inspiring dinners! (an excuse for delicious food photos!)

paul's been surprising me with lunches and dinners more often lately and it's been super awesome to get to eat together and also try new things!
the other night, i was craving baked potato styles and we had some sweet potatoes so he steamed them and mashed them and topped them with an avocado/cashew sour cream and coconut bacon and a mary's crackers chipotle tomato pretzel stick! (don't they look like savoury cupcakes?) nutritional yeast (obviously) and steamed veg on the side. YUM!

and a craving for poutine turned into... (his super yum mushroom gravy with steamed potatoes, green onion, daiya, and peas!)

and farmers market-inspired dishes like multi-coloured carrots and beets, zucchini, broccoli (all steamed) with mashed potatoes!

 and more farmers market-inspired eats (with more mushroom gravy!) swoon!
 
and, well, who can resist a great potluck/dinner party?
this is my plate from janna and phil's bbq in the summer... some whole foods deli salads and homemade slaw and quinoa salad!
 
 and from a dinner with hayz and hanh - veg burger and raw chili and salad!
 

raw pesto, minus the pesto.

late this afternoon, after only a smoothie this morning, we had suddenly realized we were hungry. paul thought of using kelp noodles and then i started imagining a raw pesto on top. i looked at food and yoga for life's recipe and realized we only needed to get some fresh basil so i headed to the store.
as soon as i got there, there was no organic basil to be found and the conventional basil, having been kept in the refrigerated produce section for however long, was now all brown and mushy. i figured we could do a pesto minus the basil which would mean something more similar to an alfredo maybe?
so i started making food and yoga's recipe without basil, but using everything else (including the sunflower seeds) but then also added an avocado! yum! then, i checked the cupboards and realized we didn't have any kelp noodles!
isn't it funny how you can start with one idea and change it completely by the end?
so paul went and got zucchini and we ended up with the most fantastic creamy zingy sauced noodles.

this recipe's a keeper! a finger-licking-the-bowl-after-you-used-a-spoon-to-scrape-excess-sauce-to-eat-after-you-ate-all-of-your-noodles recipe!
i added a fair bit of water because with all the nuts and seeds, this sauce was quite thick. (can't assure you that i measured the original recipe's ingredients! sorry!) so i'm imagining making a spreadable cheeze next time using the lemon, garlic, sunflower seeds, walnuts, avocado, nutritional yeast, rock salt and olive oil. YUM!

kindergarten lessons in raw food!

oops, so it's already july but i'm a bit behind in posting. a few weeks back, i had the pleasure of being in a kindergarten class for a morning and they usually bake bread and i didn't want to deprive them of their friday cooking lesson so i thought i'd try an 'un-cooking' lesson!

first we combined ingredients for the marinara. this is my go-to sauce that i got from you guessed it, ani phyo. i'll have to look up what book. whenever i'm at a loss for what to bring to a potluck or to quickly whip up for dinner guests or to add to something else (like back in february's lasagne), i love blending this up! i'm grateful i used a recipe i was really familiar with as trying to coordinate jobs to involve 15 active young ones is a challenge! in hindsight, i should've tested the recipe out using the hand blender in advance. and i maybe should've measured out everything first as that took awhile and we almost had a REALLY oregano-inspired marinara. but it's funny, no matter how non-exact the ingredient combinations were, it turned out well! the kids loved smelling the spices (basil was a favourite) and were curious of what this would turn into.

 the sauce took so long though that i had to send them for their recess play time while i took 20 minutes frantically trying to hand-blend the sauce into something without the big sun-dried tomato chunks! or, my worst fear, garlic chunks!

 here is the part i knew would be a hit... the spirooli! before recess, i was so scared about the results as the kids were eagerly telling me how much they didn't like vegetables (ack, the whole recipe!), especially tomatoes (gah! fresh and sun-dried in this dish!) but telling them i worked in a restaurant seemed to help. since i 'must know what i'm doing', they seemed to trust the vegetable preparations!
each of them had a few turns of the spirooli to turn zucchini into noodles. the best was when one exclaimed, "so that's how you make noodles!" i excitedly showed them the inner of the zucchini that reminds me of corkscrew pasta when the rest has been spiroolied away and they all wanted to try it! even the top part (just raw zucchini!) that i cut up into wedges when one said it tasted like pizza. must have been the smell of the sauce nearby.

 after finishing the noodles, they took turns shaking nutritional yeast and hemp seeds for a "veggie parmesan" and then sat at places at their tables with real plates and forks (none of that plastic business!).

one student went around spooning the 'rawmesan' onto plates of people who wanted it and many did! and many liked it! some were calling it sugar but whatever! many asked for seconds or thirds of the pasta. so it must have been a success!

hurrah!

korean middle school cafeteria day 16

i started off the day with organic wheat grass powder mixed into water in my travel mug. i have been missing the taste (and smell!!!) of wheatgrass and thought this may help. not really. but i feel it did give me a boost to get through the morning. it didn't taste anything like wheatgrass but how can you have that amazing fresh taste if it's not fresh? and often i felt like i was drinking dirt grits as it didn't totally mix but i just kept adding water and it was just like a cold tea.













breakfast's excitement was the oranges. hurrah!













for lunch, i finished up my raw nori sheets, rolling up the salad with some tamari and pumpkin seeds.













but i ended up cutting them for easier eating. it was a nice lunch!













for dinner, i finished up my sundried tomato pesto on top of the salad with nutritional yeast. quite nice as well!