…in a BIG tossed salad! One of my favorite tricks to ensure our family gets its raw greens and things is a big, colorful, fresh salad filled with an assortment of delicious vegetables. Pretty much every week I stop and pull out every fresh item I have in the fridge that can possibly be added to a salad. (I do, however, leave out any type of raw onion and mushroom to accommodate my sons. I keep those separate because I figure if they’ll eat all the other stuff gladly, why have a war over mushrooms and onions?)

This ready-made salad is one key to good health, plenty of fiber in our diets and convenience. Although initially it costs me about an hour to wash, dry, dice and toss, plus all the clean-up involved, it’s well worth the effort all week long when we simply grab, serve and eat.

Here is the current salad we are enjoying – you can see it’s dwindling, so it will be time to prepare another one soon…

This time it contains romaine, mixed wild greens (purchased in a ready-made combination bag at the store), radishes, carrot, cucumber, fresh basil, shredded red cabbage, red and yellow sweet pepper, celery, cherry tomatoes and turnip. I’ve started slicing all the extra-firm veggies in a food processor to save time and get a much thinner end product. My kids remarked how much they’re enjoying the new texture of the sliced vegetables. Just a twist on the same ol’ veggie.

Branch out and add sugar snap peas, diced broccoli, snow peas and cauliflower, cilantro, and anything else that sounds fun. Today I added crumbled feta cheese, kalamata olives, green onions and freshly ground pepper to my portion. Then I tossed it with balsamic vinegar and flaxseed oil. So delicious I forget it’s healthful, too. Design your own version and dig in!

I hate to waste food. Thus, my habit is to fill Ziplock freezer bags with odds and ends such as wilted celery, onions, tomatoes, extra veggies left over from meals, etc. I just noticed that I was accumulating quite a crop of these ‘extras’ so I decided to make soup. I began with some rock solid frozen stew meat at the bottom of my crock pot, and opened up my freezer bags, dumping everything else on top of the meat. I even had a couple of baggies of diced red and green peppers this time for extra kick. Fun! I added a few bay leaves and a couple of tablespoons of beef broth concentrate and crowned the whole thing with 2 bags of frozen mixed veggies (chopped carrots, green beans, corn and peas). Then I turned it on low and went to bed.

8 hours later I got up to make our morning coffee. I could smell the fragrance of stewing meat and veggies through the whole house…mmm…great food for a rainy, winter day. I added about a quart of beef broth to finish out the soup along with some salt and pepper.

All that was left to do was prepare a tossed salad and bake a whole wheat loaf in my bread machine. YUM!

P.S. My boys said my wheat bread was very tasty, but so dense it would make a great weapon! (First time recipe- I think I’ll adjust it next time with half bread flour )

…so I thought I’d share the recipe since they’re easy and impressive and a great winter meal. You’ll need:

1 pound of ground beef

shaved green cabbage – approx 1/3 to 1/2 a head

grated cheddar cheese

2 diced baked potatoes or 2 cups leftover cooked hashbrowns

1 bag of frozen bread dough balls or 1 frozen bread dough loaf (not the partially cooked-frozen type) OR 1 recipe of homemade bread dough

I thaw the bread dough rolls as the instructions indicate on the bag

I fry up the ground beef until it’s nearly done, stir in the grated cabbage and sprinkle with season salt, then continue to saute’ until the cabbage is cooked through. Stir in the potatoes. (This is your filling for the runzas)

Roll out 2 bread dough rolls. Top one with a generous scoop of filling, 2-3 Tablespoons of grated cheese – or more if you like, place the second rolled-out dough ball on top like a ’sandwich’, pinch and seal all edges and place on a lightly greased cookie sheet. Continue until all the ingredients are used, placing each runza about 2 inches from the others to give them room to expand as they bake. Bake at 375 for 10-15 minutes until they’re raised, golden and you might even see some cheese bubbling through the edges here and there.

Cool for 10 minutes before eating. Some of my kids like to eat them with barbecue sauce or ketchup, but I prefer mine just as they are out of the oven. I serve them with a big tossed salad.

These have always been one of our favorites. They keep well in the fridge in a Ziplock bag and can easily be re-heated in the microwave the next couple of days. My mom taught me to make them when I was growing up in the Midwest where there was actually a drive-thru restaurant called The Runza Hut!

Popper is in the kitchen with Mommer, cooking up our traditional Italian feast for the fam! We were chatting about the holiday fare and deciding if Italian would be on the menu. I said “if the boys arrive and there’s no garlic in the air, their jaws will drop to their knees and Christmas just won’t be the same.” LOUD LAUGHTER! Here’s my man making the meatballs…

Frying up those spicy Italian sausages…My messy corner where the ‘please-Lord-let-it-be-perfect’ sauce begins!

