Vegetarian Bolognese & Kids ate it up!

So the other night I was at a loss for what to make. We got lots of zucchini from our share in the buying club and we had tons of other veggies from past shares that I needed to use up. I had to come up with some dish that the kids would eat. I decided on a Vegetarian Bolognese (no meat since I didn't have any) and it was a hit so I'm sharing it here (so that I remember how to make it again) and so that it might inspire you to try something like it on your family.

• 1 onion, chopped
  
• 1 leek, cleaned and sliced (I happen to have it and love the flavor but you can certainly do w/o)
• 1-2 garlic cloves
• olive oil, a couple tablespoons
  
• 2 carrots
• 2 stalks celery
• 1 big zucchini or 2 smaller ones
  
• sea salt & black pepper
  
• 1/4 cup of grass-fed cream OR about 1/2 cup grass-fed milk and a roux
• handful of grated Parmesan
  
• 1 pkg pasta - we like brown rice pasta by Tinkyada

Cook pasta according to directions.

Saute onion, leek, and garlic in olive oil until the onions and leek begin to brown and caramelize. Add chopped carrots and celery and saute several more minutes until the carrots are just about tender. Add zucchini and saute until caramelized and season with sea salt and some black pepper.

Here is where I would have just added cream and let it bubble a little (if I had some white wine I probably would have added that first and let it evaporate down and deglaze the pan and then added the dairy but I didn't have either so had to make a thicker sauce with milk and a roux) so I added about 2 tablespoons of flour to the pan coating the veggies to make a roux and sauted a minute. Then I added the milk and brought it to a simmer to thicken.

Blend the whole thing to a thick creamy sauce. I used a hand-held but you could move to a blender to make a smooth sauce. Add more milk to thin it out if necessary.

Toss with pasta, top with grated parmesan and serve. They even thought meat was in it, it was so hearty.

Even Better the Next Day:
The next day for lunch I added 1 egg mixed with 1/4 cup of grass-fed milk and mixed it all together with the pasta tossed in the sauce. I put it in a casserole dish and baked it 375F until the top was crunchy, then topped it with some cheese that melted over it as it was still warm. They loved this version even more and the flavors of the sauce were even better the next day. They asked me to make it again!

Please note:
My kids, three out of four, do eat vegetables. They are bombarded by fruits and vegetables all the time seeing me and my husband eat them, and they always have a selection for snacks (washed fruits and sometimes some veggies are on the table around snack time) and during meals. But, for some reason, even the vegetable-eaters don't seem to be too fond of zucchini. It's one of my favorites so I'm not sure why, so yes, as I was making it, I got a lot of "eww, zucchini, I don't like zucchini" and "that has a lot of vegetables, what are WE going to eat?" and "I'm not eating all those vegetables and I hate zucchini" but once it was blended they didn't know (until I told them) and they ate it up and LOVED it!

Hope your family does too! My kids ate it too fast for me to snap a pic so I'll make this again soon and post it. My non-vegetable eater (well, he eats some if I insist and wait for an hour, which I do) declared it was the best he's ever tasted!

This is part of Kitchen Stewardship Make it from Scratch blog carnival

Food, Inc. - the truth about what we eat and where it comes from

Read it. See it. Change your life and the lives of your loved ones. Make a difference in your health and the health of the planet. And our future. We CAN do it and most certainly we must make informed choices.

Grocery stores are such an illusion. The waste in packaging, transporting products, the ingredients (and the real ingredient behind what is mysteriously listed on the label), shelf space and electricity, dated items going to the garbage (that's mostly produce since the other stuff has a life span to practically last into our child's adulthood), how the animals we consume are treated (you are what you eat!), hormones shot into our animals and getting into our dairy and meats, genetic modifications to the dna of the foods, the colors and additives and smells added that now seem normal to us, it's all a strange place with food-like substances. Choose FOOD. Learn how to prepare and enjoy it. We can make a difference in what's offered to nourish us.

Highly recommend:

In Defense of Food

Check out the books below too - really good ones - we are each making a decision, we are casting a vote for our lives and our food every time we put something in our mouth, every time we buy something. If you choose to skip this movie and books, you are still voting for status quo - learn what that is and how THEY are playing you. Make the decision. Make it consciously.

This is part of Real Food Wednesdays:

It's not just what you eat - it's what you cook it in

We usually get our pots & pans based upon sales or what our mom used for our childhood meals. We don't much think about it again but as we get healthier in what we eat, we start to also look at the tools we use to prepare our healthful meals.

Most cookware on the market is coated with Teflon to make the fat-free cooks happy. Teflon and Silverstone coating is convenient for sticky food and things like eggs, but there are real dangers when not used properly:

• Never use it on high heat - only put it on a medium to medium low heat.
  
