On Anna's Plate

In a recent post, my wife claimed that I never cook without a recipe. I want to use this public forum  to offer a rebuttal. I feel like I’m the victim of a smear campaign, like poor Mitt Romney, who just wanted to give his dog an exciting ride on his car’s roof without getting grief from vicious, liberal mudslingers like this guy:

But I digress.

The point is, as I much as I hate to disagree with my pregnant wife, it’s not true that I never cook without a recipe. I’m perfectly capable of scrounging together a meal from the ingredients sitting around the fridge and pantry. In fact, before Anna and I started dating, the most complicated recipe I ever followed came on a mac and cheese box (even there, room exists for improv. My college roommates once substituted ranch dressing in our mac and cheese  when we were out of milk. Not bad).

However, when I’m preparing an “On Ryan’s Plate” blog post, I try to bring something special to the occasion. My wife sets a pretty high bar, so I have to really up my game in order to even hope to compete. Unlike Anna, I can’t just improvise a great meal. I need to steal from Martha Stewart. It’s like Anna is John Coltrane, tearing up scales, and I’m Kenny G, rigidly churning out the same old rendition of the Breathless CD 20 years later (standout track: “By the Time This Night is Over”, featuring Peabo Bryson on lyrics).

So my slavish adherence to recipes is all for you, dear reader.

But the other night, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just wing it. I knew I wanted some enchiladas, which I love but hadn’t made in years ever. So I went to the grocery store WITHOUT A LIST! and just perused the aisles to see what looked good. I even had a conversation with the butcher about what meat might taste best (Me: “Is this sausage flavored?” Butcher: “Yes, with lots of things. Sage. Um, and sage. It’s mostly sage.”) Then I came home and improvized this recipe, Wayne Brady-style. Feel free to follow it. Or not:

Pork Enchiladas

Ingredients

1/2 pound ground pork

3 small peppers, chopped

1 half red onion, chopped

1 cup spinach

6 scallions, chopped

1 lime

1/2 cup black olives, sliced

4-6 wheat tortillas

1 can, enchilada sauce

1 1/2 cups grated cheddar cheese

Taco seasoning

Instructions

1) Season pork with taco seasoning. Saute pork in well-oiled skillet until it starts to brown.

2) Add peppers, onion, scallions, and spinach to skillet. Squeeze juice of whole lime into skillet. Cook ingredients until spinach wilts.

3) Grease 9×11 glass baking pan. Fill wheat tortillas evenly with pork and vegetable mixture (add some enchilada sauce if desired). Roll tortillas tightly and place side by in pan.

4) Pour enchilada sauce over all the tortillas. Cover with grated cheese and olives.

5) Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

The dish came out pretty well:

So I’ve proven that I can go without a recipe. That doesn’t mean that I will never use a recipe again. Sometimes you just want a little Kenny G. Case in point:

What makes these cookies healthy?

Omega-3’s…and fiber…and protein…you know, all that good stuff.  These cookies are chock full of healthy ingredients:

…so you don’t have to feel bad about eating three…or four…or, er, seven.  In one day.

Of course, they also have a few less than healthy ingredients too—chocolate…butter…sugar.  You know, so that it doesn’t taste like you’re gnawing on a brick of sod. 

Healthy Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

1 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup spelt flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 cup ground flax

1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

2 eggs

1/2 cup sugar

4 tbsp. softened butter

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

1/4 cup chopped walnuts

2/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Ingredients:

Pre-heat oven to 350

In a standing mixer, beat eggs, sugar, butter, and applesauce together until combined.  In a separate bowl, mix flours, flax, salt, baking soda, and cinnamon.  Add flour mix to wet mix in batches, until just combined.  Stir in walnuts and chocolate chips.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, depending on cookie size. 

Did you know that Omega 3’s are especially important during pregnancy?  I think Lila’s intelligence grew by 100 points with each cookie I ate.  Look out, Mensa.

Have a great Tuesday!

Hi friends!

