Great Leftovers...

Last night we had the left over chicken and baked it in the oven, as I didn't think it would be good reheated in the microwave. It turned out great and I couldn't taste the extra olive oil that was on it previously. We ate all of the cauliflower and onions, so I made two different side items. I cut up two large size potatoes and just added salt, pepper, butter and baked it until cooked. Last week I had made some more refrigerated pickling juice and never used some of it, so Tuesday night I added some baby carrots to it. Tonight the carrots were ready to eat. I didn't make the bread it was store bought french loaf.

Refrigerated Pickling Vegetables

I have seen a few things about pickling veggies, but never tried to make them before. Great thing is that there is no canning involved in this and it was really easy to do. I used peppercorn, mustard seeds, garlic, cumin seeds, salt to add spices to the onions, cucumber and carrots. In another container I made the spices to be ground turmeric, garlic, salt, and peppercorn. I thought I added a little too much turmeric in that one, but Mr. Crafts4others loved it. Today (being Tuesday), I made another one but with onions, carrots, and bell peppers with cumin seed, garlic, sugar, salt, apple cide vinegar, peppercorns, turmeric, red pepper flakes. This is the first one that the brine had sugar in it, but that will probably make it in the end more of a sour/tart and sweet flavor. We will definitely know in the next day or so.

Here is the main Recipe that I used to create the pickled vegetables for the picture above.

This is the new one and waiting for the brine to cool before putting it in the fridge. The color looks different since I used different spices and apple cider vinegar.

Have you tried pickling before? Do you have some good recommendations of spices that go good together? 

Vegetarian Dinner

This past weekend we made a healthy vegetarian meal. Mediterranean Quinoa Salad (from the Daniel Plan Cookbook), and it was pretty good. I did leave out a few items that I either do not like myself or didn't have on hand. The salad has Quinoa, cucumber, garbanzo beans (chickpeas), basil, oregano, lemon juice, olive oil, and we used imported provolone and red bell pepper instead of yellow. My husband added olives and tomatoes to his per the recipe. The rest of our dinner consisted of corn, red onion, green beans, red bell pepper with a little bit of butter, salt and pepper. The last item was the pickled carrots that we had previously purchased. We liked all of it, except for next time I think I will add more cucumber and herbs to the Mediterranean Quinoa Salad.

Quite a Haul....

about two weeks ago at the Farmer's Market. We got a few items that were a little pricey, such as pickled carrots $8 and a habernaro sauce for $5, but we wanted to try something a little different. The pickled carrots are great and could even be eaten as a tangy/sweet snack. The potatoes I got were 0.33 cents a pound. The potatoes, tomatoes (I got about 8 good sized ones), green beans, zuchinni, and peppers together were all $9. The apples were a little more pricer, I think around $4-$6 for all of them.