Smoke screen

Oh hi!

Guess who is going stir crazy trapped inside!!

Can you tell??

School got cancelled.

Sooooo, we are ditching Davis.

And I’ve been using up all the food in the fridge in the meantime.

Which is why the kids have eaten beans and avo more than once this week.

Here are the rest of the bits and pieces.

Look look look guys!  It’s my beloved vegan Winter salad!  It made a comeback this week thanks to the 3 bunches of kale I bought at farmer’s market last week that I still needed to polish off.

I also made my Thai salad twice…and now I am out of Nugget’s Thai sesame dressing so I will need to re-stock that once we are back in town.

Kyle was out of town two nights this week so it made eating leftovers even easier…I can find scraps for the three of us no problem but when he’s here it makes ore sense to cook a full meal to feed us all.  In any event, I had some leftover spaghetti squash from these bowls (but only enough for one serving) so I added the last of the very sad and wilted arugula, the rest of the pesto I thawed for this meal, and a hunk of manchego.

It worked!  Although it was definitely not enough calories, even with the nut dense pesto, so I had a pretty sizable dessert later that night.

For the record, the kids don’t seem to have any issues with this meal.  I added cucumber to up the veg factor (and use up one of the very last things in the crisper drawer).

It actually wasn’t quiiiite the last thing.  I did have one actual meal planned.

This seems like a weekly ritual.

Only difference was I added hazelnuts for the last bit.

I was making this!

I got Dinner Illustrated (by ATK) from the library last week and I literally want to make e v e r y t h i n g in it.  And I mean EVERYTHING. I could hardly pick out my first thing to make, but this Chopped Winter Salad with Butternut Squash was a solid start.

I paired it with home-made walnut bread from a while ago (it was a big loaf so I froze half).

The kids got a deconstructed version of the salad because I knew they wouldn’t be up for radicchio.  Kyle hardly likes radicchio.

Want to read some interesting articles that have made me do some thinking about the intersection of food and gut issues and mental health (specifically anxiety).

I’ve always been HIGHLY skeptical of those mail in food intolerance tests.  The kinds that tell you you are sensitive to like everything and scare you into eliminating your whole diet.  Read more here.

And here’s an article on how we got so obsessed with “clean eating” that it made us hyper-analytical to the point of excessively categorizing everything.

Food for thought (literally).  😛

None of that has to do with dinner, of course, so I’ll get back to it.

Radicchio, romaine, and a balsamic dressing were the base.

And then topped with feta, fuji apple, roasted butternut squash, and hazelnuts.

Voila!  America’s Test Kitchen does it again.

So if I am in a good head space (meaning my anxiety is under control and my OCD is in check) when I eat this, then does the fact that the meal has fodmaps in it matter?  I mean, yes, it does, but it does make me think…about psychological health.  Which is why I linked those articles above.

Chocolate face plant.

Ok, now here is where things realllly got interesting.

I made a strata!  Out of such randomness!  And it turned out soooo well!

It had the last of my poached tomatoes, some eggs, a few bits of sausage (from a weekend baby shower that I never even mentioned!), the last of the cow milk, and the butt of napa cabbage.  Oh and parmesan cheese.  Cheese ties it all together, I suppose.

And the crowd went wild!

See you on the flip side of this smoke sitch.