Asian Inspired Tastiness

Now, there are some things you should probably know about my food and cooking preferences before I jump into this post, and share a couple of (vague: I rarely measure) recipes:

1. I firmly believe that kale is the greatest leafy green ever.  It's one of the first veggies you can get at the farmers market in early spring and one of the last in late fall.  It's extremely healthy, and it actually tastes good (I should mention at this point that I'm not a big fan of most greens, so that's saying something!).
2. I love Asian inspired food.
3. I love tamari soy sauce.
4. I eating food in these awesome, perfectly large sized clear glass bowls we have.  Eating food out of them makes me feel all happy and cozy.

Now on to the food!

Stir-fried Kale With Quinoa

Pretty simple really: I chop up some kale (chopping up the leaves and stalks separately) and some bell pepper, cook it with tamari soy sauce, water, and a bit of this seasoning powder called Nonya (which is made up of onions, garlic, chillies, and lemon), adding chopped kale stalks first and cooking for several minutes before adding the leaves, then after another few minutes the pepper, to make sure that everything is cooked enough to become tender, but not too soft.  When done, serve over warm quinoa.  

Vegetable Chow Mein

About 6 smallish stalks of kale, leaves & stalks chopped up separately
1 medium onion, sliced
Some baby bok choy (maybe half of a head?), white part and leaves used, sliced
2 small red bell peppers, cut into smallish pieces
1 small hot pepper, ribs & seeds removed, chopped finely
A bunch of thin egg noodles (about 250 or 300 g uncooked)
Tamari soy sauce (I just add it by what looks and tastes right!)
About 1 tsp Salt
About 1 tsp Sugar
Olive oil or other vegetable oil, for cooking.
Toasted sesame oil

1. In a large frying pan, put enough veggie oil to cover the bottom of the pan. Add kale stalks (not leaves!) and let cook for a few minutes. (If I don't let them cook longer than the other ingredients, they end up tough)
2. Add kale leaves, onion, and hot pepper, adding more oil as/if necessary.
3. Sometime during first two steps, cook egg noodles as instructed on package then rinse in cold water and set aside.
4. When onions are fairly soft and kale looks nearly done add the bok choy and bell pepper (continuing to add oil on an as needed basis). Continue cooking for a couple of minutes, until bok choy and pepper are lightly cooked, crispy yet tender.
5. Put the cooked veggies in a large pot (I use the same one I cooked the noddles in), along with the noodles, enough veggie oil that everything won't stick, a splash of sesame oil, the salt and sugar, and the soy sauce.
6. Stir until everything is warmed through and the noodles are just starting to stick to the bottom of the pan, and serve!

I made this for supper tonight, and every single picky family member enjoyed it!

Garlic Noodle Soup

Veggie stock with some water, tamari soy sauce,  Nonya seasoning (powdered onions, garlic, chillies, and lemon), makes up the broth.  Then I fry (with a bit of oil then water added as needed) kale, bell peppers, onions, and LOTS of garlic (this is the type of soup I like to eat when sick) until tender, add to soup broth, add uncooked noodles to soup and cook until ready, then eat and enjoy.

Sushi Salad

This is what I eat when I feel like sushi, but don't feel like spending the two hours needed to make it!  It's pretty simple:

Sticky rice/sushi rice
Chopped up cucumbers, bell peppers, avocado, and any other veggies I like i my sush
Torn up nori (seaweed)
Sweet pickled ginger

And as a dressing:
Equal parts rice vinegar (seasoned or plain) and tamari soy sauce
A pinch of sugar
Wasabi powder to taste (I'm assuming fresh would be better, it just seems I only have powdered left every time I make this).

Mix it all up, and enjoy the yummy-ness!!

I love experimenting with food, never following recipes exactly, making up my own recipes, and just having fun with it.  I hope the stuff I've shared here can maybe inspire you to go make some yummy food of your own! :-)

Food=Love

I have a longstanding love affair with food.  As horribly cliche as that sounds, it's pretty true!

