A week's menus

Possibly the best cornbread I ever made

Ingredients for my traditional chili

As promised yesterday, I am going to list what I had to eat during the past week beginning with today's dinner: chili made with beans and lots of chopped red and green peppers and cornbread made from a recipe in Real Food Daily Cookbook: Really Fresh, Really Good, Really Vegetarian by Ann Gentry and Anthony Head (link to Amazon, but the copy I used was borrowed from the public library). Lunch was leftover pizza with grilled vegetables and breakfast was a bowl of blueberries and sliced strawberries and a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and walnuts. Do you wake up as hungry as I do?

Another day the menus included
Breakfast: bowl of blueberries and sliced peaches and a bowl of oatmeal with raisins
Lunch: tostadas as posted yesterday
Dinner: Pizza with grilled vegetables and a salad

Dinner: quorn roast, baked potato with onion and mushroom gravy, corn on the cob, and spinach salad

Dinner: gazpacho, fakin' bacon club sandwich

Dinner: potato salad, coleslaw with rice vinegar, leftover gazpacho, salad with vegan ceasar dressing

Other meals were leftovers of the above and we ate out one night at a meet the artist reception for the opening of a show of photographs taken by the daughter of friends.

Avocado and mango tostada

No, sorry, but that is not chocolate! But these tostadas were so delicious I just have to share them with you even though it is not the most photogenic food. There is a more appealing photo of a tostada on Wikipedia.

At about noon every day I get hungry, really, really hungry. I don't want take the time to cook in the middle of the day, but I admit to being a picky eater. That means I have to at the very least prepare some food. I can't just grab a piece of bread with a smear of something and be satisfied. I like to reheat leftovers whenever they are available. If there are no leftovers in the refrigerator, I try to have a sandwich and fruit or sometimes a fruit sandwich. This might be called a Mexican fruit sandwich. Not by a Mexican of course, but that is the way I thought of it.

I often toast corn tortillas made by La Banderita and sold at Publix stores where I live and at Wegmans where I often visit. Even though the tortillas contain those chemicals that I can't even begin to pronounce, they are the only grocery store corn tortillas I like the taste of.

In the refrigerator I found the tortillas, left-over refried black beans, spicy tomato salsa, a few leaves of Boston lettuce, half an avocado and a mango. The avocados and mangoes available right now are outstanding so as soon as I saw them I knew I had lunch. I put the cut up fruit and lettuce in a small bowl and splashed on some seasoned rice wine vinegar. In the microwave, I reheated the refried beans while the corn tortillas were toasting and assembled my Mexican open-face sandwiches.

It has taken me longer to write this than it took to prepare lunch!

6 Steps to answer the dinner question

Big questions of the day: what to wear and what's for dinner. I can't help you with what to wear, but I do have some help for answering the what's for dinner question.

The other day I realized that great recipes are everywhere. They are online, in books, in magazines, in your head, on little cards at the grocery store. A search on Amazon for books using the term cookbook yields 102,622 results. And we are still looking for recipes. A lack of recipes is not the problem with deciding what to eat for dinner. The problem is menu planning, especially if you are focusing on wellness and eating more healthy foods. At least for me that is definitely the hardest part.

If I wait until I am hungry and it is time to eat a meal, I end up choosing whatever is fast and is easy to prepare. Even with vegan foods that often means I will be eating the more processed and least healthy choices in the kitchen.

Now that I know what is the most difficult task between me and a healthy meal, I have been putting more effort into planning menus for the week. I am naturally quite a planner and list maker, so I have easily found a system that works for me. I need to plan three meals a day.You might not need to plan so many meals, so you may have an easier task than I do. Even if breakfast is oatmeal with fruit (again) and lunch is leftovers from dinner (ideal), I need it in writing. Dinner is what takes the most effort to plan and prepare, but 3 meals a day must be in my own plan.

1. On my paper I write the seven days of the week and "B", "L" and "D" with enough space to add a brief list of the dishes for each meal. This should all be on the left side of the page so you can put your grocery list on the right.

2. It helps if at least some of the days are set meals. For instance on Monday or Tuesday, we go to the local pizza store to take advantage of their really great prices on those days. We order a pizza with just tomato sauce, stop at The Boys Market for a box of grilled vegetables, and finish our own pizza in the toaster oven. Sometimes when I really feel like cooking, I grill my own veggies. I gave up on the homemade pizza years ago because I just can't compete with a professional oven. Or maybe you have plans to eat out for lunch or dinner during the week and know you won't have to be shopping for ingredients for those meals. So that is one day.

3. Choose two menus that you like to prepare that will provide enough food to give you leftovers for dinner. That is four days more.

4. Think about what vegetables are in season and plan a dinner and lunch around them. Now we have 6 days of dinners planned.

5. Choose one more dinner based on beans, pasta, or rice depending on the other selections you have made so far.

6. Now you have menus written on your piece of paper for 7 dinners and any other meals you have planned. Look at the recipes you will use or review the ingredients in your head. Check your supplies in the kitchen to see what is missing. Write the items for your shopping list to the right of the menus.

If you need a little more help, check back tomorrow and I will share my meals from last week's menu planning.

Warning! This video may lead to change

I want to see the new movie Food Inc., but I can't find where it is/will be playing. I did find this trailer, a little over 2 minutes long and promising. To find out more, look at the movie's official website.

Remembering Athens

Tower of the Winds, Athens Greece

Scholarhio Restaurant, Athens

Ever since we had lunch at Scholarhio Restaurant, I have been remembering the wonderful meal we had there. Of course the location had something to do with it. The restaurant is in the Plaka at the foot of the Acropolis and we sat on the balcony at a charming table for two. The owner spoke enough English to assure that we had a pleasant experience. On the menu there is an option to select about 8 out of 11 or so vegetarian dishes for two people to share. With so many choices, it is easy for anyone who wants only vegan selections. All of the dishes we chose were delicious - my mouth is watering thinking about it. One of the most memorable was the Greek salad. Surely some of the taste is a result of the fresh tomatoes, the olive oil, and the olives themselves. Even so, last night I decided that since I will not return to Athens for some time, I would try to duplicate the taste at home with a Greek salad with produce fresh from The Boys.

My version was simple and reminiscent of Scholarhio's salad without the Feta cheese. The ingredients were torn romaine, chunks of cucumber, very fresh local tomatoes, and a lot of pitted Kalamata olives. For the dressing, I looked in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman, but I ended up just creating my own dressing with half lemon juice and half red wine vinegar, whisked with more extra-virgin olive oil than usual. I might make it again tonight it sounds so good to me.