Last night we had taco salad for dinner, it was wonderfully refreshing! I had been thinking about this delicious salad for several days and finally managed to get the ingredients together to make it. We were really pleased with how it turned out, I think taco salad is a great way to get kids used to eating salads.
When I lived in Costa Rica this was a staple that we ate about three times a day! Very tasty and good for you! I use brown rice and cook a little longer, it tastes great that way. Now we enjoy this meal at least once a week for dinner and a couple times a week for lunch.
Ingredients:
1 lb (450 gr.) Black beans. Fresh are best but most likely you’ll find them dried.
8-10 sprigs cilantro (coriander leaf) fresh or frozen, not dried!
1 small or medium onion
½ small red or yellow sweet pepper (optional, sometimes I add purple cabbage if I don’t have any sweet peppers)
3 cups (700 ml) chicken broth or water
2 cups (350 ml) white rice (I use brown rice and it’s just as good)
½ teaspoon (2.5 ml) salt
1 Tablespoon (15 ml) vegetable oil
1-3 Tablespoon oil to fry the Gallo Pinto
Directions:
If beans are dried, cover with water and soak overnight, if they are fresh, just rise them off. Drain the beans and add fresh water to an inch (2.5-cm) above the top of the beans, salt, and bring to a boil. Cover the pan and reduce heat to very low simmer until beans are soft (~3 hours).
Chop cilantro, onion, and sweet pepper very fine.
Add 1 Tablespoon oil to a large pan and sauté the dry rice for 2 minutes over medium high flame then add half of the chopped onion, sweet pepper and cilantro and sauté another 2 minutes. Add water or chicken broth, bring to a boil, cover and reduce heat to simmer until rice is tender (20-35 minutes). This is also the recipe for Tico rice used in other favorites like tamales.
Once the rice and beans are cooked you can refrigerate or freeze them. Keep a significant amount of the “black water” with the beans (½-1 cup 120-240 ml). This is what gives the rice its color and some of its flavor. Sauté the rice, beans reserved chopped onion, sweet pepper and cilantro together in vegetable oil for a few minutes. Sprinkle with a little fresh chopped cilantro just before serving.
Once the rice and beans are cooked you can also refrigerate or freeze them. Make up small batches of Gallo Pinto when you want it by simply sautéing them together.
In Guanacaste they sometimes use small very hot red peppers instead of or in addition to the sweet. Some people add a tablespoon or so of salsa Lizano or Chilera to the beans while they’re cooking. Our friend Mercedes always simmered the beans very slowly all-day and preheated the water or chicken broth for the rice.
Posted in Breakfast, Dinner, Healthy Snacks, Lunch, Meatless, Whole Foods, Whole Grain
I made this the other day and it turned out lovely! Makes great left overs for lunch or dinner!
Ingredients:
Same vegetables as Hearty Vegetable Stew
1 1/2 cups black, brown, red, or green lentils
3 teaspoons curry powder(or more to taste)
1 bunch cilanrtro, chopped (optional) or 4 whole bay leaves chopped (optional)
Boil the vegetables, lentils, and curry powder in a large pot ans simmer until the lentils and carrots are cooked through(about 45 minutes). Top with the cilantro or bay leaves, if desired.
8 large carrots, chopped
5 stalks celery, chopped
1 leek, chopped
1 head broccoli, chopped
1 zucchini, chopped
1 cup chopped mushrooms
1 cup okar
1/2 medium onion
Equal parts water and Pacific vegetable brothe to cover vegetables (about 6 cups)
1/2 serrano chili (optional)
Spike to taste
Curry powder to taste
Celtic sea salt to taste
Place the carrots, celery, leek, broccoli, zucchini, mushrooms, okra, onion (and any other vegetables you desire) into a large pot with the water, broth, chili, and spices. Bring the mixture to a boil and simmer until the carrots are semisoft.
As with all homemade soups, the longer the vegetables soak in the water(even while in the refrigerator), the more flavorful the soup will become. For a thicker soup, you may blend half the mixture then add it back to the batch.
Great served with a hot slice of homemade bread!
This is a great and refreshing dressing. Next time I make it though I am going to cut the recipe to 1/3 of all the ingredients as I will not be able to make it through this amount of dressing even using it twice a day for two weeks!
2 cups fresh lemon juice
3 whole cloves garlic
3 tablespoons minced ginger
3 tablespoons Nama Shoyu soy sauce
3 heaping tablespoons raw honey (more if desired)
1 1/2 cups cold-pressed olive oil
Place all of the ingredients except the oil in the blender. Begin blending at normal speed. As the mixture is blending, slowly add the oil until it’s completely blended. This recipe should last about two weeks in the fridge.
Makes 4 cups
Posted in Dressing, Lunch, Raw, Salads, Whole Foods
Lunch-Fruit/Veggie plate
I don’t know about you but some days I have a hard time getting my toddlers to want to eat healthy. But I heard something a few months ago that really made sense. If your goal is to train your children to eat healthy and you deck the table out with the best veggies and fruits, and also set the table with Chips, cookies and candy, do you think your children are going to make “healthy choices”? Probably not. They have fleshly desires just like we do, and will go after the foods that are calling out to their taste buds. If we offer them the things that are good for them and then make them look more appealing the chances are great that our children will learn to love those things which are good for them.
