My Kind of Meal

You know, there’s nothing like a luscious, huge salad to perk up a girl’s day. This is what I served the family recently.

It took a bit or work, all that cleaning and chopping and placement. But OH it was so worth it. I never liked salads as a kid, but maybe that was because the salad basically consisted of iceberg lettuce, a few tomatoes (yuk) and, on fancy days, sliced boiled egg. No exactly a salad.

The stuff I like, is it called a “salad,” really? It looks too luscious to be called something as simple as a salad. Better buy the buy life insurance before eating one of these– you may konk over from ecstasy. LOL

In other news, I *finally* boiled corn on the cob over the weekend. Here I am, in Upstate NY, surrounded by millions chowing down on the local sweet corn, and I’m dragging my feet. I love corn on the cob but it’s so much work. And eating it, while superb, is a chore, too. I know, I’m asking too much, lol. I never liked holding a piping hot, slippery cob oozing with butter and steam. I like my fork. But the corn is very, very good. And the husband was grateful I finally made it.

So that’s my menu right now– throwing miscellaneous veggies on the table, maybe grilling some meat (I don’t like eating so much meat, actually, but grilled veggies are somewhat tasteless). I am really at a loss for recipes right now. I miss the lasagna, the black bean soup, the baking flax seed bread…. hopefully some cold weather will arrive soon and break this meal monotony.

Colorful Food

My son is so creative with his food sometimes. He made me oatmeal.

Isn’t he so sweet? I tell him he should be a cook. Or maybe a car mechanic. That way, I won’t have to fork out the thousands to have my car fixed. Yeah. Too many young people want careers in computers today. A nephew of mine is interested in making computer games– drawing the animated characters and designing stuff for them. What kind of career is that? I don’t know, maybe I’m showing my age, but making games isn’t a REAL job, it’s a hobby! At least they’ll keep the document scanning software companies in business….

We’re reading in our health book that colorful food, which is naturally attractive, is very healthful. Not artificial colors, of course! The bright reds, greens, purples, yellows and pinks of food. YUM. By the way, did you ever stop to realize that very few foods are truly blue? There’s blueberries, and …. and… I can’t think of anything else. Can you???

Anyway, colorful foods contain antioxidants and phytonutrients and all sorts of yummy stuff that your body needs. Raw is better for most fruits and vegetables, too.

Oddly enough, I like the appeal of bright red foods, but I don’t like to eat them very much. I like the colors of tomatoes, red peppers, etc, but I don’t like to eat them. However, I do like strawberries. I’ll eat anything green.

How about you? Are you attracted to one color over another? Do you like the color AND the taste, or just one over the other?

Four Foods on Friday #140

What a slacker I am! Yep. I’ve missed so many questions for this meme, I don’t think I will bother catching up. Instead, I chose the most interesting question (interesting to me, anyway!):

This week there is one question about Chinese food.

1. What are your four favorite foods from a Chinese restaurant?

Oooooohhhhhh, Chinese food… yummmmmm. I never tried it until I was engaged. I guess my parents never bought it because it was too expensive for a large family? I don’t know. We almost never ate out, never did take out, either. My poor mom, LOL! We never traveled much, either. Can you imagine the travel expenses and motor home repairs for a huge family?

Anyway. I love Chinese food. I haven’t strayed very much from my favorites– they never grow tiresome to me and I really like them. So I haven’t expanded my horizons much. Here’s the stuff I like.

1. Vegetable fried rice, with either roast pork or broccoli. I LOVE broccoli so much– there never seems to be enough of it in the rice!

2. Beef and snow peas. I prefer Chinese beef to chicken. Chicken is always mushy and tasteless. The beef is good (or maybe it’s just the sauce?). Anyway, I adore snow peas. Yum!

3. Garlic broccoli. It’s VERY spicy, and I really don’t handle spicy food very well. But when I mix the garlic broccoli with the Chinese veggies, it’s so good.

4. Beef and broccoli. Boring, I know. But that broccoli is SO SO GOOD!

I heard the next FFFF will ask about Japanese food. Uh oh! I haven’t tried much Japanese food, except sushi from the grocery store (OH YUM) and saki, like 23 years ago.

Four Foods on Friday #125

It’s back again! This week’s question is very challenging.

Tell me four things that you like cold or uncooked almost as much as you like cooked.

Uhhhhh….

When I was younger, I was very fussy about my food. I liked good food (such as vegetables), but I couldn’t eat cold leftover cooked veggies, yuk!

Boy, have I changed.

Maybe it’s because I am busy. Or maybe it’s because I am slowly morphing into my husband’s habits. Or maybe because sometimes i just can’t pull away from the xbox 360 for very long, heehee. But I will eat (almost) anything cold now. Potatoes, eggs, leftover stew, old chicken wings, egg roll, whatever. It’s kind of weird. I think it may be because I am busy and don’t want to be bothered with heating things up and cleaning after. I just dump some food in to get rid of the hunger pangs, and keep working. It’s not a great way to eat…. and I know it… and I’m trying to change it!!!

Still, there are a few things that I don’t mind eating cold:

1. Pizza
2. Fried chicken (including leftover chicken wings)
3. Broccoli. Oh how I love uncooked broccoli!
4. Kale

The list could go on and on, but I do like raw, uncooked foods. It’s just having them in the house when they are sometimes so stinking expensive at the stores!

FourFoods on Friday #123

Looks like FFoF is back! Here are the questions for this week:

Tell me either the four strangest things or four non-food items that are in your fridge.

Hmmmmm… this is a toughie. I think I’m pretty average when it comes to food…. I’ll try my best here.

1. Hummus. Three packs. My daughter loves it. I do, too, but I have to be in a “mood” to eat it. Our favorite is roasted red pepper hummus, but we also like the spinach/artichoke and green olive kinds, too.

2. Pickled banana peppers. And pepperoncini. Is this unusual?

3. A 2-pound bag of kale. It’s a huge bag. Kale is a wonderful vegetable. I love it raw. I used to devour the kale garnish on plates when we went out to eat. It’s just so good. Kale is one of those terrific natural fat burners for women. It’s also a member of the cruciferous family, known to fight disease (especially cancers). We use kale as a replacement for lettuce.

Gosh, this is hard… I have average stuff in the fridge, nothing very exceptional.. ummm….

4. Tiny heads of red cabbage, about the size of a baseball. I plucked them out of the garden before the frost, and we STILL haven’t done anything with them yet….

So! There you have it! Thanks for enduring this far, lol….

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