• Never heat it dry - always have something in it before heating, like oil or butter.
  
• Never use it once scratched - if you scratch it discard it because those chemicals will get into your foods.

When heated dry, particles become airborne and embed in your lungs. The fumes are lethal to birds. And let's face it, they scratch easily and are therefore not an economical or environmentally sound way to cook meals.

Aluminum is also popular since it is a great conductor of heat and is cheap. Most restaurants use aluminum cookware to prepare food but aluminum is a poison and leaches into our foods (and you'd better believe those aluminum pans used in restaurants are all scratched up so pieces of aluminum are surely in the foods prepared for our enjoyment - which is another reason we tend to not eat out.) Anodized Aluminum does effectively seal the chemicals but harsh chemicals are used to create the anodized aluminum. In addition, it can scratch easily and then you get the aluminum and the black specs (toxic chemicals) into your foods. And it is definitely not dishwasher friendly.

Stainless is the most economical choice but is not a good conductor so is always plied with other metals. You can easily scratch it and some of the chromium or nickel may leach into the food, but very minute amount. If a magnet sticks to your stainless steel cookware, it has less nickel and is therefore a safer option.

Instead choose cast iron (preferably not pre-seasoned and season it yourself that way you know what kind of oil you are using), enameled cast iron, ceramic, glass, or a safe stainless steel cookware.

My preference is the enameled cast iron. Le Crueset is expensive but you can sometimes find good buys at discount stores like Marshall's and Mercola has his own cookware and great information too.


This is part of today's carnival for:

Cholesterol, Eggs, Shell Color, more Egg Facts

We eat eggs. With the six of us, we go through about a dozen a day. We use them for any meal and in many ways. Eggs are an inexpensive yet good source of protein and nutrients and the magical egg - it does amazing things: soufflés, frittatas, sauces, pudding and custards, cheesecake, baked goods, meatloaf, casseroles, soups, stir-fries or all on it's own, truly a versatile food.

The whites and yellows each have their own unique properties. We can whip the whites to add lightness and air to dishes, while the yellows act as an emulsifier and adds creamy richness. The whites contain protein and no fat while yolks contain half of the protein in the egg and all the fat (about 4.5 grams of fat, 1.5 of which is saturated and the rest is polyunsaturated which has been shown to decrease LDL cholesterol) as well as most of the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. The yolks offer all the vitamin A, D, E, and zinc that is in an egg as well as a larger percentage of the phosphorus, manganese, iron, iodine, copper, and calcium than the white. The yolks are also a rich source of Lutein and Zeaxanthin, (carotenoids) essential vitamins with antioxidant value .

Yolk color is determined by what the bird eats. Deep yellow to orange egg yolks are richer in carotenoids.

Contrary to what you may have heard, eggs do not increase bad cholesterol. Nor do they increase the risk of heart disease or stroke, for the average person who is not at high risk. (Hu, F.B., M.J. Stampfer, et al. 1999) (JAMA 281(15):1387-94.) Bad Cholesterol, LDL, is based upon what you eat (saturated fats and transfats) and even what you don't eat (vegetables), than simply your egg intake.

Egg color is simply an aesthetic preference. Birds that lay brown eggs tend to be larger birds with reddish brown feathers and earlobes around their neck. Since they are bigger, they eat more food than their paler cousins and therefore these eggs are a bit more expensive. White egg layers have white feathers on their neck and white earlobes. The breed of the hen determines shell color. Aracona chickens lay a lovely green shaded egg.

Size is actually determined by the age of a hen. The older the hen, the larger the egg. Double yolks come from the same hens making the XL eggs.

Fresh eggs from pastured free roaming hens allowed to eat bugs and raised under organic conditions are best. Fresh eggs are noticeably different. The yellows stand up and are perky. There isn't the air pocket in the shell that forms between the shell and the membrane as it ages. When you put a whole fresh eggs in a glass full of water, it will sink while an older egg will float due to that air pocket. But older eggs aren't all bad. When the whites are more broken down from age they whip up lighter and fluffier making higher soufflés.

Fresh eggs will also have a more noticeable chalaza (the egg white strand that anchors the yolk in place). (The chalaza is indeed supposed to be there and it is not an embryo. It does not need to be removed.)

If your egg white is a bit cloudy, you can be assured of a very fresh egg. The cloudiness is from carbon dioxide found in the young egg that has not had time to escape yet from the shell.

Believe it or not, a bright red blood spot would also indicate a fresh egg. Though very rare nowadays, less than 1% of all eggs have blood spots, they usually occur from a rupture of a blood vessel on the surface of the yolk follicle. The blood spot can be removed for aesthetics; a blood spot does not make the egg inedible.

