Vegetable Bean & Lentil Soup

This turned out wonderfully delicious even on a hot day! We sat outside in our patio chairs, enjoyed watching the sunset and devoured some amazing soup. Sometimes when I have one or two ingredients I run an Internet search to find something healthy and child-friendly to make. My main ingredients today were beans and lentils. I also wanted it to be low-calorie, flavourful, healthy and stocked full of veggies. I saw a lot of recipes for black bean soup...gave them all a once over and decided to just create my own soup in my crock pot. Best thing about recipes like this are that they are versatile. I used what I had in my cupboard and fridge and you can use what you have, so don't be discouraged if you see something on the ingredients list that you don't have.

Vegetable Bean & Lentil Soup

Ingredients:
2 medium onions
2 celery stalks
4 overripe tomatoes
1 cup frozen mixed vegetables(corn, peas, carrots, green beans)
1 cup of kale
1 can of black beans
1 cup of dry navy beans
1/2 cup of dry lentils
4 cups veggie stock
4 cups of cold water
1 package onion soup mix (optional: you can choose to do 8 cups of veggie stock instead, I was just using what I had on hand)

~Spice mix~
1 Tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp black pepper

Directions:

Makes 15 servings!

Turn your crock pot on low. Dice all the veggies and put them in your crock pot. Add the canned black beans. Then add your vegetable stock, water and onion soup mix. Finally incorporate the spices into the mix.

If you are using dried navy beans and lentils like I did you have to soak them in water for 3 hours and typically boil them for another 1.5. I did this as the rest of my soup was cooking in the crock pot, then added them during the last hour of cook time. You could also just get canned beans, but remember canned means a lot of salt, dried beans have hardly any.

Let your soup cook for 5-6 hours in the crock pot. Then use a blender to puree 10 cups of your soup. If you are using an upright blender do only 1-2 cups at a time because hot soup means steam can force your lid to pop off. Leave the other 5 cups of soup chunky. Pour the blended soup back in with the left over chunky soup and mix them together. It turns out amazing!

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I love how low calorie this soup is...I plugged the ingredients into a recipe creator and I came out with:
15 servings at 1 cup each
84 calories per serving
16 carbs
0 fat
5 protein
4 fiber
400 sodium (This could be reduced if you used no canned beans and strictly veggie stock)

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The review from the family was positive! The hubby had 3 cups worth and loved every bit. Although at this moment he is lying here beside me stuffed and complaining he ate to much! Scratch that now he is sleeping, so remember only a cup or so will do you. I had 1 serving and felt totally satisfied.

My 4 year old is a bit unsure about beans, luckily we had a few parenting tricks. We told our little one that his favorite superhero loved this soup because it gave him the energy to go exploring and run fast. Our little guy hesitated, but then gave it a couple bites..said yuck and then ate more! Got to love that he really wanted to not like it because of the beans, but then ate it because it tasted so good.
My thoughts on this recipe are to enjoy it while you are camping or hiking like us! When the weather starts to cool off in the evening and you can sit outdoors and keep warm. It will keep you full for quite some time and that always helps while outdoors.
Enjoy your long weekend! The weather has finally picked up here, so we've been busy enjoying it.

Garden Pests and Harvesting Lettuce

I have a caterpillar problem in my garden! They are known as cabbage worms and are one of the most common insects to attack veggie gardens in Canada, United States and Mexico. There are 3 different types of these caterpillars and I have the “Imported Cabbageworm.” They are velvety to the touch, bright green, a thin yellow stripe down its back and it produces green droppings on the plants as it eats.

Where did they come from?The cabbage white butterfly! You will see them often in early spring to late fall. They are easy to detect because they don’t particularly fly, rather float with the air currents. They typically are white with a black spot on each wing.

What do they eat?
Everything! Well almost…. They especially love the brassica family, everything from broccoli, kale, cauliflower, and leafy greens.

How do I know I have them?
I realized I had some sort of pest because there were holes chewed through my lettuce, kale and broccoli. Some of the leaves were even skeletalized! Often the holes were chewed from the center of the leaf and in some cases whole leaves were being eaten. Look for them on the back of the plant leaves. Once they grew larger, I found them sitting on the top of the leaves. The larger ones also produce large green droppings, so you will realize that you have a caterpillar somewhere on that plant.

How do I remove this pest from my organic garden?
Basically check your plants often. Since I already have them, I am now checking the back of the leaves every afternoon/evening when they most commonly eat. I then remove them from our garden. I also check for tiny white specks on the back of the leaves, which are most likely the eggs. I will probably do this for the next 2 weeks. I have a small garden so this can be seriously damaging to our production. On the other hand, I have only found about 10 small caterpillars (no bigger than the width of my pinky finger) and 2 larger ones (about 1 inch long), so I consider myself lucky in terms of how bad it can get.

