Asian Cucumber Salad

If you're looking for a side dish that is perfect for summer, packed with flavor and super refreshing, this is it.  This is a modified (barely) version of a recipe I learned while doing the Beachbody Ultimate Reset (which I highly recommend). It takes all of about 5 mins to prep and is ready to eat right away!

Ingredients:

1 Cucumber, diced

1.5 tbsp Wakame seaweed, rehydrated

2 tbsp Toasted sesame seeds

1/4 cup seasoned rice vinegar

2 tbsp Fresh lime juice

Braggs liquid aminos, to taste

Dice up the cucmbers and then add everything together in a bowl and mix. Seriously, it's that easy! The longer it sits the better it tastes, as it has time to soak up the vingear, juice and aminos, but it's really great right away too.  I generally eat it all in one sitting (the above is one serving!). It's the perfect addition to some homemade sushi, or, as you can see below, two eggs over easy and 1/2 a cup of raspberries for breakfast :)

Incredible Zucchini Bread

In my forever attempt to use the insane amount of vegetables we have this summer from the CSA, I found a recipe for a zucchini bread from Danielle Walker at Against All Grain. I did modify it however so below is how I made it.

Ingredients:

2 cups of Almond Flour

2 tsp Cinnamon

1 tsp Baking Soda

1/2 tsp Salt

1/2 tsp Nutmeg

3 eggs, beaten

1/4 cup Sugar

1 ripe Banana

1 cup Shredded Zucchini

So I combined the wet ingredients and sugar in my mixer and mixed until the banana was homogenous.  Add the zucchini and then spices until everything is mixed well.  Finally, I added the flour 1/2 a cup at a time until everything was well mixed.  It's going to be really wet, like completely liquidy, but it works! I didnt have spray to grease my bread pan so I put about 1 tsp of vegetable oil in the pan before I added the batter (which is probably what made the outside of the bread so crispy and delicious.  Finally, add the batter to a bread pan and cook on 350 until a toothpick comes out clean (~35 mins). 

This bread is seriously delicious.  To make it truly paleo you would need to use 1/4 cup of honey instead of sugar, but I didn't have enough honey.  It's slightly sweet, but savory, and perfect for breakfast in my opinion.  Even better is, 1/10th of the bread is only 150 calories! I had two pieces (toasted) and 1/2 cup of raspberries for breakfast this morning!

Now....if you're thinking "paleo baking is gross" (which, in all honesty, it usually is), think again! This bread is so good, I want to eat it all. It's really moist and SO tasty! In order to really convince you (and myself, Josh and Knute) that this was a good recipe, I made a second recipe with "regular" ingredients.  As you can see, I definitely wasn't low on the zucchini department.

Ingredients:

1 cup Flour

2 tsp Cinnamon

1 tsp Baking Soda

1/2 tsp Salt

1/2 tsp Nutmeg

2 eggs, beaten

1/4 cup Sugar

1/2 cup Butter (softened)

1 cup Shredded Zucchini

I cooked everything the same way as above except I creamed together the eggs, sugar and butter prior to adding the other ingredients.  I also decided to make muffins instead of bread this time.  I'm sure I could adjust the recipe to make them better, but they were a bit dry and just not as tasty as the "paleo" style bread.  I was really impressed. Plus, tweaking the recipe will just make them more unhealthy, so don't fix something that isn't broken, right?!

Creamy Salsa Verde!

One of the things I miss the most from Texas is the incredible Mexican food.  Do you know how hard it is the get a good salsa verde outside of South Texas?! Either way, we got a bunch of tomatillos from the CSA this week and made an awesome salsa verde!

Ingredients:

10-12 Variously sized tomatillos cut in half

1 Jalapeno diced 

1/2 Large onion diced

3 Cloves garlic

1 Avocado

1 Tbsp Olive oil

Salt to taste

Add the tomatillos, jalapeno (seeded to taste), onion, garlic, oil and salt to a large sized ziplock bag and shake.  Lay everything in a single layer on a baking sheet and cook until soft (~20 mins at 350F). Take everything and add to a food processor with the avocado.  Blend until smooth.  Traditionally you would chill it before serving, but we had to try it and it was delicious even hot hahaha.  My only regret is the chips we ate it with werent salty enough :) This makes a TON of salsa.  Probably around 4-5 cups.

Go to Burrito!

This burrito is really delicious, versatile, easy and a great way to get a ton of veggies in one sitting! Plus most the veggies are raw so they have all their great vitamins!

