Great side dishes

Pear gorgonzola salad
 

Low cal coleslaw (make the dressing with 1Tb light mayo and 1Tb seasoned rice vinegar)
 

Corn salad with tomato, basil and gorgonzola
 

Things to look forward to

This is Kentucky Mint. Apparently the best for making Mint Juleps!!
 

One day this flower will become a delcious strawberry. I'm trying these out in a new spot with afternoon sun and no midday heat.
 

The raspberries are off to a good start thanks to February sun.
 

My New Plant!

I finally got a Solomon's Seal! I am so excited! Gorgeous!
 
 

Variations on Baked Eggs

I love making oven fritatas, which are basically eggs and veggies baked in the oven for 20-30 minutes at 350 depending on thickness. Then I read about making a faux quiche using a tortilla, so I had to try that. Yum! Great easy way to make a quiche. Use any combo of veggies and eggs, maybe a little cheese and you are golden.

 

 

Vegetable Garden

My veggie garden is off to a very slow start(dead hault?) thanks to the Mauary weather, but hopefully it will recover?

This chive plant is doing well and providing some good eats.
 

These peas are supposed to be purple.
 

This chard overwintered and will be tougher, but still quite enjoyable to eat before it bolts.
 

These are my lettuce starts that have stayed paralyzed since I planted them in the beginning of April. No growth in 6 weeks! Will they die?
 

Our Chickadee Family

This is our little chickadee looking nonchalant on the fence while he waits for us to stop paying attention to him so he can go in his nest.
 

This is our little chickadee thinking we are paying too much attention to him.
 

He finally lands on his nest and feeds his family! The babies sound so cute when he brings them food!
 

Here he is giving us the evil eye after. Then he posted a no paparazzi sign on the nest box!
 

Fiddleheads

I'm so excited about the forager at the farmer's market! How cool is that?

I bought fiddlehead ferns, wild watercress, morels! yay! I'm pretty taken with the ferns. They taste kind of like asparagus, but look way better and don't make your pee smell, which never bothers women - guys just sit down! - but will make fiddleheads more popular in my house.

Here they are being beautiful.  

To prepare them you dust off any of the brown fuzzy "ferny" stuff called chafe. I also trimmed off the edges of their stems first like you would asparagus or broccoli. Then blanch them in boiling water for about a minute, poor them in the pasta strainer and run cold water on them to stop the cooking process.
 

Then you can do anything with them really. Even just eat them in a salad. Here's the two best ways we had them:

In a delicious pasta with morels. A slight (read: low cal) cream sauce flavored with marsala wine. YUM.

 

On top of a small premade organic mushroom pizza. A rare indulgence these days!
 

Low-Cal Pizza

I've been making mini pizzas on la tortilla factory low-carb tortillas. Not only are they tasty and potentially very low-cal (usually around 200), they are really easy to make and very flexible to what you have on hand. I've made them with marinated artichoke hearts and sun dried tomato, potato with rosemary, and leftover grilled veggies from a BBQ. You bake them at about 400 for 10 minutes. These are great as a snack, but can be a meal if you have sides. I'd recommend two sides for dinner, like a head of roasted broccoli and 2 stuffed mini peppers.
 

 

 

 

Wild About Stuffed Peppers

I have found the best side dish ever. So easy. So good. Mini-peppers stuffed with laughing cow cheese wedges.

And I am also really into oven roasted broccoli. Here are my two faves getting roasted in the oven together at 400 for 20-25 minutes. The broccoli is plain with some oil sprayed on for good measure, serve salted and peppered.
 

The peppers are great as is, or with some oregano on the cheese before stuffing in, but the other night I wanted to be fancy.
 

So I mixed the laughing cow cheese wedges with soyrizo and spooned it in.
 

Bake at 400 for 20-25 minutes or so. Also a note about the pepper, these are hot house grown from costco. While not organic, the hot house seems to be a pretty good alternative to organic. Most (or at least BC's and costco suppliers) use ladybugs instead of pesticides and are hydroponic, so no chemical fertilizers running off.
 

Super delicious!

Baby Northern Flicker

This is a baby Northern Flicker woodpecker just chilling in our deck plant! Super wow!
 
 
 

Sadly our yard is blessed with baby squirrels as well. There are like 20 of them and they love to play on our fence and had a fight on our roof Saturday morning. I kid you not! I've been having to chase them out of the yard. Hopefully they will develop quickly and disband, because really it's a matter of how many there are. And that youthful energy. Too much energy.

Lentil Bulgur Salad

This is a highly addictive salad that I got from recipes for health in the NY Times

 

It's super easy to make because you don't actually have to cook bulgur and I make it using pre-cooked beluga lentils from Trader Joe's. I cut the oil in half in this recipe, still loved it, and it comes out to 275 calories per cup.

Mock Benedict

You can make a low calorie benedict sauce with yogurt, mustard, and light mayo. For good measure I added in some sorrel and green garlic. I first made this with 2 Tb Yogurt, 1 Tb mustard, and 1 Tb light mayo. I thought it was a touch mustardy, we used about 2/3rds of it, so I added 2 Tb of half and half for round two. That was better. But really both were good, given that these plates check in at 325 calories total (including shared potato patty and whole morningstar farm veggie sausage), I'll take it over the real thing anytime.

Wild watercress mock benedict
 

Oozing with goodness
 

Mock benedict with leftover corn salad and stuffed peppers
 

Lake Forest Park Farmer's Market

As I may have mentioned, I'm trying to get out more. And one of those things I've "meant to do" for some time is shop at farmer's markets. We still have our Full Circle Farm CSA, but I find I need to supplement it a bit and am trying to do that now at the Farmer's Market.

Check out this cool windblown asparagus:

  (you can click on this photo to make it bigger)

Even cooler is that there is a forager stand at the market! I bought some fiddleheads and will post about them soon.