Another old gardener’s trick that I learned from a dear friend of mine with 70 years of gardening experience said to sprinkle flour on your plants. Do this after it rains or in the morning after a dew. The caterpillars will eat the flour, become bloated and die.

If you do have a serious problem with them you could purchase bacillus thuringiensis from a garden center. It is a biological/naturally occurring bacterial organism that is non-toxic to humans and animals, and is often used by organic growers. Caterpillars are just repulsed by it! You can purchase it in a dust or spray.

How can I prevent it from happening?

Since this was my first time planting a garden in this location, I did not realize how avid the white butterfly was here. Next time I will probably put floating row covers, or nylon netting overtop of my plants. This would prevent the butterfly from being able to lay eggs on my plants in the first place. Also rotating your crops is a good idea every season.

I hope our garden will survive this infestation. It’s pretty far along in terms of its growth, but one of our kale plants has been hit pretty hard. Once these caterpillars eat most of the leaves the plants cannot photosynthesize and eventually die. I’m going to try the ole sprinkle flour on the plants trick and see if this works. Wish me luck!

Harvesting Lettuce
In other news I was able to harvest some of our “cut and come again” butter lettuce! Not that you want to hear about food after reading all about caterpillars, but the lettuce was delicious, soft and buttery :) A couple tips for picking this "cut and come again" lettuce:

~Always pick the outer leaves of the plant. They are usually the biggest and more mature.

~Once you think a leaf is big enough to eat, then pick it! This will encourage more growth from your lettuce.

~Pull the leaf downwards to harvest the leaf, opposed to pulling on the leaf.

~If you do end up cutting most or all of the lettuce leaves then leave about an inch of growth on the plant and it should grow back again in time.

~I usually get about 4-6 harvests off of each lettuce plant through out the season. The lettuce leaves usually keep in the fridge for about 3 days. They are so young and tender that we usually eat them before they get a chance to make their way into our fridge.

I hope you harvest lots of your own lettuce, rather than deal with pesky bugs in your garden! Happy Veggie Gardening to you all :)

Welcoming Fall...

Last post in August, which means it's September and that means fall is around the corner in my part of the world. I guess I always associated September with the fall season because of school. School means summer is over. The equation September + school = fall season! I don't know about you but I LOVE fall. It has so many wonderful aspects to it. I can't wait the 20 or so days till fall is technically here so I'm making a post today.

To me fall represents a time of change...as spring to most represents a time of re-birth. In fall we see changes from leaves changing color to the weather becoming colder/rainier. I also see warm sweaters to cozy up in and tea to sip on.Then there are the pumpkins to adore...and the gourds in all their shapes and sizes.Who can forget the fall harvest...including cranberries...yum!We are lucky enough to have a Cranberry Farm in our area. I checked it out a couple weeks ago after blueberry picking. They had the most delicious cranberries I have ever tasted! I am going to buy some of there fresh cranberries once they are harvested this September. I am so excited!

Speaking of fall harvests, our garden is starting to grow, grow, grow! And check out the cold frame my hubby built. He designed it this way so that our vegetables could grow taller with the cold frame still on, plus it opens and closes really easily. The only problem we had today was a little bit of rain water pooling on one side. I caught it before anything happened.





My garden has changed incredibly in a matter of a couple weeks. It's amazing how fast these little one's can grow. They have doubled there size since I planted them! In the front of this picture is broccoli, to the left is kale and in the very back is butter and romaine lettuce. I still have to plant my spinach. I need to get on that!

Change is really hard for lots of people including myself. I'm not a huge fan although I don't mind small changes here and there. It's when a bunch of things change all at once that can make it hard to deal with. Maybe that is why squash, gourds and pumpkins are all at their peak that time of the year. Comfort food, hello :)

This September will be a bit of a change for our family, because my guy is going back to school. Just to finish up a few classes and then he graduates with his degree. He hasn't been in school for a few years now, so this will be a huge adjustment for him. As for myself and my little one it will be an adjustment too, meaning we won't see him as much and also having to give him quiet time to do homework. I think this change will be good for us. My guy will be able to complete something he has been wanting to for a long time and we can move forward in our lives together.

Now go enjoy the last 20 days of summer and ask yourself what changes are happening in your life this Fall season?

