More Dinner Makin's

More Dinner Makin’s

Okay, so in addition to our Mudammes, we made one of our favorite dinners. Mediterranean Turkey Burgers, as adapted from Cooking Light magazine.

Tangent: I really like Cooking Light. They have a lot of good recipes that are relatively easy, quick and full of flavor. I hardly ever find something in Cooking Light that I am disappointed with when I make it. I also like that the calorie counts and nutrition info is on every recipe, so even if they have a dessert or something I can easily see if it is something I can fit into my eating plan for that day or week, or if it will need to wait for another time. Many of their recipes are in the 300-400 calorie range, so perfect for someone like me that needs to stay within a 1200-1500 calorie range most days.

Anyway, Mediterranean Turkey Burgers are O M G good! I, of course, make them a little different every time, and some ways turn out better than others, but they are still magically delicious!

Start out with a pound of turkey. I buy the leanest turkey I can find, which does tend to be a bit drier when cooked than a higher fat content turkey, but in this recipe it hardly matters. Then to the turkey add:

½ cup panko bread crumbs
Couple tablespoons diced red onion (optional, if I have it great, if not, no biggie)
Four or five green or variety olives, chopped (also optional, they add awesome flavor, but no biggie if you don’t have them)
Couple teaspoons, or to taste, minced garlic
¼ cup feta cheese (I accidentally bought gorgonzola this last time, which is a little strong for my taste, but still delicious)
A couple tablespoons, or more, of homemade or store bought pesto. I use more and typically make homemade: just basil, garlic and olive oil in the food processor until smooth.



Add all this delicious goodness to the turkey and mix together.




Just use your (clean) hands and get in there and mix and smoosh it all together.

Once you have the smooshed turkey, form it into patties, round or oval depending on what you are serving the turkey patty on,



and then toss them on a hot grill or broil. I don’t know how long… 10 minutes or so, just until they are looking golden brown on the outside, are cooked through and the juices are clear. Don’t overcook them! They will be very dry if you do that.

Now in the past we have served this in a whole wheat pita with some mixed greens and tzatziki (homemade) sauce. They are very good this way, however, the pita sometimes falls apart, which I find annoying. Also, if you are using a pita it helps if you create the turkey patties in an oval shape, rather than round.

This time we bought some of those thin buns, the hamburger buns that are thinner than sandwich bread. I made homemade tzatziki sauce with 1 cup of Greek yogurt and ¼ cup finely diced cucumber with a small dash of cayenne pepper. Spread the tzatziki on the bun, add the turkey burger, and top with mixed greens, or this time I used arugula.

Eat and enjoy!

Foul Mudammes

Have I mentioned that I love to cook?

Well, I love to cook. And, I am a darn good cook, too. Just ask my husband, or any number of people I have fed over the years. Good cooking runs in the family genes. I have good cooks on both sides of my family. Plus I am a Cancer Crab, and one of our personality traits is the want to nurture and care for others. In me, this manifests itself in cooking! Food is love people! My brother is also a very good cook, so it’s not just the women that are blessed with this good cookin’ gene.

Actually, I think my brother is a more creative or inventive cook than I am. I think he is much more willing to try something out of the ordinary, whereas I like to try new recipes, but I don’t like to do anything that I feel is too complicated or where the ingredients might be too hard to source. So, in that way maybe I’m a lazy, good cook. HA!

My darling husband, Chris, can be a good cook, but only stuff that HE wants to cook. He likes to cook on the barbeque grill, or he likes to smoke things, and he is far superior to me in cooking fried eggs over medium. I have no idea WHY, but I am unable to cook a decent fried egg, over medium. I try all the time, but if you want your eggs over medium, you should just have Chris make them for you.

Chris also is an adventurous cook, like my brother. Chris has made things over the years that I would never have attempted. One time he made absolutely delicious Cambodian meat skewers with a lemongrass marinade? Oh my gosh…so yummy! Time consuming though, and not something I would have undertaken.

Chris has been wanting to make Foul Mudammes, an Egyptian dip somewhat like Hummus except made with fava beans. You know, fava beans, as in the famous line by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, “I’ll have some fava beans and a nice Chianti” or whatever it is he says. The problem has been finding the fava beans. We have looked and looked at multiple stores (I would have given up long ago…the difference between being a lazy cook and an experimenting cook!) when finally we found some fresh fava beans. $6 bucks for two little packages of beans!

