Playing Catch Up

I’ve been slacking on posting… so I’ll back up to Monday night. 

Monday

I wanted something fast, but a plain veggie burger sounded boring.  So I cooked up some red onions to use as a side dish / topping.

I sautéed the slices in:

• 1-2 tbsp peanut oil
• 1/4 cup rice vinegar
• 2 tbsp chopped garlic
• oregano

They tasted great on their own as a side dish, but even better on the burgers!  Pat’s was served with shredded cheddar cheese and mine with Laughing Cow swiss cheese.

Tuesday

Tuesday night was a typical Freebirds night.  We always seem to go on Tuesdays – just our night for fast food I guess.  In addition to our burritos, the “pot” brownies caught my eye, so I picked one up for me and Pat to split.

Don’t worry, you can see the ingredients for yourself:

They were good, but as Pat put it best, “well, it’s a brownie.”  Nothing special, but it was a tasty brownie.

Wednesday

Wednesday night we ate at Mongolian Hot Pot.  It was a fun experience, but a difficult restaurant for a vegetarian surrounded by carnivores.  You order raw meat (among other things), and cook it yourself in a big “hot pot” on the table.  The restaurant staff was really nice though, and helped me to make it work.  Most of their broth options used beef or chicken broth, but they offered to serve their original with water instead of chicken broth.  It still had a lot of flavor from all the items they used to season the water – big garlic cloves, onion, some kind of nut, etc.  The water broth is on the left side of the hot pot:

They offered several tofu options on the menu, and I went with the fried tofu sheet.

It tasted good, and just needed a few seconds in the broth to soak up the flavor.  The texture was a little weird though, and reminded me of rubbery Chinese food.  As a side dish, I ordered the egg dumpling.  I asked what was in it, and the server told me just egg.  Well right before all our food came out, another server arrived and asked who the vegetarian was.  He told me that the first guy had told me wrong – the egg dumpling has meat in it.  So instead he recommended the egg noodles.  It was an excellent suggestion – this was my favorite dish!  If I were to go back again, I would just get the egg noodles – they were amazing, and really good dipped in the garlic paste sauce.  I could have done without the cilantro topping though.

For dessert, I was curious, and just had to try the Red Bean Paste Yam Cakes.  Sounds interesting, right?  Well, interesting is a good word to describe them.

The yam part was chewy, almost like a thick jello.  It didn’t have a strong taste, and I didn’t really like or dislike it.  The inside was a sweet, gooey red bean paste.  I was surprised by how sweet it was, and I really liked it.  It was very rich, and I ended up just eating the red bean paste out of a few pieces.  I was glad I tried it, but might not get it again.

Wednesday was also my baby sister’s birthday – Happy Birthday Cara!!  And thank you for not telling the family before you decided to jump off a mountain – yes, she went paragliding on her birthday.

Thursday

I made a Tri-Colored Tofu Stir-fry with couscous on the side.  It was colorful and tasty, with soy sauce, veggie broth, garlic and brown sugar.  We ate our dinner while watching Big Brother.  I’ve never watched the show before this season, and I’m not sure why we got started on it, but now we’re addicted.  It’s crazy that it’s on 3 times a week, but it keeps me hooked.  Is anyone else watching this season??

And that completes the tour of my dinners this week.  I hope your week was just as tasty!

Do you find that you fall into the same weekly patterns for food?  I’ve noticed that I usually cook Mondays, Tuesdays are fast food (usually Subway or Freebirds), Wednesdays could be either, but are usually eaten out or ordered in, and Thursday I’m back to cooking.

Dinner Party

Last night we had friends over for dinner.  It’s always fun to plan meals when cooking for others, and we had stocked up on lots of groceries at Costco the day before.  Our menu:

Appetizer – Homemade Guacamole

I made it the same as last time, but added in some salt and just a hint of chili powder per Pat’s request.  He wanted a little more heat, but I like my guac more onion-y, not spicy.  Served with salsa and chips.

Side Dish – Strawberry, Avocado and Red Onion Salad

I made this one the same as before – I love it!  But of course, I love anything with avocado in it.

Dinner – Soy Burritos

For dinner, I wanted to go with a recipe that would not take long to make.  I wanted to spend time with our guests, and did not want to be stuck in the kitchen all night.  I also wanted a vegetarian meal that even non-vegetarians could like, and this one usually gets high reviews from Pat, so I went with it.  I added in some of the homemade guac and salsa.

