Saturday, April 16, 2011

Cucs, coughs, and soups. Oh my!

Update: my voice not only sounds low, it also sounds phlegm-y.

Yum.

Let's back up a little bit. A couple of days ago, I mentioned a crazy cucumber recipe that I was planning on sharing. Sometimes, my experiments fail. What I can say for this one is that it turned out quite pretty looking.

Cucumber-strawberry lemonade!!
It was too sour and not sweet enough. That might have been because I only used three strawberries and no sweetener. The texture was pretty awesome though, and the foam on top was a nice little bonus!

In other updates, I woke up this morning with a horrible, uncontrollable cough. I've mentioned how I hate taking medicine. (If not, now you know). I'm not that extreme in that I won't take anti-inflammatory if I have a fever and have to finish writing my Master's report that's due the same day.

#Mylifetwodaysago.

But when it comes to a cough, I'd rather not take cough syrup, because not only does it taste bad, but to me, it's unnecessary. So I did some research and found that (along with honey) some breathing techniques can be used to subside a cough. Strangely, it worked.

It could be psychological. All I know is that I do not need cough syrup or cough drops. #Score.

Where I was going with this is that I wanted something smooth, hot, and delicious to eat for lunch to subside my throat that had become coarse from coughing so much.


Doesn't it just look healthy?! The soup was a slight modification of the creamy vegetable soup (made by Mario in Costa Rica--if you haven't seen that post, it's worth your while to see it!) and the eat your veggies soup. I used carrot, tomato, garlic, cilantro, turmeric, spinach, and peas in my soup today.

To finish off cucumber week, I made cucumber raita. It's a refreshing snack, perfect for a warm day.

Ingredients:
  • 1 cup yogurt
  • 1/3 cucumber, peeled and chopped
  • 1 teaspoon mustard seeds
  • 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
  • salt/pepper to taste
  • cilantro for garnish

In a small pan, toast the cumin and mustard seeds over medium-high heat. The cumin seeds will brown and the mustard seeds will start to pop.


In a bowl, combine the yogurt and cucumber.


Add the toasted seeds.


Season with salt and pepper and garnish with cilantro.


I like this plain. Or you could eat this with a chappati to make for a more authentic Indian dish. :)

Later this evening, April and I went to Choice Greens for dinner. I really like this place because you can customize your salad to your liking! There are way too many choices--both for veggies and dressings. We both stared at the menu card for at least 10 minutes before making our decisions.

My salad:

Spinach + kalamata olives + artichoke + beets + chickpeas + jicama + cilantro dressing.
Even though that salad looks small, it was quite filling. And it included beets. What is there not to like?

See you tomorrow! (Any recipe/vegetable of the week requests?)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have a good challenge for you this week! Passover starts tomorrow night (so I won't be able to come to your class :-( ) and I was wondering if you could come up with some filling kosher for Passover ideas? So this would mean meals without bread (and bread products, anything leavened), barley, wheat, rye, oats, rice, beans (and other legumes), corn, pasta, soy... it's pretty bad for vegetarians :-( I know I'll be having a lot of matzoh pizza haha... looking forward to see what you come up with! I have faith :-)

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