Daily Foodie Eats: 20/04/12

Breakfast: Coffee and a stuffed mushroom cap

Lunch: Gyros meatballs on a salad of tomato, red onion and spinach with some chopped veggies on the side

Snack: a mason jar of carrot-ginger soup (recipe coming!).. then I ate a nice big chunk of brie cheese when I arrived home. I was having a bad day. I needed to eat my feelings, ok?

Dinner: Now this is what I call “Paleo junk food”… A giant chicken shawarma salad. Man, it was good. Crispy charred chicken bits, salad, garlic sauce. Sure it’s probably full of nasty canola oils, but a better choice than pizza, no?

Snack: “ice cream” aka banana, almond butter and cocoa in the food processor. yummy.

Daily Foodie Eats: 18/04/12

Breakfast: Same old… coffee and cream. Do you seriously want another picture of my mug? Didn’t think so.

Lunch: More mango/shrimp/avocado/salsa salad. See yesterday’s post for a pic. More veggies and babaganoush. Again, see yesterday’s post. I’m like that disappointment you feel when you realize your favourite sitcom is a rerun. Sorry. ha!

Dinner: Spinach salad with hard boiled egg, red onion, tomato and… no bacon. Funny thing about that bacon… I arrived home a few minutes early tonight so I stopped at home to pop the bacon in the oven before I walked around the corner to get the kiddo from daycare. As I was prepping dinner after we returned home he kept saying “bacon! bacon! bacon mommy!” Wait, how do you know I’m cooking bacon? Do you seriously recognize the smell? Dear god, you ARE my child! When I took the 8 slices of bacon out of the oven and crumbled them into bits to cool on the paper towel he kept asking for them. Then grabbing them off the counter and loading up his bowl…. Sigh. I give up. Just eat the bacon, child. He ate five entire slices (for those of you who are good at math… I ate the other three. ha!) So no bacon for this salad. We also had bowls of soup from the freezer (sausage, tomato, spinach, bone broth with some parmesan sprinkled on top). Good times.

MOAR BACON, MOMMY!!!!!!! (His expression is hilarious)

Snack: I taste tested a sausage stuffed portobello mushroom… Recipe to come!

Daily Foodie Eats: 17/04/12

Breakfast: Coffee and cream. The usual, you know.

Lunch: Homemade turkey meatballs (ground turkey, coconut flour, egg, pesto, chopped spinach, and sundried tomato… and yes I did eat them cold. YUM). I took a photo with my blackberry but it was too terrible to share. Embarrassing!  Egg salad in a curry Pure Wrap. These are amazing raw coconut wraps that are a great sandwich wrapper and bread replacement. I first saw these on nomnompaleo.com and went on a mission for a Canadian distributor and found UpayaNaturals.com. Now these puppies don’t come cheap at $5.59 for a four pack (and that’s on sale!), but tell me this – have you ever dropped way too much coin for a fresh bakery croissant? Yes, that’s what I thought… Too rich for lunch every day, but a nice treat. I forgot to take a photo of it until I got to the very last bite. Whoops. I sincerely apologize for this horrible photo!

Also had some chopped cucumbers, red pepper and Smoky Babaganoush, and some Sunshine Sauce. I’m undecided on the sunshine sauce, although I altered the recipe to use almond butter instead of sunbutter because it’s all I had. I think I will play with it some more the next time I make it.

Snack: Piece of cold chicken from the fridge and a Larabar. I needed to get some damned food into me before we went to Costco. Costco on an empty stomach = bad.

Dinner: Shrimp, mango, avocado and salsa. Yummy.

Daily Foodie Eats: 16/04/12

So, I’m a bad bad girl. I forgot to take pictures of my food today until dinner time! So to make it up to you my devoted readers lonely, singular reader, I busted out the good camera to take some pics!

Breakfast: Coffee and cream. Yum. Some call it intermittent fasting, I call it laziness and a busy morning at work.

Lunch: Two hardboiled eggs (breakfast!), cucumber slices, another taco salad (just like yesterday’s breakfast, go look at the pic and it will be like deja-vu. I promise). I also had a mini chorizo meatloaf. I’m going to include the pic from the author because mine are decidedly less photogenic, but incredibly flavourful. This recipe is a winner! Yes Virgina, there really is a meatloaf that doesn’t taste like cat food. This is it.

Dinner: Cocoa toasted cauliflower and pork tenderloin. For the pork, I used the rest of the delicious rub I had remaining from the other day when I made The Best Chicken You Will Ever Eat. Seared it up in the cast iron pan and finished in the oven. A tip about pork. Pork tastes nasty when it is overcooked. Invest in a good instant read meat thermometer. I cook a pork tenderloin to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. It is okay if your pork is still a wee bit pink in the middle. Once you take it out of the oven, let it rest under some foil for 5-10 minutes. The temp will creep up to about 145. Trust me on this. And if you don’t want to trust me, trust the FDA. While I can be “anti establishment” when it comes to public policy – especially food policy (we’ll save that rant for another post, perhaps on a rainy day when I’ve had enough of procrasti-cooking), go with this recommendation for cooking the pork!

Yummy. I added some sliced tomatoes because I felt my plate was too brown. Kiddo happily scarfed the tomatoes down along with his leftover lemon parmesan risotto from the other night. The best part about this dinner is that it is all very simple ingredients that were turned into a flavourful and delicious meal just by adding spices. Spices are your friend. They can turn something mundane into something magical. This dinner took me about 30 minutes to prepare. 20 of that was spent sitting on the couch…

Snack: I dunno. But I’m sure I will munch on something later. ETA: I had an ataulfo mango. So good.

Kitchen gripe of the day: So I have this reasonably fancy-ish Venmar hoodfan. It’s great and all, but the stupid electronic control panel keeps falling into the fan housing! After a trip to my friendly Venmar dealer (read: some hole in the wall appliance repair centre in a basement of a building in backwoods Hull where I made a colleague come with me in case I got murdered and/or I was too chicken shit to speak french) the nice guy there showed me the piece and I figured out that all I had to do was open it up and slide a little lever. Great, but now I seemingly have to do it every 2 months or so. The last time I did it I didn’t turn the breaker off. Momentary lapse of reason. Whoopsie. Yes, my hand was vibrating for an hour. ha!

Daily Foodie Eats: 15/04/12

Breakfast: coleslaw mix topped with salsa verde, shredded chicken thighs with homemade taco seasoning, chopped avocado and a drizzle of homemade mayo just because I like playing with my not-so-fancy drizzle bottle I got at a restaurant supply store. And coffee. Mmmm…

Lunch: Meh, didn’t eat much. Had a few bites of these amazing Apple coconut waffles, but before I could snap a good photo the kiddo had dug right in. Note to self: find some better almond flour, because the only stuff I can find at Bulk Barn (almond “meal”) just isn’t cutting it! Nothing else for lunch, but I did a lot of munching while I prepped food for the week.

Dinner: Ah, this would have been much more photogenic if I had got out the real camera. Prosciutto-wrapped chicken breast stuffed with spinach and sundried tomato, spaghetti squash carbonara, braised artichokes (never again. I have never been successful in cooking a fresh artichoke!) with some garlic aioli for dipping.

Snack: fat cat plantain chips. I love these things…

Also, the excitement of the day… I snagged a great 17 cubic foot upright freezer from my basement from kijiji! Time to upgrade from the small little 5 cubic foot chest freezer that I’ve had since university. It seems so empty now. I’m shopping for a grass-fed cow to fill it up. Maybe a pastured pig to go with it!