Cooking through winter: Couple healthy veg recipes, as -friendly as they get

Tags

comfort food, healthy food, recipes, seasonal, vegetarian, winter food

Garlicky gnocchi with butternut squash puree and kale.

Winter is here. It took its sweet time, but I’ve already cursed while scraping my windshield, so it’s official. I can’t think of any new ways to stay warm other than my basic standbys: red wine or chocolate stouts, bubble baths, fleece-lined leggings under everything, and comfort food.

Except I ate about 600 holiday cookies too many and am a little concerned about my starch and dairy intake—less because of gaining weight, more because I don’t want to (re)introduce myself or my eating-machine 3yo to crappy habits.

I always say I wish this was a food blog. I could blog about food every day. Maybe I should just change the name to “Dinner dates with Jax” (or the food blog name I’ve carried in my head for years: Unsophisti-kitchen).

Here are a couple new dishes I’ve done that were kid-friendly, waist-friendly, palate-friendly, consciousness-friendly, earth-friendly, winter-friendly…the kind I’d make if friends were coming over. 

I blogged while hungry again: Muffin tin quiches

Tags

feed me, food, food matters, healthy food, muffin tin quiche, picky eaters, quiche, recipe, sneaking veggies into food, toddler food, vegetarian

I won’t say that my blog is having an identity crisis, only that perhaps I am, but I think it still kind of wants to be a food blog.

I pin a lot of recipes on Pinterest—because sometimes my tiny eater is picky but I’m not. I like to cook and eat new things. It’s a different interpretation of all the “trying” I document here.

The challenge to get my kid to eat vegetables continues. Right now, he’s really into cheese and fruit with his protein. He won’t completely ignore veggies, but he doesn’t ask for them or go to town on them, either. We do a lot of broccoli mac and cheese, shrimp and shroom alfredo linguini, and veggie pizza.

And when mama needs a break from that stuff, she resorts to sneaking greens and reds and oranges into likable, recognizable staples. Enter the muffin tin quiches.

I heart farmer’s markets

Tags

buy local, eat local, farmer's markets, vegetarian

Cipollinis from a farmer’s market last fall. I didn’t even get them home before I had to snap a pic of their awesomeness.

The farmer’s market came back to my town a little earlier in the season than usual, so I’m taking this opportunity to geek a little bit, and to share one of my major “I try”s in life: to buy and eat seasonal, locally sourced produce.

When I left home to gallivant around the country for some years, there was no farmer’s market here, to my knowledge (if any Huntingdonians are reading, correct me if I’m wrong, by all means). There were plenty of roadside stands to buy tomatoes and sweet corn, maybe a watermelon or some funky squash in the fall, but a collection of vendors at a consistent time and place each week? I never saw one.