Category Archives for salad

Piggies, green dinners, & dinner bowls

Lately I’ve found myself eating a lot less meat. This is for a couple of reasons: making sure to eat everything I get in my CSA, saving money, and lastly, wanting to start really “eating what I preach.” After reading a bunch of really great books on the subject of the food industry I can say that it’s pretty grim. I recently went to go see Food, Inc. – great movie, I highly recommend it – and while I knew about much of what the film discusses, it does a good job presenting how government agencies, food corporations, and American farmers interact and what it means for us as consumers. I won’t go preaching about it all but it’s definitely worth checking out.
As a result of my deciding to eat less large-industry farmed meat, my meals have taken on a vegetarian turn:
This was my green dinner — Zucchini pasta with fresh greens. Again, super simple and only takes maybe ten minutes to prepare. All it requires is:
  • grating zucchini with a mandoline so you get strips of zucchini
  • heating up sliced garlic in a couple tablespoons of olive oil
  • adding zucchini to olive oil/garlic and cook for ~5 minutes
  • grating some fresh parmesan on top
  • enjoy!
Another super easy dinner is what I call my dinner bowls. All you do is cook a few ingredients, together or separately, and then combine in a bowl. One of my old favorites is a brown rice, sliced zucchini, and italian sausage bowl. This week I made a potato, corn, and zucchini bowl.
For the potatoes:
  • potatoes
  • onions
  • olive oil (I used ~1-2 T, original calls for a lot more)
  • s&p
Dice the potatoes into large bite-sized chunks, cover with cold water, bring to a boil and cook until just fork tender (about 5 minutes depending on chunk size). Drain and cool slightly. Heat up oil in a pan and add the potatoes. Don’t move them and cook for about 5 minutes. The amount of oil in the pan will impact the “crustiness” of your potatoes. Flip the potatoes, add onions and salt & pepper, cook another few minutes. Set aside.
For the zucchini & corn:
  • zucchini slices
  • corn (fresh off the cob is ideal)
  • garlic
  • olive oil
Slice the garlic and add with the olive oil to the same skillet as used for the potatoes, heat up slightly. Add the zucchini, sautee for a couple of minutes, add the corn, sautee about a minute more. Take off the heat, combine with the potatoes, and enjoy!

Black Bean Burgers & Sick Tomatoes

Yesterday I randomly clicked on a link for Low Calorie Budget Meals (oh-so-exciting, I know) and the only thing that piqued my interest was mention of black bean burgers.  I’ve never had one but I knew I had a couple cans of black beans in my pantry as well as some toppings in the fridge.  Dinner plan, check.  

I looked up a couple of recipes to get an idea of how these would come together and then decided to loosely follow their guidelines.
Very simply all I had to do was drain a can of black beans, mashed ’em up with a fork, and combine with minced onion, salt, pepper, a bit of Goya Sazón (because I didn’t have cumin), and some homemade whole wheat bread crumbs.  
Formed two patties, put them on the stovetop grill pan on medium-high heat and cooked for about 7 minutes.  Then I went to turn them and….  fail.  The patties didn’t hold up at all.  Time for improvisation #2: transfer to a skillet.  I actually let them cook about 10 minutes a side so that they formed a hard crust on the outside (yum).  
In the meantime I made a carrot slaw from this week’s CSA veggies.  It was super easy.  All I did was combine some shredded carrots with a quick lemon vinaigrette.  The carrots were really sweet so the slight tartness of the lemon vinaigrette was nice.  
As for the sick tomatoes, we just got an email from our CSA farm, Red Fire Farm, alerting us that about 2 acres of their 8 total acres of tomatoes have been struck by late blight.  They’ve removed all of the infected plants and are hoping that the rest of their crop will not be affected.  Keep your fingers crossed!  
Just in case, I’ll be monitoring Boris (and Natasha) very closely.  They both already have a tomato or two growing.  Let’s hope they don’t get sick as well.  

Boris with his first tomato fruit (to the left of the flowers)

(New) Potato salad

New: in all senses of the word.

Usually when I crave potato salad I’ll make my mom’s version: potatoes, mayo, vinegar, green peppers, salt & pepper.  I grew up with it and it’s my favorite.  With the 2 lbs. of new potatoes from this week, though, I decided to try something new (*Lizarazo-humor warning*).  
I wanted to try the horseradish potato salad that Deb from Smitten Kitchen made but I was too hungry to go to the store for horseradish.  Instead I made Red Fire Farm’s new potato salad (ha!):
  • new potatoes
  • mayo / plain yogurt
  • dill
  • (fresh) garlic
  • (dijon) mustard
  • s & p
I ended up undercooking the potatoes slightly but better than overcooking them.  And I’m starting to like dill a lot more than I used to!