ones that are 8″ to 12″ long, and about 2″ in diameter)
1 tsp olive oil
salt and freshly ground pepper

Cut the ends off the zucchini and cut lengthwise into quarters (or, if you’re going to put them on a sandwich later, you can cut them in 1/4″ thick lengthwise slices). Drizzle the olive oil over top, and add some salt and pepper. Grill for about five minutes, but not until they’re mushy.

Farmer’s market bounty

Today Will and I went to the market, and got about as much as we could carry:

• a pound of ground beef from the Mennonite farmer/butcher; it was their last week at the market, unfortunately
• Roma tomatoes
• French beans
• raspberries
• 1/2 dozen eggs
• 1/2 dozen ears of corn
• new white potatoes
• a basket of peaches
• apples
• and edamame!

But, the poor zucchini from last week are still languishing in the crisper drawer of the fridge.  It’s their night to shine, and the other veggies will have to wait their turn.