Sea Veggies in Pressure Cookers

Pressure cookers are fun, easy and a real time saver. But they are also a wee bit persnickety! Tonight while making some fresh garbanzo beans, I decided to add a few sea vegetable flakes to them for extra seasoning. I have recently learned quite a bit about the importance of iodine in our diet and sea vegetables are an easy and tasty way to add a natural occurring source of iodine. (No, I am not really weird – just health conscious and if I can improve our diet and nutrition without spending much money – I do it. I don’t like supplements – I like getting what we need from whole foods. Besides, I love sea weed salads when I go out to eat and I love vegetarian sushi – although I can rarely afford it.) Anyway, so I tossed in the soaked beans, added the water and then added about a tablespoon of seaweed flakes. (Seaweed flakes are much less expensive than seaweed sheets and if you aren’t making sushi – go for the flakes!) Well, much to my surprise, my pressure cooker began to make some pretty strange noises. Just enough strange noises to make my children leave the kitchen in a real hurry – they are a little scared of my pressure cookers and convinced they are going to blow up some day. Quickly, I grabbed the jiggle valve and removed it from the cooker – only to see a lot of brown ooze coming out of the vent. Oh my! Sea Vegetables! I released the pressure, drained and rinsed the beans, cleaned the cooker and the pressure valve, and put the beans back on. Next time, I think I’ll pay a little extra for the sea weed sheets if I am going to use them in the pressure cooker!

Finally - they are eating salads!

It’s only been recently that my son has started begging for a green salad. Oh – music to a mother’s ears. For years, I have tried to get my children to eat a nice green salad. I have tried plain salads, many different greens, a wide variety of toppings and an even greater variety of dressings. Anything to easily get nutrient dense, raw foods in my children. Although they have always had to eat what I have prepared – it kind of took the fun out of family dinners when I watch their faces as they eat. Then – I went to visit a friend of mine and watched how she served salads to her children. The lettuce and all of the ingredients were finely chopped or grated. My husband says I chop them so fine he almost doesn’t even have to chew. Although I don’t quite chop them that fine, I do chop, dice, grate, toss and mix so that the salads are easily eaten with a spoon (no more struggling to get them on a fork) and the texture is quite appealing to the children. I have also found that I use much less salad dressing when I chop the salad. Once the lettuce, carrots, cucumbers and bell peppers are mixed together, I add their favorite toppings – black olives and garbanzo beans. My daughter is still a little resistant, but my son now says salads are his favorite thing to eat and he even likes to eat them with no dressing. That’s pretty good coming from someone who would be happy to eat toast and rice krispies at almost every meal – if I let him. Now my biggest challenge is to keep his little hands from trying to grab handfuls of salad as I am mixing them up. Someday he just might just lose a finger if he isn’t careful.

Plate full of green tonight!

We had a wonderful dinner tonight – full of green vegetables. Yesterday I stopped at the produce market and just couldn’t resist the first of the Florida okra. I had stopped for only some Kirby cucumbers, but ended up with a basketful of veggies – including some of the best okra I have seen in months. My kids love fresh okra. It wasn’t always that way. I have always loved fried okra and when we owned our own produce market, I finally started making it myself. Now, when I say fried – I don’t mean breaded and deep fried. I simply slice the okra and pan fry – without any breading – in a very hot cast iron skillet with a very small amount of oil. (I used to try breading the okra, but the breading always ended up in the bottom of the pan and my okra was naked. So, I started leaving off the breading and discovered how much we like it that way.) To make a long story short, my children’s love affair with okra took many, many, many meals before they became as enamored as I am. Now, I have to buy at least 2 pounds of okra to satisfy everyone’s appetite. I have found that quite a few of the vegetables and main dishes I serve the family take several presentations before they are well accepted. Taste buds can be trained and old unhealthy habits replaced with new ones, but it takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day – and neither was our overwhelming love of okra. I can’t wait for summer when fresh okra is available all the time!

Just returned from a week of fun camping!

As many of you know, we just came back from a long week of camping. We had a wonderful time enjoying the spring weather in Florida and the beautiful sunny gulf coast beaches. We managed to squeeze all of our bicycles in the back of our van so we even managed to do quite a bit of bike riding at several state parks while on vacation. Camping is an activity everyone in our family loves. Although I still have to prepare all of the meals while we’re gone, it just doesn’t feel like work when it’s done outside while enjoying God’s marvelous creation. As we sat outside the camper enjoying our dinners – made all the more delicious by our camping appetites – we talked about how different our meals are than most people’s meals. But, boy, we do love ours! We really ate well on this camping trip without a lot of hassle. I brought some bags of frozen vegetables (just kept them cold until we ate them) and a wide variety of produce that didn’t require refrigeration. We feasted on sweet potatoes, white potatoes (both fried and baked), cabbage, corn on the cob, broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, apples, pears, bananas and dried fruits and nuts. I also made some healthy muffins, bean spreads, spinach dip and salads before we left. A small investment in ice kept it all nice and cold and delicious. Last year I wrote an article on 10 Tips to Healthy Eating While Camping – which outlines a lot of what we do while on the road. The most important thing is that we had lots of fun and could have stayed another 7 nights!