Avocado BLT Egg Salad

Hello there! It's been a while since I have posted. The holidays kept us busy around these parts. The holidays also left us feeling also heavy. Oh goodness, I always forget how much delicious food I end up consuming between the months of October-December. Between the dinners, holiday parties, goodie-baking for friends, the list just goes on and on and the scale just went up and up and so did the head aches.

When January came around I was so ready to start feeling good again, and after a lot of contemplation I decided to give Whole 30 a whirl. While I don't feel like eating this way is sustainable, nor healthy for long periods of time (too much meat, and I think grains are a healthy part of any food table, in moderation) , I have found it to be incredibly cleansing as well as powerful when it came to defining my relationship with food.

Spinach and White Bean Stuffed Sweet Potatoes

I saw something similar to this recipe in a cookbook years ago and tried to recreate it for some friends recently. Basically, my version was terrible but I still loved the idea. Then I remembered a miso maple sauce I had eaten awhile ago at a terrific restaurant and wondered if it would help out the mess I had created. After a quick Google search I learned that the sauce was basically equal parts vinegar, maple syrup, and miso paste. Boom - perfect! It tasted like I had spent hours working on the sauce but only took about 15 minutes to cook. The perfect fake out food!

I love fake out food - recipes that taste fancy and taste like they take a lot of time, but take minimal effort. I've found that the secret to adding flavor without a lot of effort is to add an umami ingredient. What is umami you might ask? Umami is sometimes called the fifth flavor and adds deep, rich, savory flavor that comes from glutamine. Foods with umami flavor include meats, especially stocks and other slow cooked meats, tomatoes (especially tomato paste), mushrooms, Parmesan cheese, shellfish, and fermented foods (among a few others).

For this recipe I used miso (mee-so) paste, which has a deep, lovely flavor. Miso is pretty foreign to many home cooks, although it is becoming more common. Basically, it is a salty, thick paste made out of fermented soybeans. It sounds super weird and kind of creeped me out at first. Once I got the hang of it, though, I really grew to love miso. I generally always have at least one tub of it in my fridge and it lasts a LONG time so you don't have to worry about it going bad. I like to make homemade ramen soup with miso paste, and it is GREAT flavoring for soups and salad dressings. You will generally find it in the refrigerated case near where you'd find tofu. There are multiple kinds - white, red, sweet, etc. Red miso has a somewhat stronger flavor while white is more mellow, but really any kind will work for this recipe.

If you can't find miso in your grocery store, are kind of freaked out by it, or just don't want to bother, you can also use soy sauce for this recipe. Frankly, I think it tastes much better with miso (I've tried both ways), but either way works.

It's all about food prep

You know those days when you wake up to a race bugle and you go all day only to crash that night thinking, what just happened? On days like this the first thing to go is healthful food choices and thoughtful meals prepared at home (and who are we kidding, we all know they are usually significantly better for you).

I also find myself in this rut, with work and travel (mostly for work) and a threenager, and a busy hubby with a company run for our home, and his book deadlines, and race training (I love to run and those longer races take a lot of time away from home in the wee hours of the morning). So, in order to not flop everyday, I need, nay, MUST HAVE, a plan.

Everyone does this a bit differently depending on their needs and schedules. My little sister Natalie,  and our resident homesteader, plans 4 meals weekly so she has some flexibility and the opportunity to gobble up leftovers. One of our readers, Erin, posted that she has gone back to planning her meals a month at a time because it helps her plan and budget ahead. Micah, our resident gu-ru on plant based-eating, plans her meals on Tuesdays, shops on Wednesdays (when her local grocery store's weekly sales overlap), and preps and washes all produce Wednesday night.

Beef, Veggie, & Quinoa Stew

Happy New Year! Natalie here and are talking beef stew today. A rich hearty beef stew is soul warming on a cold day. I'm not sure what the winter is like for you, but here on the Homestead in Eastern Idaho it is negative temperatures and down right miserable. I was on a search to make a veggie-filed beef stew and was once again, like many traditional comfort foods, was turned off by the prepackaged ingredients filled with MSG, high sodium, unknown ingredients, butter, flour, etc. Hence, this recipe was born and quickly became a wintertime favorite.