It's been a month and a half...

It's been ages since I last posted, but at least I have an excuse!

Wedding planning and a honeymoon take up a lot of time.

But while we were on our honeymoon, we both picked up pairs of Vibram's Mocs. They're like leather gloves for your feet. We're both wearing them daily now - soooo comfortable! I don't think they'll last long, unfortunately; Vibram suggests using them indoors, and we wear ours outside quite a bit. I've already had to use a little Shoe Goo to reattach the sole in one spot. But we'll see, they also look easy to repair.

By the way, eating paleoish is pretty difficult when you're eating out constantly, and you can't really cook in a hotel room that only has a mini-fridge. I mostly gave up on paleo while we were away, and as a result I gained about 8 pounds (half of which I've lost again since - I think the remaining four are baby) and felt worse than usual. It's nice being back and cooking again. Now I have to go through the carb crash again, though. Not fun.

Speaking of cooking, got some recipes for you today.

Recently we made meatloaf using this recipe. Substitutions: 1/2 cup almond meal and 1/2 cup grated parmesan instead of the bread crumbs. We also didn't have any onion, bell pepper, or tomato paste, but we used some dried onion and a little (a couple teaspoons) ketchup instead, forgoing the extra tomato on top. Oh, and we added more bacon on top of course - all woven together. It came out awesome, and was fantastically filling.

Then we got sandwich steak from our meat share (more about that in a minute.) It's little pieces of steak, sliced for sandwiches, in little rounds. We sauteed some onions and mushrooms in just a little cream until tender, sauteed the (salted and peppered) steak slices lightly in that, and layered it all onto steamed cabbage leaves to make little cabbage wraps. They didn't look very appetizing, but they were pretty tasty. I'm not sure the cream was necessary though, and next time I'll add more spices.

Today we spent a lot of time preserving things. We got a lot of apples in our CSA yesterday, and today we made 4 and a half quarts of applesauce, nicely jarred for future use. We also froze 5 pounds of blanched french-fry cut potatoes while still having a pound of home fries to go with dinner.

Along with the apples and potatoes we got a purple cabbage, a dozen potatoes, two dozen eggs, rainbow chard, broccoli, an acorn squash, a butternut squash, cauliflower and brussel sprouts. I've always hated brussel sprouts, so we're going to have to experiment with different ways of cooking them. They're basically little cabbages so maybe I can hide them in the cabbage somehow.

Unfortunately this was our last week of the summer veggie share. We're definitely going to continue it next summer, though; we still have lots of veggies in our freezer and pantry to eat for a while, and I love the variety without having to go shopping.

We also signed up for the winter share, which we get to pick up every two weeks. Apparently it's going to include more apples, eggs, squashes, things grown in their greenhouse, and cheeses. I'm excited to see what we get, and it continues all winter. We also signed up for the meat share like I mentioned. It's expensive, but the meat is all pastured and antibiotic-free, and we get a large variety of cuts. Yesterday we picked up 30 pounds (we'll get 25 pounds each month), in 12 different cuts of beef and pork - including pastured bacon! Expensive, yes; worth it, hopefully. The quality of the meat will help a lot. The DelMonico steak I'm eating now for dinner is really tasty! At the very least we'll be shopping around for cheaper meat shares if we decide this one's too expensive. The small chest freezer, though, is already proving it's worth.

Anyway, this post is getting long. Back to handing out candy (anybody have ideas for a healthier alternative for these kids?) and finishing my dinner between visitors.

Medleys

We've been almost drowning in veggies this week, having been away from home until Tuesday evening. So last night, since neither of us really wanted to cook much, we decided to throw a bunch of stuff together and see what happened.

Well, what happened is pretty tasty, so I thought I'd share.

We made two dishes. Last Saturday, instead of eggs, our farm offered us 2 lbs of grass-fed, grass-finished ground beef, which we gladly accepted. We cooked that up in a pan and added just a few things: halved yellow cherry tomatoes, some Chinese 5-spice powder, and a few spoonfuls of Greek yogurt. It's a little bland, but once you add some salt and pepper or a little Frank's, it's really good.

