June Special - Recipes!!

I have hardly even been home for the past month! I have been on so busy that I haven’t spent much time focusing on reading about pregnancy. Especially since my wedding is approaching quickly and things need to get done. I have been continuing to work on preparing my body for pregnancy in terms of trying to eat right. It’s been very difficult to eat right since I have been all over the place and never home, and for that reason I did decide to buy some vitamins and folic acid pills. But now I am settled back down for a few fleeting weeks before the wedding, and I have been trying out all these wonderful recipes from this book I bought called The Healthy Pregnancy Cookbook by Jane Middleton and George Rapitis. I have loved the book so far and highly recommend it to everyone, not just pregnant women because the recipes are really yummy! Ask Joel!! So I have decided to just post recipes for this month, and I have tried to take pictures of the food. However, now that I am with Joel for a while, we lack the proper set up and dishes to make pretty pictures. Hopefully you can just focus on the picture of the food and imagine if you might like it or not based on the ingredients. I think that’s pretty much all I’ll be posting until after the wedding.

White Bean & Butternut Squash Soup

This is one of the recipes I got from the Healthy Pregnancy Cookbook. Joel and I loved it! The ingredients inculde: butternut squash, white onion, white beans (navy beans), olive oil, thyme, garlic, spicy tomatoes, tomato paste, chicken broth, parsley and cayenne. The butternut squash was unbelievably good. It has changed my life! From now on I am going to try to eat butternut squash at least once a week! Also I have heard from Joel's mom that there have been claims that eating orange vegitables can increase your chances of twins!

Mashed Sweet Potatoes

Joel really loved these potatoes, and I was really surprized at the idea of such unique and tasty potatoes! The ingredients were: sweet potatoes, white onions, chives, cream cheese, and picante sause (I added this in place of the red peppers that the recipe called for). The sweet potatoes gave it a sweet taste, and then mixed with the cream cheese and picante was just great! Definitely try this out!

Buckwheat, Bananna & Blueberry Pancakes

I had posted the buckwheat pancakes before, but I knew many people wouldn't love them because they definitely had a wheat taste to them and they weren't very sweet. It didn't help that I didn't have eggs at the time nor that Joel wanted to buy the reduced sugar syrup. However, now with the addition of banannas and blueberries, ANY pancake recipie is going to taste amazing! So this is a great recipe for people who would like to be healthy like having wheat pancakes, but who don't want a bad or "not great" taste. These are good! It even tastes good with the reduced sugar syrup! The ingredients for our pancakes were: buckwheat pancake mix, milled flaxseed, mashed banannas, and blueberries.

Cream of Mushroom Chicken

This food idea I kind of got from both my mom and my dad. My mom had used cream of mushroom before many times in things she cooked while I was growing up, and it makes chicken and potatoes very yummy! Also my dad showed my the error of my ways by cooking the juiciest, tenderest chicken ever. I realized then that I cooked pretty dry chicken. But not anymore! So this way of cooking chicken is an easy way to get a nice flavored chicken. I just used chicken, white and green onions, and cream of chicken.

Sausage Soup & German Dark Wheat Bread

This is a recipe I am really proud of! I feel like it is German inspired, since I got the idea from my trip in Germany although I didn't learn this recipe, I made it up! It included: lentils, brown rice, sausage, carrots, white and green onions, and tomatoe paste. I made this more than a month ago, and so I can't remember perfectly if that is everything that went into it. I just know that we were trying to buy hot dog weenies, but I didn't feel they were healthy, so then we stumbled upon these sausages, and I tried to eat them like hot dogs, but they didn't taste good like that so then somehow I came up with that soup. It was really good! And definitely reminded me of a soup I ate while in Germany. The bread along with it was called German Dark Wheat bread, although you can't see anything with all the butter Joel put on it!! But it was definitely a very tasty meal. If you want a taste of Germany, make this! And you have to toast the bread, becasue they only eat hard bread in Germany!

Spinach & Lentil Soup

This recipe I also got from the cookbook and honestly, it wasn't amazing. I felt like it lacked a flavor that I couldn't identify. However, I will probably make it again simply because it is so good for me. Lentils and spinach are both good sources of folate. And the soup wasn't bad, I am pretty picky and when its bad, then I can't eat it. But I was able to eat this, so it was just ok, but not amazing. The ingredients include: spinach, lentils, white onion, garlic, indian seasoning (coriander and cumin), tomatoes (I added that to the recipe because I wanted to use the rest of my cherry tomatoes), chicken broth, lemon juice, olive oil and cayenne pepper. Let me know if you have any ideas on how to spice it up!

Spinach Salad with Homemade Dressing

This is a yummy, but fairly basic salad. It includes: cherry tomatoes, gorgonzala cheese, white onions, garlic and spinach. However the thing I got excited about this was that we didn't have any salad dressing, and it had never before crossed my mind to make my own salad dressing until then. So for this salad, I mixed together some spices (basil, italian seasonings, and parsley) with olive oil. It was not the best, in my opinion, although Joel really liked it. But now that I have had the idea to make my own dressings, I intend to start playing with dressing recipies and eventually make great dressings. I really like Italian and Ranch, so I will try to make those first. Anyway, so I wanted to introduce you to that idea as well, try making your own salad dressing!

Tilapia, Stir Fry Veggies & Brown Rice

As you might be able to notice, at my mom's house we have a variety of dishes which allow for varied pictures. This meal my mom made, it is always yummy to have fish, vegitables and rice. Of course you probably know that the fish has the good fatty acids and the brown rice is a good compex carbohydrate, and the vegitables taste great with it.