Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Healthy Meals - Lentil Soup, Carrot Raisin Bread, Leek & Lamb Loaf & Honeyed Turnips

Yesterday I wrote about creating dishes on autopilot. Today I decided to get more inspired and explore some cookbooks given to me by my cousins a while back...NYT Natural Foods Cookbook and New Recipes From Moosewood Restaurant won out. I also flipped through Harriet Roth's Cholesterol Control Cookbook (some great heart healthy recipes). Really I was looking for something different to do with the leeks I bought.

But let me digress....have you ever been grocery shopping and seen some beautiful produce or fish or meat or ....well you get the picture....and then you get them home and they sit in your fridge a while? By the time you go to make something, the moment has passed and now you have to figure out an alternative menu. I saw some plump leeks and immediately thought Mushroom Leek soup (I was freezing to the bone and the thought of a hot bowlful had me drooling) and bought the ingredients....leeks plus shitake and cremini mushrooms thinking I'd add some interesting dried mushrooms I have in my pantry. Naturally by the time I actually decided to use the leeks, I realized that I already had posted 2 excellent versions of my own ... one with spinach and milk and one with Swiss chard . Talk about doing ALMOST the same thing over and over. So now I had a dilemma...what to do with leeks.

On that shopping expedition I also bought plump, firm and gorgeous eggplants (I have to hide it in dishes so my honey will eat them), some ground lamb (I love lamb in any form) and wanted to do something out of my usual pattern...now I'm obsessed with that notion, but I couldn't find anything I liked in my 150+ cookbooks so I did what I usually do when I'm fed up...google search and I found an interesting recipe for lamb & leek croquettes, a Shephardic Greek concoction that sounded great except for the frying part. I am trying to stick closely to South Beach Diet, Phase II.

So here's what I made that's healthy and different....

Menu

Lunch

Armenian Lentil Soup
Adapted from New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant

Carrot Rasin Bread
From Harriet Roth's Cholesterol Control Cookbook

Dinner

Leek & Lamb Loaf
Adapted from a google search find

Baked Honeyed Turnips
From NYT Natural Foods Cookbook




Chocolate Hazelnut Bark
(a variation of this nut cluster recipe from the South Beach Diet Party Cookbook- I just melted some semi-sweet chocolate, added nuts & dried cherries and pressed the mixture on a lined baking sheet and stuck it in the fridge for an hour before breaking it into large chunks)

2 comments:

Sara said...

Ruth I just ate lunch but these pictures have made me hungry again! I am always buying food with ideas in mind, then changing my mind by the time I get them home.

foodiechickie said...

My mom makes the recipe a bit differently but still tasty.