Spring's A Great Time for Quinoa Veggie Salad

I'm not much on grains in my low-carb life, but am fond of a bit of quinoa mixed 

with veggies  and fresh herbs in a lemony dressing.

I've pretty much given up most grains, but sometimes I crave the "tooth/mouth feel" of little bits of neutral crunch pepped up with citrus and garlic and lots of veggies and herbs. Quinoa is more virtuous than many grains as it's high protein and also loaded with fiber, iron and other nutrients. An ulterior motive for cooking up some quinoa is that we're headed soon to visit our son and daughter-in-law, who is about to pop our second grandchild. She's a vegetarian and I will be cooking. I need to practice! 

Spring is also a good time for a good mood. What with all the color and fragrance and soft, sweet air, and streams rushing with snow melt, and forsythia, cherry and plum trees blooming, and spinach and kale in the cold frame, it reminds us that life begins anew, without fail, every spring. We can count on it, and face it, there's not that much delight promised by the universe. Spring is a given and a gift.

When I die, I hope it will be in spring and my ashes can be troweled into a garden, which may result in tastier tomatoes and greener kale. When you reach a certain age, you are encouraged to fill out forms that inform your loved ones how you would like to be treated as you deteriorate and how you would like to be disposed of when the time comes. Garden, please, however ghoulish you may find that to be. And don't spend any money if you can help it.

Here's a quick, easy, delicious quinoa/veggie salad recipe followed by some recent garden pix.

Quinoa Spring Salad

• 1 cup quinoa, uncooked (makes 2 cups cooked. directions below)
• 1/2 cup slivered almonds or roasted pine nuts
• 1 cup fresh or frozen corn kernels (I used the last of the 2012 frozen corn.)
• 3 tbsp fresh mint leaves, chopped
• 3 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped (flat-leafed Italian preferred)
• 2 radishes, trimmed and thinly sliced
• thin slivers of spinach and/or kale, a generous handful
• 3 tbsp chopped onion, or 3 scallions, sliced
• 3 tbsp chopped sweet red or yellow sweet pepper
• two or three large whole spinach or kale leaves as a bed for the quinoa mixture
• juice of half a lemon
• balsamic vinegar to taste
• 4-5 tbsp olive oil
• 2 small cloves of mashed garlic
• salt and pepper to taste

Note: As with nearly every recipe I post, consider the ingredients as suggestions and use what you have. Don't run to the store for radishes! If you don't have fresh mint or parsley, try something else. Cilantro? Basil? Chives? Arugula? Or even dried herbs.Tinker with the dressing. I usually end up adding more lemon. We're going for tangy and tasty, not bland or sour. 

Directions

Cook the quinoa. Most recipes say to rinse it first to remove a bitter coating. I always do this, but my favorite daughter-in-law does not. She works full time at a high-powered job, reads incessantly, rises at 5 a.m. daily for exercise, has an adorable toddler who wants her attention, and does not suffer fools or fussy recipes. She says she's never tasted bitterness in her cooked quinoa and does not intend to rinse. So be it.

I have the extra 15 minutes. If rinsing, place the quinoa in a fine sieve and place it over a bowl or cooking pot so that you can cover the grain with warm water and swish it around. Let it soak for 15 minutes or up to a half hour. Drain the soaking water and pour fresh water over the quinoa before dumping the rinsed quinoa into a 2-quart cooking pot with a lid.

• 1 cup quinoa
• 1 1/2 cups cold water
• 1/2 tsp salt

Bring quinoa, water and salt to a boil, cover with a tight-fitting lid and turn the heat down to simmer. Cook for 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let it sit for five minutes with the lid on. Uncover and fluff with a fork. Cool.

Add all the veggies and the dressing and taste, taste, taste. Refrigerate to let flavors blend, or serve immediately. Spoon quinoa salad atop large spinach or kale leaves. We ate this with grilled salmon and served it with sliced lemon. Yum! 

Spinach and kale are going bonkers in the cold frame. 

Cold-frame spinach and kale got together with a 2012 storage onion and
discussed the dinner menu. They came up with quinoa salad. 

A parsley "bush" is mined regularly for salads. Sadly, it is a biennial
plant and will go to seed this summer

Spearmint is a blessing and a curse. It is invasive and I must rip it out
of the garden periodically, but it is available most of the year for
seasoning and, now through October, it provides abundant leaves
 for  making sun tea by the gallon. 

Savory Kale, Eggs, Prosciutto—Breakfast!

Eggs, proscuitto, kale, and serrano sauce on a corn tortilla. Yummm.