Fava beans look like an overgrown green bean, with a thick pod that is cottony on the inside. First we had to shell the beans from the pod. Then we cooked the beans, with a small potato, until the beans were soft.



Then we had to shell the beans, again. They have another hard fibrous shell around each individual bean. Apparently fava beans are very concerned about a nuclear attack or something. After multiple shelling sessions, we ended up with this:



That’s about a cup of cooked, peeled fava beans. Huh. That was a lot of work already (says the lazy cook)!

After the beans are cooked, we sautéed some onions



and garlic and tomatoes until they were all soft and the tomatoes were getting mushy.

Then we added the cooked fava beans, the potato, and seasonings: cumin, cinnamon, curry power, chili powder, and turmeric to the mix along with some lemon juice.



This cooks for about 15 or 20 minutes to mush everything up a bit more and blend the flavors. At this point it starts to smell amazingly good! Then it all goes into the blender. Whir!

The final product looks like this and is so delicious.



We served it with heated, store-bought naan bread, brushed lightly with olive oil.



As you can see, it made quite a bit, and we ate all the naan bread up and a good amount of the dip.

I’m glad Chris is an adventurous cook otherwise I would not have been able to enjoy this delicious dip. This is something he wanted to make that we cooked together, and it turned out to be very easy, outside of the tedious shelling of the beans. We have found a solution to the tedious shelling, though! While grocery shopping yesterday I located dried fava beans sold by Bob’s Red Mill. They are already shelled and ready to cook!

A side benefit of the Mudammes is that it is a relatively healthy dipping option, excluding the bread. It has good fats of olive oil, good spices, onions, garlic tomatoes and beans. Not a lot to make it a heavy calorie dip.

Egyptian Foul Mudammes is definitely something we will be making again.

Garden Update :(

Garden Update :(

Well my friends, I have some bad news about my garden.

We had four days of frost in a row, in MAY!

This is what frost does to sensitive little plants, like cucumbers, pepper and tomatoes:






So sad and pathetic looking…..

But, the news is not all bad!

Other crops are not affected by the cold, like my lettuces! They actually seem to like it and are thriving! So much so, that I was able to clip my first harvest! Less than one month after planting I was able to make myself a beautiful garden fresh salad with my own, home grown lettuces!



Isn’t it beautiful!?!

It was so delicious. Nutritionist foodie people always say that fruits and vegetables start to lose their nutrients from the moment they are harvested. I would believe it, just based on the amazing flavor packed into those little leaves versus what is found in the stores!

I added a few things to make my salad a little more substantial, but overall it was a delicious lunch and a great way to start my garden harvesting!

As for the frost burned items, it is likely that we will do a replant next weekend. We should be past frost danger at that point.

In other positive garden news, we have sprouts of the onions, cilantro, dill, some pickling cucumbers (though some of them got frosted, too), carrots, parsnips and the potatoes look like they are doing something!

I bought corn seeds and some bush bean seeds and will likely plant those next weekend as well.

All the other starts we planted seem to be doing quite well. They look hardy and happy!

More updates on the garden will come along as things progress.

Cleanse Complete! Whew!

Cleanse Complete!

Well, I finished up my Spring Cleanse Thursday night. I ended up having just enough drops to make it through the last day, but barely.

For me, as I’ve said, cleansing is about removing toxins from the body, but also it is away to refocus my eating habits. I try to eat a fairly healthy diet, most of the time. Some days I do better than others. Sometimes I eat too much and sometimes I eat just right.

This is a journey for me. Sometimes it is a struggle because I really enjoy food, and I really enjoy cooking, so trying to keep my eating habits in check can be a challenge. Over the past few years I have learned a lot about food and about what is and is not healthy, what is and is not good food advice, and I’ve learned a lot about myself.

