Food superblog!!!

All right, I am just going to knock this bipper out because it's been a while since we ate some of these, and there are so many good ones!!

Wraps!

These wraps are just refreshing and yummy. Tortillas, hummus, cukes and guac. Also good with lettuce and tomatoes. Here's a super easy hummus recipe.

• 1 (15 ounce) can garbanzo beans, drained, liquid reserved
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon olive oil

Just blend together in a food processor or blender. If it needs more liquid, add the garbanzo bean juice. It's a little bland, and a little garlicky, so I've started buying organic hummus, which is super good and creamy. But this works in a pinch! 

Another good wrap (that I don't have a picture for) is this.

Corn tortillas

Black beans, mashed and heated up with cumin, chili powder and cilantro

Green peppers

Sour cream

Guacomole

Salsa or tomatoes

SO GOOD! 

Blueberry cornmeal pancakes, dedicated to all of the pancake loving babies out there. 

This is probably the best recipe I've found so far. They're pretty dense, and stick with you, and just have such good texture and flavor! I use frozen blueberries, and then buy the ugly bananas at the store and freeze them, they're perfect for this. I just thaw them in the microwave. 

1/3 C. yellow cornmeal

2/3 C. whole wheat flour

1/2 C. frozen blueberries (I add lots more because I LOVE bluebabies!)

1/2 C. milk

1 mashed ripe banana

1 egg

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

More milk if too thick

Don't mix too much!

Pita pockets! Such good flavor!  

Pita bread

Hummus

Filling (chop everything pretty small)

10-12 Kalamati olives (I bet regular olives work just fine)

3-4 leaves Romaine lettuce

1/2 green pepper

1/3 cucumber

3-4 slices of pickled beets

1-2 Tbsp. Balsamic vinegar

Smoky veggie chili and cornbread

This is wonderful, but a TON of food for 2 people. The cornbread was a little overdone, so I'd cook it shorter at first. Also, slice the sweet potato really small because it doesn't break up very much in the cooking process. Also, I have this buttermilk powder that saves my bacon because it's always called for so randomly, and sometimes I don't get a recipe done when I want to :-) One more thing... greek yogurt doesn't seem like much more than snobby sour cream. 

Asparagus, leek and swiss quiche 

First of all, a good swiss cheese is a substitute for the gruyere which is MASSIVELY EXPENSIVE!! 

Second, you can substitute some milk for some half and half to make it a little less fattening. 

Third, add more veggies and take out some of the egg mixture to make it healthier. I used a different crust recipe. It was a little tough, but pretty dang good. This makes an EXCELLENT breakfast!! 

Last, but certainly not least, are our snacks! Courtesy of greenereating.com (thanks for the tip Em). These are vegan recipes, which I de-veganify by just using eggs and milk, etc. The cherry chocolate chip snack bars freeze well, and are very filling, and good for my sweet tooth. I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to add the water that goes along with the egg replacer, so I added it, and they were pretty dang moist, which we both liked. 

The "CRUNCHY BANANA EOUNEGNI PPLESAUCE MUFFINS" (see Matt's GoPro test video on YouTube or Facebook) are a new FAVORITE!!!! Even DALLIN the pickiest eater on EARTH enjoys these. They're nothing too special, but they have just the right amount of all the good stuff, and I love the oat-ey texture. Again, I just microwave the frozen brown bananas, and otherwise I have all of the ingredients on hand. I'm not sure if these freeze well or not because between the Fab family and Matt and I, we've eaten 3 dozen since last week. They're a perfect quick breakfast, pre-Zumba snack, mid-morning snack, B'sexperimentingwithanewrecipeandit'stakingalongtime snack, etc.  

These are definitely all recipes we want to repeat, and some that we have repeated quite a few times! 

Bon Appetit!! 

My thoughts on food.

Well, as some people know, I've become an almost vegetarian over the past month. I say almost because Matt's awesome family makes amazing dinners for us on Sunday, and I'd hate to be a burden, and I don't want to develop any nutrient deficiencies, so I am a vegetarian six days a week, and on the seventh day I rest :-). This was hard for about a week, given that my favorite foods were hot dogs and jerky before this, but it has not been too bad! I was a vegetarian for the my freshman and sophomore years of high school, and it feels good to be back. I haven't had the heart to throw away the pack of hot dogs in the meat drawer yet, but I have buried them under three different kinds of tofu. Matt is not staying away from meat as much as I am, but he is enjoying my cooking, and has been eating much much better and reaping the rewards of it.

