Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

Foodie Friday: Eating in and making our own

This was going to be one single Foodie Friday post, but it started getting long, so today’s a two-for-one day!

Eating In

For this portion of the post, I thought I’d share a few fun things we’ve played with recently.  Before I reveal the identity of this super purple soup, any guesses???

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First, pink waffles.  I don’t know where he got the idea, but a couple of weeks ago, G requested pink waffles.  I had some powdered beet on hand, purchased over the summer to help intensify the color of his strawberry birthday cake (I ended up using fresh, pureed beet for the cake, since we had some on hand).  In honor of Valentine’s Day, we whipped up a batch of pink waffles this week.  I used our standard recipe with about a teaspoon (?) of powdered beet.  Similar to our green pancakes, the batter has much more color than the finished product.  The powdered beet was a bit clumpy, even after sifting, but that led to some nice pink flecks inside the cooked waffles.

Okay, are you ready for the soup reveal?  I made the purple sweet potato soup with roasted [purple] sweet potatoes, coconut milk, a bit of water, a bit of salt, and a dash of powdered ginger.  This soup followed a more traditionally colored sweet potato soup I made earlier in the week.  The soup from the orange-fleshed potatoes was a bit sweeter, but both were quite tasty (and Gabriel approved!).

Over the past several months, we’ve had a couple of really delicious quiches, including ones at Ken’s Bakery (in Portland, OR) and, locally, at Sweet Art.  We tried to make our own with middling success, and then I saw this recipe in Feast Magazine.  This comes from none other than Pint Size Bakery (just mentioned in my Eating Out post).  We hadn’t actually tried their quiche, but we knew they made delicious baked goods.  We were excited to try this recipe, and it didn’t disappoint!

My personal pastry chef followed the crust recipe, but used our standard whole wheat pastry flour with good results.  I think I used sauteed leeks and a bit of kale in our first quiche.  After that, Matthew made a couple more crusts, which we froze for later use.  Those crusts later became a caramelized onion, asparagus, and sun-dried tomato quiche and a roasted pepper and sun-dried tomato quiche with smoked Gouda.

Making our own . . .

I’ve been making soy milk with the blender method since the beginning of January (I returned the borrowed soy milk maker just before Christmas).  While it’s not quite Silk, I have a pretty good recipe (it’s technically soy-cashew milk), and I’m enjoying not having the packaging waste that comes with store-bought soy milk.  That said, making the last several batches has felt like a chore.  I used up all of the soy beans that I bought back in November for this purpose (as well as all of the old soy beans that I bought when I’d previously intended to make soy milk), and I’m going to take a bit of a break.  If I decide to go back to making it, I think I’ll invest in a machine.

Speaking of reducing packaging waste, I’ve started making peanut butter.   This activity was spurred by the purchase of thirty pounds of peanuts from a food buying co-op to which we belong.  At less than $4 per pound for organic peanuts (they were on sale), I can now make [organic] peanut butter cheaper than I can buy it, and it doesn’t use a new glass or plastic jar every time.

Foodie Friday: Eating out

It’s been awhile since we’ve talked food around here.

We don’t eat out all that much.  In fact, only one item on this list actually involves eating a meal at a restaurant.  We do love our bakery runs, though!  Here are three highlights from the past few weeks.

The salted caramel croissant at Pint Size Bakery.  This delicacy is only available on Saturday mornings, and it doesn’t come out of the oven until 9:30am.  During most of the year, Matthew is well into gardening by that time.  We took advantage of the gardening down-season, and a couple of unseasonably warm Saturdays, to bike over and get our first taste of this treat.  Worth the wait!  We also got to enjoy a couple of their other Saturday-only items: the [savory] hand pie and the brioche cinnamon roll.  It’s probably a good thing that the garden limits our visits.

Dinner at Lulu’s Local Eatery.  The owners of the food truck opened this brick and mortar location last year.  Until last week, our only Lulu’s experience was the food truck, specifically, the food truck on Food Truck Friday.  After the ridiculously long lines and swarming crowds of that event, it was so nice to walk right up to the counter, order from a full menu, and have our food brought out to the table.  We enjoyed the buffalo cauliflower, tater tots, and sweet potato falafel.  After a couple of recent experiences with hovering waiters, I also appreciated the waiter-less, fast-casual dining — no interrupting my meal every three minutes to tell someone that yes, the food was fine, and no, I didn’t need anything.