Sunny days

Past few days we've been enjoying the sunny, warm weather by exploring our little town of a city. We live in a pretty small city compared to most, so it's easy to forget that there are little gems that we haven't discovered yet. On our list so far have been murals, gardens..lots of gardens, thrift stores, and parks. I think in the past two days we've spent 7 dollars and that's because we shared some lunch at a cafe. It's can be so simple to find inexpensive or free activities, especially in the summer. We just have to go for a walk around town, visit a park/trail, bring some essentials with you and suddenly you have a day full of free fun.

We discovered these fun summery murals down an alleyway. It wasn't really a discovery in the sense that I have seen them quite a few times, but for some reason when murals are painted down alleyways it just always seems new or different every time I see them. We also found a herb garden someone had planted down an alley, so we walked down a narrow little path and enjoyed every minute. Then we did some thrift store window shopping, and I say window shopping because no one ended up buying anything. I guess it wasn't our lucky day to find a small treasure or two.

(My lil one at the community garden)

We've also been going to a local park the last couple days, where they have a nice playground and waterpark for my lil guy to play on. There are also beautiful totems, community gardens and ponds. Needless to say I've been getting a great big dose of vitamin D, minus a sunburn, thankfully :)
On to our foodies...It seems that salads have been on the menu lately and why not!? They are easy to make, always taste different and you can basically use any vegetable you have in the fridge.

"Hale Kale Salad" (Recipe by Rod Rotondi)

1 bunch of Kale leaves
1 medium Avocado
1 Lemon (juiced)
1/2 tsp of salt
Dash of cayenne peppe (I omitted)
Handful of raisins (my own addition)

Put everything together in a bowl and begin mixing. Squeeze the avocado with you fingers and work it into the kale. Once everything is coated enjoy!

We took this on our picnic and it kept quite well. The salt breaks the kale down making it softer, so the longer you wait to eat it the softer the kale seems to be.

"A Sunny Fiesta Salad" (Recipe by Maggie, livingfoodjunkie)

We made this one up ourselves and basically it's dice up what you have in the fridge. No measurements here, since you can estimate what you might need or have :)

(The salad)
Corn
Red pepper
Cucumber
Zucchini
Pineapple
Avocado
Green onion
Carrot

(Seasoning/dressing)
Dash of Chili powder
Zest and juice of a Lime

As I was eating a bowl of this I started craving some raw crackers or chips, we didn't have any on hand though :( Then I thought how great would this be as filling for vegan or raw burritos! It has a "meaty" enough texture with some crunch, plus all the different flavor components makes it perfect. Next time I think I'll try it out :)

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Next post is going to be raw kid-friendly recipe that my lil one and I made last night! It's dessert, snack or anytime you want a treat item..yum!

Happy sunny days to you!
~Maggie

Dinner Time!

This was our dinner tonight! I am so proud of our dinner tonight because it had three dishes, which were all made from living foods! They were all delicious and easy to make.

I found the funkiest recipe for avocados! The woman who posted this is so inventive, which I love. Check it out Avocado Fries! They are buttery with a crunchy coating. I want to try the same "breading" with zucchini. I can't wait!

I made these tonight with her recipe for Raw Nut Burgers.

Three dishes for us is a huge step, we were usually able to make about one dish per meal mostly due to poor planing and time restraints. This leads me to our third dish which was kale chips, sadly I didn't get a great picture of the kale chips on their own yet. The kale chips I made this afternoon. They just have a couple tablespoons of olive oil, salt and grated garlic. I dehydrated them for 4 hours or so.

So lets start off at the beginning. Yesterday I made Ani Phylo's Black Sesame Sunflower Bread, which is always a great bread for burgers and I also like it as a cracker for dipping in soups. This bread took about 4-6 hours to dehydrate, so it is something you could do the same day as making the burgers :)

The raw nut burger was one of the best raw burgers I have tried. It's meaty, spicy and fast to make! All the other raw burgers I have made take a long time to dehydrate, where as I left this burger on for about 30minutes and it was good to eat! I should note that I didn't have a full cup of walnuts, so I added what I had plus some almonds. It worked wonderfully. The recipe made 4 patties.

Then I added all the fixings! Tomatoes, cucumbers, sprouts, and red pepper were all in the mix! So good, however after making it i thought "how am i going to eat this?" I went in fork and knife at first, which works well. Then I tried eating it with my hands which was a little messy, but way more fun!

I am so full now :( I couldn't help but eat to much, this was way to good. We have left overs too, which is going to be in both our lunches tomorrow. Go have fun with your food, I know we enjoyed tonight's dinner. We were both so excited and giddy to be making such creative, fun dishes that tasted delicious :)

~Maggie