Pumpkin Oatmeal

I've been on an oatmeal kick lately. Maybe it's the cold weather that makes me want hot oatmeal for breakfast. Last week I blogged about Banana Berry Oatmeal and this week we are having Pumpkin Oatmeal. I love all things pumpkin but had never thought of putting it in oatmeal until now. Pumpkin is actually very good for you. It's a great source of Vitamin A.

Pumpkin Oatmeal
Serves 2

1 cup oats (not quick cooking)
1 3/4 cups water
1/4 cup ground flax
1 tsp cinnamon
Dash of salt
2 tbsp maple syrup
1/4 cup pumpkin

Bring water and oats to a boil. Reduce heat. Stir in in flax, salt, and cinnamon. Simmer for 5 minutes until oats are cooked. Remove from heat, stir in pumpkin and maple syrup.


This oatmeal turned out to have a great flavor. However at times it was a bit gritty. I'm not sure why that was. It wasn't enough to make me not want to make it again though.


This oatmeal would be a great way to use up a last bit of pumpkin from a can when you don't need an entire can for another recipe. I will be making this again. It's great in the winter.

Other Pumpkin Recipes:
Pumpkin French Toast
Pumpkin Cupcakes

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

For my birthday last fall my in-laws gave me a toaster oven. I had wanted one for awhile as a way to bake small things without heating up the entire oven. I think it will be particularly useful in the summer months when I want to bake but don't want to heat up the house with the oven.

The model I got is a Cuisinart Convection Toaster Oven.


It's really a neat little appliance. It does both convection and convention style baking as well as broiling and toasting. It's the perfect size for my family since there are only two of us.

Now the instruction book that came with the toaster oven had several recipes in it and one of them was Roasted Sweet Potatoes.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Serves 2-3

2 large sweet potatoes
2 tbsp Earth Balance
1/2 tsp sea salt
2 tbsp light brown sugar

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Cut sweet potatoes into 2-3 inch spears and place in a large bowl. Sprinkle brown sugar and salt over sweet potatoes. Melt butter and pour over sweet potatoes. Stir to coat. Spread sweet potatoes on a baking sheet covered with foil. Bake for approximately 30 minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally.


These potatoes were so delicious. And so easy! They made the perfect side dish. I really enjoyed them. We will definitely be making this again.

Butternut Squash and Sausage Pasta

I've really been enjoying exploring vegan cooking and one of the best parts is getting exposed to all sorts of new foods that I might not have ever tried otherwise. One of those foods is Field Roast Grain Meat.

Field Roast Grain Meat is actually a meat substitute made out of wheat gluten (sorry celiacs but this is definitely not for you). I had read about how great it was and really wanted to try it. I found it at Whole Foods near the dairy section by the tofu. I decided to use it to turn this recipe, Pasta with Roasted Butternut Squash and Sage, into a vegan dish.

Field Roast offers several flavors of its grain meats. I decided to go with the Smoked Apple Sage Sausages for the recipe:


At first I was a little wary. I mean it looks like meat but its not really meat. What exactly is it going to taste like? And more importantly what will the texture be like? I am very big on the texture of my food. There are certain foods I don't like because of the way it feels in my mouth. Shrimp, lobster, scallops, and ham to name a few (hmm...all meat).


Anyway I already bought the things so we had to go for it. Now on with the recipe!

Roasted Butternut Squash and Sausage Pasta
Serves 3-4ish

1 butternut squash
2 apple-sage Field Roast sausages,
Olive oil
White onion, chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped or pressed
Penne pasta, about 8 oz

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Peel and chop butternut squash into 1 inch pieces (make sure to scoop out the seeds in the middle), and place in large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Stir to coat. Spread in glass pan or baking sheet and roast in oven for about 30 minutes or until fork tender.


Meanwhile cook pasta according to directions, drain and set aside. Slice sausages into 1/2 inch rounds. Heat oil in skillet and add onion. Cook for a few minutes then add garlic. Cook a couple more minutes. Add sausages and cook until browned. Add pasta and roasted squash. Stir to coat everything, adding a bit more olive oil if necessary.


Voila!

