Sick Day Stew

I woke up this morning with a head cold and I'm trying to get over it. I have had a ton of tea, made soup for lunch... and when it was supper time, I only wanted soup, but it needed to be filling enough for my kids too.

So here is what I did:

I threw the following into a pot:

8-10 cups of chopped milk thistle (I foraged these milk thistle plants from out in back of my house, but if you can't do that, or don't want to, you can use spinach or chard... The 10 cup measure is for raw. This equals about 1 normal size package of frozen spinach)
1 onion, diced
4 carrots, diced
2 kishuim, sliced (kishuim are a light green squash, very similar to zucchini. the main difference is their color.)
2 cloves garlic, chopped
soup stock
extra water
salt, pepper to taste
Later, when it was at a full rolling boil, I added a package of whole wheat lokshen noodles, and my leftover veggie meatballs from the other day...

Bring back to a boil and simmer for 5-7 more min. Serve hot.

Enjoy!

Tuesday, Jan 17, 2012

It got busy here, but I need to make sure I have a supper plan - so I'll quickly write it down!

We were really intrigued by the milk thistle growing out back, and after some experimenting and research, I decided to use it for supper...

We have a really large patch of this growing out behind our house!

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And, those beans that I cooked overnight... those were supposed to be for supper tonight, not prepared simply, but rather turned into attempt #2 in my hunt for the perfect vegetarian meatballs!

So, it turned into an afternoon of  dicing, pureeing, checking greens for bugs, pulling little thorns out of my fingers, chopping, sauteeing...

Here's the menu:

Whole wheat spaghetti with black bean vegetarian meatballs and tomato sauce (recipe for meatballs not perfected yet, sorry! But they were good and this time they actually held their shape. SOON, I will share my recipe. Next batch I will actually record what I did, ok?)

Milk thistle and feta cheese roll (This involved a whole bunch of steps. 1. Forage for tender milk thistle leaves. 2. get all the thorns out of your fingers. 3. soak and check said leaves. 4 chop them (you can leave the thorns on if you'll be cooking the leaves, they soften when cooking and you won't notice them there). 5. Cook milk thistle leaves with onions, till the milk thistle is a really dark green and looks like spinach. 6. Spread the milk thistle and onion mixture on puff pastry, add feta cheese, and season to taste. 7. Roll up puff pastry. 8. Bake.

This took me so much time, but all was delicious!