Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Vegetarian dinners?

I am looking for quick, easy and yummy vegetarian dinners. I have found that all my vegetarian recipes are either variations of beans and rice or pasta. We have not given up meat, we are still omnivores, but we are now participating in Meatless Mondays.

It recently came to my attention that Brian’s cholesterol is too high.

When I say it came to my attention, I mean that I spent an entire afternoon freaking out that his life insurance was going to cost more than mine, significantly more. Now I know I am not the picture of health, but I always thought Brian was. After all, he was a soldier and had to pass physicals and fitness tests for his ‘job.’ And now they were telling me that his risk of death was so high that we could only afford the ‘minimum’ life insurance. I was sure he was going to die any day and leave me and our as yet to be adopted child, homeless and penniless and living in pioneer park.

I decided that something had to be done. And not just talk about increasing the produce in our diets and decreasing the take out. It was time for a real change. I declared that we were going to start Meatless Mondays and Fish Fridays.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Meatless Mondays is a movement. Whoo Hoo we are part of a movement. There is a website and everything: http://www.meatlessmonday.com/ Cutting meat one day a week saves money, your health, and the environment.

One day a week is good for me. I have tried vegetarianism and found that I came to a better understanding of my body and how it works, and mine works best with some meat. But that was many many years ago, and I don’t think I was doing much cooking then.

So anyone have any good vegetarian recipes? If not it looks like an omelet for dinner this Monday.

P.S. we had our black beans in a rice and bean burrito this week. Yummy.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Doesn’t add up to a hill of beans

One of our garden experiments this year has been dry or field beans. We tried a variety of kidney and a black bean. We tired just one square of each, that’s what you do with an experiment, start small and see how it goes. We planted with visions of homemade chili made with our very own beans.


As an experiment it was a great success. I harvested our beans yesterday. They were easy and grew well without much fuss. They dried nicely and are lovely if I do say so.

As a harvest, I have to say I am not sure if this was a grand idea. You can see how well we did. These are quart jars for scale. We may have just over a cup if we put them together.


I don’t know how much space we would have to dedicate to beans to get a real harvest, but at least a 4X4 box, maybe more.


We will have to think about this one.


Our corn is also ready to harvest! Unfortunately because we were not thinking when we planted it, it is all ready now. We didn’t like the frozen corn on the cob we tried last year so I will need to find a different preservation method. Any suggestions?