Completing a cleanse for me is a way to take the good information I have about food, about health and nutrition and vitality, and refocus my energy and get my diet in better balance. It is interesting how easy it is to veer off course of healthy eating. Bad food and non-food is everywhere, and it’s cheap and it tastes good! But it is so bad for our bodies. One of my main motivations for eating healthy is that I do not want to battle Western Metabolic Disorder diseases. You know the diseases that anyone eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) suffers with. Things like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and cancers. More and more research supports the fact the mental disease, bipolar, depression, ADD/ADHD in children and even diseases on the autism spectrum, are in direct relation to the chemicals and processed corn and soy products that are in the food we consume every day.

I, for one, do not feel that it is necessary for me to give up my right to a healthy life to the food conglomerates that don’t care about whether I’m healthy or not, they only care about the dollars in their pockets. So, I choose, more often than not, to avoid their non-food, in an effort to protect myself from debilitating disease.

Side effects of healthy eating include more energy, weight loss and natural body weight maintenance, better mind acuity, clearer skin, and no medications!

This time around, my cleanse did all of the things I hoped it would do. I lost a few pounds, my skin is clearer, my mind feels sharp and my energy level is up. I am incorporating more activity into my every day. I am looking for ways to be more active. Take the stairs; walk from the back of the parking lot, all that stuff.

Most importantly, my food is clean, healthy and natural. I am back on track. I am eating good food, in good portions and I am feeling better every day. I think most people who eat a SAD would be shocked to realize how much better than can feel if they really, truly ate a clean and healthy diet.

At any rate, my spring cleanse is over. I feel good and happy. And, I’m glad to be able to eat eggs again! I missed eggs.

Cleanse Day 12- Food Diary

Cleanse Day 12

12 down, 2 to go!

I fear that I am going to run out tomorrow of the Red Clover drops. I will probably have enough for the morning, but unlikely to make the afternoon. I’m going to stick with the program through end of Thursday (Day 14) regardless. If I’m really lucky, the set I ordered from drugstore.com will show up tomorrow and all will be well.

I thought I would take the opportunity to share an entire day’s worth of food. This is somewhat typical, but as you have seen in earlier posts, many days we had fish for dinner. I was getting tired of fish, so decided I would mix up my dinners a little bit and get my protein from beans and grains instead. I have salmon defrosting for tomorrow night, and likely will have salad and Chinese peas to go with it.

Dinner is always the biggest “planning meal” of the day because I need to feed Chris, too. The rest of my meals are pretty simple because I don’t have to be concerned about making sure he has enough food, or making sure it is something he will like or eat. Although, I must say that he is not a picky eater and would pretty much eat whatever.

I have made separate dinners the last two nights for him. This is what Chris' dinner looked like from Sunday night:




My dinner from Sunday night:



Today’s Food (a photo collection)

Juice: 5 kale leaves, 2 carrots, 2 celery, 1 lemon, 1 apple, 1 cucumber, 1 beet



As you can see, the beat really changes the color of the juice! Very tasty!



Lunch: 1 orange, 1 large banana, 10 strawberries, sliced and mixed



So pretty and so yum!

I didn’t eat all of this at lunch, so had the rest for a snack after school.

Followed by: quinoa and kidney beans.



The quinoa was leftover from earlier in the week. I just mixed some kidney beans and warmed it in the microwave.

Later: finished the rest of my juice from this morning and then had some Miso.



I was hungry this afternoon. The juice and fruit from the morning had worked well until about 3:30 or so, after I was done at the gym.

Dinner: The last of the leftover quinoa with some more kidney beans, broccoli and coleslaw.



The coleslaw is just the bagged kind you buy at the store with no dressing. I added sliced fennel (LOVE fennel!), red bell pepper and a purple radish. No dressing. It is so flavorful all on its own!

I’m finishing up my day with some nice warm tea.

That’s it. That is my food journal for the day. As you can see, there are plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, a small amount of grains and little bit of protein. Some days are higher on the protein, less on the veggies, but this is a pretty reasonable representation of the type of food I’ve been eating the past two weeks, along with stuff I’ve posted previously.

Cinco de Mayo is tomorrow and that would normally mean a lovely Mexican dinner and margaritas, but I’m sticking with my plan and eating my good food. This weekend I might make some enchiladas or something to celebrate.

I haven’t really missed anything too much the last couple of weeks. I feel really good and that is a great motivator, plus I’ve been sleeping really well. There have been a couple times that I have wanted something like cheese, or eggs or just some protein other than fish. What I have really been wanting though is sushi! Man I miss my Sushi Hana restaurant! So far, I haven’t found a good, cheap, easy sushi restaurant here in Medford.

