Moving Into February

^{Pan-Seared Turkey Breast atop Mashed Casaba Squash with Bluefoot Mushrooms and Tomato Pasta in Cilantro Pesto Sauce}

Still keeping up with the daily routine. The hardest thing to find a place for regularly is kale. Kale is good. Kale is hearty. Kale has many applications. Kale can get to be booooring.

Tomatoes are a natch, I can put them with just about anything, and eat them raw right out of the fridge. I’ve made quarts of pico de gallo, tomato sauce(raw and cooked), oven-dried, roasted, I’m even going to smoke some to make a Super Bowl spread. Tomatoes are easy.

Mushrooms are easy. They go in everything, it seems. I haven’t eaten as much raw mushroom as I’d like, I wanted to keep it about 50/50, and now I’m about 80/20 in favor of cooked. Just about every dinner I do features mushrooms.

Sweet potatoes are easy too. Just when I think I’ve run out of smoothie ideas, I create a new one. This morning it was Sweet-Potato-Pear-Pineapple with Mint. A recent blood test tells me that my overall cholesterol is great, but my HDL is on the low side. So more smoothies will have orange juice for about two or three months(this has been shown to raise HDL considerably) and I’ve already found that sweet potato-orange smoothies are delicious. Sweet potatoes make their way into the daily diet as well, usually as a side for dinner. The complex carb helps fill me up and keep me from snacking.

So, for at least a month, this kind of food habit is proving doable. I’m planning to be more creative and actually build some recipes so that when I get into a slump, I can look back at really tasty recipes that worked and were fun to do. That should keep it interesting. The Lilburn Farmer’s Market is proving a great resource for kale, tomatoes and potatoes, priced nealy half the regular stores. Whole Foods has great variety of tomatoes and also different(albeit expensive) mushrooms to sample and experiment with.