For  breakfast, most of my life, I ate oatmeal with skim milk, jam on so-called whole wheat toast, an occasional egg, or more likely, Cheerios, Wheaties, Bran Flakes, Corn Flakes and other extruded industrial  processed grain crap. I was on auto pilot.
In those long-ago days, Sunday mornings and special occasions demanded blueberry pancakes, French toast, bread-infested breakfast casseroles and the like. I slowly gained weight, of course, and at one unlovely point, contemplated size 16 jeans. That was shortly before launching into yet another low-fat diet in my yo-yo weight gain/loss life.

Then, about 10 years ago, low-carb became my mantra and breakfast became more problematic. I haven't eaten industrial cereal since 2003, and also gave up bread, for the most part. Without bread, or cereals, including oatmeal, one must be resourceful and forward-thinking, which I often don't feel like being at the crack of 9 a.m. (Retirement! Yeah!)

Now I have another little breakfast problem. I have been advised by a healthcare practitioner to banish dairy. The reason why "no dairy" and how a person is to deal with such deprivation, is fodder (ha ha) for another post, but the short answer is bone spurs.

On a recent morning, unable to enjoy my typical delicious yogurt-based breakfast with berries and low-carb granola,  I went on a hunting expedition in the Amana. Shoving around mouldering bits of this and that, I uncovered prosciutto with an expired pull date, a bunch of kale, and a little feta.

Note: Feta, a brined cheese made from sheep or goat milk, is allowed in seasoning-type amounts by some who promote a dairyless diet. I have grabbed on to this small pleasure until further notice. 

I also unearthed some corn tortillas, which are my major carb splurge, as well a jar of homemade serrano sauce and wonderful organic eggs produced by my wonderful yoga teacher's winsome hens.  She sells the eggs cheep cheep because she says the hens have a high entertainment value. It is good to have an entertained-by-hens yoga teacher.

The breakfast that transpired was beyond satisfactory and has been repeated numerous times. You don't need to be a carb avoider or a dairy swearer-off-er or a nutcase to relish this breakfast entree, which could also pass for lunch or dinner. It is delish and nutrish no matter your condish. 

Ingredients
one serving
2 eggs
2 slices of prosciutto, fat removed
Big handful of tender kale or spinach, torn
Feta or other cheese to taste
Serrano sauce. Sriracha chili sauce is a good substitute.
Corn or flour tortilla, small or medium sized
Olive oil for frying
Salt, pepper to taste

Directions - 10 minutes, start to finish

1. Fry the eggs in a little olive oil. Break the yolks. The eggs pictured are from the yoga teacher's hens, those happy and entertaining little bug and grass eaters who produce incredibly orange yolks. Turn the eggs, unless you prefer runny. Remove from the frying pan and set aside. 

2. Saute the kale or spinach and set aside with the eggs. 

3. Place the tortilla in the hot pan, and melt whatever cheese you prefer in whatever quantity makes your socks roll up and down. I currently avoid most cheese, but at the time  I was uninformed about the hazards of  dairy, and I used a little grated Swiss and some crumbled feta. If you don't want cheese, warm the tortilla in the pan anyway.

4. Place prosciutto on the tortilla to heat, then add the cooked kale or spinach.

5. Arrange the fried eggs on top of everything and spread with serrano chili sauce, if you're lucky enough to have it, or use sriracha chili sauce. I like the tart, hot, tangy taste of both serrano and sriracha, but you could use a milder sauce to give it a little zip.

6. Fold that sucker in half and eat it with your hands. You will be glad you did!

Mining Freezer for Summer Goodness

Summer's berries about to star in a cobbler. These are fresh from the freezer, part of the 2012 garden harvest. 

Winter months are pay-off time for all the garden and kitchen grunt work that occurs August thru October. I whine about toiling to harvest and process food. But dang, it is so satisfying to thaw a quart of ratatouille, crack open a pint of salsa, or dump a frozen rectangle of marinara sauce into the spaghetti pot. We have a large pantry in an unheated porch to stash canned sauces and salsas and winter squash,  and the pump house protects potatoes from freezing.

An old refrigerator in the garage holds apples and onions, and its freezer, once loaded with berries, now keeps pork that was raised nearby. A small upright freezer in our back porch stores chard, kale, berries, corn, peppers, eggplant, green beans, tomatillos, whole Roma tomatoes, pesto, chili verde, walnuts, and chipotle cubes. Ditto the kitchen refrigerator/freezer. Whew. It was a lot of work, but winter meals are a breeze.

