Day 71 THIS ALKALINE YEAR Market-basket Update, New Food Prep Method

Made this week’s second (and final) grocery shopping, which included the usual tomatoes, almonds, radishes, eggplant, leeks, red onion, garlic, with a few new additions: apples, oranges, cauliflower, quinoa pasta, lemons, rolled oats.  Total: $43.13.  Total  for week: $116.06.  Seems expensive; thirty years ago, I fed a family of four on $100/week; this is just for the two of us with occasional guests.  Am hoping that total will go down as I pay greater attention to it.  Jack is getting into the spirit of this adventure, so perhaps I won’t need to buy much extra food for him.

When you go to all the food-prep effort of chopping and dicing and creating a great meal, it seems counter-productive to let leftovers moulder in the refrigerator, right?  My newest food prep method, for the past few nights, has been to make varied vegetable stews, a little more than we needed for dinner, refrigerating, then throwing the leftovers into the blender to make  soup for lunch the next  day.  One meal, which both Jack and I liked, was eggplant cutlets topped with a generous helping of the stew. 

To make the cutlets, roast the whole eggplant in a 400-degree oven for 20 minutes, let it cool a little, then peel it and cut four big slices, each about ¾” thick,  from the middle.  Brush each side with sesame oil, salt and pepper to taste, then set them aside until the stew is almost ready.   (You can use the extra eggplant the next day in the lunch soup.)   Just before finishing the stew (see below), turn the oven to “Broil.” Set the eggplant slices under the broiler until nicely browned on each side.

For the stew, you’ll already have a beet boiling and a yam nearly baked in the oven.  Dice  half of a big fennel bulb, as much of the leek as you care  to clean (the green part is good nearly up to the top), and brown them in a little olive oil.  Chop (each vegetable) and add half a green pepper, a tomato, the baked yam and mostly-boiled beet, and add half a cup of vegetable broth.  Add salt and pepper to taste, and spices such as turmeric or garam masala.  Cover, lower the heat and let the mixture simmer for five or ten minutes, adding more broth if needed.

While the stew is simmering, broil the eggplant cutlets as suggested above.  Spoon the stew liberally over and around the “cutlets” and enjoy!