mmmmmmmmm winey food

Okay so here it is. My beloved husband starts his new job tomorrow. We're all very excited about his success. I was going to make some sort of homemade bolognaesey situation, and I was determined to use lots of herbs and spices to keep it delicious, but base the meal on real ingredients, largely vegetables, home cooked. nothing processed, no adding anything.

The other thing is, we opened the nice bottle of red wine that I got in Santa Barbara and so this blog is going to be somewhat ill-formed.

I wanted to make some sort of tomato-based sauce with garlic and paprika. I wanted to use minced/ground chicken instead of beef to keep the calories low but the protein high. I could not find a recipe that I wanted to use. I probably googled 15 recipes but didn't want to make any of them because they were all to simple, too complicated, or required too many ingredients that weren't the kinds of food that I want to use.

I ended up bastardising all of them.

That sounds grand. Freddy Kruger, of the much loved Nightmare on Elm Street franchise,  is the bastard child of one nun and a thousand maniacs. My dinner, in contrast, was the bastard child of one me, and about fifteen online pasta sauce recipes. It's a lot nicer than the Freddie Kruger. Instead of creating an undead child-killer who stalks the dreams of children to get revenge on their parents for burning him alive, I created nutritious family meal.

While my husband went to one supermarket to get the ground chicken, I went to the one that does the good vegetables, and bought this mountain of colorful produce.

That's tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, garlic, spinach, celery, spaghetti squash, basil in a tube, Worcestershire sauce, paprika, oregano and 'Italian seasoning'. I cooked in a bit of a blur. I started off with garlic and onion in a bit of olive oil in a large pan, then added chicken and more garlic, and then celery and mushrooms, the tomatoes definitely came last and the herbs and spices were being added throughout. I baked the spaghetti squash and served the dinner with a side of spinach and a glass of fancy wine.

How fucking sophisticated. We even lit a candle.

It was delicious. I could have sauteed the celery and onions for longer before adding anything else to have them be softer, and I could have peeled the tomatoes to make the sauce smoother, but I quite enjoyed the interesting texture and the occasional crunch in the overall result. My family ate it all up and had seconds and thirds. I love them so very much, and seeing them enjoying a plate of vegetables makes me so very proud.

Wine is also good. Wine makes one feel extra sentimental towards ones family, but they are genuinely wonderful. I am incredibly lucky.

This 'Nutrition Facts' thing refers to all the food I included in the whole meal. Divide the numbers by at least three to see what one serving contains.

Sausage Miracle

I invented a recipe and called it "Sausage Miracle".

I woke up late. I got ready for work with about ten mins to spare but that's not enough time to make tea and drink it. If I can't have my morning cup of tea then I don't want to have any breakfast. Toast without tea would be like the John Stewart show without John Stewart - totally pointless.

In the ten minutes that I had to spare, I made Sausage Miracle. It's called sausage miracle because it was so very very very delicious and made in about ten minutes with only the limited ingredients that I had in my house. It happened in a flash! Like a "Road to Damascus" moment, but with sausage. :)

I warmed some olive oil in a pan, threw in two cloves of chopped garlic, and two Walmart mild Italian sausages that was chopped up small so they would cook fast. I put some frozen green beans in the microwave. When the sausage was brown, I added two good sized chopped tomatoes and let the whole thing cook. When the beans were cooked I added them to the garlic/sausage/tomato mixture with a healthy amount of black pepper.

I warmed it up as soon as I got to work because it smelled so good and I'd missed my breakfast. Viola!

This is one of the times where healthy food rivals unhealthy food in terms of taste. This was easily more delicious than a cheese burger. I know, there's a sausage in it, but I ended up splitting this meal with my office-mate so we only had one sausage each, that can't be that bad.

Unfortunately, I didn't share this one with my husband and son, and the whole point of this blog is to make healthier food for them. I'll have to make it for them soon. It was just so delicious.

