Chick Pea/Chummus Fritters (Vegan/Pareve, Gluten Free)

I made a ton of homemade chummus on Friday, and it was more than we could possibly use up quickly enough (homemade chummus spoils much faster than store-bought).

So today I decided to see if it could be repurposed into Chick Pea Fritters.

And it worked - they are quite flavorful!

I made a rather large batch - here's what I did:

Chick Pea Fritter Recipe

3 cups chummus (already made)
2/3 cup brown rice flour
spices - salt, black pepper, granulated garlic (and whatever else you want), to taste

Mix well.
Heat some oil in a frying pan. Drop the chick pea mixture by the large spoonful onto the frying pan, leaving a bit of space between each fritter, and pan fry on both sides. Continue until you've used all the mixture!

Serve hot. Or cold. With whatever dipping sauce you like (we use techina, or ketchup. I'm sure it can work with other sauces too)!

These make a great snack or can even be part of a meal.
Now I just need to remember to make these anytime we have leftover homemade chummus - before it spoils!

Supper Plan

I really have lost my ability to plan meals in advance, help! At least I'm not running out to pick up take out or some missing ingredient. I'm making do with what I find here in the house (pantry is well stocked, but we're pretty low on interesting fruits and vegetables, due to the recent marked increase in price, and my staying away from the store).

Here's what we're having:

Lentil "meatballs" in sweet and sour sauce (I'm turning yesterday's cooked red lentils into meatballs by adding some carmelized onion and garlic, ground flaxseed, oat bran, black pepper, and smoked paprika. Form meatballs, place on baking pan, and bake for about 20 min. Serve with sauce over it)

Round Brown Rice

Boring old Potatoes - even though they are boring, most of the kids eat them

Cucumbers, tomatoes, and carrots - still have a few tomatoes left from the pre-Shabbat tomato splurge. Haven't yet made it over to mega to get semi affordable tomatoes...

What's for dinner at your house?

Lentil Meatballs before the addition of sauce. I kept them separate to deal with picky children

Do you embellish leftovers?

I decided to serve our Shabbat leftovers tonight for supper - no need to stash *more* leftovers in the freezer I have decided to empty by the time Pesach rolls around (that matches my husband's commitment to make me empty all the old, useless boxes of stuff out of our miklat before Pesach).

Do you serve your leftovers as is, or do you remake them into a new dish?

Right now, I am an as is sort of person - for me the point of serving leftovers is to be able to simply reheat and eat, no fuss or anything...

What about you?

(So tonight we're having vegetable-split pea soup, teriyaki chicken, rice, carrot kugel, roast potatoes, and some fresh vegetables. I love having a low-prep night! I must figure out how to do this more often.)

Freezer Cleanout and Leftover Dinner

I haven't been posting my meal plans lately, it seems that there have been other things on my mind. But it is time to get organized again! (What better time of year to do that than in the month before Pesach?!)

I am working on cleaning out my freezer in preparation for the arrival of Pesach. I love Pesach, really I do, but sometimes all the preparations for it stress me out...

So today I served this supper:

Potato and Vegetable soup (lots of onions, potatoes, and carrots, since those are all really plentiful and cheap right now, with a smattering of summer squash and garlic thrown in for taste). I made enough to last for another 2 meals, so that will be a good thing at lunchtime tomorrow!

Leftover Vegetarian Cholent from Shabbat - I made too large a cholent and whatever hadn't been brought to the table was still pareve. Today was use it or lose it day. I served it, and some ate it...


Steamed Broccoli and Snow Peas - this was in a mystery dairy container in the freezer. I really must learn to label my frozen foods better!

Eggplant with tomato sauce and cheese (also from the freezer)

A wacky meal, but everyone found something they were ok with eating, so I guess it worked...

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

This year, Wednesdays are what Thursdays used to be. You know, the day the kids have afternoon activities that run late, and it's hard to figure out supper on nights like that!

So, some weeks we have pizza on Wednesday, or sandwiches. This week we get to have all the leftovers!
I want to make room in the fridge and can't stand it when I have to throw out food that sat around too long!

Here's what's left:

Minestrone Soup
2 kinds of pasta
steamed veggies
avocado

Hopefully enough to go around, but if need be, we'll find something around to embellish our dinner with.

How do you make sure not to waste food?

Wednesday night - May 18, 2011

Wow! Once again, I don't have to cook this Shabbat! 2 weeks in a row, quite unusual around here.

