Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Perfect Shade of Olive

Okay,so we are finally making some headway on our house! We bought it last August but never had any time to do anything with our horrible work schedules. Now that I am home, we have more time to get stuff done. First project is the dining room. When we moved in it had old stained wall paper and a verigated golden colored rug. We tore up the rugs and got the wallpaper off within the first month but the project was at a standstill until now. We filled in all the holes and gouges and now we are sanding it all down. Hopefully by the end of the week it will all be primered and then paint! We are going with this Egyptian Nile color(I think) by Behr. It is really hard to settle on a color because once you do the “virtual” color thingie on the website it always looks different! I know I want a dark green color,not too bluish, more on the yellow side but not too trendy. Any suggestions?

RIP Ronnie James Dio

First Peter Steele and now Ronnie James Dio-two awesome musicians gone too soon. Read Ronnie’s wifes touching tribute here.

The dreaded weight post!

I know that it is not a good thing to dwell on and talk about it too much on your blog,trust me I do. I suffer from bouts of binge eating,severe restriction,over-exercising and just giving up. I just know that over the past few weeks I have definitely gained 5 pounds and it is ALL in the stomach area. I have been working out MORE and eating about the same. I know it has to do with me not running around at work anymore and burning up all of those calories. It is just so frustrating because I really don’t want to go back to counting calories. I did it before and lost 20 pounds,but it was such a hassle. It would also be even harder now because I am pretty much eating all whole foods and no convenience foods with the calories already counted and portioned for you. Unfortunately I will be counting for the next month or so-I won’t post too much about it as to not be a trigger to myself or others-but when none of my pants are fitting I have to do something!

Friday, May 7, 2010

New Blog!!!!

Check out my new blog at http://veganwhoopies.wordpress.com/ !

Shortening the Food Chain

I watch this show on the Planet Green channel called "Future Food". It's a really interesting show where they are very inventive with food and have a theme each episode that they follow. They use a lot of those funky ingredients like gelling agents,foams and stuff I'm sure would be difficult for us to incorporate into our home kitchens,but nonetheless they are fun to watch. Last night they had a burger episode. They wanted to make a burger out of just the things that a cow eats. The ingredients were:
  • corn that they charred
  • beets that they juiced(I think they only used the pulp but I'm not sure)
  • oats
  • corn starch that they "disturbed" with sonic beams to mimic fat
I would love to try this burger,they were saying that it tasted like a real one. Since I don't have access to a sonic beam machine I'm pretty sure that won't be happening though =(.

So after they all developed their recipes, they took them to the streets so people could taste them and vote. Burger 1 was a regular beef burger,burger 2 was a veggie burger made with soybeans,spinach and other veggies and burger 3 was the beet burger. The winner was the veggie burger which was awesome. Everyone said how flavorful it was, I just was a little concerned because it looked like fried baby poop. Oh well,I give these guys mad props for doing things like that and helping people see how wonderful and delicious meatless food can be. I think I may do some experimenting and see if I can't mimic that beet burger...

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Amazing Mushroom Barley Soup

In my attempts to reduce our food bill I have been looking for recipes that are inexpensive. I came across a recipe on allrecipes.com but I modified it quite a bit-here's my recipe-

Nicole's Vegan Mushroom Barley Soup

  • 1 c. barley
  • 3 c. water
  • 2 tbs. margarine(I use willow run)
  • 2 onions chopped
  • 1 carrot thinly sliced
  • 2 stalks celery thinly sliced
  • 2 cloves garlic minced
  • 10 oz. mushrooms chopped
  • 5 c. veggie broth(I used knorr)
  • 2/3 c. red wine
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 1/4 tsp. pepper
  • 1/2 tsp. dried rosemary
In a large pot combine barley and water. Bring to a boil,lower heat and simmer 30 minutes.
Meanwhile in another pan heat margarine and saute onions carrots and celery for 10 minutes. Add mushrooms and garlic and saute 5 more minutes. Add broth and wine to veggies and simmer15 minutes. Add mixture to barley and add salt,pepper and rosemary.

This soup was absolutely delicious. It is rich and tasted very decadent although there is hardly any fat in it. Definitely a winner. The best part is that the barley cost 50 cents and the mushrooms ended up costing around a dollar because they were marked down. Everything else was stuff I always have on hand-a perfect inexpensive pantry meal! Feel free to experiment too-white wine instead of red,rice instead of barley and so on and so on-this recipe is very forgiving.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

In My Cupboard

In my (messy) cupboard:
  • All natural salad dressing(Annie's that I bought for pasta salad and Drew's Lemon Tahini which is like manna in our house)
  • salsa! I don't know why I bought this brand,I think it was on sale. We usually get Newman's.
  • Teddy's PB
  • cooking spray(a necessary evil til I get a Misto)
  • salt and pepper-the salt is awesome primordial sea salt-I found it at Marshall's strangely enough
  • Those are all beans in the back-refried,black,chickpeas,red and white.
  • canned tomatoes and paste
  • that little box on the right is bouillon
  • also hiding behind the salt is some magic shell stuff I bought for a party-shameful =)
  • On the upper shelf I keep all our grain staple stuff-bags of beans and barley,falafel mix,polenta,tvp,chickpea flour-stuff like that.
  • There is ANOTHER shelf above that which has all of our noodles and rice
So that is just one of the food storage areas in my kitchen-more to come next post!