Green Bean Dinner (Kosher for Passover - Kitniyot)

Last night I came back from the co-op with a pound of green beans in my share.  What the hell do you do with a pound of green beans, you ask.  Well, you sautee it with a bunch of other things!  I adapted this recipe from something I found online, which I can't find at the moment but I think it's generic enough to not have to give credit.

Ingredients:

1 lb green beans, washed, tips cut off

1.5 cups chopped mushrooms (wash the mushrooms right before you chop them if you get fresh mushrooms)

1 large tomato, peeled* and chopped

3 tbsp olive oil

2 cloves garlic

Directions:

1. Sautee garlic until garlic starts to get dark, but not burn

2. Dump everything in.  You might want to do this one thing at a time, like mushrooms, green beans, then tomato, but whatever.

3. Sautee them until the green beans are to your liking

4. Eat.

Green beans are controversial during Passover - are they kitniyot, are they not kitniyot?  Who knows.  Their name makes them sound like a bean, though.  Good thing I eat kitniyot!

Let me add that there was a time where I made green beans with pasta by literally dumping them in the boiling water with the pasta and then eating it with tomato sauce.  I guess that's not so bad but it's funny.

*How to peel fresh tomatoes:

1. Boil some water

2. Drop in tomato

3. Let tomato sit in there for 30sec

4. Take out tomato, run it under cold water to cool it down a little, pierce the skin and peel it off with your fingers.

Special Tuna Salad (Kosher for Passover)

Today I made some tuna salad for my dinner.  I don't usually make tuna salad because I don't much like it, but it's one thing that is easy to make and reasonably filling - one of my big problems on Passover is that I am hungry much of the time.

So I added some of my favorite ingredients (also surplus from the co-op haha) and this is what I got:

Ingredients:

1 can of tuna

1/2 red bell pepper, diced

1 green part of a green onion, diced

~1 1/2 tbsp mayo (I would use soy mayo if during non-Passover season since it's 80% less fat and just the same taste-wise)

Directions:

1. Smush together in a bowl.

Variations:

In the future, if I made tuna salad again any time other than Passover, I might add cilantro, cumin, etc.

I think the red bell pepper is better than celery because celery doesn't add much other than texture.  The bell pepper adds the same crispy texture as the celery, but also some taste and vitamins.  The green pepper adds depth to the salad - you don't really notice it's there except that it tastes better.

Yum!

Basic Neon Orange Soup (Kosher for Passover)

Last week I made soup for the week and it was delicious. I loved that every day I was able to have a bowl or two of soup. I was never a soup person but it's so convenient and filling!

So today I decided to make some more soup with some of the things I got from the co-op. It turned out to be very, very tasty and BRIGHT ORANGE.

Here's the recipe.

Ingredients:

3/4 of one bulb of GIGANTIC green onion, chopped (i think this is about 1/2 cup)
3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
1 yam (about a pound!), cubed
1 medium/small yellow (summer) squash, cubed kind of
4 cups vegetable stock
2 tsp dried thyme

2 tbsp olive oil
s+p

Directions: 

1. Sautee onion and garlic in olive oil until onions are translucent
2. Add squash, sautee for a couple of minutes
3. Add stock, yam, and spices, bring to boil and then let simmer for 15min
4. Blend
5. Eat.

I don't think you get a more simple soup recipe than that!

Languishing Friends! :(

Food friends has kind of died, but I will start posting my Passover recipes and successes to reinvigorate it... or just keep myself from dumping everything on HillelLady over AIM!

fruit in unexpected places

I love fruit. I especially love it when fruit turns up in places it wouldn't normally be. For example, a few weeks ago I had the most amazing salad-- with grilled peaches. It sounds weird, but it was SO GOOD. It was so tasty because of the surprise factor, I think. I mean, who grills peaches? The taste of the grill, a little bit of oil and a little bit of that burned flavor, was perfect with the sweet, soft, juicy peaches.

So, I've taken to putting fruit in unexpected meals when I cook for myself. Yesterday, I had a delicious sandwich: ciabatta bread (er, sorry if that's misspelled), avocado, spinach, summer squash, and raspberries. It was perfect.

Fabulous Lunches

Today, JewishGuy told me that I eat some fabulous lunches after seeing what I made for lunch today. (I offered to make lunch for him but he doesn't like fabulous lunches, just pbj for him)

Here is what I had today:

S.H.E.P Sandwich
I like to name my sandwiches with acronyms based on their contents.
Rosemary sourdough bread (from Whole Foods) - one large slice, halved
Fresh spinach
Hummus
Hard boiled egg slices
Yellow bell pepper

Salad
Fresh spinach
Yellow bell pepper
Cherry tomatoes
Scallions
Low-fat Italian dressing

Sides
No-butter-low-salt-low-fat popcorn
A few dried apple rings
A tablespoon of semi-sweet chocolate chips (to satisfy the junk food chocolate craving)

I had a small portion of everything so I got a wide variety of tastes and texture, a mixture of salty, tart, and sweet, etc. Apparently you crave snacks less if you get all kinds of variety in your meals.

This is basically like all of my lunches that I have when I have the luxury of eating lunch at home. I try to prepare a lot of things in advance (like hard boiled eggs, roasted cauliflower, etc) so that I don't have to spend too much time making food when I'm hungry. The biggest difference is that I don't usually eat sandwiches on regular bread; I eat whole wheat pita basically every day but we're out right now.

I'm always a little sad when I have to have lunch on the go... I end up with pbj, string cheese and dried fruit. I mean, that's all right, like I said I love string cheese and I am falling in love with dried fruit salads, but it's just not the same.

Ultimate Portability (yet, oddly disturbing)

Col-Pop: The Future of Fast-Food Technology from Adam Kuban on Vimeo.

One question, though: would the chicken warm the soda or would the soda chill the chicken? Because, either way, I think this is somewhat of a major design flaw.