Saltimbocca

Tonight we had chicken saltimbocca. Organic chicken breasts pounded thin, coated in flour, paprika, and lemon zest and browned in olive oil and butter. The sauce is shallots, vermouth, lemon juice, herbs and capers. I served it over whole grain spaghetti.

We also had grapes, lacinato kale and a salad with spinach, blueberries and pears in balsamic vinaigrette. Dessert was a whole wheat and flax banana muffin sweetened with agave and honey. I love the sparkle and crunch of turbinado sugar on top.

Orange Ginger Seitan

Tonight we had ginger-and-orange-glazed seitan on quinoa; spring greens with blueberries and apples; and roasted sweet potato puréed with a little agave and my favorite spice for baking or for seasoning winter squash or pumpkin:

It's from Penzeys, and the star anise is what makes it brilliant.

I made the seitan from scratch, from the Real Food Daily Cookbook Chicken-Style Seitan recipe.

I like this recipe because it uses cannellini beans and garbanzo bean flour in addition to the wheat gluten, so it seems less like a hit of pure gluten. None of us has a problem with gluten, so I think seitan is a great high-protein occasional meat alternative, especially when I make it at home. Most of the supermarket meat alternatives don't seem like much of an option, with their highly processed soy, and sodium, and preservative chemicals.

I browned it in a cast-iron skillet and then made a quick glaze with freshly squeezed orange juice, grated ginger and tamari. I served it with stir-fried carrots, cauliflower, scallions and rainbow chard stems over quinoa. The organic rainbow chard was so beautiful at the market today, the stems were all shades of lavender/violet pink and bright golds and red and deep purples. It's always such a scramble right at the end to get it on the table while everything is hot. Especially since R asks for miso soup with every dinner now. I'm glad she likes it, but there is another extra step. I cut the scallions on the fly. They taught us in cooking school to cut our scallions so elegantly, into slender little O's. I didn't realize how shameful these are until I took a close-up picture. But it's just family dinner on a Wednesday, and it was good.

Back to Bentos!

It has been quite awhile since I took lunch photos in the morning. For various reasons--keeping things cold, lunch box shape--they are often not really bentos any more. They're not in one box. But I think the principle is the same.

Bean Soup

I am trying to be better about making whole-food meals from scratch, and eating less meat, more whole grains, and more fruits and vegetables. More colors on the plate, for variety and nutrition. Taking pictures in the wintertime is another story, when it's pitch dark by the time dinner is on the table.

Tonight was 16-bean soup that simmered all day in the slow cooker; peach and Rainier cherry cobbler from the peaches and cherries I canned over the summer; kale with caramelized onions; steamed carrots and oranges. I put out some preserves I canned in June, strawberry preserves with black pepper and mint. The black pepper just gives it a hint of heat, more like a warmth at the end of a bite, and the mint is un-identifiable, something fresh and grassy under the straight-ahead sweetness of strawberries.

The preserves were so good with this Oat Soda Bread from 101cookbooks.com. You make the oat flour by whizzing rolled oats in the food processor. I substituted white whole wheat flour for the all purpose flour. What a great recipe! It's a whole grain quickbread, no yeast or rising, a way to have warm homemade bread on the table for dinner without planning ahead very much.

Cooking beans at high altitude can take forever, but this soup went into the slow cooker at 9 a.m. and the beans were soft by dinner at 6.

I have big plans too, to get back to taking pictures of the bento lunches. Over the weekend, I made and froze brown rice onigiri, baked egg rolls, some healthy muffins and cookies, and two batches of homemade seitan. I still take a lot of time with R's lunches, but it seems like we're busier this year, and taking photos before we leave for school at 7:20 has eluded me since September.