Ravioli

I have been playing with the idea of adopting a more vegetarian diet. I don't think omitting meat from my diet will be a problem, but totally giving up dairy would be! I do love cheese, I don't eat it all the time and I don't eat tons of it when I do, but I don't want to give it up completely. So, in talking with Kip about going meatless or vegetarian or whatever, he doesn't want to totally give up meat and I don't want to feel like I am always just eating side dishes. I do make a few meatless dishes already and I decided if I could come up with things that feel like a main meal and are meatless that we could go meatless several times a week.

I am a pretty good cook, love to find new recipes so I am always experimenting in the kitchen. Sometimes they flop and aren't things that will make it to a repeating status. Sometimes I know my socks off and this ravioli was one of those things. This was delicious. I made a simple tomato sauce using fresh tomatoes, onions, fresh basil and garlic all from the CSA. For the filling in my ravioli, I sauteed some spinach and mushrooms and then chopped that up. I added some cottage cheese (no ricotta on hand) and the used wonton wrappers for the ravioli. Definite repeat and they are meatless.

Friday's Bento

This is the Bento that I made for Samantha yesterday. In addition to this she had a cookie and a small container of kale chips. She loves kale chips and she had asked if we could make some when she was at the house on Thursday and she told me she wanted some for lunch the next day too. I had the bento done, photo taken and was getting ready to leave when I remembered she wanted kale chips.

The top tier has some little whole wheat pita rounds and some baked tofu cut into umbrella shapes since it was a rainy day. The side container contains some hummus for the pita bread. There are also some sliced grape tomatoes in there. The second tier has some grapes, raspberries, pineapple and star fruit along with some colby-jack umbrellas.

One of the kids in her class was celebrating a birthday and had brought cupcakes to share with the class. I rarely bring dessert other than fruit or a smoothie, mostly because she would rather have the other stuff. I told her it must be her lucky day since she was getting two desserts. She corrected me that she actually had three desserts: the cookie, the cupcake and the kale chips. She must really like those kale chips to consider them a dessert!

A Happy Girl

I just had to share these pictures of Samantha. Tomorrow is her Mom's birthday so we were cooking her a birthday dinner tonight. I took Jenna shopping and she picked out the gifts and Samantha and I cooked dinner and dessert. We had chicken pockets, rice with veggies and a salad and creme brulee for dessert. This is Samantha with my torch caramelizing sugar for the first time. She was giddy with excitement that she was going to get to use the torch by herself, and I think you can see that in her face. She loves to cook so she was my little sous-chef tonight. She has gotten pretty good at slicing veggies, separating eggs and now caramelizing sugar! This was a more complicated dessert than we normally make but it was a lot of fun!