The result: I made my husband try the Field Roast first because he will eat anything. He loved it! And so did I! It is seriously the best non-meat "meat" that I have tried. The texture is really good and it had great flavor. My husband said he could seriously eat it all the time. He has already been asking when we can buy it again because he wants to try all the flavors. I thought the apple sage sausages worked really well in this recipe.


Next time I might make a few changes though. This pasta dish didn't really have a sauce, just some oil coated all over everything. The roasted squash and the sausages were really flavorful so it didn't necessarily need it though. However next time I might try some veggie broth mixed in at the last step. Or I might try a bit of soy cream or thick coconut milk as a substitute for the cream in the original recipe. I might also drizzle with balsalmic vinegar as the original recipe calls for that as well.

The Field Roast sausages cost about $5 for a 4 pack if I remember correctly. We only used two of them in this recipe so we had two left over for another dinner. That means the "meat" portion of our dinner cost $2.50, which is not really any more than you would spend on real meat (maybe even less!). Even if you aren't interested in a vegan lifestyle, consider trying this stuff. It's way healthier for you than meat and you might find that you like it better.

Can I also just throw in that another great thing about vegan cooking is that you never have to worry about contamination from raw meat? That is something my husband and I have thought of several times while cooking these past few weeks. You can cut everything on the same cutting board, you don't have to be meticulous about washing your hands and your knives and getting nasty meat juice on the counter. Nope! It's great!

All in all the recipe was a success and I'm looking forward to trying more of Field Roast's products.

More pasta recipes:

Chickpea Pasta

Garden 2009: Failures...

I wanted to write some posts to catch up on my garden from last year. A couple weeks ago I wrote about my garden successes in 2009. Today is the opposite - the plants that were complete failures in 2009.

Cucumbers. Cucumbers were a complete and total failure. I tried planting them twice and barely got any flowers, much less a cucumber. They would grow into these pitful looking plants and then die. I'm not sure what went wrong with them. Not enough water, bugs, the soil, who knows. It could've been anything. I'd like to try them again in 2010 though to see if we fare any better.

Corn. I tried planting corn in a three sisters garden in one of the beds along with pole beans and pumpkins. The three sisters garden is a method of companion planting where the pole beans use the corn for support and the pumpkins grow around the bottom of the corn and keep the weeds down. The pole beans also fix nitrogen in the soil for the corn. Well I ended up with some decent looking corn stalks, but very few actual ears of corn. And the ears we did get were not developed all the way. We may have been picking it too early. Also an animal of some sort got in the garden and ate some of the corn so that didn't help at all. We're going to try corn again but not in the three sisters format.

Pole Beans. I am totally done with pole beans from now on. They were the bane of my garden in 2008 and were also a pest in 2009. I planted them around the base of the corn in the three sisters garden (see corn above). They wound around the corn stalks for support and then kept right on growing until they pulled the corn stalks over. We did get more of a harvest off the pole beans in 2009 compared to 2008 but I thought the pods were a lot tougher than bush beans. Also the pole beans were home to the BIGGEST grasshoppers I have ever seen. They totally freaked me out.

Soybeans. I thought it would be great to plant soybeans in the garden because I love edamame. I had visions of my freezer stocked with edamame and I could snack on it all winter. So I planted an entire plot of soybeans. And they grew just fine. They even survived a deer attack. But when it came time to harvest them, oh boy. I think we let them stay on the plant too long so they were a little tough. And really, really hard to get off the plants. We sat out in the garden all afternoon one day pulling soybeans off the plants. We never did get them all. If we plant them again, it will only be a few plants and I will keep a careful eye on them.

Peas. Peas were one of the first vegetables I planted last spring. I planted two short rows of them by my onions and lettuce. They were supposed to be self-supporting plants so I did not use a trellis. They took forever to grow and did not produce very many pods at all. I probably got about a half-cup of peas total for the whole year.


Herbs - Cilantro, Parsley, Oregano. I planted all three of these herbs two or three times and they never grew. I direct sowed them into the garden and not one sprout came up. This year I will start seeds indoors so I can set the seedlings into the garden instead of direct sowing.

Beets. We tried two different plantings of beets, one in the summer and one in the fall. The plants never came up for the summer planting. For the fall planting, they did come up and get some decent leaves but they never got big enough to produce any fruit.