When last I saw you, we were headed out the door to Chattanooga for an overnight birthday celebration.  Chattanooga was great—we got massages and ate some delicious food.  When we rolled into town around lunchtime, Yelp helped us find Sluggo’s Vegetarian Cafe…and I’m so glad we did! Our lunch was awesome!

Ryan got a black bean burger:

…which was delicious and huge.  But the real star was my veggie bowl, filled with breaded tofu, veggies, and tons of peanut sauce:

SO.  GOOD.  So good I was still full about six hours later! Luckily I managed to make room for our dinner at St. John’s.  Unluckily, the restaurant was pretty small and our waiters were very attentive, so I didn’t feel comfortable whipping out the ol’ Nikon during dinner.  But if you’re ever in Chattanooga and looking for a nice meal, St. John’s hit it out of the park.  Local, seasonal, and delicious food all around.

On Saturday, we’d planned to explore Chattanooga…but the weather gods had other plans.  Unfortunately, it was POURING down rain, so we just headed home.  No biggie—Chattanooga is less than two hours away from us, so I know we’ll be back soon!

We spent Saturday running errands and crossing things off our to-do list…and some of them had to do with the nursery! It’s not ready for the big reveal just yet, but here’s a little preview:

…it’s really coming along!

Last night, for dinner, we whipped up an easy frittata with some simple ingredients and leftovers that we already had in the fridge.

Into a skillet went six eggs, some milk, parmesan cheese, leftover roasted potatoes, and spinach:

…baked for about 15 minutes, and voila! Frittata!

Hope you had a great weekend.  I need to get to work on my to-do list…I think it’s going to be a busy day!

See ya!

When it comes to cooking styles, you might have noticed that Ryan and I come from two different camps.  Ryan NEVER cooks without a recipe, and always follows whatever recipe he picks out to a T.  I, on the other hand, rarely even start with a recipe…and if I do, you can bet that I’ve strayed from it about five minutes into the cooking process. 

Witness: last night’s dinner, as compared to Ryan’s meal on Tuesday night.  Ryan neatly picked out his Cooking Light recipe (with a few nudges in the right direction from yours truly), bought the ingredients, and followed the recipe Staci Keanan-style (that would be step-by-step, for you non TGIF-ers out there) with only one substitution: salmon for chicken.  Wild man!!

Yesterday afternoon, I thought about finding a recipe in a cookbook…for about five seconds.  Then I decided to do what I do best: pantry cooking.  Pantry cooking is great because you don’t have to follow a recipe, you generally find cooking items that you’d completely forgotten existed in the back of your pantry (we still have wheatberries?!?), and, most importantly, you don’t have to leave the house. 

I scrounged up lentils:

tomatoes:

and a sweet potato that was on its last leg:

plus some soy sausage that we had in the fridge.  Threw it all together with some garlic salt and water, and voila:

Pantry dining at its finest!

Today is actually my birthday, and Ryan has surprised me with an overnight trip to…Chattanooga!  I’ll see you from Tennessee!

If there’s one thing I tell my English students time and time again, it’s that reading is lame. Why read something like a nerd when you can look at a picture, like a cool person would? Now that Anna got Photoshop, I can make turn everything into a visual and never have to read again (plus, I can put Photoshop the dogs’ heads on the bodies of famous historical figures. Prepare to meet Napoleon Boneabark). Inspired by these visual recipes, I decided to create a visual recipe for Cooking Light’s Miso Chicken Recipe (but in a shocking twist worthy of M. Night Shaymalananan, the chicken has been replaced with salmon. Gasp!) So stop reading this, dweeb, and check out the recipe below.

I guess that’s how I’d describe myself these days.  I do usually have a vegetarian breakfast and lunch…but then dinner almost always involves some sort of meat. 

Yesterday, I had a vegetarian wrap for lunch, starring this:

…which, I know, looks like something the cat would hack up.  But it’s actually black bean “hummus”—I just mashed a bunch of black beans with about a tbsp. of sabra hummus and a good shake of nutritional yeast.  Easy!

The full wrap:

Purely veg!  Dinner, on the other hand, was meat-tastic:

Homemade spaghetti sauce with ground beef, crushed tomatoes, lots of onion and garlic, and dried basil. 

