Happy Saturday, friends! I hope you got a little sunshine or fresh air (both?) into your week. I’m working on a blog post about food that helps our bodies cope with anxiety and trying to walk the talk for me and mine. We spent last week eating theme park food so my family needed as many vegetables as I could squeeze into our meals this week. Here’s to you and yours enjoying a nice weekend together.
Two Recipes I Tried (And Loved) This Week
When we got back from a week of eating corn dogs and ice cream sundaes in Disneyland, I was craving vegetables badly. I’d frozen a bunch of leftover cooked chicken from a Costco rotisserie bird before we went away and wanted to use it up. I found this great recipe that works with raw OR cooked leftover chicken and it’s so good. My whole family loved it, and that’s saying a lot because my kids were skeptical of chicken soup thanks to my weak efforts to “throw it together” on my own lately:
Leftover Roast Chicken Soup with Roasted Vegetables by Danielle Walker, AgainstAllGrain.com
I think what makes it seem heartier and more flavorful is that you roast the vegetables first, then put half of them in the soup, but you puree the other half in a blender before you add it in.
I also wanted to find a new way to use black lentils that I bought after reading up on the Mediterranean diet in my quest to reduce inflammation. I’m so glad that I tried this one:
Vegetarian Lentil Tacos (Slow Cooker) by Jaclyn at CookingClassy.com
She calls for green lentils in the recipe which I just don’t find appetizing to look at (HA!) so I used these from Whole Foods which cooked up a little faster than the recipe said (3-1/2 hours on high was enough). Historically my family balked at my efforts to take the meat out of dinner, but 3/4 of us were fans of this recipe (which yielded a lot!) and my daughter, the holdout, said “It’s okay, I just prefer meat.”
P.S. Did you know you’re “doing it wrong” if you don’t heat your corn tortillas before serving, or if you warm them in the microwave? Last night with the lentil tacos I heated corn tortillas in a cast iron skillet per this article and they were so much better than when I don’t! They were also way more “bendy” and didn’t split down the seam!
P.P.S. I always make a batch of the fajita vegetables from this recipe by Joshua Snyder whenever we have tacos. I also use the recipe for the chicken when we’re having fajitas or meaty tacos.
An Inexpensive Mental Health Hack
I’m sure you’ve heard about forest bathing and all of its mental health benefits for humans. Well, I don’t live in the mountains and although I go for walks all winter in Colorado, I stay close to home and see more suburb than forest. In January I was feeling the post-holiday blues badly and wishing that I lived in Hawaii. Blessedly, I had a sudden realization one week that the tropical conservatory at the Denver Botanic Gardens is Hawaii-like, all year long. It’s basically my favorite place in Colorado right now. I try to go once a week and soak up the palm fronds and bromeliads.
Bonus: the Offshoots Cafe, adjacent to Pavilion, serves all the coffee drinks, plus excellent quiches and pastries (just make sure you bring earphones/headphones/earplugs if you plan to work there – some mornings it’s busy and the concrete ceiling amplifies the sound of people talking). Daily admission is $15 for adults, $11 for children and students. An “Individual Plus” membership is $75 and allows you to bring a guest every time.
P.S. I’ve been sharing a lot of photos from my DBG forays on my Instagram account if you want to take a look.
What I’m reading: This book is super depressing (climate change, pandemic, etc.) but beautifully written so I’m reading it in small doses and never at bedtime: How High We Go In The Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu.