Indian Summer Dinner

This is a guest post written by my stepmom...when she and my dad came to visit, we cooked (and ate) some delicious meals.  Here's a little sample of what happens in our house when guests come to town!

Menu

Baked organic whole chicken, with gravy made from the juices

Farmer's market salad greens with roasted glazed beets and sweet and spicy pecans

Roasted backyard cherry tomatoes with fresh basil

Brown rice (to go with the gravy)

Preparation for our meal began early in the day with a stroll through the Norwich farmer's market for  fresh vegetables and organic meat from the CSA.  Everyone seemed to be out basking in the final warm days of the year.  After a freshly grilled papusa and a few oatmeal raisin cookies, we were off to the food coop to complete our purchases.

I love to cook, but I infrequently share this activity with others- which made this meal especially enjoyable.  Ms. Melon's large kitchen is well equipped which made it easy for us to work together in our culinary composition.  Pleasant weather, fab food, and enjoyable company - what more do you need to fully experience an Indian Summer day?

Steffie Grow

4th of July Breakfast!

 

We started off our July 4th holiday with a lovely, sunny breakfast on the back porch.   It of course included the usual breakfast requisites: bacon, eggs, coffee, orange juice, toast.  But this holiday meal had a little something special.  Any guesses?  I'll give you a hint.  Those are no ordinary eggs.

Actually, the eggs themselves are quite ordinary.  But what's in them is divine.  The egg scramble we made is chock-full of local, organic produce from our summer CSA!  This one little serving has heaps of spinach, radishes, onion, fresh basil, and garlic scapes.  It tasted green and delicious.

I'll be posting more about our CSA adventures soon.  Stay tuned!

Day 6 - Weekends Mean More Time for Cooking

Today's menu:

• Ginger smoothies
• Hot water with lemon
• Quinoa salad with toasted almonds
• Guacamole with homemade potato chips
• Orange-and-ginger-glazed pork chops with mustard greens and baked acorn squash

We had friends visiting this weekend, and since they were stuck sharing our restricted diet with us for a day we decided to go all out and try to have the best detox food possible! We started the morning with some zingy smoothies, which were quite good although very gingery. Then we had some excellent, light and tasty quinoa salad for lunch. We substituted yellow squash for the zucchini called for in the recipe and it was quite a good meal.

For dinner, we went a little overboard. It started off with an appetizer of guacamole with homemade potato chips (to get around the no-corn and no-processed-food rules). In fact we had a guacamole-off with two types: Matt's favorite, from this recipe, and my favorite, which is just avocado, garlic, lime juice, and salt. We all agreed that Matt's was more flavorful but mine highlighted the avocado flavor better. Win-win!

Then we had a full meal of pork chops, mustard greens, and acorn squash (leftover from our CSA). None of these were official 28-day challenge recipes, but they all conveniently fit into the first week's restrictions. Well, except for the acorn squash. The recipe called for butter, but we just omitted it with no substitution and all though it was fine without it. Another meal to prove that eating healthy can still mean eating truly delicious food.

Tuesday Dinner - Beets, Beets, Beets!

Tonight's menu:

• Cajun skirt steak with creamed corn
• Roasted beets with horseradish creme fraiche

This beet salad was amazing. Thank you, CSA (more on that later), for forcing us to try new recipes with foods we might not have otherwise eaten!