It still feels a little weird to eat a big dish of meat for dinner…but I have to admit, this was really good.  Nothing beats good old-fashioned spaghetti and meat sauce. 

In baby news, we had a successful doctor’s appointment this morning—got to see little Lila’s face in all her 3D glory!  Truthfully, the 3D ultrasounds have always freaked me out a little bit…but it was actually so neat to really *see* her—I feel like now we have a little bit better of an idea of who will be coming out to greet us in a few months!

I think she takes after Ryan…she was goofing around during much of the ultrasound, kicking her legs behind her head.  She also covered her face with her hand at one point:

….I’m pretty sure that she did this right after Ryan told a lame joke to the ultrasound technician.  She’s already embarrassed of her old man. 

That’s not to say that she’s all Ryan.  Like me, she seems to have mastered a pretty effective lip pout:

…which I’m sure we’ll see a few hundred thousand times in the first few years when she doesn’t get her way.  Just like mama. 

Hope you have a great Tuesday!

Ryan and I were saying over the weekend, January is a hard month.  When we were up in Pennsylvania, I always assumed that it was just a sucky month because we usually found ourselves trudging through three feet of snow to go anywhere…but now that we’re in Alabama, I know that’s not true.  We’ve yet to see snow stick here (although we did get big flurries last week!), and other than a few freezing days, the temps have been satisfyingly mild…and still, I find myself feeling…just blah.  Spring feels so far away in January, even in the South. 

At the same time, in this year’s January, I find myself wishing that time would slow down a little bit, because spring = baby = EEK!!!  There is still SO much that we have to do—we’re meeting with a potential pediatrician today, and hoping that it goes well.  If we like this doctor, that would be a huge scratch off on the to-do list.  The process of preparing for a baby is (duh) completely overwhelming at times.  We went into our giant Babies R Us last night, hoping to pick up some essentials.  We wandered up and down the aisles for about 45 minutes, and then left with a ten-pack of baby clothes hangers, because…well, that was all I could wrap my mind around us needing.  There are so many choices, so many “must haves”—and the thing about the “must haves” is that you know you’ll only end up using about 1/3 of them, if that. 

Sigh.

I’m not complaining,  because honestly, I do find the whole nesting/preparation element to be pretty fun—but it’s also overwhelming and intimidating.  What if we don’t pick the right sheets?  What if we don’t buy the right swaddler?  What if we buy ten pacimals, only to discover that Lila really prefers the wubanub???

Deeeeeeep breath.

Sometimes I think the hardest thing about pregnancy isn’t the nausea, or the stretch marks, or the hammer constantly driving itself into your lower back…it’s the waiting.  Because it’s during the waiting period that you can drive…yourself…crazy.  Crazy with happy anticipation, but also with worry, angst, and fear.  One of the strangest parts of being pregnant, for me, has been an increased feeling of constant anxiety, because somehow the baby growing inside of me makes it seem like there’s suddenly more at stake. This is not at all to say that my life pre-pregnancy didn’t matter…only that I now find myself thinking more and more about how lucky I am.  And along with that awareness comes that perpetual thought of how easily all of this could be taken away. 

See?  January makes me fun. 

This was supposed to be a post about chicken:

But I guess I kind of strayed, huh?  

I guess I’d better get used to it, because from what I’ve heard, parenthood is just one giant flaming ball of anxiety that never really ends. 

I’m trying to focus on the things I’m looking forward to, rather than worry about the things I can’t control.  I was working on photoshop again last night, editing some of our pictures from our Nantucket trip, two summers ago.  We’re going back this summer, and I’m so excited.  Just looking at these pictures gets me excited for spring…and summer…and everything that will come after that.

Plus, looking at this picture:

…never fails to put me in a better mood.  Lila…meet your father.  He is one goofy bastard.

Sadly, this is not what I woke up to this morning.  I woke up to a frosty lawn, a terrier wedged into my side, and someone else’s jimmy legs creating an earthquake in the bed. 

But I still woke up in a good mood.

