This Week's Basket 1-22-15

I am so excited for this week's basket! I can hardly wait to figure out my menu for next week.

Celery

Corn on the cob

Napa cabbage

Cauliflower

Green bell peppers

Tomatoes

Jalapeno Peppers

Carrots

Yukon Gold potatoes

Blood oranges

Thai Coconut

I think the coconut will be the hardest to figure out what to do with.  What would you do with a coconut?

Eggplant Parmesan

One of the best parts about participating in Bountiful Baskets is getting to try new fruits and vegetables that I wouldn't have otherwise. I have discovered that I really like Eggplant Parmesan, or at least this recipe for it. I prefer my homemade sauce, but my kids find it a little spicy, so I also used some store bought sauce.  I adapted this recipe from one from The 17 Day Diet.

Ingredients:
2 eggplant
3 whole eggs
4 Tbsp water
Parmesan cheese (I used some powdery stuff and some grated stuff)
garlic powder- to taste
2 cups of marinara sauce

Directions:
Peel the eggplant and then cut into 1/4 in slices. Crack the eggs and whip them with the water until frothy. In a shallow dish, dip the eggplant slices in the egg, then into the Parmesan cheese, pressing cheese into the eggplant. Spray a baking pan with nonstick cooking spray and place eggplant in a single layer on the pan. Sprinkle with garlic powder if you so desire. Place pan in an oven that has been preheated to 400 degrees and bake for 30 minutes, turning after 20 minutes.  Eggplant should be golden brown and cooked through. Next, cover with the marinara sauce and cook for another 20 minutes until eggplant is hot and sauce is bubbly.

Verdict:

Yum! All of the kids ate it.  My 2yo liked it the best. I served this with some green beans that I sauteed with hazelnuts and butter.  My 9 yo preferred the green beans to the eggplant, the rest of the family liked the eggplant better than the green beans. I ate the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Unstuffed Pepper Casserole

I have blogged about my Stuffed Bell Peppers before and my family really loves them, but I noticed that they would just eat the stuffing out of them and then throw the pepper into our chicken bucket.  I was tired of wasting so much food (even though the chickens loved it), so I decided to deconstruct it and turn it into a casserole.  Here is what I used this week:

Ingredients:
3-4 cups cooked rice
3 bell peppers
3 cups cooked beans (1 quart size jar of homemade canned)
2 cups salsa, or canned tomatoes (1 pint size jar homemade canned)
1 Tbsp chili powder
1 tsp ground cumin
grated cheese
ground meat, cooked (not shown)
1 cup sour cream (not shown)
1 Tbsp taco seasoning if using canned tomatoes instead of salsa

Directions:

Chop up bell peppers into bite sized pieces. Add the rest of the ingredients, saving some cheese to sprinkle on top. Put in a casserole dish and sprinkle with the remaining grated cheese. Cover with foil and bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

Verdict:

My kids love this! I have also used quinoa in place of the rice before and all but one of my kids eat it that way also. Any color pepper works, so we just use whatever comes in our Bountiful Basket. Some of the kids will still pick out the peppers, but at least this way I know less food is being wasted than when it was a whole pepper.

Menu for the Week

In case you didn't know, I homeschool.  That means I have all of my children all day, every day, just about.  We love it and it is the right choice for our family, but it does mean that I am responsible for all of their meals. So, when I make a menu, it isn't just for dinners, it is breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Here is what I've come up with for this week.

Breakfast:
Sausage patties, eggs, potatoes
Bacon, eggs, potatoes
Hashbrown casserole with sausage, cheese, peppers, green onions
Bacon, eggs, potatoes
Hashbrowns with sausage gravy, eggs
Daddy's Breakfast on Saturday (usually omelets)
Cereal

Lunch:
Unstuffed Pepper Casserole
Gluten Free Macaroni and Cheese with Broccoli
Fried Rice
Corn Chowder
Must-Go soup
Hot dogs and french fries
Whole Chicken in the crock pot

Dinner:
Eggplant Parmesan, green beans
Red Enchiladas, salad, beans
Sausage Stuff, quinoa, salad
Baked chicken, fried zucchini
Pizza- sausage, pepperoni, whatever other topping we find, salad


There are a couple of evenings where we are either eating out or just having leftovers this week.  Also, while I have a menu plan that I post on the refrigerator, it is subject to change if I don't get to the store in time or someone in the family accidentally eats one of the main ingredients the morning before I want to cook it. Life happens. Hopefully this week I can get some of these meals on the blog for you.  I'm really looking forward to eating the yummy produce that we got in our basket.

Bounty for 1-8-15

Check out this beautiful basket.  I am so excited to plan my meals for this coming week.  My goal is to get back into posting recipes here.  I can hardly wait to see what delicious thing my kids and I come up with for this basket.

Orange bell peppers

Broccoli

Eggplant

Yellow Onions

Zucchini

Red Potatoes

English Cucumbers

Cherry Tomatoes

Grapefruit

Strawberries

This Week's Basket 11/13/2014

I know it's been a while since I posted one of these.  We closed our site for a little while, but now we are up and running again every other week and on Thursdays instead of Saturday.  I really like having pick-up on Thursday night and leaving my Saturday open to do things with the family.  I also really missed my group of friends that I had made at my basket site so it's been good to see them again also.

So here is what we got this week:

Fuji apples

Jonagold apples

Cucumbers

Oranges

Asparagus

Watermelon

Carrots

Bananas

Green onions

Radishes

Red Potatoes

Now to make a menu plan for all this goodness.

It's been a while

I realize it has been over two years since I last posted.  Wow, time flies.  Lots of things have happened during that time.  I had a baby, and I'm expecting another one.  We took my oldest daughter in for some food testing.  She tested negative for Celiac disease, which was a relief, but she does have some food sensitivities.  The test that they did covered 81 different things, and her body at that time was reacting to 42 of those.  We did a crazy elimination diet where we took all of those out for about 3 months and then started adding them in one at a time.  We still aren't for sure what was causing her health issues, but in the meantime, I lost the last bit of stubborn weight that I could never get off, and I felt really good.  I don't know about her, but I discovered some things out during that time.  I don't handle wheat well.  I already knew I had a sensitivity, but this reconfirmed it.  Wheat makes me feel very fuzzy headed and I get little bumps on my fingers that itch like crazy.  Who knows what it is doing to my insides.  Also, because of all the things that we took out, we ended up not eating processed sugar, with the exception of the Salty Sweet Kettle Chips which were made from cane sugar.  Those were good and the only treat we got besides fruit.  My kids behavior was so much better. 

So now I am trying to figure out what to do with all this information.  As anyone with a wheat allergy knows, it is really hard to avoid.  Wheat is hidden all kinds of places and the easy, convenient, comfortable foods almost always have wheat in them.  For now we are trying to keep wheat out of our house, but we aren't going to stress about if the kids get it somewhere else.  Nobody has shown a huge, negative reaction so I don't worry about anything life threatening, but they all do seem to be more focused and healthier when we cut down on our wheat. 

This has caused me to rethink a lot of my meals.  It was quite the adventure there for a couple of months, and I really should have recorded some of that, but I was so focused on just getting things cooked that I wasn't thinking about taking pictures and blogging about it.  We did find some new things that we liked, though. and so hopefully I can recreate that here and share those recipes.