Dan Dan Noodles

Another night with a surprisingly yummy dinner. I’m a huge fan of new meals, almost every dinner I have made over the past month has been a new recipe. Somehow all the recipes I’ve made have been successes. Tonight I was a little nervous that this could be a fail – Jake and I joked about having a sign that says XX days since last dinner fail on our fridge like a construction site.

Tonight I made Dan Dan noodles and they were super yummy with a very nice heat. If you like spicy food you should make this meal!

 

Here’s my version of the recipe.

Ingredients:

• 22 oz. large udon noodles (from the refrigerated section)
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• Toppings
  • 2 tbsp peanut oil
  • 1 tbsp grated ginger
  • 3 red thai chilies, chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 lb chicken cut into tiny pieces (I would use ground chicken in the future)
  • 1 tbsp Chinese sesame paste
  • 1 tbsp soy sauce
  • 1 tbsp rice wine
  • 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• Garnish
  • 1/8 cup chili oil
  • 1/4 cup sesame oil
  • 1/4 cup soy sauce
  • 2 scallions, thinly sliced
  • handful cilantro, chopped
  • 2-3 cups chicken broth

Directions:

1. Cook the noodles according to their package, drain, toss with sesame oil.
2. Heat peanut oil in a large saucepan over high heat, add the ginger, chilies and garlic. Saute for a minute and then add in the chicken. Cook until the chicken has some color and then add the remaining topping ingredients. Continue over medium-high heat until chicken is completely cooked.
3. Mix the chili oil, sesame oil, and soy sauce for the garnish (I stored it in a clean glass bottle to keep in the fridge).
4. To make a bowl: put some noodles in a bowl, add some chicken, pour as much broth as you like over top and garnish with the oil mixture, scallions, and cilantro.

Who knew that the girl who had never really cooked until a little over a year ago would have made all of this?!

Noah’s first gummies

http://ift.tt/1nbMdDt via IFTTT

Spaghetti Bolognese

Another delicious meal from Bowl Food. Although this is a time intensive dish (few hours) it is relatively simple since most of the time is spent waiting for it to reduce to a thick sauce. This is our new favorite pasta sauce (previously I always turned to the meat sauce in Eating for Pregnancy).

Here’s my adapted recipe:

Ingredients

• butter or oil
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 stalk celery, diced
• 4 oz. pancetta, diced
• 1 lb. ground beef (I used about .9 lb and it was plenty!)
• Half an Italian sausage (we are using the other half to make pizza and I didn’t want it to go to waste), diced
• 1 cup of red wine (used cabernet sauvignon)
• 2 cups broth (use just water to reduce sodium in dish)
• 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes
• 2-3 tbsp tomato paste
• 1 tbsp dried oregano
• 1/2 tsp Italian herbs
• 1/4 tsp dried basil
• 1/4 tsp dried coriander

Method

1. Heat the butter or oil in a nonstick saucepan (4 qt. saucepan was perfect for this).
2. Add the onion and cook over medium heat for a couple of minutes. Add in the celery, carrot, and garlic, cook for a few more minutes over medium-low heat — the onions will be translucent.
3. Add in the pancetta, beef, and sausage. Cook on high until mostly browned, make sure to break up the ground beef as much as possible.
4. Pour the red wine over the meats and simmer for about 5-8 minutes (until it doesn’t smell very strongly of wine).
5. Add the remaining ingredients, bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer. Simmer for about 2 hours or until it reaches the consistency you want for pasta sauce.

Notes: Next time I think I’m going to double the celery and carrot, they are very subtle and I’m thinking this could be a good way to sneak in more vegetables. Mushrooms would be another great addition to this sauce, maybe cup the beef in half and add a container of sliced mushrooms? Jake and I agreed that we could have doubled the pancetta but we don’t want the cost of this recipe to get too crazy. We haven’t tried it with Noah yet but I bet a couple pulses with the immersion blender and he would eat this with some macaroni!

