HJ Waxing Moon

In 2012, I did a 31 Days of Dinner blogging challenge where you pick a topic and write about it for 31 days. I enjoyed the idea, and while the original challenger isn't doing it this year, I'm going to do it again! With this Candida Cleanse, I spent a lot of time looking for recipes. So. MANY. of the recipes labeled anti-candida-diet-friendly on Pinterest are decidedly NOT (seriously, orange-maple candied carrots anyone? Every single ingredient was banned). And as a result I've struggled to find menu ideas that are both appealing and on this cleanse. I'll also be linking to these posts on Pinterest so hopefully it can infuse some helpfulness into those search results. --------------------- Day One: This cleanse is killing my counter space. But it makes me smile to see so many fresh veggies waiting to be used! Avocados, tomatoes, rutabagas, bell peppers, and a couple green apples sitting there too. Green apples are a quibbling point on this diet; some versions ...

The Challenge: Northwest Edible Life has a yearly Eat from the Larder challenge in April. I only read about it on April 1, but it had been a half-assed goal of ours anyway so I jumped onboard. Their rules are a ZERO dollar food budget and no intentional stocking up ahead. Of course without any forewarning I couldn't possibly have intentionally stocked up ahead, but I'm not interested in a $0 grocery budget--just cleaning out some of our excess pantry storage and being a little creative. We're having an issue with our freezer & fridge that requires us to minimize our perishable food stock before fixing it, besides the excessive collection of condiments and pickles in there. Our Rules: No purchasing non-perishable food items.  Minimal purchase of perishable items.  No opening of new condiments if they can be avoided (until after the fridge is fixed, whether that's in two weeks or May).  Be creative!  Keep it simple, right? Bonus goals: Use ever...

We spent more on groceries last week than I think I have ever spent at once. Our refrigerator is full to bursting and I've no excuses for myself. We weren't even shopping while hungry! On the up side, quite a bit of it was just dry staples that happened to run out at the same time as we had money and good deals, so most of it wasn't perishable. However, it was and is important that we properly store it all so that we CAN use it, DO use it, and DON'T go out shopping for oh, the rest of the month except for milk & coffee cream & maybe some fresh veggies such as they are. I'm quite proud of us though: We managed to make a menu for this week that doesn't require a single purchase, utilizes some prepped leftovers, gets us out of a rut, brings back some old favorites, tests a new recipe, AND utilizes our new rice cooker to make it more than s ingle-use item. To top it off, as I write this, we've already prepped what we can for the week, and it's a ...

The garden is really making progress! I'm pretty excited about it. One of these is kale, the other is mustard greens. These and the lettuce below, I'm not sure at what point I start thinning and eating micro/baby greens. It took a while, but the dill decided to come out to play! Plus a volunteer oregano there at the bottom left corner. Marigolds! I'm pretty excited for these. When I was planting I was really disappointed in my lack of nasturtiums this year, but I've got more pots now! Hanging ones even. I don't think we get warm enough or enough sunlight around here for tomatoes, so maybe I will use my hanging pots for nasturtiums. The scallions are so much happier outside in dirt with some sun than they were on my counter with no sun in a glass of water that we rarely remembered to change. However, they grow more slowly out here which makes me a little sad.  My lavender did decide to grow back! Maybe I will cut off the silly stump now. I ...

So at my favorite chinese restaurant, they have an amazing delicious vinegar on the table, used as a condiment. I've asked a couple times what it is, and they look at me as if I have three heads and say it's vinegar. When asked what kind, they say, "Vinegar." I haven't gotten up the nerve to ask to see the bottle. And ultimately that's probably going to have to be my next step. But in search of this delightful condiment, I purchased a bottle of Black Vinegar. I was hoping against hope that it would be what I was looking for. While it is delicious, and the right color, it is not the same stuff. The stuff on the table is light, roasty, malty, but much richer than a standard malt vinegar. The stuff in this bottle tastes like worchestershire sauce as a vinegar rather than a salty-sauce. Good, flavorful, and has come in very handy in my stir fry adventures, but ultimately not what I'm looking for. What's unclear is whether Black Vinegar and Black Rice V...