The other one is veggies. We diced a kohlrabi and started sauteeing that; added two small eggplants, and then diced up a few small bell peppers to add. Tossed in some garlic, ginger, a little Worcestershire, and a very small amount of soy sauce. Tastes pretty awesome, and the kholrabi overpowers the eggplant pretty well, which is good because I'm not a giant fan of eggplant and we've had a lot of it recently.

Then we also made a dessert. Orange juice, yogurt, honey, and some lemon juice to soak peach slices in. Came out awesome. I'm excited to have more tonight, too, because right now it's freezing and should make a pretty good almost ice cream.

This morning we scrambled a few eggs to add to our veggie mix, and I'm eating some of that right now. Yum! Will make these again.

Going to the gym tonight...

Eye experiment!

It's 2 pm, and I've just taken off my glasses. In order to read my computer screen, I have to be no more than 16 inches away (without squinting.) I'd like to see if that distance changes by the end of the day. Of course, leaning forward all the time won't be good for my back, so if it looks like it helps I'm going to see about getting a pair of glasses that's about half-strength, and try using those for a while.

In other news, we made liver and onions again last night, with enough left for lunch today. Elk liver this time instead of buffalo. I definitely cooked it better, it's not dry, but I still have some learning to do when it comes to cooking this particular organ. By the way, there really is a difference in flavor between the elk and the buffalo, although they look exactly the same.

And further news, we've finally discovered how much our cats are supposed to be eating. This comes at a very good time, since one of our cats (Syntax) seems to be always hungry, yet is more than a pound overweight. We were pretty close. but he now gets very few breakfast kibbles. Hopefully he starts losing some of that weight soon. The vet called him fat at his last checkup a few months ago; he's gained a pound since then...

Also confession time! I've been going off-diet a little too much lately. Pizza one night because we were lazy. Crackers another night with (eww, can't believe I ate this) a soybean oil based 'cheese snack spread' among other, more paleo-friendly dips. A cake tasting to get our wedding cake all set up (the grain-free chocolate monstrosity is really tasty though, and paleo except for the inordinate amount of sugar that must be in there.) A few spoonfuls of Rich's Ramen last night because it smelled really good. Gah. Well, I think I can start doing better again; all I have to do is remind myself how I felt the day after the pizza. Really, not kidding. It hurt.

We finally picked up more almond flour though, so maybe I can start making my own crackers again. That would help a lot.

Ok, a quick question: we have corn coming out of our ears. Each week we've been getting a dozen ears of corn from our CSA. Some of it we've given away, but a lot we just cut off the cob and put in ziplocs and freeze. We have 3 gallon bags full of the stuff now. What on earth can we do with it? Is there any way to cook it/process it so it's a little healthier? I don't know, but I'm going to have to come up with something soon.

*It's now 8 pm. Based on my extremely inaccurate measuring methods, I can sit an inch further from my computer screen and still read what's there. I wonder how I can measure it better... just using a 12 inch ruler for a 17 inch distance and guessing on an equivalent level of fuzziness is far from conclusive. Perhaps I can load up an eye chart tomorrow.

Basket of veggies

Wow, I guess it's been a while. So much for weekly! Where to start? Well, there was a 'Sauces' cooking class, with more yummy recipes to make. We've gone to the gym a few times. We got another couple veggies baskets; the one shown is this past Saturday's. We had to take a picture this time just because of how much there was! In there you can see a lot of corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash, a pattypan squash, butter beans (in the bag), blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, peaches, rainbow chard, a canteloupe, bell peppers, round cucumbers (the three little whitish round things), and a kohlrabi (the spiky thing on the left. Apparently it's like a turnip, and it tastes like broccoli stems.) Whew! I'm a little surprised we got in all into our fridge. By the way, I know they all look small in that picture, but I assure, those are normal-sized ears of corn, and the tomatoes and cucumbers are quite large. By the way, if anyone has any ideas for cucumbers that doesn't include a salad, I would love to hear it!

We did a fondue dinner last night that helped us eat some of that stuff. We used some of our homemade veggie stock along with a few spices as a cooking medium, which was pretty good, although we didn't add enough salt. We chopped up one of the tomatoes, a bell pepper, half a summer squash and half the kohlrabi for cooking, along with some beef and chicken; we had a few sauces to go with it, including mustard, a couple bbq sauces, a habanero cheese dip, and a cucumber tzatziki sauce that came out pretty good (and used a cucumber! yay!) Turns out it was a lot of food, and at the end of the meal we dumped the rest of the chopped up items into the cooking stock and called it a 'soup' which we had for lunch today.