But, I have not been craving bread or sugar. I think that is awesome for me, because I really use bread a lot for quick snacks and meals.

One of the big keys for me though, in avoiding the food I don’t want to eat, whether it’s now while I’m cleansing, or just in general, is having the good stuff on hand and readily available. For example tonight, I was getting pretty hungry feeling, and it was still a while till dinner. I was wandering around in the kitchen…just…you know…looking. I was also feeling a little cold so I didn’t want to eat cold veggies. Then I remembered the Miso. Perfect! 50 calories, 2 minutes to heat the water and voila! Quick, tasty, appropriate, and healthy and it filled me up.

Having the right stuff, the good stuff, on hand, ready to go, is critical for me.

I’ll wrap up the cleanse Thursday night and post some overall thoughts after that.

Spring Cleanse Day 10

Over halfway done!

Cleansing is a way to detoxify the body from chemicals we are exposed to in our everyday lives. We are exposed to chemicals and toxins in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the products we use to wash our clothes, homes and bodies. Cleansing or detoxing is a way for me to use natural herbal supplements to help remove these toxins from my cells.

A lot of people are skeptical about cleansing, and there are a lot of wacky cleansing/detox programs out there. If you are looking at doing a cleanse you can do a quick Google search on the word “cleanse” and come up with 10,300,000 results in 0.17 seconds. That is a lot of cleansing! It seems that every health food store, drugstore, and celebrity has their own version of cleanse or detox available.

Many people have heard of the Master Cleanse, which is a very restrictive cleansing program. I know it entails lemons, cayenne pepper, maple syrup and not a lot (if any?) food. This is not an acceptable way to cleanse. Personally, cleansing is about nourishing and restoring health and vitality to the body, not creating more stress to the system by starvation and burning your colon!

As I said earlier, I am using the Supreme Cleanse by Gaia, as it was recommended to me by a naturopath physician. I have had great success with this product in the past. The fact that it allows me to eat real food on a regular basis and does not have the side effects of other cleanses is a major plus. (Some cleanses are pretty harsh on the system and they cause a significant increase in elimination of wastes from the body-read: lots of time in the bathroom.)

The Gaia package supports two full weeks of cleansing, but there is enough left over to do almost another two full weeks. Almost. The cleanse package that I am using this time is my second time using this package. So, as I’m getting to the later stages of my 14 day cleanse, it appears that I am getting low on a couple of the drops. As I went to the internet to purchase more (there are no local suppliers to purchase from) I see that Gaia has done us all a favor! They have changed their program to be liquid capsules instead of various drops, and they have changed the regimen so that the capsules only need to be taken twice a day, rather than the drops which were taken multiple times a day! YAY! This will be so much more convenient! I ordered from drugstore.com because they had a very reasonable price of about $29.99. I hope it gets here before I run out so I can finish my full 14 days.

What else is going on? Well the cleanse itself has been going well. By day 8, I was getting tired of eating the same stuff (veggies, salads, fish), and was fantasizing about what I was going to have for dinner this coming Friday, when I am no longer cleansing! And let me tell you, the things I was thinking of were NOT healthy! But by day 9 I was over that, and going along on track.

I have been exercising regularly, sleeping very well, and feel just generally “lighter” in my insides. It’s a hard thing to describe, but I can certainly tell that the cleanse is working and that I am less bloated, and again, my insides just feel “lighter”.

I had a smoothy of frozen blackberries, organic strawberries and a banana for lunch the other day. I just add a little water to the fruit to get the right consistency.



You can see how much this made.



I also have been making my green juice. I start out with something like this:



and end up with something like this:



This usually makes about 2 ½ glasses of this size

So today is day 10, I have to finish today and have 4 more to go. I have been dairy, wheat, sugar, alcohol, coffee, caffeine, meat, nut, and processed food free for 10 days (13 days for the coffee). I find it to be interesting how easy it is to avoid these foods when I have the added incentive of being on the cleanse, but if I were not on the cleanse, avoiding all these foods would seem very difficult. Interesting how our brains work, eh?