Yes, only three days. We're trying out a new Thing were we do our menu plans twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays. We are hoping it will lead to less food waste if we keep up on our perishables a little better. Of course, that means I need a new fun banner for menu days, but we'll get there eventually! Sunday: Crockpot Chili Mr. Moon is working a double, and we haven't been great about dealing with the late-night dinners lately. Late night take-out on a tight budget leads to bad choices for the tummies and the wallet. Kicking off fall with a pot of chili sounded like just the right remedy for getting some wholesome food into us at the end of a busy day. Monday: Stuffed Peppers Mr. Moon is on call that evening, so it could be a late night dinner or sudden extra time to unpack boxes. Having something we can prep ahead is good! I'm not really a fan of the tomato-and-rice stuffed peppers, but I saw a recipe for some with chicken that looked good. It had c...

Next week I embark on a three week vacation. I feel like we are completely on track for preparing for this, all the laundry is done (or is getting finished tonight) and most is even folded and put away. I'll be packing my suitcase tomorrow so I can't accidentally wear something I want to take with me--and subsequently if it does happen to be currently dirty, we have plenty of time to wash it. I finished the to-do list for projects Mr. Moon can work on while I'm gone, all prioritized and everything. There's a menu plan for each of the three weeks I'm gone. We're hoping after I get back to do a monthly menu plan system (at least as far as most of the grocery shopping is concerned), though we will still have to plan which meals are on which days weekly due to the nature of flexible scheduling. Week of Dec 9-16: Breakfasts: Cottage cheese & pineapple, smoothies, bagels with cream cheese. Lunches: Grilled cheese, Bacon Chicken Cheddar Ranch pasta salad....

Regardless of your opinion on the state of our food systems, having options and making informed decisions is always good in my world. Years ago I started questioning every bite of food I put in my mouth, in some very specific ways: notably, with the goal of eliminating sugar and reducing carbs. Over the years my vision has changed a bit. New information about artificial sweeteners and insulin-reaction was released, I became a certified nutritionist and learned to cook even more, I was having trouble sticking to my choices without becoming a hermit, and I found myself questioning a lot of my decisions. I really couldn't understand how using a chemical that is known to cause cancer and obesity is somehow better than a potato, a whole food grown in the ground and eaten with skin intact for maximum nutrition. So now, I am trying to define my food values. A lot of this relates back to the hierarchy of food needs , though I'm not ready to prioritize them. In no particular order,...

I previously discussed, without pictures, the food storage situation at our house. I didn't have pictures then for a lot of reasons, one of which being that I've never been much of a shutter bug, as evidenced by the fact that I forget a lot of the "Before" pictures for some of these projects. Also, it's one thing to show the before pictures of a shed in disarray, most people with a shed are probably in the same boat. But I don't want to shame people publicly for being behind on major household projects, especially when there's no real "fault" to be thrown around. This is why we're here. But! That won't stop me from bragging on all the awesomeness we've accomplished! These shelves were just full, stacks had toppled over, things were stacked in front of other things so we had no idea what we had, and I'll just skate right on past the details of the mouse infestation issue which has been taken care of, thank goodness. Of cours...

Happy Mother's Day!  Somehow I learned that to love people you feed them (in my family?? NEVER!), and my standards means I usually cook. I once created a new tradition for Christmas day in my family by being SUPER!Broke and giving the gift of Quiche for brunch. Since then, as I'm not a fan of Quiche, we have a tradition of me cooking the main dish for Christmas morning (usually french toast casserole AKA a less-sweet bread pudding). Everybody looks forward to it, and the gift giving becomes a lot easier. Along a similar vein, Mr. Moon and I decided that rather than a drab card or just a phone call, we would like to do something special for Mum. My family usually takes one grandma and my mom out to brunch, but we decided we'd rather cook ours. What was on our menu? Waffles (we have three waffle makers, it seemed like a good idea to USE them); quiche "of some kind"; biscuits & sausage gravy; ham; fruit salad (no whipped cream dressing--I'd never h...