I think that's pretty much it on the crops I consider failures. There were also a bunch of crops that were in between. Not a wild success but not a complete failure either. I'll try to write up a separate post on that and also on a phenomenon in the 2009 garden - surprise plants!

Bite Bags

It has taken some time, but I have managed to transition to using reusable bags when shopping almost all the time. I have a stash of them that I keep in the car at all times and actually remember to bring them in the store about 90% of the time. Then when I get home and unload the groceries, I immediately put the bags back in the car. Yea for a good system.

It has always irked me though that even though I try to be good about using canvas shopping bags, I still used plastic produce bags. It doesn't seem right to put a plastic bag inside a reusable bag. The point is to keep plastic bags out of landfills right? That includes those little produce bags too.

Let me introduce you to Bite Bags. These are reusable produce bags!


I can't remember how I heard about these bags. Probably on a website or forum or something. Anyway as soon as I read about them, I went straight over to the website and ordered the "Rustic" 3 pack. I really wanted to order the cute pink ones but figured my husband wouldn't be too crazy about shopping with little bags with pink trim.

Total cost with shipping was around $18 for all three bags. They arrived in about a week. So far I LOVE them! They are perfect for grocery shopping. And what I didn't realize until I got them is that they are see-through. Here are two of mine in action with some potatoes:


I have used them at the grocery store several times now. Anything that I would put in a plastic produce bag I now put in these bags. I've also used them for dry beans from the bulk bins. The bags have a drawstring top with a cord lock that keeps the bag closed.

The problem now is that I only have three of them so I might be placing another order soon. I see that they also sell a little snack bag which would be great for my brown bag lunches during the week.

To purchase Bite Bags, go to www.sustainablebite.com

Surprise Harvest

Look what we found in the garden today:


Surprise! The carrots we planted last fall (and never picked) had survived the crazy snow. The snow has finally melted almost all the way so we were able to go check out the garden this afternoon. And we dug up these carrots. We already tried one and they are nice and crunchy. Maybe next year I'll plant carrots in late fall on purpose so I can harvest them in January.



I'm getting excited for the 2010 garden!

Banana Berry Oatmeal

I came across this recipe over at The Discerning Brute, a blog for guys that I happen to read sometimes (hey it's interesting!). It looked super delicious and very healthy so I knew I would try it. I made it for a late breakfast/early lunch last weekend after we got back from a morning at the gym and grocery store. Here's how I made it, with a few variations from The Discerning Brute's original recipe:

Hearty Banana Berry Flax Oatmeal
Serves 2

1 1/2 cups of oats (not instant)
1 cup of water
1 cup almond milk
1 Tbs Maple Syrup
1/4 cup flax meal (ground flax seeds)
Handful of almonds (or your favorite nut)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 Large Banana, sliced
1/2 cup blueberries

Combine the water, milk and oats and bring to a boil over medium heat. Lower heat to a simmer and stir in the maple syrup, flax, almonds, cinnamon and vanilla. After 5 minutes the oats should be cooked so turn off the heat. Stir in the blueberries and banana.


My take on it: The original recipe called for equal parts oats and liquid (water + milk) which I completely disagree with. I've always made oatmeal with a 2:1 liquid to oats ratio. But I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, so I only reduced the amount of oats from 2 cups to 1 1/2. I should've reduced the amount all the way to one cup because I still had to add some more water during the cooking process. However it may also be a personal preference. I like my oatmeal more liquidy.

I also forgot to add the almonds in the middle of the cooking so I threw them on top and stirred them in at the end. And my banana wasn't quite ripe enough.

Despite all that, I really liked the flavor of this recipe. AND it is so healthy for you. Blueberries, oats, flax, cinnamon are all great things to add to your diet. If you've never used ground flax before, I encourage you to try it. I bought a bag of Bob's Red Mill ground flax a few months ago and I've been putting it in everything. Smoothies, yogurt, cereal, oatmeal and cornbread to name a few. You can also stir it into soups and sauces. It's a great source of Omega-3 fatty acids.


Doesn't it look yum? I think I would eat this every morning if I could get myself out of bed early enough. This is the type of breakfast that keeps you full all the way till lunch.

Bottom Line: Definitely making this again with more liquid or less oats next time.

Top 10 Reasons to Eat Oatmeal