Today I got to experiment with the rest of the kohlrabi, and made kohlrabi and summer squash au gratin with the rest of the habanero cheese. That worked pretty well too, except for the amount of liquid; you really do need heavy cream instead of half-and-half, but I can't find organic heavy cream at any of the grocery stores we go to. The half-and-half at least comes organic, without the carageenan and other crap. We had fun making deviled eggs last week, too. That's a lot of egg, by the way, since we started with two yolk's worth of homemade mayo and just added more and more eggs after that.

Oh my god, I am so sick of salad. We've had salads of some sort or another in our fridge for the past two months! It's an easy way to use veggies, especially the leafy ones, but a girl's gotta have a limit somewhere. We've made the cucumber-tomato-mint salad for three weeks in a row, and it's tasty stuff, but I'm so tired of it. We're going to try to make tomato soup tomorrow as an alternative tomato meal; I'm betting it'll be good, and it looks fairly easy to make. We have some wild rice we've been saving that will go well with it, too.

In other news, I think that 100-day challenge is over, for now. I've had quite a few non-paleo items the past couple weeks, and not really for any special occasion; on top of that, I've lost track of those. But that's ok. Maybe I'll try again when I'm not so busy with other things, and it's not like I've gone back to the SAD (standard american diet.) It's been a few munchkins on one hand, butter beans on the other, and green bean casserole on the gripping hand; then there's the corn. As you can see we got a dozen ears this week; we got a dozen last week, too, and a dozen the week before that. Right now we're cutting it all of the cob and freezing it in Ziplocs - we have a gallon and a half of frozen corn in the freezer. Who knows what I'm going to do with that stuff. I don't really want to eat it. I found a fun post on Mark's Daily Apple that might have some ideas, though.

So yeah. Any squash or cucumber ideas, please please please let me know. Oh! We did make pickles! We have a big jar of cucumber spears slowly pickling away in a nice dill brine; I really hope they come out well. We'll probably do a lot more of that, cuz I like pickles, and they keep well. I think we'll need more jars. We made more pickled eggs, too. I love those. And now made with farm-fresh eggs from the farm's "all-natural bug control!" But even with the pickles, right now we have 5 very large cucumbers in the fridge, along with a big summer squash, a bigger zucchini, and the ufo-shaped pattypan. I really didn't expect to be drowning in veggies, but it seems we are... can you pickle corn?

Graduation parties, some cooking, and some veggies

I'm pretty sure graduation parties are out to get me. I had a few cousins graduate high school, and of course they had parties to celebrate. I don't know how much sugar I ate, but I do know it was far more than I should have eaten - even if most of it was in fruit form. Remember that 100-day challenge I'm in the middle of? I've already used quite a few of those 'special occasion' meals, and I've got a long way to go still...

But on a better note, we went to the gym this morning. Our trainer is out next week, so we get two sessions this week; we'll have a second on Thursday. As usual, he kicked our butts, and as usual, I hurt. I'll hurt tomorrow, too. And probably Wednesday.

We got our first veggie basket from Springdell Farms on Saturday. Lots of spinach, some field lettuce, pak choy, a few tomatoes, some wonderfully flavored unpasteurized farm honey, a dozen eggs, and a basket of small, sweet, juicy strawberries. This is the smallest basket of the season, apparently, so I'm looking forward to Saturday's. Today we're going to make a spinach and strawberry salad to go with the buffalo liver my parents bought for us. The honey has been transported to the office to be used in our tea. I could get used to this whole CSA idea.

Additionally, as you may remember, we had our very first cooking class yesterday. So. Much. Fun. We learned how to choose a good knife; we learned the different kinds of (basic) knives; we learned how to take care of them, sharpen them, hone them, carry them, and, finally, we learned how to use them. I've been teaching myself a little about cutting veggies, and trying to do it right, but I learned more in those three hours than I've taught myself via Food Network over the past year. And at the end of the class, we got to eat the french fries and salad we all so carefully tried to cut, expertly seasoned and dressed by our sweet little chef. I am really, really looking forward to egg class next week; the chef said we're going to learn how to make a souffle, among other things!

Also: this.