I think one of my biggest hurdles was finding the time to cut up and prepare all these wonderful things, it was easier to just put together two peanut butter sandwiches and watch them devour them, then I got to sit down and eat something with them at least. Then the other day I figured it out. The plate you see above was actually prepared for me, the kids ate it in courses. I just grabbed whatever I had in the fridge, one orange, one apple, half an avocado, bag of baby carrots and a couple of raw granola bars. I took all the food to the table, a knife, a cutting board and sat the kids down and I started cutting things up. The boys never used to like oranges which was beyond me because they love orange juice, but when I cut them up like you see in the picture and forced encouraged them to try one, low and behold they love oranges now! I usually start with something I know they will enjoy to avoid whining from hungry children, then I go to something I know they aren’t very fond of and I actually make my kids try it. My theory is that if I push my kids to try things they don’t like that they will begin to develop a taste for those things. All the while I am encouraging them in the Lord, talking how we will build character and strong muscles when we eat things that are good for us even when we might not like them, I also encourage them that one day if they continue to eat them, they will actually like them! And this is Aidan’s favorite, I tell him how one day he will be married to a woman and she will cook for him and he needs to learn how to like everything now so that he will be a good husband and appreciate what she cooks for him when he’s married. And to be honest, this I really believe encourages him more than the others! And then there is the last resort of consequences when the children disobey our instructions.
I don’t do this everyday, I do still give them PB&J sandwiches sometimes, or healthy crackers, meat and cheese but I try to always add a few carrots or peas to the side of the plate and ask them to eat at least a couple of them. Here is what I’ve been doing lately…
Costco has great bulk fruits and veggies, I pick a few each week and we eat them until we are sick of them and then go to another one. For instance, last week we had grapes and oranges and apples almost every day. This week I bought a pineapple, a box of strawberries and a tub of mushrooms to go along with the little bit of produce I had from last week. We will eat all that and then next week we will try something new, they have enough options that you can do this and then be ready for apples and oranges by the time you get through them, your kids wont get sick of the same thing everyday and neither will you. And through the weeks of trying new fruits and veggies my kids will begin to develop a taste for more healthy foods. Sometimes a little ranch helps but you don’t want to do too much because they will develop a taste for ranch dressing!
I think that’s about it for now, my brain is tired and I think I should take a little nap while the kids are all sleeping. More on what I fix for myself, my baby and my husband later.
Posted in Low Sugar, Lunch, Meal Planning Tips, Toddler meals
Trink–The book “Feed Me I’m Yours” is a good one for making interesting toddler meals. I am on my third copy since my first child was born 27 years ago! Another excellent book is “Sugar-Free Toddlers”. The La Leche League cookbook “Whole Foods for the Whole Family” is also excellent. I have used these three books over and over again to feed my kids when they were small. I have also given them as baby gifts more than once. I HIGHLY recommend them!
For a couple of quick suggestions, though: Toddlers like finger foods. Give them a plate of several different kinds of fruit, meats, and veggies–cubes of cooked chicken or cheese, hard boiled egg slices, apple slices, grapes, carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, etc., and let them pick at whatever they like. Serve with “toast sticks”–slices of bread, cut into 1″ strips, and maybe a dip of peanut butter or salad dressing for the veggies. Kids love dips!
Freeze grapes and serve frozen on hot days. Kids also (believe it or not!) love frozen peas right from the bag! That was a favorite of my oldest child at 1-2 years old. Homemade ice or yogurt pops are a big hit on hot days–just let them eat it outside with a tarp underneath them, and no shirt on, whenever possible! The cookbooks I mentioned above should have recipes for ice and yogurt pops, if you don’t know how to make them.
Finger jello is a big hit, and can be nutritious if made with your own juice and Knox gelatin–those are the only two ingredients! I know at least two of those cookbooks have this recipe, or it also might already have been put in our files section. I posted the recipe here myself within the last couple of weeks.
Minimuffins are nice because they are toddler sized. Take any muffin recipe and bake in minimuffin tins at the same temperature as the large muffins, but for half the time. I do this all the time here.
Yogurt is great–just use unflavored or vanilla yogurt, and stir in the fruit of your choice. This avoids the corn syrup or artificials found in most commercial yogurts.
Posted in Lunch
Brunch Casserole
2 lbs potatoes scrubbed and peeled
1 onion chopped
1 lb breakfast meat, chopped ham, or sausage cooked and crubled, or smoked sausage sliced
2 C shredded cheese
12 eggs
1 C milk
1/2 t salt
1/8 t pepper
Layer 1/3 of potatoes,onion, meat and cheese 3 times. Combine eggs, milk, salt and pepper and pour over the top. Cook on low for 8 hours (overnight works great). There are 5 of us in our family and we ate exactly half for Sunday lunch (we eat a lot and the kids really liked it), so I think it would feed 10 if a couple are kids.
Posted in Breakfast, Casseroles, Lunch
These are ideas for a daily healthy eating schedule for one person. So the servings are for one person but they are easily adjusted for more people. Sometimes I lack creativity in the breakfast/lunch department so I thought I might share something I found, I think this is really going to help me out, and I will be sharing more later :)
Breakfast Meals
Lunch Meals
Dinner Meals
Snacks
Posted in Breakfast, Dinner, Healthy Snacks, Lunch
Open the box of Kraft Three Cheese Macaroni…put in boiling water. Cook noodles for 8-10 minutes. Drain. Add 1/4 cup milk and 1/4 cup butter (not margarine). Add cheese package and WAA LAA you have mac-n-cheese baby. Yes, it will always be my favorite, and with little girls, they don’t mind having it 3 to 4 times out of the week! I am not much of a cook but I do have one special. I will send it later. Chicken parmesean. Mmmm Mmmm good!
Welcome to my blog! My name is Jenni Burns, I'm on a journey of discovering the many joys found in being a homemaker. I started this blog as a place to help me keep my many recipes, and it's kind of transformed into a blog about what we are eating right now :) Currently our family is on a journey to become more healthy, AND I'm expecting our seventh child in June! We are doing the Paleo/Hunter Gatherer Diet, and making big changes in how we eat! I hope you find something to encourage you in your journey!
