WHAT'S IN YOUR FRIDGE TODAY?

Welcome to my blog! This blog is for food lovers and green-minded cooks. I would like to share what I do in the kitchen with others and hope that this will be an interactive site where we can learn from and be inspired by one another.  The idea is to share a meal a week.  The meal will be made from ingredients that are in my fridge without that temptation to run out to the market for extra items.

If you’re like me you probably decide what you’re going to have for dinner that night and then go out to buy the ingredients for your meal.  This makes meal planning basically nonexistent and brings spontaneity to meal preparation.  It also brings lots of bits and pieces of ingredients lurking around the fridge, some of it forgotten and only discovered several weeks later in leaky plastic bags hidden under a stale loaf of bread in one of the drawers.  Does any of this sound familiar?  

Well, I recently decided that I was wasting too much food and challenged myself to use only what I had on hand to prepare meals for one week.  I have a large supply of herbs and spices, sauces and pastes and a cupboard full of rice, quinoa and pasta, so I figured it would be easy to accomplish. And it was! It also satisfied my creative side. 

 Here are the ingredients I started with the first day of my challenge. This amount of food fed my husband and me, so I'll say two servings even though it could have fed three.

ON THE CUTTING BOARD:  parsley, sugarsnap peas, tomatoes, jalapeño pepper, artichokes, parmigiana-reggiano cheese, an egg, two slices of bacon, red, green and orange peppers, asparagus, collards, radicchio, basil, onion, garlic, pasta sauce, green lentils.

STEP ONE:

Cook one cup of lentils in two cups of water for 30 minutes or until they are soft but not mushy. If you have some mushroom broth on hand, substitute for water.

Steam the artichokes and remove the hearts. Chops in quarters and set aside. In a T. of olive oil, saute  the vegetables: onions, collards, radicchio, peppers and asparagus first for a few minutes before adding the rest (including the artichoke hearts but not the snow peas). RESERVE SOME OF PARSLEY FOR GARNISH.  Cook the bacon in a separate pan until crisp. Crumble and set aside.  

STEP TWO:  

Throw in the snow peas and cooks for about 3 minutes.  Heat pasta sauce.

STEP THREE:  

Whisk the egg with 1T. of water in a small bowl and quickly stir into the vegetables.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

STEP FOUR:  

Add the crumbled bacon (or not) to the vegetables and toss.  Arrange lentils on a platter,  Pour the heated pasta sauce on one side of the platter over the lentils. Arrange vegetables on top. Grate some of the cheese and sprinkle over the vegetables.  Garnish with  parsley.  Enjoy!

This meal has a decent amount of protein (egg/cheese/lentils,) lots of vitamins and minerals, fiber (lentils) and delicious taste that comes directly from the organic vegetables and the earthy lentils. For this dish, I didn't add any other sauces except the pasta sauce that was sitting in my fridge in a container.  I was in the mood for exquisite simplicity.  As I already stated, it served me and my husband most generously.  If another person had been here, we would have had plenty.  For best results, remember not to overcook the vegetables.  The colors need to stay bold and appetizing. Ten minutes from start to finish and they're done!

YOU MIGHT WANT TO CONSIDER COMPOSTING YOUR FOOD SCRAPS IF YOU DON'T ALREADY DO SO. IT'S A TIME-CONSUMING PRACTICE, BUT ORGANIC COMPOST IS GREAT FOR THE GARDEN. WE SUBSCRIBE TO A COMPOSTING SERVICE CALLED VETERANS COMPOST.

Alla Vostra Salute!  (To Your Health)