Don’t mind the “napkin” – even though we had clean cloth napkins in our hutch, the hubby went with the paper towels 🙂

Dessert – Blueberry-Lemon Coffee Cake (Cooking Light)

I wanted to try something new for dessert.  I made this coffee cake earlier in the day because I knew it might take awhile.  I found this recipe under a list of good summer desserts, and I had just bought a huge package of blueberries at Costco, so this sounded perfect.  Not to mention, it called for lemons.  My husband eats lemons for dessert.  Like, he eats them as though they were oranges!

I started with the batter.  The recipe called for almond paste, but it was $4 for a tiny thing at the store.  So instead I bought almond pie filling for half the price.  I’m not sure if it was a good idea or not, or how the paste would have made a difference, but I think it came out fine with the almond filling!  I also used light vanilla soy milk instead of milk and swapped Smart Balance stick butter for regular butter.  I think I also added a little extra lemon zest!

It was a good thing I found an electric hand mixer in the cupboard… it had never been opened before, so it was probably a wedding gift that got stashed away.  It would have been helpful when I was making the egg souffle!

The topping was the best part – sugar, butter, cinnamon and sliced almonds.  I felt like it could have used more topping, but then I guess it wouldn’t have been such a light recipe, would it?

Into the oven at 350 degrees for 35 minutes, and out came this delicious pan!

It cooled while we ate dinner, and then I threw a few pieces in the microwave before serving them.  They were thick, moist and refreshing.  I don’t bake often, but I think these came out pretty good!

It was a fun night with great company 🙂

What is your favorite thing to make for a dinner party?

I Hug Avocados

Now here is a blogger challenge I can really get behind – Katie’s Hug A Fat challenge.  She’s encouraging everyone to get out there and hug their favorite *healthy* fat.  Choosing my favorite fat was not easy – I love nut butters, almonds and coconut… but in the end, avocado won.  I love avocado.  So much that I went ahead and hugged it.

Not pictured:  I kissed it too.  And then I cooked with it.  On the menu tonight was black bean veggie burgers on the grill & a strawberry/avocado salad.  My salad was inspired by this post from Organic Undergrad.  After seeing the strawberry & avocado combination, I knew I needed to try my own.

Let’s start with the salad.  Into the bowl:

• 15 strawberries
• 1/2 red onion
• 1/2 avocado
• 1 tsp lime juice
• 1.5 tbsp light raspberry vinaigrette dressing
• a bit of cilantro

I’m not a fan of cilantro.  It tastes like soap to me.  But Pat loves it, so I tried to use a little – and set the rest out so he could add more to his portion.  The strawberries we got had some interesting shapes.

The final product was pretty.  This was a really good one, I will be making it again.

But I didn’t stop there.  After having an avocado burger earlier in the week I was craving more, so I added avocado slices to my veggie burger.  I ate it on wheat thins with Laughing Cow garlic & herb cheese and ketchup.

The veggie burger had a strong black bean taste, which I really liked.  But if I were to ever give up meat, this does not come close to replacing a thick burger.   I would eat this again though.

In the spirit of the challenge, what is your favorite (healthy) fat?

Manic Mondays

It was a busy day at work today!  Good thing I had lots of snacks to get me through:

Oatmeal w/ strawberries & coconut, leftover meat-free chili, sugar-free chocolate pudding, string cheese, Special K tomato basil crackers, blueberries and strawberries.  The blueberries were so sweet!

For dinner tonight I decided to try Caitlin’s Santa Fe Casserole.  She listed it as her favorite casserole ever, so I thought it must be pretty good!  My favorite casserole ever is this recipe for Swiss Chicken Casserole.  So bad for you, but sooo good.  Anyway, back to the healthy recipe 🙂

Isn’t it pretty?  Red onion and garlic, mmm.

All the goodies mixed together.  I didn’t have any red beans so I used black beans instead.

All set to go in the oven.  Now, it only had to bake in the oven for 25 minutes.  But it wasn’t a quick meal – I had to cook the brown rice, saute the onion and garlic, and mix the other ingredients first.  The kitchen smelled good though!

Doesn’t it look tasty?  It was!  But I was expecting (and craving) something cheesy, and this was not super cheesy.  I added a slice of Laughing Cow swiss cheese.  I think just about every dish needs some LC.  My favorite thing about casseroles is that you’ve got leftovers for the rest of the week.  What’s your favorite casserole recipe?