What we’ve been eating

This is going to be a horribly inadequate food post.  I realized I’d been good about taking pictures of the foods I’ve been cooking, and really terrible about posting anything on here.

Last week we bought purple long beans from our local farmers market.  They cost $1 for a large bunch and they are HUGE.  Over a foot long each.  They are a bit more meaty than green beans, but otherwise very similar.  I cooked them up with tomatoes from our garden and onions from farmers market.

A variety of pickles and other canned goods in the cupboard.

BBQ’d vegetables with rice (a fair amount of ginger-soy dressing was dumped on all of this after the photo was taken).  I love my BBQ.  Our house gets unbearably hot if we turn on the oven over the summer, so a huge amount of our food is getting cooked outside.

This was our dinner from last night.  I’d had a tiny bit of a brown rice salad a few days ago and been craving more since.  This turned out really, really delicious, so I’m going to attempt to document what I did.

First I cooked up 2 cups of rice (half brown rice, half a wild rice mixture I had) with 4 cups of water (and a tablespoon of chicken Better than Bouillon) in the rice cooker.

While that was cooking I mixed up a dressing that included roughly: 3 tablespoons of olive oil, a teaspoon of whole grain mustard, a teaspoon of chestnut honey (yum), 2-3 tablespoons of seasoned rice vinegar, about 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, and about 1 tablespoon of plain yogurt.  I also added in a bit of salt, ground pepper, and a dash of curry powder.

I also chopped up several stalks of celery from our friend’s garden, an apple, about 2 cups of grapes, and a medium-sized onion.

In a bowl I mixed the chopped up stuff with about a cup of raisins and dried cranberries.  I threw in half the dressing, stirred and let it sit while the rice finished cooking and cooled.

Once the rice is at least mostly cooled, I mixed the rice into the chopped mixture with the second half of the dressing.

I meant to add chopped almonds, but I forgot and it was a-okay.  We also didn’t really wait until the rice cooled off, and that was also fine.  It does taste better today though, now that it’s been in the fridge and really soaked in the dressing overnight.

I highly recommend this!  It was dang good and probably fairly healthy.  Also, Paul usually can’t deal with just a salad for dinner, he was starving last night, and this was hearty enough that with some bread he was fine.