Food In Many Forms

 I have a busy week ahead with early start times and lots of demands at work. I have been stressing for days about what breakfast food I can grab and run out the door to make my 7 am start time. Today, I decided to re-make these delicious morning glory muffins, with a few adaptations. I love that these recipes has so many fruits and vegetables, but how many servings does each one have really? Let me break it down... 1 apple - 1 serving 1/2 cup applesauce - .5 serving 3/4 cup raisins - 3.8 servings 6 carrots - 12 servings 8 oz pineapple - 1.4 servings / 18.7 servings per recipe, .6 servings per muffin So, if I have two muffins for breakfast, I'm getting > 1 servings of my fruits and vegetables for the day. It's not great, not terrible. As I said before, I do want to figure out how to add more protein to this - maybe next time I can add some flax seeds or something. Ingredients 1/2 cup spelt flour 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour ½ cups sprouted wheat flour ¾ cup almond flour 1 ...

Determining the menu for our Sicily trip was the easy part. The larger challenge is making sure you have a solid team for provisioning, and that your crew members are on board to help prepare meals. Here are some other considerations when you plan your sailing trip to the Aeolian islands: Availability of different foods Don't assume that you will be able to prepare your favorite taco recipe or chicken teriyaki in Italy. Although there were a few international foods available, the best availability is always going to be for local foods and local recipes. Through my research beforehand, I learned that Italians generally eat a light, sweet breakfast, like biscotti or pastry with coffee. Our group tends to eat a lot of yogurt for breakfast, and muesli is pretty common in Europe, so that was a good combo (one of our crew mates mixed the yogurt with muesli, banana and nutella - yum!). Seafood is popular in Sicily, so I knew there would be plenty of tuna, sardines and anchovies. We rarely...

Each time we go on a sailing trip for a week at some marvelous destination, I look up what other people have done for meals. It always feels like there are very few resources available, so I thought I would add my menus to the collective knowledge base, talk about what was easy to find, what was hard to find, and what I want to remember for next time. For your reference, we sailed with Dream Yacht Charter out of Portorosa Marina in mid-September. This is considered shoulder season for the Aeolian islands. The weather felt like shoulder season, but the vibe on the islands was "off-season" - a lot less nightlife and fewer people. The Menu  Saturday   Portorosa        Sunday Panarella by dinner  Monday Panarella  Tuesday Panarella > Stromboli   Wednesday Stromboli > Salina > Lipari  Thursday Lipari > Vulcano  Friday Vulcano > Lipari >  Mari...

 It's hard to believe this is our fourth year doing the farm share. I have often felt anxious about the start of the season - there is a lot of pressure to use up all the produce, clean it, prepare it, etc. Somehow this year feels easier. Partially, it is easier, because we have been consistently splitting up the share. But also, I think I better understand the flow of duties each week.  Day 1: cut up green onions, chop off carrot and beet greens, wash and freeze kale, spinach swiss chard, or other cooking greens, wash at least 1 head of lettuce if there are no clean salad greens, maybe wash a 2nd lettuce, like radicchio or arugula Day 2: roast zucchini, yellow squash, or beets, wash steam broccoli for freezing, slice turnips, and/or radishes to put on salads or pickle Day 3: pickle radishes, turnips or beets This way, I always have salad greens, which I can use for salad. I do a classic Caesar with rotisserie chicken, parmesan, and croutons, or throw Costco Tuscan bean salad,...

When the farm share starts in June, one of the first things we always get is lots of greens - salad greens, spinach, cabbage, kale, rainbow chard. Some of the more exotic ones are a hard sell in my house - I was enjoying rainbow chard in omelets, and sauteed in olive oil, but I couldn't inspire any enthusiasm for it. The end of the season also brings lots of greens, so I had an opportunity to try again. This recipe, inspired by Martha Stewart and the New York Times, makes Swiss chard a bit more palatable, without the elaborate assembly that lasagna normally requires. INGREDIENTS 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 1 medium red onion, coarsely chopped 1 pound Swiss chard 5-6 cloves garlic, crushed 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes 1 can whole-peeled tomatoes with juices (do not drain) 8 no-boil lasagna noodles 1-2 cups of fresh whole milk ricotta cheese Salt and pepper to taste DIRECTIONS Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Wash the chard and separate the leaves from the stems. Chop the onio...

I couldn't keep up with the weekly posts, but this week seemed like a good week to get back into it. I had winter squash accumulated from multiple weeks - butternut squash, acorn squash, delicata squash, and 2 different types of pumpkin - and I just got a new Blendtec blender, so it seemed good timing to do a squash soup. I halved the pumpkin, delicata and acorn squash and roasted them in the oven at 350 degrees, taking them out one-by-one as they softened up.  All my blanching and freezing these past few months paid off when I had celery and onions, but not carrots. Luckily, I had carrots from August all sliced up in my freezer. I sauteed them in a stockpot with olive oil, until they just started to caramelize.  In the blender, I put 2 cups of chicken broth, the squash, and 1-2 cups of mirepoix. The squash was still hot from the oven, and after 90 seconds of blending it was ready to eat! It was surprisingly sweet, so I may have to add a little cayenne pepper or something to g...