Living in a house with four people is difficult enough when everyone cooks for themselves. Mr. Moon likes to HELP with the cooking, but prefers to be given direction and instructions rather than be given the title of an end-product and let loose. Mum is learning new things to cook all the time and is limited in her mobility. When we all originally discussed Mr. Moon and I moving here, I agreed to take responsibility for most of the cooking and meal planning and grocery shopping. Pops has no desire to participate in any of it, really, though we can send him grocery shopping and only expect a 10% variance from the list. But beyond the physical and emotional is the medical. Cancer diet for hormone-related cancers recommends a low-hormone diet. This means that Pops needs to be cutting out, in order of importance: Red meat; fowl; dairy; fish; all animal products altogether (honey is OK). Best advice is to go vegan, but he's a cheese addict and has no desire to limit his enjoyment or u...

Sure, maybe you've read elsewhere about how menu planning works, how helpful it is, how it can save you so much money because you're sticking to a list... But I can't tell you how many blog entries I've read where people basically say "This is how you do it! Just do it." Or where they skip steps in the process because they assume you know already. This is crap I had to learn myself, the hard way, and I figure if it helps one person figure out how to put together a meal plan then it's worth the time I spent telling you all about it. In our house, we've started a habit of menu planning on Sunday afternoons/evenings. I'd like to say it takes 10 minutes, but let's be real here: It takes longer than that once you add in all the extra steps. First I clean out the fridge. I try to make a habit of touching everything in the fridge except the stuff in the door, because the stuff in the door is either condiments that rarely go bad or beverages that ...

Do you have allergies? I've been blessed with not just obscure food allergies (asparagus? grapes? really?) but seasonal ones. Pine trees and cottonwoods seem to be my arch nemeses, but there are some other villains in there too. An important thing to know, that I only discovered within the last year: The technical definition of an allergy is an immune response to the protein strands. When it comes to food, a reaction anything else is an intolerance. It totally explains why I don't have problems with aged balsamic vinegar that has had time to denature the proteins, but wine gives me hives (and trouble breathing). It also explains why some people have reactions to raw foods that are fine once cooked. Honestly though, this post wasn't supposed to be about food allergies. I don't know if there just weren't enough of the offensive plants in Seattle to trigger my allergies, or if they didn't even grow there at all. I know there were pine trees, but I'm not s...

All my life, I have struggled with planners, calendars, hand-held organization devices, computers, smartphones... All in the name of Getting Organized. It usually lasts about 3 months. Part of the struggle of course is that I will start a system and then circumstances will change. When I was scheduled so tightly that I needed to remind myself when to eat and sleep, a planner with multiple lines for every 15 minutes of the day was essential, but sharing it in that kind of detail with others wasn't as critical. When organizing a household of computer-users who had smartphone access, Google Calendar worked wonders. The hardest thing for me to learn is that no system will ever do everything I want it to. I have to pick what's most important to me. Is it having everyone on the same page instantly? Is it having information synced to multiple locations without me re-writing things? Does it need to be color-coded? How far out do I need to be able to see? How much do I care about scribb...

I admit with only a little shame that I am a food hoarder. I have, over the last year, increased my food storage supplies such that if I were to be unable to acquire new foods suddenly and had to live off what I currently own, we would be OK for a while. Fresh foods are currently limited, and we would have to start getting creative rather quickly, but the dry goods would last for weeks. I'm not ashamed of it because we do actually USE all of the foods I have stored, in a First In/First Out method whenever possible, and with the exception that we have more of it than is reasonably easy to store it's not been an issue. Well OK, I also have stored the very foods I am trying to cut down from our menu plans, which means that the length of time these foods would be getting stored increases. And yet in the grand scheme of things, these are not "bad" foods--brown rice, dried beans, whole grains, and some canned goods that (ignoring the health implications of the cans themselv...

You can find more detailed information about grocery shopping price books at Get Rich Slowly and Organized Home (both links take you straight to their price book articles) so I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, as a kitchen manager and chef, I have been sold on the concept of price books--they're imperative to costing recipes. I haven't really used them outside of work, though. Not because I don't think you should, but a) because I did it at work and didn't want to do that at home too; and b) because I have a head for numbers and am obsessed with getting the best deal, so I do very well with that without writing things down. When I moved from Michigan where I knew all my prices (and had determined that Shop At Meijer was the best way to save money) to Seattle where I didn't know the prices and had a lot of other projects on my plate, I didn't pick it up then either. Nonetheless, I think it's a good idea. I have heard a lot of peopl...