There are so many ways you can alter this meal but here's the basics:

Ingredients:

Basic flour tortilla (larger than a taco, smaller than a burrito size)

1/4 cup Hummus

1/4-1/2 cup seasoned black beans rinsed

1/4 Sauteed onions (I really dont like them raw)

1/2 cup Sliced peppers (any variety)

1/2 cup Lettuce

Salt to taste

All you have to do is throw them on and eat! The only thing I do extra is cook the tortilla on a pan until it's crunchy.  Today I actually had this for lunch except that it had hummus, tomatoes, lettuce, kale, basil, red cabbage and cucumbers.  I would have added some avocado but I forgot! oops.  I love the crunch of the veggies and you can stuff so many in there that it seems like you are eating so much food! It's really filling too because of the hummus and black beans.

Too many veggies!!!

Joining a CSA was one of the best google induced ideas I've ever had.  Check out this weeks lot!

....and you can't forget the left overs from subsequent weeks....

Needless to say, we had a crap ton of vegetables.  Since these are fresh and don't contain preservatives, they only stay good for about a week (depending on the veggie).  So I had to be creative and do something with them all!. Now, I didn't come up with these things myself.  As part of the CSA, we get a cheaper price when we pledge "sweat equity".  What that means is, we pay less money, but go to the farm for a minimum of 3 hours to help out.  We harvest, plant, weed, etc.  Basically anything the farmer needs that day.  It's really REALLY awesome! Very cool to see where the food is coming from, and a total learning experience in the art of farming for this city-born girl. That being said, I got most of these ideas from the people in the CSA.  We decided to blanch the rest of the greens we had (different kinds of kale and chard).  What that means is you cut the leaves off the stem and boil them for about 1 min. Then you plunge them in and ice bath, dry them off and they are ready to be frozen! Voila, veggie stores for winter soups! We also did this with our purple beans.  We had so many beans.....

Then we had tons and TONS of basil.  The obvious choice? Pesto!

Pesto is so easy to make (and so delicious) it's ridiculous.  Here's how I did it:

Ingredients

2 cups basil

2-3 cloves garlic

1/4 cup walnuts (traditionally you use pine nuts, but they are insanely expensive)

1/2 cup EVOO

Salt 

Basically, put it all in a food processor and blend until smooth! I also salt to taste after everything has been blended.  This stores great in the fridge or freezer and makes about 1 cup.  Later today I am going to make Thai pesto spring rolls with it...yummmmm

To the cucumbers.....

We have an insane amount of cucumbers.  Those white things you see in the first picture? Also cucumbers....so we decided to make pickles! I forgot to take a picture of them but I got this recipe for "freezer pickles" from a woman named Marsha at the CSA.  She is clearly a wealth of food storage/use knowledge and I basically follow her around with a pen and pad when I'm supposed to be working on the farm.

"Freezer" Pickles by Marsha

Ingredients:

6 cups medium sliced cucumbers

1 cup white vinegar

2 cups white sugar 

1 tsp pickling salts (or Kosher salt)

1 cup thin sliced onions

Take the onions and cucumbers and throw them into a gallon sized ziploc bag.  Put the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and stir until dissolved.  Add the mixture to the bag and seal, getting out as much air as possible.  Let that sit on the counter for 2-3 hours, flipping occasionally so the cucumbers get equal exposure to the vinegar mixture.  Then put them in the freezer! They store pretty much indefinitely, and when you want to eat them just take them out and thaw them.  In retrospect I probably should have aliquoted them into smaller bag so I didn't have to thaw all of them to eat them, but you live and learn! 

Finally, with a little help of a facebook request, I had an idea for some delicious infused water.  I used watermelon, mint (from my garden) and a cucumber.  I dropped some in two of my nalgene bottles, filled it with water and let it sit in my fridge overnight.  It was seriously delicious, I couldn't believe it.  Infused water is THE BEST when you get really bored with drinking tons of water all the time!  This is a small sample I made...

Eat hearty......Winter is coming

Keeping in the theme of "eating more than usual for the triathlon" Knute cooked Josh and I an amazing meal from the Game of thrones cookbook the other day.  I don't know the recipes, and they obviously have a copywrite, so here's a link to the cookbook if you're interested.  I've thumbed through the book and the recipes are amazing.  I'll be buying it eventually.

First on the list was a honeyed wine from across the narrow sea, just like Khalesi would drink... This consisted of a cheap bottle of white zin, about 3 tblsp of honey and some line juice.  Don't they look like queens?

For the meal we had almond crusted trout from House Tully and a Sansa salad with homemade raspberry vinaigrette.  It was incredible!

Finally, we had lemon cakes.  They might be the most incredible baked good I've ever made.  They were really simple to make.  Knute made them but I'm pretty sure they were butter, flour, sugar and lemon zest.  Amazing!