The Shenandoah Pizza at Pi.  Matthew brought the leftovers of a lunch with his dad home a few weeks ago, and this pizza, a special from the CWE location, totally rocked!  (We reheat pizza in a cast iron pan in our toaster oven, for an almost-as-good-as-fresh taste.)  From their website, the Shenandoah is, “The first in our series of frittata pizzas:
caramelized sweet potatoes, goat cheese, red chiles, baby spinach, agave and eggs.”  The combination is spot on, though beware the red chiles mean that there are some zippy bites.  I don’t think they have this on the menu every day, so I’d call ahead.

 

 

Bicycle boy

Shortly before Christmas we were at The Hub, where I was looking at bikes, YET AGAIN (the employees have been very patient and helpful, but I can only imagine the amount of eye rolling that happens when they see me headed into the shop for the eleventy-billionth time).

Anyhow, on this visit, Matthew and G were with me, and after a bit, G headed over to the kid’s bicycles and hopped on a 16″ bike (with training wheels).  I knew he’d been working on pedaling his tricycle (which has been at my MIL’s house for the past few months), but I was unaware it was a fully acquired skill.

[Tri]Cycle Chic
[Tri]Cycle Chic
He needed just a bit of coaching on pedaling forward, not backward (to avoid the coaster brake), but within two minutes, he was riding that thing all around the shop, including some pretty decent steering maneuvers.

If that wasn’t enough to warm this bicycle mama’s heart, he started singing, “Bicycle boy, bicycle boy,” (an original song) while riding.  Now, I’m really hoping to find a pre-loved, bike-store bike for him, but darn if it wasn’t tempting to just drop the money on a new bike then and there.

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t get just any bike-store quality bike, I’d go with an Islabike (featured over at Tiny Helmets Big Bikes), which many consider the cream of the crop, due to having the lowest weight of almost any kid’s bike and having all components nicely scaled for little people.*  Of course, you pay top dollar for that (~ $400 for an Isla compared to ~$200 for a kid’s Giant or Trek), and, despite knowing the value of a good bike, I can’t see spending that amount of money on a bicycle for a three-and-a-half year-old!

Unfortunately, if we’re set on bike-store quality, this may end up being a new purchase, as almost two months of CL searching has yielded next to nothing in the “higher quality” department.  CL has a plethora of discount store bikes, which, for now, for this first bike that he’ll outgrow in two years, is pretty tempting.

Matthew’s really pushing to get something sooner rather than later, and I don’t want to delay and miss out on G’s enthusiasm.**

*See Hum of the City’s post on their kids’ bikes, including the 16″ Spawn Banshee, which seems similar to the Islabikes (similar price, too, though).
**No joke I saw a CL ad for a 16″ [wheel size] bike (which means pretty small bike/pretty young kid) that said, “Like new condition. Kid would rather play video games.”  And I’m thinking, “Really??? Really?!? As a parent, do you not have some control over this situation?”  I’m not worried about G choosing screen time over a bike because in this house, it really isn’t an option.

 

Kitchen exhaust fan

Last week I mentioned the kitchen exhaust fan project.  In our previous apartment, we had a working, old-school, built-in exhaust fan in the kitchen.  While probably not quite as effective as a true hood, it was situated right by the [gas] range/oven, and was certainly better than nothing when it came to improving air quality.

While I highly prefer gas ranges to electric, they do have some downsides when it comes to indoor air quality (good paper here).   This might not be a big deal for people who rarely set foot in the kitchen, but we cook and bake A LOT.  After two-plus years of living here with no exhaust fan in the kitchen, we decided we really needed to do something.

The kitchen in our current building HAD a built-in exhaust fan, but it was painted shut when we moved in, and not situated all that well with respect to the stove.  We toyed around with the idea of opening it to see if it worked, but never got around to it.

Back in November, after some particularly fume-y baking sessions, we broached the subject of adding an externally vented exhaust fan with our landlord, J.  He preferred an internal vent hood (which filters the air before recirculating it, but doesn’t remove it), but agreed to look into external venting.  We offered to share part of the cost of the project of getting it vented externally, but he never took us up on that.

In the end, we settled on an over-the-range microwave (J wanted to put in a microwave; we had previously been using our own) with an exhaust fan that could either be internally or externally vented, with plans to hook up the external venting.

