What does my family eat? Vegans will yawn, knowing we eat food… vegetables, beans, grains, fruit, nuts and seeds. Pretty straightforward, eh? I don’t count calories or count grams of protein or fat or carbohydrates. Instead, I have a general sense of what my family and I need. There’s variety in our meals each day… but we have standard staples that I enjoy cooking.
Morrocan Stew is one of our favorites. Served over couscous, this hearty meal is perfect with a nice raw salad. I saute onions in olive oil, add chopped zucchini, chopped carrots, chopped potatoes, tomatoes (I use canned tomatoes from Trader Joe’s), cumin (lots), garbanzo beans, kidney beans, cinnamon, raisins, cilantro, water. This is super good – and, like pizza, it often tastes better the next day.
Our family buys mostly organic vegetables, and it pays off when I think about this Morrocan Stew. It’s a pot of food that doesn’t have any chemical pesticides included, and it doesn’t have the negative energy from conventional farming practices… the impact on the people who grow the food and the farm’s neighbors who are affected by chemicals. The earth didn’t need to get infiltrated with chemicals for me to bring this stew to my family’s table.
The kids are both very healthy – energetic, perfect weight – and they have days when they eat a lot and days when they don’t. I put very little energy into worrying about how much they eat, since it’s not a problem for us, but I can understand completely the fears parents have when their kids don’t eat very much.
Fruit is always a favorite. Gianna is really into rolled up flatbread with hummus, cucumber and tofu. I slice them up into circles – a great handheld lunch for her. My version of the roll includes avocados, lettuce, tomatoes and dressing (like a salad in a roll… my husband calls it Middle Eastern sushi).
I bake tofu at home now instead of paying three times the normal price of tofu for the store-bought baked version. It’s so easy and tastes so much better. Baked tofu is great in sandwiches with wheat bread, avocado, lettuce, and mustard (plus I add dressing). After pressing the water out of the tofu overnight with towels and a wooden cutting board (if it’s not the already-really-really-firm tofu), I slice it up and let it sit in a mixture of tamari, ginger, garlic, Bragg’s Liquid Aminos, mustard and sometimes Goddess Dressing. Then I bake it at 350, turning it over and leaving it until it looks good to eat.
One of my favorites is pumpkin pie. It’s so super easy and yummy… Gianna always eats the filling and I eat the crust. A win-win relationship! I buy the crust, but maybe this year I’ll make it to save money and have that satisfying feeling of doing it at home. In the Cuisinart I mix mashed canned pumpkin (yes, this is a total cheater, busy mom recipe), silken tofu, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla. It bakes in about an hour but needs to cool for a while.
We have lots of produce on hand most of the time, jars of beans for soaking and cooking, rice and quinoa, nuts for snacks and recipes, rice milk. What we don’t have is sodas, prepared food with dies in them, and prepared food with unidentifiable ingredients (though who knows what Toffuti Cuties are made of). The stores we shop at normally don’t even carry food with dyes, so it’s not like I need to avoid them.