Day 16 – 100-mile Diet : Simple is best.

Until now, I’ve never really taken the time to fully appreciate what the convenience of quick food brings us. The idea of coming home, mixing together a few things and sitting, lazily, while they bake or cook, has become foreign to us now.

The average dinner meal at our home now takes about 1 hour and a half to make. Even though we have never been big on “meals in a box”, we would still take advantage of buying pizza dough, buying pizza sauce and then having nothing to do but cut up veggies and grate cheese. A slightly more involved version of the frozen option, but all ready in 20 minutes. Then we would sit, relax and wait for dinner to be ready. Those days are still far away. Will we ever go back fully to those ways? I don’t know. But it seems that having the choice of going back or not is the luxury itself.

Yesterday was our first real lazy evening when it came to dinner. And I say that still after my husband spent most of the first hour home after work doing dishes. (This diet makes a LOT of pots and pans!) Then, while I was putting together a soup and making dinner, he spent the next hour cutting up the huge celery and the 2 huge rutabagas that we had bought to freeze for the following month. If you ask my husband, THIS was lazy compared to any other night since we have been doing the challenge.

Dinner was simple:

Cauliflower and Broccoli florets sautéed in sunflower oil, garlic and red onions. Then topped with the tomato sauce I made last night and covered in aged cheddar. Sent in the oven for 15 minutes and served.

Total time of preparation: 30 minutes. I almost cried.

Our first 100-mile soup

This one was inspired by a million acorn squash soup recipes I had been looking at. It is squash season and I couldn’t resist buying an acorn squash almost the size of my head when we were at the market a few days ago.

Ingredients:

• 6 cups of vegetable stock (Made the night before… The taste of the soup will change with the flavours of stocks, but I recommend a sweet stock for this soup.)
• 1 large acorn squash, peeled and cut into pieces
• 5 small apples (I used Paula Reds), cut into pieces
• Half a large red onion, cut into pieces
• 3 medium potatoes, brushed, with skins on and cut into pieces
• 4 large carrots, brushed and cut into pieces
• One good size sprig of thyme. (Use any herbs you have around the house)

Cook everything at low boil for about 45 minutes (until everything is tender).
Pull out the thyme sprig from which the leaves will have fallen.
Spoon out all the veggies and purée everything in the food processor.
Add back as much of the leftover broth as needed to make it the desired consistency.

It makes a LOT! You can freeze parts of it. I never keep soup in the fridge longer than 5 days.

Voilà!

And we have soup for 2 lunches each and a container in the freezer for another hopefull lazy evening next week.