Food Spending Challenge

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Years ago Gwyneth Paltrow failed in living up to a food spending challenge.

She was allotted $29 dollars per week to buy food. It’s the amount of money the average SNAP or food stamps recipient gets to buy food.

The point is not that you should have to live on twenty-nine dollars each week. The point is that people who receive food stamps should get a livable benefit that’s bumped up to the cost of living.

You don’t say? Yes, I do. Give people collecting SNAP more money.

It’s unconscionable that Americans have to go hungry and without food.

I’ve said before in here that buying food at a Greenmarket and supplanting these items from a food pantry is nothing to be ashamed of.

I want to return to talking about nutrition and how to develop a healthy eating plan.

I’ve decide to chronicle three days worth of a nutrition plan and eating routine.

$175 dollars with a $5 delivery tip as part of this total cost bought me:

Lobster salad (not cheap because it’s real lobster)

One CSA Box (community-supported agriculture)

  • Contains green leaf lettuce, mini sweet peppers, five hot peppers, mint, thyme, and sage, red potatoes, head red cabbage, one carrot, 2 non-organic Empire apples, container of cherry tomatoes, and container of heirloom tomatoes

2 beefsteak tomatoes

2 containers organic blackberries

2 organic Bartlett pears

6 containers Fage (pronounced Fa-ye) fat-free plain yogurt

1 box Barbara’s crunchy oats cereal

1/2 gallon organic skim milk

58 oz bottle Evolution organic orange juice ( my go-to when oranges aren’t available)

2 bars organic 74 percent cacao dark chocolate

1/2 pound scallops

Earthbound Farms container organic spring mix salad

4 organic bananas (they often arrive green and need to ripen)
2 Amy’s Organic Lentil Soup
2 Amy’s Organic Minestrone Soup
2 Amy’s Organic Vegetable Barley Soup

In the next blog entry I’ll record the kinds of meals you can make that I made with these groceries.

I’d love to hear the kinds of recipes readers use to make meals.

 

My Second Nonfiction Book

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I’ve been remiss in publishing blog entries here because I’ve been editing and revising the book proposal for the second nonfiction book I want to publish.

It’s a one-of-its-kind career guide. I will be able to tell you more about this in October.

October is Disability Employment Awareness Month.

Coming up in October I will return to writing about career topics.

As of tonight I’ll be returning to writing blog entries here.

What I’d like to start out writing about this week is a true story.

It goes back to my time working as an administrative assistant in an insurance office.

That was my first-ever full-time job after I stopped collecting government benefits.

Stay tuned.

 

 

Pizzoccheri

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pizzocheri

This time around I’ll use more cabbage.

The Pizzoccheri recipe is  from thekitchn.com. The link will take you to the recipe since it’s kind of long so I won’t repeat it here. The recipe might be copyrighted.

You can print the recipe up from thekitchn.com.

It calls for pasta, potatoes, and cabbage.

I used bionaturae organic 100% whole wheat chiocciole.

You shred the cabbage in strips.

I bought a mandoline–is that what it’s called–a kind of slicer in a housewares store years ago. This might help shredding the cabbage into strips.

There you have it: a tasty meal you can make year-round on weeknights.

Swiss Chard Dinner

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2017 swiss chard csa box

This was a weeknight dinner.

The Swiss chard arrived in a CSA box. I bought the chicken like that from an online grocer. The pepper jack cheese was accidentally packed in with the groceries.

The cheese slice is only 80 calories and has calcium and if I remember 9 gm of protein.

The chicken was precooked and arrived in a plastic container.

I sauteed the Swiss chard in olive oil until it was soft not totally wilted.

Perfetto: a summer dinner that takes only about 10 minutes to cook.

I will return early next week with a recipe for pizzocheri. It’s an Italian pasta dish you make with cabbage. I have a photo for that meal too.

Garlic Scape Dressing

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garlic scape dressing

I received another CSA box with an unusual produce item that looked like scallions with a tiny green bulb at the end.

It was fortuitous: at a Greenmarket I found the item featured in an egg frittata sample to taste. I brought home the one-page recipe for the garlic scape dressing.

The person I served the salad to claimed the dressing I created was the tastiest he’d ever tasted.

This recipe is from thespruce.com:

Garlic Scape Dressing

Ingredients:

2 garlic scapes, coarsely chopped

2 green onions, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon honey

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard or similar brown mustard

4 tablespoons red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

dash salt

1/8 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Instructions (see my clarification below this):

In a blender, combine the garlic scapes, onions, honey, mustard, red wine vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Blend until smooth. With blender on low, slowly add the olive oil until well blended.

Makes 1 cup.

The trick is to add a little olive oil, PUT THE LID ON the blender, and turn the blender on low. REMOVE the lid, pour in a little more olive oil, put on the lid, and repeat.

I couldn’t figure out which button on my blender was the “low” option so I used the puree button to blend the olive oil into the mixture.

Listen: using lemon juice by squeezing real lemons is preferable to using the lemon juice in a plastic container. The store-bought lemon juice contains sulfur dioxide.

Real lemons are plentiful in produce departments at food markets so I recommend buying lemons instead of the juice in a plastic container.

This salad dressing recipe takes about five to seven minutes to create. It’s a quick and easy recipe for salad dressing you can use with summer salads.

I happen to think that red leaf lettuce is delicious. If you ask me it tastes better than the usual ho-hum spring mix salad greens.