About to dive into berry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

Here's one of my favorites—a delectable melange of summer berries in a relatively low-carb cobbler. This recipe evolved from a berry concoction that used yellow cake mix as the topping. My low-carbing sister, Monette Johnson, ditched the cake mix and substituted oatmeal and a bit of flour. I tweaked further to include almond meal and oat flour. As you can tell, there's a lot of leeway with the topping! It always gets rave reviews. I make this when company is coming. In this case, son Chris, is due home today!

Just out of the oven. Looks like I baked it a bit  too long, but it still tasted great.

Mixed Berry Cobbler
For the fruit layer:
Four to five cups of berries, fresh or frozen: blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries
One 3-ounce package of sugar-free JELL-O, raspberry
One cup of water

For the topping
3/4 stick butter, melted
1/4 cup oat flour
1/4 cup almond flour (or 1/2 cup almond flour and omit the oat flour)
1 1/4 cup old-fashioned oatmeal*
3/4 cup Splenda or equivalent non-sugar sweetner
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

*I've been meaning to eliminate all but a quarter cup of oats and instead mix an equivalent amount of almond and coconut flours with the butter and Splenda for a lower-carb count. If you try that, let me know, please, how it turned out.

Directions
Spread the berries in a 9X13 inch baking dish. Distribute the J-ello powder on the berries, then drizzle with water. Mix the butter, oats, flours, Splenda and walnuts. Sprinkle atop the berries.

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes. Serve warm or cool with ice cream or half and half or unadorned.

Putting Wine in Its Place

Weekdays, wine glasses will be for purposes other than
chardonnay or cabernet sauvignon. *

I know this will come as a terrible shock to my wine-loving friends, and that includes almost all of them, but I'm putting wine in its place. Its place is on weekends and special occasions. It is not for every single day, as it has been for more years than I care to count. Why this sudden loss of sanity? Why the deprivation? The suppression of desire to swill wine while cooking dinner and eating it?

It's about a couple things. Weight is one. I've been seeing the same 3-4-pound-range on the scale for more than 10 years. Ten years ago is when a near-death experience and 9 days in intensive care led to a 15-pound weight loss.  I started to regain the weight (which I was ecstatic to have dumped), because I still believed in the erroneous low-fat-equals-weight-loss theory of dieting. Too many bowls of brown rice, dry baked potatoes, and boxes of fat-free Junior Mints later, I discovered low-carb nutrition. I committed to the lifestyle and yada yada yada. I lost the weight I'd regained and stabilized, with a few minor corrections through the years.

Now, I'd like to drop a jean size or two. But I detest dieting and don't want to give up anything. I already said goodbye to bread, pasta, rice, sugar, potatoes, bananas, wheat and most grains ten years ago. I'm NOT putting aside butter, cream, eggs, meat, berries, olive and coconut oils, mountains of kale, chard, spinach and broccoli, plus a little bit of chocolate at night. What else is there?

Wine.

Let's see. At 3-4 glasses of wine daily, I'm consuming around 15-20 carbs and between 300-600 calories, which adds up to as much as 140 carbs and 4,200 calories a week. Yikes.  I know, I count carbs, not calories. But still. I can't ignore these numbers. PK has suggested several times over the years that we test our shared wine habit with a period of abstinence.  Go ahead, I've always said. I wasn't ready to stare at the stove in the twilight without a glass of wine nearby. What changed my mind?

I'm not sure. Just a gradual dawning that I was indulging a daily habit that, despite claims to wine's health benefits, probably wasn't doing me any good. Plus the fact that the ugly A word kept bobbing  up. After all the years of routine wine-ing, could we really quit?

Yes, it appears, but on our terms. We've decided to drink only on weekends or special occasions, including vacations. So. A couple weeks ago, we put away the corkscrew and Sunday through Thursday did not imbibe. Come Sunday night, we were back on the wagon again for a second week, which included the 3-day MLK weekend, technically a special occasion. Come Monday, though, a return to alcohol-free living. It's been a lot easier than I thought.

The truth is that I needed to push the reset button on everyday drinking. I'm going to stick with it for a year and see what happens. In the meantime, we're spending a week in Mexico soon with a group of friends. It will be a special occasion, indeed, and I will raise a margarita to toast my new relationship with wine.

*Those lovely geraniums are growing in our living room!

Turning the Tables on Elderly Mom

Mom's handiwork.

See this? My MOM made it! In 1992! 

 I was flitting from table to table in the dining room at my mom's assisted living place, inviting residents to admire her handiwork, which they did. Politely. This is just a tiny piece of her work, I gushed. She was never without a project! 

I spoke as if the residents weren't facing the same issues of loss and diminishment. As if they all hadn't accomplished wonderful things and didn't have boatloads of great tales to tell and mementos to show and memories to share.

