Veggies Galore!

Being nutritionally sound is tough! I spend I don’t know how long digging through recipe books to find not only something that sounds good (to both Nick and me) but isn’t bad for us as well. I have a favorite food website, but it’s not what you think. While foodnetwork.com and vegtimes.com are two sites I frequent often, my most reliable food guide is nutritiondata.com. It’s fantastic! I just plug in the ingredients to whatever I’m making and presto! It gives me the nutritional information. I’m actually really in tune to what I’m eating—that’s not to say that I don’t totally blow it calorie wise on occasion. It just means that when I eat naughty food, I always do it intentionally.

This little website also helps to answer the “where do you get your protein” question that I get all the time—especially when I’m eating vegan. I realize that I’m at least one of the oddest vegetarians alive since I don’t like vegetables, but having this handy dandy website helps me get my vitamins too. Saying that I don’t like vegetables is a bit of a misnomer—I do like them…some of them…ok, a few of them. I had a new vegetable yesterday, in fact—capers. They’re kinda like mini olives. I made ratatouille pasta (love that Rachel Ray!) and then we watched the movie—very fun. Anyway, it was loaded with vegetables—zucchini, tomatoes, onions, red and green peppers, garlic, olives, capers and eggplant (yum!). All good veggies. Ivy and Nick even liked it. We were all a bit skeptical after Wednesday night’s disatster—Roasted Butternut Squash Bisque. Doesn’t sound so bad, right? Uh, no. Nasty! It was sort of a puree of squash, potatoes, leeks, and carrots with lots of veg. broth and miso. We ate it, but I didn’t save the leftovers. It looked like baby food. We almost ordered pizza.

It’s really on the common vegetables that I don’t like. I went out to lunch with work people today at a FABULOUS little Asian Diner, Peiwei. WOW! They have great tofu! I can eat almost anything on the menu, which is also a nice change. I even ate most of the vegetables on my plate—just picked out the broccoli and snap peas. I can pretty much say that if it comes in a bag in the freezer section of the grocery store, I probably don’t like it: corn, green beans, lima beans, peas, broccoli—all of those nasty ones. But parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, squash, leeks, eggplant, carrots, celery, salad, peppers—all of those are tasty. Beets—I don’t think I like beets. I’ve never had one that wasn’t canned, but I’m not sure I’m really that interested in proving myself wrong…or right. I’ll just leave the beets for borscht.

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