Chris has been a trooper. He has been getting lots of fish and veggie dinners through this process. It’s a good thing he likes fish! I have made him other things and I have just had salad and veg on those nights. It’s a good compromise.

Plus, he is the bestest boyfriend in the world because today he made ME breakfast!


Orange, pineapple, banana smoothy with ice. YUM!!

Garden Project

Garden Project

Chris and I like to try and grow things. In the past 12 or so years we have had a couple of different garden attempts. When we lived in Beaverton we had a huge yard and did the whole till up the soil, make rows, plant stuff garden. I don’t recall exactly how that turned out, but I don’t recall it being a huge success.

Later, when we moved to Tigard, we did some container gardening and depending on the year, it went okay. Common crops were lettuces or herbs, and tomatoes. We had strawberries one year, but it takes a lot of strawberry plants to get a decent amount of yield.

A couple of years ago we had an okay crop; we got some carrots and broccoli, some tomatoes, some beans, but it was still not a great garden.

Last year our garden failed pretty miserably, except for our tomatoes, which went gangbusters and I turned into one of those crazy gardener people that was giving away tomatoes by the bag to anyone who would take them! This was from only two plants!

This year, with our move to Southern Oregon, a warmer climate, and a side yard that was all rocks,




Chris and I decided to try our hand at Square Foot Gardening. Square Foot Gardening is the brainchild of Mel Bartholomew, a retired engineer who felt that single row gardening was too much work, too many weeds, and a waste of space. I had stumbled across his method sometime in my past but had not pursued it. This year, Chris and I decided to try it out.

The first thing to do was to build the boxes. Mel suggests a 4’ x 4’ square, but we opted for a 4’ x 8’ square. We (meaning Chris) built five boxes, one of which is 12” tall instead of 6” tall, so we can grow root vegetables that need more than the 6” depth.




The next thing to do was to add the dirt. Mel calls for a mix of 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite. Well, large quantities of vermiculite are near impossible to come by. A small bag, about the size of a cereal box, was quite expensive and nowhere near the quantity we needed. So, instead we used a mix of locally sourced garden compost/dirt, some bagged compost-with a variety of ingredients, including chicken manure, worm casings and several other items, and the peat moss. Here’s hopin’ it works good enough!



That was a sunny, early spring day the end of March, which is too early to be planting at 1400’ above sea level in a Southern Oregon mountain valley. So, we had to be patient and wait.

We waited about a month. Our local county extension service puts the last frost date of our area at April 28th, which turned out to be fairly accurate, as the lower peaks around the valley were still getting snow this past week (about 3000’ level).

So two weeks ago today, on Sunday April 18th, our patience had worn out and we decided to plant our Square Foot Garden. Now, it’s called Square Foot Gardening because you take your box and divide it into square foot sections. Then you plant each square with 1, 4, 9, or 16 plants, depending on what you are planting. For example, one cabbage plant goes in one square, but 16 carrots are planted in one square. This is where the utilization of the space comes into play.

We planted: Peas, cucumbers, basil, cilantro, yellow onions, brussel sprouts, radishes, several lettuces, cabbage, an entire bed of various peppers, including bell, jalapeño, anaheim, and new mexico, along with dill, broccoli, chives, pickling cucumbers, tomatoes (two kinds), carrots, parsnips and red potatoes. (I think that’s it).



We filled four of the five boxes, placing the items in various squares throughout the boxes, which is a way to make the garden look pretty as well as handle crop rotation.

Some of the items, like the tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, peas and a few others, were planted with starts (plants that are already green and growing), while most of the garden was planted with seeds.

Today is two weeks since we planted and we are excited by the progress! We have had some rainy weather and some cold, but our garden seems to be holding up. We have also had two weekends that have been very warm and sunny.

Already we have sprouts!! The radishes sprouted after only one week!



They are going strong and looking good! Yesterday morning we didn’t see any additional sprouts, but after a day of warm and sunshine we have more! The dill, a pickling cucumber,




and some carrots have all sprouted. We are excited to check the progress again tonight and see if a few more little friends have joined our garden!

We still have one box to plant, but aren’t sure what we are putting in there yet. We might do some corn and melons, but haven’t decided quite yet.

I will continue to periodically post about our progress and (hopefully!) the bounty of our harvest!