So, that means I want to skip my usual Wednesday grocery run. And looking thru my fridge/freezer and pantry, I think this means we'll have some sort of "shmorgasbord" dinner tonight. Let's use up some of my ridiculous odds and ends! (Actually, when I do this, my kids ALL find at least one food they are happy with, so I think it works out ok in the end)

Here's what I found: beets, lettuce, red pepper, yellow pepper, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, potatoes, kishuim (like zucchini),eggplant, melon, apples, overripe bananas, eggs, cottage cheese, mozzarella cheese, yogurt, milk, 2 grapefruits, phyllo dough, "corn pie" (polenta with veggies and cheese), assorted packages of leftover this or that, barley, rice, oatmeal, whole wheat flour, couscous, etc

Here's what we'll have:

Vegetable soup with barley (in my crock pot)


Corn Pie, Broccoli Quiche, and assorted odds and ends from the freezer

Baked Potatoes


Banana Bread


Make your own salad

Tuesday Night, May 3, 2011

Today I am looking for ways to feed the family with only whatever is already in the house, despite the fact that originally I planned to run some errands and pick up some tofu for sloppy sams. In the end, I'm delaying the errands till tomorrow or the next day, since being a one-car family can complicate matters somewhat (and waiting for a paycheck can do that too)!

Here's the plan:

Broccoli, Potato and Cheese Soup - I plan to remake the leftover potato dish from yesterday into a creamy-style blended soup (trying to get more creative with leftovers, please help!)

Rice and Lentils  (Brown Rice, dry lentils (rinsed and checked for stones), chopped onions, vegetable stock, and spices)

Homemade Flatbreads (see the homemade alternatives page)

Cut vegetables and dips

Melon

Inspired Leftovers?

What do you do when you make too much of something you KNOW will not get eaten as leftovers?

Today, I made a pot of oatmeal for breakfast, but one of the children refused to eat oatmeal this morning, so there was a nice-sized serving left. Needless to say, nobody really eats it after it's been stored and reheated. I've tried turning leftover oatmeal into cookies, but the results were far from impressive. I racked my brain, and finally decided to make a quick bread out of it.

Here's what went into it:

1 - 1.5 c. cooked oatmeal (mine was cooked with milk, plus extra dry milk powder for a nutritional boost and a shake of salt)
1 egg
1/3 c. oil
3/4 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 c. whole wheat flour (sifted, as is the custom here in Israel, despite my custom of keeping all flour in the freezer)
1 tsp. baking powder
chopped walnuts
1/4 t. cinnamon.

Combine all ingredients, wet first. Mix well, but don't overmix. Pour into loaf pan(s) and bake at 350 F for about an hour.

My children loved it as a treat this evening. And I made enough that they can have it again tomorrow!

Sunday Night, March 13, 2011

As usual, the family needs to eat. Doesn't matter what's in the news, the kids remain blissfully ignorant and excited that Purim is coming...

Sunday night's supper:

Soup (leftover from Shabbat)
Various leftovers from our dairy meal on Shabbat
Pita "Toasts" - with cheese melted on them
Cherry Tomatoes

Feeling really uninspired today. What do you do when you are preoccupied, overwhelmed, and just really not in the mood to cook?

Monday Night

Aside from the frugal aspect, I'm looking for easy meals. We usually have busy days, and since I homeschool my 4 kids, I really don't have much downtime...ever.

For Monday evening, I'm looking to incorporate leftovers into the plan (I've been trying harder not to have to throw those out. If you have tips to make sure that leftovers get used up, please share! My kids sometimes groan when they see a food served "AGAIN".).

I just took stock of the fridge, and while most of our Shabbat food actually got eaten (and the leftover barley went into the freezer), we have plenty of vegetable noodle soup left!

(By the way, I'm really big on soup right now. It's winter, and we live in a "warm" location in Israel, which means we have a poorly insulated house and not-so-efficient heaters. And it's raining - a good thing! In other words, sometimes it's colder inside our house than out, and I'm too frugal to heat the place all the time!)

So here's what we'll be eating (it's a vegan menu!):

Vegetable-Noodle Soup
Sloppy "Sams" in pitot
Steamed Cauliflower and Broccoli
Oven-crisp Roasted Potato Wedges
I rarely do dessert during the week, but maybe I'll even bake muffins! I have a few wrinkly apples to use up.

Some notes about these foods:

The soup is the same one from Friday night. I keep all my Shabbat soups pareve, so I can use them again during the beginning of the week.

Sloppy Sams are Vegetarian Sloppy Joes. I'm making these with drained and crumbled tofu (I buy these at Kimat Chinam; if you buy 3 tofu cubes at a time, they are 3/23.99 NIS. Does anyone have a better deal to share?), browned in olive oil with diced onion and peppers, cooked with tomato paste, water, and spices. We still haven't worked out the perfect combination of Sloppy Sam spices, so if you have any TNT recipes, please share!

Cauliflower and Broccoli - the cauliflower was on sale for 1 NIS/kilo, so we'll be going heavy on the cauliflower, light on the brocolli. The best price I found for broccoli was 8 NIS/kilo at Yesh. Kimat Chinam was 14 NIS/kilo and Rami Levy something like 17 NIS/kilo. My kids love broccoli, so I figured I would have to continue to buy it and stretch it with the cauliflower...

For the Potato Wedges, I usually combine olive oil, mustard, garlic, salt, and pepper. Mix well with potato wedges (just scrub and cut - leave those peels on so you get the vitamins and trace minerals!), and bake in the oven at 400 F till crispy and turning brown. The kids like to eat them with ketchup...