Nutritional Information:

Back to School

I love the first day back at school. New shoes, new socks, new pants, new shirt, new haircut, new books, new pens, new classes - it's all just so exciting. I love to see my handsome boy's life moving forward.

It is tradition in our house that the first day back of school is met with a full-English breakfast. Now that we live in Texas, we get to do the American version. It was not healthy before. Nothing got any healthier when it relocated to Texas. I give you, the full English Breakfast, Walmart style.

It is not healthy. It did not make him any better able to concentrate in school. It may have made the 7am alarm clock slightly more tolerable, and that's really all it's for. I'm going to give myself zero stars for providing healthy home-cooked meals today, but I don't feel bad about it. I am a very proud mamma. Today was a good day.

Kale Fail

Today we had plans to meet friends for Thai food and then go bowling. With very little notice, the Thai food part of the plan was cancelled but we still had to leave for bowling in an hour. This gave me very little time to decide what I was going to make for dinner and we had nothing in the house to eat. I had to go to the supermarket and get ingredients, prepare a nutritious meal, and eat it. The kitchen wasn't clean. The hangover dinner from the day before had not been tidied away and there was not a clean plate or pan or work surface in the place. This is where I would normally have said "fuck it. It's not my fault. Let's just get a cheese burger at the bowling alley". Instead, I called Julia.

Julia is a sweetheart that I work with. She always makes an amazing lunch. Everything in her tupperware is made from scratch and flavoured with herbs and spices that are ingeniously combined. It's not like she's eating rabbit food, she's taken the time to make something wonderful. If I make a tuna sandwich with wholemeal bread for lunch, I generally to feel pretty happy with myself, but Julia has me in awe. She's also a very busy woman studying for an MD/PhD so I have no idea where the fuck she finds the time to make this food, but that's a separate issue.

Julia, bless her heart, is encouraging me on my journey to healthy family meal times and had emailed me a recipie for 'Kale and Cranberries' that seemed pretty straightforward and novel (because what the fuck is kale?). Unfortunately, I had panicked and raced to the supermarket before working out what I needed to buy. I have one of those shit phones that doesn't really do the internet. I called Julia from the supermarket and she sorted me out. 

Kale and Cranberries, with a side of left-over chicken, and a fresh chopped tomato. Here it is. Isn't it colorful! 

The problem is, I was rushing. I was trying to simultaneously wash plates and cook something new while my only son yelled instructions at me that he was reading from Julia's email. Neither of us got part about taking the stalks off the kale. It's in the email, clear as day, but we didn't notice that part. I cooked it with the stalks on. None-the-less, with the garlic, olive oil and the cranberries - this was a pretty nutritious and appetising dish. I just cocked it up a little bit. I will do better next time. 

Even as I ate, I was still stressing out about the time and feeling pretty stupid about the stalks (we ate around them). My family are very sweet and they ate the dinner gratefully, reassuring me that it was fine and I should be proud of myself. There was plenty of appreciation, but no eagerness. This was a perfectly nice dish, and very nutritious, but I think I can do better next time.

A hangover family meal

After leaving the boy home alone to drink booze, I was pretty hung over the next day. When I'm hungover I crave a traditional roast dinner. Specifically, I crave mashed swede with butter, homemade gravy and the crispy skin of a chicken.

Needless to say, any meal based around this need is not healthy. It is, unfortunately, impossible to make homemade gravy without fat. Chicken skin is so high in fat that it's as if the chicken's just playing the long game and is going to win out in the end. In addition, my husband, makes a mean roast potato. There is a lot of fat in this meal.

There's also be a lot of salt. We can't seem to get good chicken stock very easily, it tends to be considered 'Spanish food' around these parts and we get this very cheap looking salty crappy, chicken stock which is a weird bright-yellow colour. If you can imagine a "chicken" highlighter pen, it would be this colour.  The involvement of this dubious substance must decrease the nutritional value of the meal by a significant amount. It certainly adds a lot of salt.

