Easy delicious healthy hummus

I'm kind of stealing this from the E2 Extra website with some changes.  But it's so basic, I hope it's okay.

Ingredients:
2 cans unsalted chickpeas, drained, but save the liquid!
3 cloves of roasted garlic
juice of 1 lemon
2 tsp ground cumin (or if that seems too strong, start with 1 tsp and you can add more later to taste)
1 tsp low-sodium tamari (or soy) sauce (optional)
liquid from the can, to desired consistency
paprika

Roast the garlic in the oven, 375 for 20 minutes (just put them unpeeled, uncovered in a little pan).   Let cool.  Squeeze out the gooey insides into your blender (smells great!).  Add the lemon juice, some liquid from the can (start with 1/4 cup), the cumin, the tamari, and about 1/4 of the beans.  Blend until very smooth.  Add all but 1/4 of the beans, blend until smooth, add liquid if you want it less thick.  Then add the last of the beans and blend to desired consistency.  If you want a smooth base with a few chunks of chickpeas, blend some.  If you want it all smooth, keep blending.   Spoon into a bowl and top with paprika to make it look pretty.

I've become such a salt wimp that even 1 tsp of the tamari seemed too much.  So I think I'll go without it next time.  Or go down to 1/2 tsp or 1/4 tsp just to get that little flavor.

Weekend cooking

I did some experimenting this weekend and went overboard with maple syrup in the process.  okay, lesson learned.  Even when you do everything else right, the maple syrup in excess is still a problem as I'm feeling the creaks in my joints.  :)

Yesterday I made mighty muffins (without the walnuts and raisins).   These are good and don't have an excessive amount of refined sweetener in them.  So I would say I can repeat these in the future.  They remind me of banana bread.  However, I made the full recipe and ate too many of them both yesterday and today.  But it looks like it would be really easy to make 1/6 the recipe in the future.  I'll do that!

Today I made blueberry-spelt pancakes which I topped with gallons of maple syrup.  Boy was that good--of course because of the gallons of maple syrup.  The pancakes on their own, I'm not even sure what they tasted like.  The batter tasted kind of yucky actually.  Now I still might consider doing this in the future too, on special occasions and with only small amounts of maple syrup.  But I don't think I'll desire it for a while.

I was very much looking forward to real food again tonight.   I made Kichadi.  It was great!  I added 1 cup of fresh corn to the recipe.   I also had a fresh corn on the cob with it for dinner.

Tomorrow I will have more kichadi for lunch, and Ann Esselstyn's lovely collard wraps for dinner, along with other delicious healthy stuff.  Yeah, I prefer that stuff.  Nice to know.

Today's food

I had to leave kind of early this morning so breakfast was just snacking while preparing lunch:  a few blueberries, some cabbage and spinach, apple peels (from food prep).

Since I had that ketchup experiment in my head, I had to have a burger and fries to try it out.  So for lunch I had:

potato "fries".  Do those look good or what?  seasoned with Penzey's mural of flavors and onion powder;

Collard wraps.  1/2 burger in each + ketchup + mustard and "pickles"  (cucumber + dill + d'angou pear vinegar).

and cooked cabbage + apple + cinnamon.  Here it all is.  What a great lunch!

Dinner was the vegetables and pasta.  What a great dinner!

pasta and vegetables

This is based loosely on Cathy's Pizza Pasta recipe, but I don't really think of it as pizza and I used different vegetables.  I think of it more like a pasta primavera or ratatouille.  I liked the idea of fresh basil and nutritional yeast--that worked really well.

Here are the vegetables I used, which is just what was in the fridge:
onion
red fry pepper (like a red bell pepper)
celery
a little leftover mushrooms
a little leftover green bell pepper
eggplant
zucchini
broccoli

I fried up the onions, bell pepper and celery (the cajun trinity), added the others as I chopped them, added a little water when needed.   then added

1 can of tomatoes

simmered for about 10 minutes.  then added

some frozen corn
basil leaves (mine were frozen and I just crumpled them, about 1/4 cup)
1 tsp nutritional yeast

cooked for another 10 minutes.

I cooked up some organic einkorn whole wheat rigatoni pasta.   I like it.  It's very hearty.  I think I'm a little sensitive to wheat or gluten, but I understand if you only have slight sensitivities, these "ancient" versions of wheat (this has not been hybridized) might not be a problem.  So I thought I'd experiment and see.  So far so good.

I ate half tonight and will have the rest for lunch tomorrow.   Yum!

Cathy's Ketchup

This is really good.  I wrote a post yesterday on an instant ketchup that is definitely good in a pinch.  That got me curious to try Cathy's recipe.  It's really good.  I thought the apple would make it not taste like ketchup but it's great.  I didn't have lemon so I used fancy-pants apple infused balsamic vinegar.  I suspect that's even better!  

Now the only problem is, it makes more than I need for a day or 2, and what if it gets old before I'm done with it?  I decided to divide it into two bowls and freeze one.  I'm not sure how it will be after thawing.  I'll find out soon enough!

Instant homemade ketchup

I'm finding that I don't like much added salt.  I bought some sugar free ketchup but it has 70 mg sodium per Tbsp.  That doesn't seem like much but if I have 2 or 3, I notice the effect--my fingers swell up and I find that a little disturbing.   Now Cathy Fisher has a home-made ketchup recipe here.  I will try this sometime because it does look good.  But in the meantime, if you need a quick ketchup fix in a small amount, and don't want salt or sugar, here's an option.  It only has 2 ingredients!    You need a fancy-pants vinegar, probably apple-flavored.  Here are some websites with fancy-pants vinegars:  Cuisine Perel (they make the best d'angou pear vinegar),  Olive tap,  Vom Fass.  The other is a tube of tomato paste.  Those are nice because you can use small portions and the rest doesn't go bad.   Mix them together, add a little water.

Tonight, housemate was serving up a meatloaf dinner to her brother.  I was able to eat pretty much the same dinner, just subsituting my veggie burger (with ketchup and mustard) for the meatloaf and topping my potato with soy yogurt and chives.   It was fun. I had to pass on the dessert though (cake and ice cream).  

Speaking of veggie burgers, fat-free vegan just posted one that looks really good:  http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2012/09/savory-lentil-mushroom-burgers.html

At the bottom of that post are links to some of her other burgers.

Here was a yummy meal this week

That's corn on the cob, cajun seasoned home fries dipped in soy yogurt, cooked kale, onions, and mushrooms.