Gently simmering now with the meatballs and sausage…mmmm! Visions of bolognese dancing in our heads!

Never fear – I have my hairnet on as you can see below and I lint-brushed hubby and I before food preparation so no ‘fly-aways’ in Mama Mira’s sauce…

Yes, it’s true, I do possess some obsessive eccentricities But you can feel good about eating when the cook promises never to lick her fingers or double dip a tasting spoon, right?! (No cat hair either, I promise!)

Yep. I was feelin’ it. Life is flying about me like clothes in a tumble dryer and my to-do lists are growing longer and stretching across pieces of odd-shaped papers grabbed from here, pulled from there. Stress was pounding in my chest so I had to TAKE CHARGE!

I began to list neatly on ONE page every single thing I needed to get done this week from making a grocery list based on the meal list still needing to be completed, to deciding which sheets will go on which bed for our house guests, to cleaning the ceiling fans, toilets and sweeping the front porch. Then, I organized it into four lists: 1-meal list, 2-grocery list, 3-cleaning list, 4-errands to run.

Then, I sent my two teen-agers, shopping lists in hand…

to do ALL the holiday food shopping at two different stores, God bless ‘em!

They came home 3 hours and a few phone calls later (Momma they don’t have sweet-hot mustard…Momma they don’t have summer sausage…), exhausted (welcome to my world, boys!) and victorious. I was so proud of them. One of them had called me in a panic to make sure there was enough money in his bank account to get through the check-out line without embarrassment (been there, done that before!).

Mission accomplished!

Tomorrow they attack the cleaning list! Thank God for teen-agers!

I was reminded as I ate dinner last night of how the best meals can come into existence at the time you are least prepared to create something delicious. Your expectations are at their lowest. Perhaps that’s why it tastes so good!

At the moment we’re in the middle of painting a good portion of the interior of our house.We’ve been waiting for a year to begin this project and it’s so much fun to finally watch the progress unfold. But it’s a tedious, time-consuming job, right smack-dab in the middle of anywhere you might want to be in the main living areas of the house – which makes the simple process of living life a little awkward. I’ve been running a lot of errands to stay sane .

Since the stove and fridge have been covered in drop cloths, preparing food hasn’t been possible the past couple of evenings, so we’ve had to grab meals out. Eating out is such a treat, until you have to! I knew it was time to make something fresh and relatively healthy last night. The only problem was that it was also time to do a little grocery shopping to freshen up the produce supply, and it was Friday and I was booked solid.

So I went through the cupboards and the fridge and evaluated the situation. As I sorted through the fruits and veggies, I found some very tired and limp oranges, apples and assorted items. I loathe wasting food, so it was painful to toss out a few things – but the things I could save for soup were chopped and stashed in the freezer.

I evaluated my supplies and began to prepare. Plenty of potatoes – so I washed a bunch and put them in the crock pot at noon. I always make extra because they’re perfect for next-day fried potatoes, burritos, soup, lunch… I didn’t have cucumbers, carrots, radishes, broccoli, mixed greens or sprouts, but I did have plenty of good romaine lettuce, so I chopped, spun and washed a load. Some hearty celery left from Thanksgiving preparations was diced and added to the lettuce. A can of sliced black olives, too, plus a half of red onion was chopped and added. I rescued 2 firm tomatoes from those begging to be frozen – chunked them and crowned the salad with those.

Then I spread a bag of frozen chicken thighs in a baking dish and baked them ’til they were almost done – drained the juices to save for future soup and topped each thigh with a plop of barbecue sauce and put them back in the oven for a final 10 minutes. In the meantime I steamed the last fresh vegetable I had – a pound of asparagus that managed to stay alive for 2 weeks. We topped the potatoes with butter and sour cream and enjoyed a feast. The flavors all blended so well and although thighs are a cheap cut of chicken, they are moist, juicy and tender, a perfect combination with the barbecue sauce. The salad didn’t have a bunch of glorious veggies, but the simple mix was so flavorful topped with some homemade buttermilk dressing I’d made a couple of weeks ago.

I still have a recipe in my file called Desperate Pasta I created from cupboard gleanings and threw together one frantic night between meetings 12 years ago. I’m sure you have similar creations. Perhaps you’d like to share them with us – it would be fun to gather a few as we enter one of the busiest seasons of the year. They might come in real handy!

I’m about to enjoy a plate of leftovers as I wrap up this edition of the blog. Yum. Happy Saturday!

