Cooking from the Farmers’ Market Box

After getting a variety of veggies from a farmers’ market, I was inspired to prepare some meals.

For lunch, I made a sandwich with toasted Ezekiel bread, a tomato, 1/2 avocado, and some spinach.  I paired it with some bell pepper.  It was a fantastic lunch.

For dinner, I made some chicken tortilla soup, minus the fried tortilla strips.  At the library, I had picked up a cookbook with recipes from Mexican restaurants.  I used the soup recipe from Papasitos.  Instead of grilling chicken, I used some fajita chicken that I had in my freezer.  That saved me a lot of time.  Concurrently, I made a chicken fajita on a whole wheat tortilla.  Since I needed to limit my carbs, I used one tortilla and crisped it in a dry skillet.  I kept it flat and piled sauteed onions and bell peppers, tomato, chicken, a little bit of cheese, and some avocado on top.  It was a great dinner.

The soup used:

• chicken broth and a small amount of boullion
• onions
• carrots
• zucchini
• squash
• tomato
• corn
• chicken
• paprika
• cheese and avocado (added when serving)

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Farmers’ Market

I’ve been taking a yoga class on Saturdays, and there is a small farmers’ market down the street.  There was one veggie stand and a tie-die stand.  We stopped there today and got a variety box from the veggie stand.  It was a much better deal and price than the local box we had gotten delivered on occasion last year.

At the stand today, we loved that we could substitute items and that we had 2-3 choices for certain items in the box, such as choosing yellow or purple onions, or Swiss chard or kale.  It was also neat that the variety box came with either a prepared meal or a dozen eggs.  Choices for the meal were meat pasta sauce (grass fed beef), salsas, a stir fry, etc.  The stand also sold various meats, which was neat.

We got:

• tomatoes
• strawberries
• kale
• 2 kinds of onions
• bell peppers
• zucchini and squash
• cabbage
• prepared meal (we chose beef pasta sauce)

Recently, my health care provider has put me on a healthy “diet,” where I need to limit my carbs and sugar.  That means no potatoes and no juice.  I also needed to get back into eating veggies, which I had stopped eating, and I had to eat whole grains (I had been eating white bread and croissants).  No more pizza.  No more brownies.  You get the picture.

Getting a box of veggies from the farmers’ market was the best thing I could have done for myself.  It really motivated me to get in the kitchen and cook again.

 

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