Some of our reasoning behind this.

-Matt has a lot of trouble sleeping, and so we decided to kick all soda habits, and neither of us have had soda in over a month. We both experienced withdrawals, and that got us thinking about how many chemicals are in our body.

-Matt doesn't eat. It's not uncommon for me to come home at 4 and hear "I'm starving, I haven't ate a single thing today." When we talked about this, one of his reasons (besides just forgetting) was that he hates making things, and another one was that he doesn't want to just eat anything, he wants to make what he does eat do his body good.

-We watched Food Inc. It was very very interesting, and very very traumatic. There is a scene in a chicken factory where they open a drawer that turns out to be some sort of incubator, and most of the eggs have hatched and there are tons of little chicks just wandering around this tiny, dark drawer. Then they close that drawer. The chicks get sent off to a massively filthy, cramped, dark, awful coops, where they are raised for the next 70 days to be so fat they can hardly walk, and then they're killed. That was the moment that did it for me, and I was a re-devoted vegetarian after that.

-I've been working out a lot lately, and it sucks to put chemicals and yucky stuff in your body after working so hard to take care of it.

-We've reread the Word of Wisdom pretty closely, and both feel that there are some things that we could improve on. It talks about grains being the staff of life, so we've been working hard to incorporate more into our diet. It talks about eating meat only in the winter and times of famine, and the rest of the time eating fruits and vegetables and other good things.

I'm going to get onto a soapbox for just a minute. We were given the Word of Wisdom to protect our bodies from harmful addictions and substances. We don't need to look very far to see how bad alcohol and drugs are. But coming in close behind that in danger is the obesity epidemic. There is such a lack of mainstream nutrition that 1 in 4 children born nowadays will develop diabetes in their lifetime if there is not a drastic change. All the junky food is cheaper than the nutritious stuff because people have opted to buy it, corporations can afford good lobbyists, and the government subsidizes mass produced, chemically enhanced garbage that they hardly even have to label anymore because no one takes the time to care about what they're putting in their bodies!!! We eat three meals a day, and everything that we eat becomes our body and blood, so we literally are what we eat. Things might taste really good in our mouth, but what does it do for us after that, when it has the most impact? Another point; We lived the Mosaic law before Jesus came to the earth and performed the Atonement. That law is what the Jews still follow today, and they make all of their meat Kosher, which means it is treated way better, more respectfully, killed more humanely, the animals are blessed, etc. After Jesus' life, we were given higher laws to live. I would think that Heavenly Father never meant for any of his creations to be treated the way that animals who are commercially raised are being treated. I'm not any type of church historian, but I couldn't find any evidence of advice that we'd been pardoned from obeying those parts of it. If the pioneers were told to obey food restrictions when food was so scarce, it should be every bit as important now when food is in abundance.

So, now that I've preached all of that, I'm here to tell you that healthy food can be just as yummy, and Matt and I both feel so much better, more energetic, and just less yucky after we eat. Also, not buying meat is pretty easy on the ol' grocery bill. I will be sharing some of the better recipes we've tried with you in the very near future!

It's that time of the month...

The time when Matt would gladly trade places with almost any person in the world. The time when animals and small children burst into tears when they see me. The time when my mother has been tempted to call the local mental institution/buy me a straightjacket, and iPods have been seen flying across the house. Monster time!

Now, all women can get a little moody, but I have been cursed with the ever loving pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD, which is the evil stepmother to PMS. I am on medication, which I take for 10 days before you know what, but the days between you know what can last from 25-35 days, so sometimes we have to wait for the claws to come out to know that it's actually time. The medicine just makes me regular old B again, not irrational, red-eyed, fire breathing B, but tonight it looks like it hasn't kicked in yet. So everyone should post something encouraging for Matt to get him through these next 24 hours or so, and remind him how nice I am when I'm not slamming doors and growling. That's all, thanks.