Could her digestive problems have anything to do with the large piece of greasy, white-flour crusted, cheese-laden pizza she is consuming?! When we spotted this on the shelf at the pharmacy, hubby and I thought it was too funny to pass up …

My folks raised our family with the value of staying healthy. I wouldn’t call them extreme health nuts, but when I lived at home, you’d rarely find a soda in the house or candy on the counter. We drank water. We basically had 3 T.V. stations and an Atari, which wasn’t a real big draw day and night like some of the games these days. We ate lots and lots of fruits and veggies and exercise was a way of life. We rarely ate out – it was a huge treat. I appreciate those habits being ingrained in me. I’ve not only passed down the same to my kids, but tried to take it up a notch to pursue greater health, although I think it’s even a bigger challenge now with relatively cheap, tasty, unhealthy fast food available at every corner, our sweet tempting coffee/drink culture and far more sedentary electronic amusements to choose from. I have to intentionally seek to stay fit because in actual fact, it’s easier not to!

I don’t ‘diet’ per se because diets are bondage for me. I’ve been on so many of them for so many years that I’ve completely lost the patience for them. If I want egg nog, I’m gonna have egg nog, rather than eating 2 oranges, a pile of celery, 30 almonds, a piece of diet toast and then at midnight finally succumbing to a quart of egg nog! Ha! That was my life. Eat everything you can from the ‘yes’ list and think about the ‘no’ list all day…finally indulging in too many ‘no’s’ in a weak moment.

With the holidays upon us, cooler temps persisting – I’m making an effort to keep movin’. That’s what my dad taught me. We jogged/walked and bowled in the winter and played tennis, biked and swam in the summer. It was a natural seasonal progression. I find myself doing pretty much the same as an adult, but now in a warmer climate I get to mix up the summer stuff into winter which is a real blessing!

I was riding my bike in the park nearby this week.

Suddenly I spotted a pack of wild turkeys crossing the road…

I mischievously began to follow them…They began to run frantically – I was laughing out loud while I tried to steer my bike and shoot photos…I was having so much fun and then I realized another biker was behind me, watching the whole scene. I pedaled faster and took a sharp left to escape!

All the colors of fall are so beautiful, aren’t they?! I’m a little sad to see all the leaves disappearing. Seasons change so quickly…

We’re hosting a Thanksgiving feast here on the home front tomorrow, so there are lots of duties to be done – especially since we’re once again in remodel mode, plus hubby has been seriously motivated to ‘Deck the Halls’ this year with all our kids coming for Christmas Our second-born arrives tomorrow and I can hardly wait! Daddy really wanted the house to be welcoming. YIPPEE!!!! WAHOO!!! EUREKA!!! Absolute chaos. I’ve hardly had space to walk through the house, let alone clean and organize it. God bless MY MESS!

Gregory, my husband of nearly 29 years (on the 29th!) is cutting my prep time in half this year just by chopping stuff. What a major help!!! He made it through the celery without a hitch, but the onions got him! I said, “welcome to my world!” but actually I cheat because I wear contact lenses and I’ve discovered that chopping onions has no effect on me whatsoever and apparently my contacts are the key. Well, he was overcome with the fumes and went out to the garage?!…

I was engrossed in my own tasks, when suddenly I looked at him and saw the swim goggles. OMGosh. He learned that tip from our two boys who often serve as my sous chefs – what a scream!  Isn’t he just so handsome…he still takes my breath away.

I’ve been warning my youngest, “Seth, Wednesday is a WORK DAY so be ready to roll – we’ve got a lot to accomplish.” So after Bible and his Wednesday dog walk for the widow down the block, he began his first task…the dreaded laundry!

His big brother Levi is in school full time now, preparing for a career, so he was busy in the kitchen last night making his lunch for the ‘morrow. He prepares some pretty creative wraps that WOW his fellow students. Chicken, fresh basil, tomatoes, Italian salami, cheese, ranch dressing, sprouts, sweet red peppers, whole wheat Lavosh wrap bread…all sorts of healthy, good stuff. Some days he gets lazy and it’s just PBJ on a bun…

Everyone chipped in tonight to clear the clutter and clean the kitchen – Levi is doing dishes while Seth is preparing a family tradition – ambrosia salad. One of those things the Miras have to see on the buffet or it’s just not Thanksgiving! You can find a lot of recipes for this online. They call it 5 cup salad. It’s easy and absolutely delicious. Here’s how you make it:
Ambrosia
1 cup sour cream
1 cup sweetened grated coconut
1 cup mini-marshmallows
1 cup very well drained mandarin oranges (we throw the juice out – just sugar water)
1 cup very well drained pineapple chunks or tidbits (we save the juice to drink)
Mix the first three ingredients together well in a bowl.
Fold in the fruit.
Chill overnight.
YUM. Great frivolous side dish, almost a dessert.
(We multiply it by 5 or 6 to make a big batch)

HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY! HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Yummy Spaghetti Gamberi – light tomato-garlic sauce with plump shrimp, fresh spinach and parmesan. Served with garlic-cheese toast. You can search the recipe on my blog; it’s easy and scrumptious…Bon appetite’