All is Full of Lentils

After this post, a few friends were wondering what happened to all of my prep work. It was pretty, but did it work? Well here's how it fared:

• For several work lunches, I filled a bowl half full with lentils, nestled a puck of caramelized onions in the center, and topped it with chunks of the roasted butternut squash. I carried along a small contained of my raisin vinaigrette to toss with everything after I heated it at work.
• Later in the week, I seared a large batch of kale which I also added to the lentils, squash, and vinaigrette.
• I pureed the last of the cauliflower and it's water with the last of the carrots and squash, some apples, broth, and cayenne pepper for a creamy soup.
• I NEVER USED THE BRAISED MUSHROOMS WHAT. They looked delicious but I just never wrapped my brain around incorporating them into things, and now they are floating eerily in the back of the fridge like a jar of eyeballs and I am scared to even open them.

The Ginger peeling ginger.

The week after, I added a couple more elements to my repertoire: roasted chicken thighs, poached balsamic fig sauce, brown rice, and a lot more seared kale (it gets so nutty and keeps so well- yum). I mixed and matched them for work all week but it didn't get old because that fig sauce is so darn good. I also made one of my favorite recipes from The Kitchn, warm chickpea salad. A little container of that broke up any monotony that may have lurked. Tomorrow I have some poached salmon with my brown rice and seared kale that I had prepped yesterday.

Erik helped me peel and grate over two pounds of ginger root, which I have mixed with a little vodka in a 16 ounce mason jar in the fridge. It is so wonderful to just reach in and spoon a little out. I've mixed it with the rice, stirred it into salad dressing, and sauteed it with ginger and garlic as a base for many meals already. The time and effort were so worth it; I'm never going back.

Do I like the mass prep? Resounding YES. I will absolutely be keeping this up as much as I can. I have a couple of pumpkins, acorn squash, and some yams that I plan to roast for my next round. I should really be taking more pictures this time too.

And now some business talk. There has been an absence of posts for two reasons:

1. I have been struggling with a mild case of cooking burnout, partially remedied by...
2. An excessive amount of eating and ordering out.

Relating to the latter, Erik and I took a long weekend in Nashville for an early birthday present to him, and I took pictures of nearly everything we ate. That is a fairly picture-heavy post in the works, and it's going to hard to write unless I have a giant bowl of snacks next to me because that post will make me HUNGRY. 

Until then,

Lindsey

Leg(ume)s For Days

I'll blog that cover salad too.

In my quest to get back to the Pesca- Ovo-Vegetarian Diet Part 2: Now With Less Gluten!, I've found that I can't rely on my old fast meal standards like chicken and pasta. As a result, I'm crunched for time because I don't start thinking about preparing dinner in the middle of the day and before you know it, dinner is on the table at 8:45 with a 9:30 bedtime looming.

This month's Whole Living Magazine as well as The Kitchn have been pushing the idea of prepping individual ingredients as opposed to entire meals, and then improvising different combinations throughout the week. Rice is one ingredient that I usually make in huge batches and then reheat for days, but I hadn't thought of broadening my mise en place. Smart.

With a free Saturday afternoon, I put on some yoga pants and Vampire Weekend Pandora Radio and got to work.

Oh yeah baby do that delicious thing.

Today's prep list:

• Caramelized onions
• Roasted butternut squash
• Lentils
• Golden raisin vinaigrette
• Braised mushrooms
• Blanched cauliflower
• A sad few blanched carrots (they were about to go bad)

In a couple of hours I amassed a nice pile of jars. And at this point, I'm feeling pretty healthy. My hope with all of this prep work is not only to stop the dinner panic that has been happening more frequently, but also to prevent so much food waste. If I can at least blanch or freeze half the veggies that languish in my crisper, I will save myself the humiliation of reaching into that drawer and emerging slimy-handed and full of shame.

Future prep list:

• Ginger root > in vodka
• Sweet potatoes > parboiled?
• Sliced celery > frozen in bags
• Polenta
• Quinoa
• Seared greens of some kind, probably kale
• Something with excessive tomatoes > possibly this?

The aftermath L-R: caramelized onions frozen in a muffin tin, lentils, braised mushrooms, roasted squash, raisin vinaigrette, blanched carrots, blanched cauliflower.