However, eggs with blood spots are not considered kosher. This is because blood spots can also occur due to fertilization. Of course, most hens are not allowed anywhere near a rooster so fertilization is an impossibility in today's eggs, but religion dictates that we toss the egg with the blood spot. The laws of Kashrut do not dictate white eggs over brown or other color eggs, just that it not be a fertilized egg. Some people believe that there are more blood spots in brown eggs than white eggs because they mistakenly think that a naturally occurring brown marks of coloration in the brown egg are a blood spot. The laws of kashrut are clear that it is the red blood spot that is not allowed for fear of fertilization and that brown spots can be ignored.

Inappropriate temperature and humidity will age an egg. (A week-old egg can actually be fresher than a day-old egg.) In the U.S. eggs are refrigerated but in other parts of the world they are not. They will keep fresh out of the refrigerator if never placed in a refrigerator but once they are refrigerated, they must always be refrigerated to maintain freshness.

Conventional eggs are from hens living in very cramped quarters where their beaks are clipped so they don't peck at themselves or their sisters who are literally stacked on top of one another. They are fed genetically modified and pesticide-doused corn and soy and sometimes their own brothers ground in the feed. They live stressful lives in a toxic environment - that is carried through in the eggs they produce. Just remember, you are what you eat.

Choose organic free range eggs. Yes, they are more money, they need more room but organic eggs are more nutritious so you get more bang for your buck. Organic eggs are from hens given no hormones or antibiotics and fed only organically certified feed grown without pesticides, insecticides or herbicides. They are free roaming and must have access to fresh air. They are healthy eggs and all in all, we're not talking $10 for a dozen eggs, it's still pennies an egg, maybe dimes, but seriously, is that the quibble here? Cheap eggs to poison our world, our animals, and our bodies or healthy eggs to make us strong that cost less than .40 each as an inexpensive source of nutrition.

This post is part of the No GMO Challenge - JOIN US!

Breakfast

Breakfasts are a big deal around here. We never have cereal, well, occasionally a warm bowl of oatmeal, or muesli or granola over yogurt. But normally it's eggs (organic and free range, and preferably pastured) every which way and sometimes pancakes or muffins and normally a smoothie and yes, a salad.

This morning it was a plain ricotta & sour cream frittata. I usually use the frittata as a conduit to adding veggies, left overs and fresh, but today we did the salad on the side. The sour cream added a creaminess and ricotta just lightens up a frittata beautifully so I try to keep some grass-fed ricotta stashed in the fridge.

• 8 eggs
• 1 package ricotta
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• sea salt & freshly ground black pepper

that was it - simple, easy and really tasty. Mix it all together. Heat butter slowly on medium stove. Pour into a pan warmed on the stove once the butter bubbles a bit. Transfer to a preheated oven at 375F for about 30 minutes until it's puffy and golden.

It will fall so make sure to present right out of the oven so you get the ooohs and aaahhhs.

We served it with some greens and a salad of tomatoes, avocados, parsley, sea salt, and a squeeze of lemon.

We usually nosh on the frittata throughout the morning since it can be eaten warm or at room temp.

I had lots of yogurt I needed to use so I made a quick easy smoothie:

• 1/2 bag of frozen strawberries
• 32oz container plain yogurt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3 tablespoons chia seeds
• 2 tablespoons of honey or agave
• 1 ripe banana

Blend, serve, enjoy.

I add chia seeds to morning smoothies. Chia seeds are high in omega 3s and fiber, very important for good health. I add them every morning to the kid's smoothies. They come whole or ground. I use the ground in the smoothies because the kids don't like the texture of the whole in a drink. They get jelly-like when combined with liquid so you can actually store it in the fridge in water (9 cups water to 1 cup chia seeds) and use that slurry for baking and smoothies. You can easily add chia seeds or the gelatanous liquid mixed with chias to smoothies, yogurt, baked goods, and cereal or granola.

Since I had a lot of yogurt on hand and since the kids asked for muffins, I decided to try some banana yogurt muffins.

• 2 eggs
• 2 cups plain yogurt
• 1/3 cup succanat
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 tablespoons coconut oil
  
• 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
  
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
  
• 2 ripe bananas, cut into chunks

Mix wet ingredients. Add dry ingredients on top and mix. Add chopped bananas and mix gently. Spoon into well buttered tins (the bananas will get sticky!) and cook for 30 minutes until they are done in the center.

The bananas get ooey gooey and fall to the middle and bottom so I served them upside down. I bet it would have been prettier with some powdered sugar on top. Everyone loved them.

All in all our breakfast doesn't take that long to make but we do sit around the table together and gab and take our time enjoying it. It's a whole lot better than something out of a cardboard box and I know they are full of stuff that will keep them going strong all morning. A good breakfast is the best start to a productive day.