Step 1: More power for the kitchen.  For the past two-and-a-half years, we’ve lived with everything in our kitchen (other than the lights) being on one circuit: refrigerator, dishwasher, and all the outlets (that power microwave, toaster oven, and toaster).  The result of this arrangement was that we couldn’t use two high-power draw appliances simultaneously, or we’d trip the breaker.  For example, if the dishwasher was running, we couldn’t use the microwave.  Or if I was heating something in the microwave, I couldn’t toast a piece of bread.

If we’d discovered this before we moved in, we would have made our tenancy conditional on it being fixed, but no.  We didn’t discover it until we moved in, and, at that point, J didn’t seem terribly interested in upgrading things.  I didn’t feel like pushing the issue because within two weeks of our move-in, the refrigerator died.  After J replaced that, I wanted to lay low for awhile, so as not to be that tenant.

While somewhat annoying, we’d adapted to the kitchen power situation fairly quickly, with a strict “one appliance at a time” policy.  Given J’s earlier response, I was rather surprised when, at the beginning of this project, he brought up that the first step would be getting more power to the kitchen.  I don’t know that the exhaust fan draws all that much power, and thereby wasn’t sure why we suddenly needed to change things now, but I wasn’t going to argue.  Most of the work happened when we were out of town at Christmas, with a bit of additional work later.

Step 2: Acquire and install the microwave.  The model J selected was back ordered, but the delay gave him time to do the wiring.  The microwave arrived in mid-January.  J bumped up the over-the-range cabinets to make room for the microwave underneath.  The space the microwave now occupies used to be bare, light-colored wall, so this darkens things up a bit, but that’s a trade-off we can live with.

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Step 3: Duct work for external venting.  This required that we lose a little bit of actual cabinet storage space, as well as the above-cabinet space that we’d been using to store some larger kitchen items.  Storage space in the kitchen is a premium, but this was worth the trade.

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J removed the old exhaust fan and used that space as the outlet for the duct work for the new fan.  As you can see, the project isn’t quite finished, but we have a functional externally vented, over-the-range hood, which is huge!

Having power to actually run multiple kitchen appliances at the same time is also huge.  It took me a couple of weeks to adjust to the idea that I could, in fact, toast toast a piece of bread and heat something in the microwave at the same time.  After a month to adjust, it sometimes feels a little odd, like I’m doing something forbidden when I use the microwave while the dishwasher is running.

We haven’t really put the exhaust fan to the test yet.  Of course, many of the pollutants it will remove are of the colorless, odorless variety, but there should be some improvements we notice.  I don’t know if it was real, or just in my head, but there have definitely been some times when I’ve spent a lot of time in the kitchen with the oven on and seemed to notice some effects on my lungs and breathing.  Now that it’s done, I only wish we’d done it sooner!

Aerial fun

Fortunately, these past few weeks haven’t been all sick and no play.  We wrapped up our 6-week silks intro class toward the end of January.  Trying something new, and active, together was a great experience.

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Matthew made it all the way to the top on the night of our last class.

From here, we could have moved on to the Silks 1 class.  Many people choose to repeat the Silks Intro & Strength Building.  We opted to continue building our strength and practicing what we learned in the intro class by going to the open aerial sessions (essentially an open gym to practice on your own).  Unfortunately, “open” does NOT equal free, but we bought a punch card, which brings down the cost a bit.

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We skipped a week between our final class and our first open aerial.  At first, I felt like I’d lost a lot in those two weeks, but then I warmed up and got in the swing of things.

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Matthew pulled off this move at open aerials.  He was the only male in our intro class, and I think all of the females envied the muscle-building benefits of testosterone.  Unfair advantage!

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We’ve been taking advantage of playground equipment to sneak in extra upper body work, and we just bought a pull-up bar so we can continue some strength building at home.

Aerials are a lot of fun, and you get a great work-out (you build strength quickly when lifting your own body weight!) without the monotony of a traditional gym (something I don’t really mind, but Matthew hates).

The open aerial punch card will take us up to the start of gardening season, when Matthew’s time will be a lot more limited.  I’m not sure what we’ll do after that.  We’d both like to continue, but, in addition to making the time, it’s not a cheap hobby.  Eventually, we’d like to be in a place where we can have our own small rigging (a rigging is what the aerial apparatus — whether silk, lyra, rope, or trapeze — hangs from), so we can practice without the gym fees, and at times that are most convenient for us.