 

Chicken fajitas

In the past few months I have gotten more enthusiastic about meal planning and trying new recipes every week. We’ve found a bunch of recipes that we’d cook again! I’m using a couple of different websites/apps to help organize my recipes and track our meals. For recipes I use Pepperplate — it’s great for storing your recipes, bringing them up for cooking, and creating a shopping list. My only complaint is that I wish it was easier to export recipes from their site. Once I cook a particular meal, we take a couple pictures and journal it using Evernote Food. This way I know the last time I cooked a particular meal and can read our comments about how the meal went.

Anyway, I thought I’d start sharing the meals that we think are “WOW — make this again!” meals. Here’s the first one from last week: sizzling chicken fajitas from Smitten Kitchen. I made the main filling exactly as the recipe stated (minus hot sauce so Noah could try it) and we had sour cream, salsa, cheese, and cilantro for garnish. I think what really made this dish work for us is my new saucepan! We finally upgraded from the cheap Target one that we’ve been using since we got married. It really helped to sear the chicken and veggies. (No, we didn’t pay $225 for the pan. Although it is totally worth that much, we only paid $50 at the Calphalon Outlet.)

Zero Waste Toddler Lunches and Snacks

Noah doesn’t quite yet have the appetite or teeth for sharing our meals just yet. This is easy to fix at home since we can just make him a separate meal, but it becomes more challenging whenever we go out. I’m not ready to shell out money for a kid’s meal (that isn’t very healthy) so we always come prepared with our own food. We all have things that are a priority and one of mine is waste reduction.

Here are a few ways that I reduce our waste every week:

1. No paper towels … seriously. I have a pack of paper towels in the garage from when we first got married (almost 5 years ago) that we use for things like grease or oil. Instead, I use microfiber cleaning clothes, hand towels, and real napkins.
2. No paper plates or utensils. If you don’t have them in the house, you don’t use them. I will buy a small pack if we are having a large party just to make the day a little less stressful but usually I use my extensive appetizer plate collection (Jake would refer to it as a plate hoarding problem) when we have a bunch of people over.
3. Water bottles and coffee mugs. We don’t buy bottled water and almost always make our own tea/coffee before leaving the house.
4. Cloth diapers.
5. Lunches.

Most of the time Jake takes his lunch to school. I found him the plainest, least ornate lunch bag at Target; he loves that he can clip it to his bag so it’s one less thing to carry. He uses Glass lock containers for leftovers and various other plastic containers we have in the house for salads and snacks.

We do something similar for Noah. I have a cute submarine lunch bag I bought at the Dolphin Store in Groton. It easy fits an ice pack, his milk, and 3-4 containers of food. Instead of plastic bags, I use LunchSkins – they are very durable and can be washed in the dishwasher! The downside is that they aren’t even remotely airtight.

Not only are we reducing the amount of trash we put out each week (normally our recycling is greater than our trash) but we are saving money!

Homemade Ice Cream

One of the items on my Christmas list was this ice cream maker:

Jake got it for me and it’s become kind of a gift to both of us! I’ve only made recipes from the included booklet but there are tons online that are very interesting.

We’ve done regular vanilla, raspberry sorbet, thin min, Mexican chocolate, and strawberry! I’m amazed how easy it is to make and it’s even cheaper than ice cream at the Commissary!

  

Snow Day Spice Organization

Where did this snow come from??

I guess Noah and I aren’t going for a run today….or even tomorrow? Actually tomorrow might be a great day to run since not many people will be on the road but it should be plowed enough that we can run in the street. And since Noah has a stroller bundle me and rain/snow/wind cover, he is going to be way more comfortable than me!

So while Noah had fun climbing on his slide….

I decided to empty out our spice cabinet and reorganize. It seems that things get lost in here and I never know what we have when it’s time to go grocery shopping. You can’t tell from the picture but there was the lightest coating of drywall dust on the tops of each thing (and on the shelves themselves) from the construction. I’m also a huge fan of reusing containers, just like my mom, so most of things in these pictures aren’t in the original containers.

