Sunday, February 12, 2012

spontaneous lunch blog (yes, food pics, for you who love those)

Well, I hadn't planned on blogging my lunch today; it's not a "recipe" per se, just Karen having fun with food right after church, hungry and wanting something quick that didn't require much thought or effort to prepare.  But it came out so beautiful that I just needed to share. Here we go:


 While cooking up 3/4 cup of organic whole wheat pasta and watching a movie on my iphone, I washed up and chopped up all these veggies (I love chopping...really therapeutic and comforting to me).  The top plate is 1/2 a giant red bell pepper, a bit of purple onion, a handful of grape tomatoes, a huge handful of spinach, and 6 each of black and green olives.  


The bottom plate is half a head of purple flowering kale.  These are for 2 separate dishes.

Olive oil and garlic - I use WAY too much garlic.  I am sure my skin and breath will smell like it for a week.  To my friends, family and coworkers who will have to be around my stinky self, SORRY!  But on the other hand, it's delicious and so very good for the body. 
 Cook on medium-high, just a few minutes.  Like, 3 minutes for the kale and maybe 4 or 5 for the other.  


Add freshly cracked pepper and fresh ground sea salt to both dishes.  If I had been thinking, I'd have added oregano, basil, and parsley to the top pan before the veggies, but as I mentioned above, I was hungry and didn't feel like thinking. 


Add the pasta to the veggies and stir.
 Add a heaping teaspoonful of this or any other pesto.  Lino (mentioned in my last blog) taught me to love pesto as he noted that we eat too much of our pasta totally drowned in heavy sauce, and that a little bit of pesto adds a ton of flavor to a lot of food.  I probably could have gotten away with a heaping teaspoonful, but dude, I WAS HUNGRY and feeling quite greedy by this point in the process.

As I was plating this up, I realized I had made too much pasta.  I had measured the 3/4 cup when cooking, because one thing I know about me and pasta is that I'm going to eat every bite of it, no matter how much too much I make.  I was working at portion control.  I ended up stopping mid-plating and putting the rest of the pasta not shown here (about 1/3 of the pan) into a leftover container for another day - I needed to do that RIGHT AWAY, or I already knew for sure I'd be polishing the whole thing off.  This meal could have fed 2 people easily and in abundance, had one more element (soup? salad? dessert?) been added.


Per the "mindful eating" I mentioned last blog, I made a point (with gigantic reluctance) to turn off my iphone movie and leave all other electronica off as well.  I sat in silence with my plate, savored my food, thought grateful thoughts, and wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as I had been last night (though I'm not gonna lie - I was tempted with every single bite to lean over and turn the movie back on.)  Amidst appreciating what I was eating, I picked up this gorgeous little leaf and just had to take its picture.



If we can have food that excites the senses, loves our bodies in very tangible ways, and looks like a work of art...why the heck do we spend so much time stuffing our pie-holes with garbage that kills us day by day?  


I'm loving this journey. 

1 comment:

  1. So the flowering kale is so inviting. What does it taste like?

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