Crazy Cooking

I like alliterations, can't you tell?  Anyway, earlier this week I saw an ad at a local store that sells mostly restaurant quantity stuff.  You can get a keg o' ketchup, a case of crackers, a shitload of shiitakes or every flavor of latte syrups you can think of.  But what I saw that caught my eye was the 25 pound box of red peppers.  Yep!  25 lbs!  Ahhh, roasted red peppers.  I love them.  We use a jar or so every couple of weeks, so I figured how many could 25 pounds be?  Well, duh!  25 pounds, dummy.  We also eat a lot of fresh peppers -- sliced on a sandwich, in stir fry, they are great roasted with other veggies, and they go well in a curry dish that I really like (sorry, honey, but I do).

So it only took five hours to roast 42 red peppers on the grill.  We saved three out to eat fresh, mainly because I was tired of the every-15-minute trip to the barbecue to flip and rotate.

Here is the timeline of my morning:

Here is the first batch taking a bath

All clean and ready to go

Roasting away

Cooling & waiting for bagging

Bagged and ready for the freezer

I really enjoy the weekends for they are great times to be in the kitchen for long periods.  While most people are out working in the yard, going for a bike ride or drinking beer on the golf course, I'm in the kitchen concocting the next weird thing.

Let's see, in the last month, in addition to my regular fare, I have made oil-free basil pesto stuffed mushrooms (twice), no-tuna salad, roasted red pepper hummus, my own sunflower seed butter (a desperate attempt to replicate the store-bought stuff), Thai coconut curry, Aztec stuffed pitas, mushroom oat burgers and "fries," homemade muesli (that one got shipped off to our son who longs for normal food -- notice I said "normal" and not "Mom's cookin'"), a couple of different salad dressings, creamy zucchini bisque, and a bunch of other things that I can't think of right now.

A friend of mine told me the recently that I spend more time in the kitchen in one day than she does in an entire week!  I love this way of eating.  We try so many new things -- some we don't like & I'll never make them again. 

People often ask us "what do you eat?"  It's like they have the idea we only nosh on heads of lettuce for dinner and nibble on carrot sticks for lunch.  Au contraire, my friend.  We eat incredible food, including green smoothies that taste like chocolate milkshakes, veggies stuffed in a pita topped with dijon/date dressing, and oh, wow, we even eat lasagna or "spaghetti" squash topped with our favorite sauce.  Don't forget the black bean lettuce wraps that are so fresh & tasty you won't even know they're healthy!  And for dessert, you say?  We've had banana "ice cream," black bean brownies and chocolate truffles.  And there's always the old standby dessert, FRUIT!  One of my favorites is an apple sliced up, dipped in almond butter and then dipped for the second time in currants. 

I really do think we have greater variety now that we've been "Eating to Live."  Maybe it's because I work hard to plan our meals.  I don't remember putting nearly this much thought into meal planning when we ate meat and had a processed food at almost every meal. Now our meals are full of things from the refrigerator.  Very few items come out of the pantry anymore unless it's to open a carton of nut milk, or to open a can of beans in a jiffy because I forgot to thaw some out & we need them NOW for our salad.

Well, I will be poring over the recipes for next weekend to see what fun things I can come up with for the following week.  You see, I apparently have orthorexia nervosa, a condition that is specific to those who are healthy eaters.  We tend to focus on food and plan our meals well in advance.  On the self-diagnosis quiz, I believe I scored an 8 (or 9, depending on one answer) out of 10.  I wonder what they cure is... GREEN LEAFY VEGETABLES; that's it!