You can see at the bottom where she embroidered her initials and the date. I blathered on. She was YOUNG then. Only 76. 

Then I went to work on the staff. After the housekeeping director expressed the proper admiration, she said: You're very proud of your mother, aren't you?

I hooted. I've never thought of myself as being "proud of my mother." But it became clear at that moment, that yes, I am. Proud of my mother. I laughed at myself for boasting about her accomplishments.  Why laugh? Because this is what she used to do to me! Except I was painfully aware (as she isn't) and so embarrassed by all those incidents of what I knew to be overblown praise and admiration.

Now I'm getting her back. I guess it's OK that she's not really aware that I'm tearing around the dining room with her counted cross stitch Santa Claus practically grabbing innocent old people by the throat as if to say, Don't dismiss her! She's still in there! 

My mom is three weeks from turning 97. She is unable to hear or see much, and her hands long ago lost the dexterity for intricate handwork. She nods off a lot during the day, requires assistance for "tasks of daily living," uses a wheelchair, and recently was identified as someone who needs "plate guards" to keep her food from ending up in her lap.

It is difficult to watch, this mother who grows so old before my eyes and diminishes every day. But I'll tell you what I'm proud of, in addition to needlework she accomplished decades earlier: her continuing spark. She can't see, can't hear, and still she can't stand to miss anything.

The other day, I mentioned to her that bingo was scheduled for that afternoon. But as we both know, bingo (her favorite now that her brain/hands/eyes don't work well enough to play bridge), often doesn't occur because people fail to show up. Here's what she says about that: They complain there's nothing to do, but when there is something, they can't get out of their apartments. That's old people for you!

A recent photo of mom playing bingo, with the help of her friend.

Then I took her in to have her maddening ears cleaned. They were clogged with wax, stuffed back in there by those big almost useless hearing aids. In conversation, she'd forgotten something important we'd talked about last week—the death of a relative. When I reminded her she said, Not even all that ear wax can keep things in my head! See how smart she is? How funny?

 For about 12 years I wrote a weekly newspaper column, and one piece was devoted to the mother/daughter relationship. I couldn't help but think of it when I figured out the tables have turned. An excerpt from the old column follows.

But first, one more thing. I realize now that her unearned praise made me stronger. I didn't understand until much later that some mothers neglect to pile positive adjectives on their kids, or look at them with such admiration and love that the kid can just about get knocked over. In my teens, this was excruciating. Even into my 40s, as described below, her "pride" in me was embarrassing. But I think now I need to say, thanks mom, for believing I was more than OK .

Grants Pass Daily Courier, Second Thoughts column, early 1980s (excerpt)
Mother/daughter dynamic still sparkles, sparks

My mother and I were browsing in an antique store close to where I live. She'd come from South Dakota for a visit. The proprietress was minding her own business, or trying to, when my mother spoke up."This is your neighbor!" she said, referring to me. "You do know who she is, don't you?"

My father, Floyd, and mom, LaVone when they were about the age I am now.
She was still bragging up a storm about her "wonderful daughter." My father died in 2006 at 93.

"Mother!" I hissed, my face flooding with color. I knew what she was up to. She was going to brag about me to a stranger who could care less who I was. What's more, she was going to feel no remorse even though my discomfort was immediate and acute.

My mother seemed displeased that the antique store lady didn't know me.
"Well!" she said "This is Mary Korbulic. She writes for the Daily Courier!"

She delivered this information as if I was a Pulitzer Prize winner from the New York Times. She smirked and awaited a response, which she expected to be genuflection or an autograph request.
The woman smiled politely and said, "How nice. I think I have seen your name." She cast me a sympathetic look.

I am a middle-aged woman, but at that moment I squirmed like I did as a child when my mother launched into her bragging-about-nothing routine. When I was a senior in high school, she was still begging me to dance for company. That's right Dance For Company. I finally figured out how to get out of doing the "frug", if you can remember what that is.

When I brought home one A, mostly Bs and one C on my first college report card, she became the town crier. It was unsafe to go with her anywhere as she carried a copy of my grade report in her purse and would whip it out for anyone who made eye contact. She really did this.

"How nice," people would say.

 Privately I admonished her, as I had countless times. It is good at any age to have at least one person who thinks everything you do is wonderful and you are the most clever person ever, not to mention the best looking, but could she please stop sharing her  opinion?

No, she said. She could not stop. "You might as well get used to it," she said, turning away. She did not stop, and I did not get used to it.

(Being a parent now of two fantastic, brilliant, daring, and gorgeous sons, plus the grandmother of the cutest, smartest, funniest grandson who ever toddled on the earth, I kinda get it now.)