Cooling Off Just A Bit

Happy Sunday to everyone.  Not quite the oven here today that it's been for the past three days, but still too hot to do much of anything outside.  My poor doggy hasn't had much exercise except trying to convince me to chase her around the house or play the unending game of catch.  Oy!

There's only a few days on this plan.  She has a day that is geared more toward having to travel.  I picked this for the day that my sister and I will be on the road to her son's graduation.  I sure hope she doesn't mind eating this sort of food.

One of the days is all about the dehydrator.  I've had one of these - naturally - for many years but have not used it much. The biggest challenge, as I see it is all the prep time that one has to plan for prior to eating foods from the dehydrator.  Given the jam packed week I've got coming up I figured that Monday is the only day I can do the dehydrator meals so that means getting things all prepped up and ready to go on Sunday.  So - today is actually a day where I get to cook double.

Cooking extra on the weekend is a frequent trick that working mothers have done for years in order to avoid the drive thru on the way home from work.

I wasn't as prepared as I should have been for breakfast since the menu said we were to have Cinnamon Oatmeal.  I thought for sure I had some oat groats in my pantry but could not find them.  I did have some gluten free grain cereal so I thought I'd go with that.  When I started scooping the cereal out of my rice maker it dawned on me that it was HOT!  Such a revelation that I'd not had anything that had been cooked for three whole weeks!  Oops!  But so happy that I really have not missed eating cooked food.  The cereal was good as it was mixed with raisins and walnuts.  Very nice.

So for lunch lets get back to business and adhere a little more closely to Cherie's recipes.  We're to make two things for lunch.  First a Zucchini Hummus.  This is a nice dip made with some zucchini, garlic, tahini, sesame seeds and some lemon.  This is quite nice but a little more loose than the hummus I am used to.  This makes sense since chick peas are much more dense than zucchini.  She suggests eating this rolled up in a romaine leaf but I think it is not stiff enough for this but it makes for an excellent dip.  I give this a B.

In addition to the dip we have a nice green soup named Creamy Kale-Apple Soup.  This is a surprisingly sweet green soup.  The addition of an orange and an apple to the kale, onion, tamari, garlic and pumpkin seeds really sweetens this drink.  Since it has been so warm I've really not had much of an appetite so I apparently put this drink down in the kitchen and forgot about it for awhile.  What came as a huge surprise was my first sip after finding my drink - it had congealed!  Not quite as bad as the blueberry drink we had in the Fat Blast a few weeks ago but reminiscent of a child's art project again.  Needless to say the remainder was fed to disposal.  Sadly - we had a contender for a high scoring soup but I think I'm forced to give it a C after seeing how it turned into silly putty.  I suspect the high amount of apple pectin - often added to gelatin and in canning is the reason that this soup set the way it did.

For dinner we have a salad with home made salad dressing.  The dressing, called Liquid Gold Dressing is quite involved with multiple ingredients: zucchini, lemon juice, oil, tamari, flax seeds mustard, agave, garlic and some cumin.  This dressing is a really winner!  Totally worth the effort to put all these ingredients together.  This definitely gets an A.

The salad we're having is called Green Garden Salad Bar which has greens, romaine, avocados, tomatoes, cucumber, bell pepper, olives, sunflower seeds, onion and carrots.  So a busy but lovely mixed salad that was quite inviting to dig into.  It was at least a B prior to adding the salad dressing.  Truthfully - with my first bite of this salad I said WOW!  No kidding.  The variety of fresh veggies with this knock it outta the park dressing is probably one of the best salads I've had in a long time.  And I eat a lot of salads.  I will definitely be making this dressing - at the very least - many, many more times in the future.  Simply great!

So - that's our Sunday.  Now on to the dehydrator!  Here's the summary:

Recipes
Name	Category	Diet	Day	Page number		Rating
Broccoli-Tahini Pate	Dip	Raw Rev	one	144		C
Green Giant Juice	Juice	Raw Rev	two	119		B+
Banana Blueberry Smoothie	Smoothie	Raw Rev	two	102		B
Garden Blend Soup	Soup	Raw Rev	two	188		A
Figgie Nut'ins	Dessert	Raw Rev	two	212		A
Zucchini Hummus	Dip	Raw Rev	three	145		B
Creamy Kale-apple Soup	Soup	Raw Rev	three	186		C
Green Garden Salad Bar	Salad	Raw Rev	three	177		A
Liquid Gold Dressing	Dressing	Raw Rev	three	151		A+