The good news is that apart from the fat, and the salt, the meal was reasonably nutritious. The gravy and potatoes were bad news bears, but there were lots of vegetables (swede, carrots, green beans, spinach and mushrooms) and protein (chicken). Personally, I don't like roast potatoes very much so focused on the chicken and vegetables.  

The plan of this blog is not for me to just serve green beans and spinach on the side of an otherwise high-fat meal. I need to get more creative. This was just a hangover day and I needed my comfort food. I'll try harder next time.

mo spinach, fewer problems

Time management is a problem. I don't get home from work until at least 6pm, sometimes later. And this was one of the evenings where I had plans later on and my son would normally be tasked with fixing his own dinner. He's 12 years old. He's not allowed to use the cooker, so he'd just be grabbing stuff from the fridge (like cheese) and perhaps warming something up in the microwave. It's not a healthy meal that is prepared in this way. 

On this occasion, with my new attitude to family mealtimes, I managed to do a little better. I had a  lot of leftover spinach. I have a bag of frozen cooked shrimp. I always have garlic in my house. I threw together a quick version of the stir fry that  inspired the blog. I also had some frozen green beans and a packet of cheese & broccoli rice. The rice is not healthy, even though it says broccoli in the title, it came out of a packet and was cooked in the microwave, but considering I threw this meal together in about ten minutes, I'm pretty happy with the overall result. It was a mountain of food. My son was very happy with it and I got to go out and drink, leaving my child home alone, with much less guilt than usual. Huzzah! :) 

Introduction

This blog exists to help me improve the diet of my family. I have a son and a husband who really like their food and I like to give it to them. I love to see the delight on their face when they gobble up something delicious that I prepared. I also like to surprise them. I don't wait until my husband is peering into the fridge. I like to preempt his needs and show up with a bacon sandwich just before he realizes how much this bacon sandwich is exactly what he'd like to eat right now. I love to make him happy, and food really makes him happy. The problem with this system is obvious. We're all getting chubby.

I have tried to make healthier decisions. I don't think it's up to me to decide what we all eat, but I appreciate that I do most of the cooking and want to take my share of the responsibility for the health risk that this is causing. The problem is that my husband's delighted smile to a plate of hash browns or beef and dumplings is not quite the same when it's a chicken salad. Smile's not even the right word for it, he looks at hash browns right in the eyes and devours them like a beast. Eventually, I go back to making unhealthy food because I miss the reaction that my cooking gets when there's a stick of butter in the recipe. It seems that there is a miserable trade off inherent in the system. Health is more important, but no-one wants to eat boring, flavorless food, even if it is healthy, and I don't get the same satisfaction from cooking when the reactions are muted.

On Wednesday, the system got fucked up. On Wednesday, I managed to make a very healthy meal that everyone loved. I didn't take a picture of it so I'll just describe it. It was fresh shrimp, stir fried in ginger, garlic and a fuck ton of spinach, served with green beans, spaghetti squash and a fresh chopped tomato. From my calculations, this mountain of food worked out at about 400 super-nutritious calories per person and was as delicious and satisfying as a sixty-nine with Jesus.

I got a double hit of pride. I'm not going back. I need to find more recipes that are vegetable based, low fat and  delicious. I think this is mostly going to involve an increased use of new and interesting herbs and spices so I can make vegetables taste better. There's probably going to be a lot of garlic. Ultimately, I want to get that feeling at every meal time. I want to give my son a healthy attitude to food before he goes off into the big wide world without me, and I want to keep my husband healthy so I can die first. I'm not interested in watching him die and then dying alone. I already shotgunned going first, but this can't hurt. And I want them to think that their mamma/wife makes the best food in the world!

I've made this blog to motivate me on my search for healthy, tasty meals and to keep me on track. I'm fickle. I'm really into this now but I need to remain focused. Remember the shrimp? This is possible. You can have it all!