To me, food is something fascinating and fun and exciting.  I love trying new things, looking at food and eating in new ways, and playing with eating different diets (and when I say "diet", I mean it in the lets-try-a-new-way-of-eating way, not the I'm-trying-to-lose-weight way).  I adore fresh foods (I was delighted when my mother brought home organic snap peas on Saturday, that she picked from the vines herself!), healthy and organic stuff, food from different cultures...

I tend to go in cycles in terms of cooking more and eating better, versus cooking less and eating worse.  I start to feel not so great, get tired of the boring stuff I've been eating, and realize that I need to cook more.  I start cooking a lot more, and feeling better and more excited about food again, before I start slowly slacking off...  I'm currently in the stage of realizing the food I've been eating isn't making me feel so good, so starting to cook again!

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in the sun, watching my sister march in a parade with one of her highland bands.  The food that was served there was your usual hot dogs and hamburgers, so I ate a couple veggie (soy) burgers there, despite the fact that those are definitely not on my list of foods that makes me feel good, or even on a list of foods I particularly like (I was hungry, okay?)!  But when I got home, I decided that I wanted to eat something healthy, and also something grain free.  So I fried an egg (seasoned with herbs) in coconut oil, then heaped steamed kale and baby garlic on top of it.  A bit of salt sprinkled on top, and voila!  Healthy, grain free, and not too bad on the taste buds. 

Since I was still hungry after that, instead of turning to my usual snacks of grain based foods, I ate a bunch of the aforementioned snap peas then baked some carrots with coconut oil and a bit of brown sugar.  Vegetables for the win!

What we eat has a HUGE impact on our overall health and well being.  It affects how much we get sick and how long it takes to get better; it affects our moods and emotional well-being; how much energy we have and how well we sleep...  What we put into our bodies affects everything.  And for different people, different  ways of eating are needed!  Which is why I like playing with my diet.  I love seeing what changes I see in myself from changing what I eat.

My newest food experiment is the no-grains thing.  I've been reading interesting stuff about grains, and how they probably shouldn't be such a dietary staple for so many people.  I want to go entirely grain free for a week once SMUG passes (I'm way too busy until then!), which should be interesting!

Other ways of eating I want to try at some point are a sugar free diet (processed sugar, not foods with natural sugar), a dairy free diet, a paleo diet (minus the meat), and eating raw food more regularly.  Maybe eating entirely raw one day a week?  The possibilities are virtually endless, and when food is looked at as something interactive and interesting, it's also genuinely fun!

Peace,
Idzie

P.S. Sorry I've been a bit neglectful of this blog, and that this post might be not so hot!  Life has been busy, and inspiration for blog posts has been virtually non-existent.  Hopefully that will change soon!

Fried Dandelion Blossoms

Continuing my experiments in cooking with dandelions, I decided to try this recipe, shared by Gen, author of the guest post on suburban gardening, for fried dandelion blossoms.

First, you collect the blossoms!  Dandelion stems are very bitter, so you cut off all the stem, leaving only the flower (plus green flower bit/thingy underneath it, so that the flower holds together!).

Then, rinse the blossoms in lightly salted water. 

Pat them dry on paper towels.

For the batter, mix 1 cup flower, 1 cup milk, 1 egg (beaten), and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

Then dip the flowers:

And fry them in hot oil!  We didn't *quite* put enough oil to make them deep-fried, but you do need a fair bit of oil.

Blotting off any extra grease is always important when frying things, I find.

Annnnd here is the finished product!!

They were great!  A lovely, fluffy texture and simple but good flavour.  We didn't feel a need to put anything on them, and just ate them plain!

I really want to get more into foraging this year.  I'm starting out with one of the most easy to find plants, dandelions, but we've had our wild edibles plant books out a lot lately, and have taken more out from the library.  On walks we've been identifying edible plants, and I think we're going to start taking a book or two with us on walks, to figure out what the plants we can't easily recognize are...

Far beside the fact that I think finding and growing your own food is a MUCH better way to do things than buying stuff from a supermarket, I just find it immensely fun.  I'll gleefully dance around outside, gathering yummy food, and have been more involved so far this year in gardening than I've ever been before.  I love cooking, and I find I also really, really love being part of the growing and/or finding process in the food that I cook.  I'm looking forward to many gardening and foraging adventures this summer...

Peace,
Idzie