Organic or not, I urge you to give red leaf lettuce a try in the summer. One head of lettuce can sometimes last a single person two days.

Forget iceberg lettuce.

Chilled Avocado Soup Recipe

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Here’s a photo of a dinner where I created a chilled avocado soup recipe:

avocado soup

The salad is easy to make with red leaf lettuce.

In the summer, I run to butter lettuce and red leaf lettuce because they’re tasty. Just add colorful tomatoes, onions, and radishes. Even olives and chickpeas can be used.

The shrimp I cooked are from a shrimp scampi recipe I found in a Food Network magazine years ago.

Chilled Avocado Soup

1 large avocado

1/2 cup plain yoogurt

1 1/2 cups milk or cold vegetable stock

salt and pepper to taste

  1.     Peel avocado. Cut into large chunks.
  2.     Place the avocado in a blender and add the yogurt. Blend until creamy.
  3.     Turn off the machine. Scrape down the sides.
  4.      Add the milk. Blend for 15 seconds.

You can season the soup with salt and pepper. It can be garnished with some tomato salsa, chopped fresh herbs, or chopped green onion.

This isn’t one of my favorite recipes yet I repeat it here because readers might like it better than I do. The recipe is quick to make. The soup is a cool version of soup to have in the summer.

The recipe was found in The Jumbo Vegetarian Cookbook which is a collection of recipes for teens.

 

Mashed Potatoes Recipe

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I buy a CSA box–a Community Supported Agriculture box–that is stocked with produce.

The latest offering featured dried chili peppers, mint, parsley, and thyme, two potatoes, and red leaf lettuce. I couldn’t tell what the other produce item was–it was a thick green frond. Not like Swiss chard–it was thicker and harder.

I figured out how to make mashed potatoes. The good news is you don’t need a recipe for them to come out right. It’s nearly foolproof so here goes:

For one person:

Peel two potatoes. Cut them into chips and cut the chips in quarters.

Boil the potatoes in water in a sauce pan with the water covering the potatoes.

Boil for about 40 minutes. Drain the water from the saucepan.

Use a potato masher to mash the potatoes until there are barely any lumps.

Pour in milk slowly from a measuring cup. Use a teaspoon or tablespoon to beat the potatoes.

Use a tiny amount of milk and add more milk as you go along.

Once the potatoes are as creamy as you’d like them:

Serve with butter and if you’d like you can salt them.

Voila: an easy recipe for mashed potatoes.

As you’ll see below I served them with a parmesan-crusted chicken cutlet.

I’ll be making another recipe for chilled avocado soup and will return with a photo of the soup.

It’s summertime–and the living ISN’T always easy. Yet if you ask me it’s a wonderful season for cooking from recipes. The abundance of fresh and tasty produce is a cook’s delight for at least the next six months.

mashed potatoes

Beautiful Day

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It’s a beautiful day here.

Sunny and warm.

I’m testing the WordPress app.

There’s nothing better than plein air typing.

Van Gogh liked to paint outdoors because of the curative effect of the air.

I urge everyone to go outside in the sunny weather.

Being near water also has a curative effect.

Do wear sunscreen though.

Have a beautiful day!

CSA Boxes

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A CSA is Community Supported Agriculture.

In New York City you can get a CSA box delivered to your house or apartment via Fresh Direct instead of having to travel to an inconvenient location to pick up a CSA box and then schlep it home.

The photo below features a salad created with CSA box produce: red romaine lettuce, red oak leaf lettuce, greenhouse tomatoes, and french breakfast radishes.

You can buy the indispensable book Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop.

I go running to this cookbook all the time in Greenmarket season.

Also in the box was kohlrabi and I’m going to make a recipe with this vegetable too.

The box contained yellow chard and baby red bok choy too.

greens

This is the spring table decor. A joyful table can put you in the mood to linger over your food.

I didn’t post the zucchini recipe. I realized I had posted a blog entry with this recipe years ago. It might be in the recipes category link on the right.

I will return in the coming week to topics I refer to in my upcoming non-fiction books.

Recovery is an Open Door

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Tonight I’ve changed the wording in a couple of sentences in the book description for Left of the Dial on Amazon.com.

You live–you change your mind. I deleted the reference to achieving a “pre-illness dream.” I replaced it with wording that you can have your own version of a full and robust life.

Going on over two years since the memoir was published I’ve learned something profound, more realistic, and hopeful in terms of what is possible:

That when we get older we can discover that we have a new talent that we didn’t have before we got sick.

This is the real hope. The truth is that the illness can attenuate for a lot of us in our older years. So the point isn’t that to be considered successful we must–or can–achieve our pre-illness dreams.

The point is that I didn’t achieve my pre-illness dream of getting a Masters’ in Journalism.

This is the far more remarkable thing: that a person can have better life after they’ve had a breakdown than before. And this life isn’t always the one we wanted or expected to have.

Nothing succeeds like persistence. Recovery isn’t quick and it isn’t easy–it’s challenging and hard at times. Yet it can be a beautiful expression of the potential within each of us to do some kind of personally meaningful “work”–paid or not.

There’s an ending to the expression: “When one door closes, another door opens.” It’s this: “Yet we often look so longingly at the door that closed that we don’t see the one opening before us.”

It’s a mistake to regret what cannot be. It’s a gift to embrace what life has in store for us when we dare to walk through the open door.

No one else has stated in these exact words what I’ll be the first person to tell you now:

Recovery is an open door.