Once everything had been emptied I wiped off the shelves and then started thinking about how I wanted to put things back…. I grabbed some old flashcards from work and started labeling anything that was missing a label (or had a tiny label). I also had a bunch of empty containers up there that I was able to use to consolidate some spices that were in larger containers.

About 30 minutes later I had this:

At the end I had a ton of space for the bottom shelf so I put a box on the bottom for random items — half used seasoning packets, extra flashcards for labeling, etc. I even labeled my spice rack!!

I also made a list of everything that we had and what shelf it was on; the next step is to put a piece of paper next to each shelf with what it contains. This way I don’t have to move everything on each shelf to find one item. It was interesting to learn that we have several different types of poppy seeds and sesame seeds. And multiple forms of cumin, cardamom, coriander, clove, and cinnamon (all C’s!). I guess it’s obvious that we do a LOT of Asian cooking!

Right now we are waiting for the snow to slow down so that Noah can play outside! I haven’t taken him out in the snow yet since he wasn’t walking before and I’m not a huge fan of playing in the snow. Now that he has snow boot and a heavy jacket I don’t really have any more excuses.

Best Mashed Potatoes Ever

I bought a huge bag of organic potatoes at Trader Joe’s last week for a few of our recipes. As with any extra produce, I used the leftover potatoes to make food for Noah. Weelicious had a wonderful recipe for mashed potatoes and I modified it a little bit for Noah since we are still pushing extra fat/calories whenever possible.

Instead of 2% milk I used half & half (what I had on hand) otherwise I probably would have used cream. I used almost 3 tbsp of butter instead of 2 — this makes the mashed potatoes taste AMAZING (and the extra fat doesn’t hurt Noah).

Play with Your Food!

Along with What’s This Wednesday, I am trying to add in new textures as often as possible to Noah’s play. This is following up on the OT at playground observing that he is much more sensitive to textures than the other babies in playground. She suggested that I continue to expose him to new things to prevent him from becoming averse to new sensory experiences when he becomes older.

Sensory aversion seems to be tied in with food aversions (or at least that’s what my Google results suggested).

One article stated that:

Parents frequently report that these children do no like to get their hands “messy”; do not like to have their teeth brushed or hair washer; or become distressed when asked to walk on grass or sand or to wear socks or shoes, certain fabrics, or labels on clothing. Many of these children are also hypersensitive to smells, and some many have difficulty with loud sounds and bright lights.

http://main.zerotothree.org/site/DocServer/29-3_Chatoorv.pdf

I feel like this is a pretty good description of Noah. He doesn’t have any issues eating food (once you force feed him the first bite) but he hates touching anything cold, slimy, gritty, grainy, etc. with his hands, always rips his socks off (unless we are at playground and then I think there are too many things to distract him), and he is petrified of anything that makes a loud noise (garbage disposal, vacuum cleaner, sewing machine).

Today I was having my snack of cauliflower & dip on the kitchen floor while Noah played in his kitchen toy bin (aka our second recycling bin). Noah was very interested in my food so I gave him a couple hunks of cauliflower and spent the next 10 minutes laughing at his reactions….

I would almost believe that the cauliflower is causing him physical pain from the look on his face!

I was pretty impressed with how much he touched the cauliflower … but I think his goal was to destroy, not play. Each time he threw it to the kitchen floor, I would hand him the largest piece again.

I threw it on the ground!!

By the end of our “play” time he seemed to be a little bit more comfortable with the cold, wet, and bumpy texture of cauliflower…and he almost smiled!!

This random (but fun and hopefully productive) activity got me thinking….what other healthy snacks could I enjoy eating while Noah enjoys playing??

• Cauliflower
• Broccoli
• Celery sticks
• Cucumber slices
• Oatmeal (give him some dry oatmeal)
• Lettuce

Woot Woot!

Took Noah to the clinic today for a weight check. He is up to 18 lbs 3 oz and jumped from the 4th percentile to the 7th percentile for weight!

I guess our baby fattening program worked!