Yesterday afternoon, my doctor’s office called and said that I PASSED my three hour glucose test!!!

You know, it’s funny—after getting so upset about the initial test, I calmed down and realized that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I did have gestational diabetes—I’d just deal with it.  Your comments and e-mails from other mamas-to-be and current mamas certainly helped…a LOT.  So, I went into the three hour test with the expectation that I wasn’t going to pass and that I would just need to deal with the cards I’d been dealt. 

And then…the cards dealt me a passed test!!!

As much as I’d come to terms with the fact that gestational diabetes might just be something I’d be dealing with in pregnancy….I was pretty pleased when I got that call.    I guess you just never know. 

Thank you again for all of your sweet comments and e-mails—this wasn’t the first hiccup in my pregnancy, and I’m sure it won’t be the last! 

I don’t have food photos to show you, but hopefully I will soon, because I opened up an early birthday present from my parents yesterday, and recently installed…photoshop!!! I am SO excited to play around with this software—I’ve been working with it all morning, revisiting some of our old photos to see what all I can do.  It’s pretty complicated, and I can already see that it’s going to take me a VERY long time feeling comfortable with the software—but I already love it!

Here are some of the photos I played with this morning, along with that Nantucket sunrise:

French cows:

Relaxing after a hike:

My two favorite guys (doing what they do best):

…and sweet Sophie:

I know I’m going to love having this software, especially once Lila comes along. 

Hope you have a great Saturday! The sun is out, so we’re about to go enjoy it!

No, not this one:

…although I do want to see this movie.  Meryl can do no wrong. 

Yesterday at my doctor’s appointment, my blood revealed not only a high level of sugar (and thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for your words of encouragement—I’ll definitely keep you informed on how the test goes tomorrow!!), but low iron levels too.

Sigh.

Low iron is something a lot of pregnant women deal with, so I wasn’t really surprised, especially with my partly vegetarian diet.  I’ve added meat back into my meals throughout the pregnancy, but I’ve hardly been downing steaks every night.  Anyway, my doctor gave me a prescription for an iron supplement, and I’ve decided to do what I can through incorporating more iron-rich foods in my daily diet—red meat, chicken, eggs, dark leafy greens, beans, and…artichokes?

Who knew?

I didn’t!  But when I left to teach my class yesterday afternoon, Ryan said that he’d have dinner waiting for me when I got back, and sure enough…

…it was an iron-fest of eats! Steak, along with a really tasty salad that he called the “Iron Lady Salad”—clever, Ryan.  This salad had beans and artichokes, which are very rich in iron, along with olives, bell peppers, parsley, and olive oil.  Yum!

A tasty dish from a very sweet husband. 

Lots of things going on on the pregnancy front today—we met with our doula this morning, and we’ll be attending our first set of parenting classes tonight.  Then, tomorrow, it’s up and at ‘em bright and early for the three hour glucose test.   Wish me luck!

Adios!

That might be a direct quote from this weekend.  And yes, I have been, admittedly, more irritable lately.  Not just more irritable—more emotional in general.  I’ve had some moments of inexplicable weepiness, some moments of extreme joy—it seems like these days, whatever I’m feeling is AMPLIFIED times about 25.  Or 50.  Or 100. 

And this morning, I was feeling…nervous.  This was my breakfast:

Mmmmm….nothing like 50 grams of sugar to get you going at 7 am.  I had a bad feeling about this glucose test, and I was right to be nervous: I failed. 

Now, a lot of women fail their first glucose test.  You drink the orange stuff, wait an hour, they prick your finger, and if your sugar levels aren’t below a certain level, you have to take another, more comprehensive three hour test. 

I thought I might fail the test, just because many women do.  But I didn’t think I’d fail so badly—my number was really high.  And now, because of that, I’ve pretty much convinced myself that I’m going to fail the three hour test too, and will be diagnosed with gestational diabetes. 

Rational?

Not necessarily.  I’ll take the three hour test on Thursday, so we don’t have to wait too long to find out.  But, as I said, my number for the first test was so high, I’m not very hopeful that the third test is going to go well.

And then what? 

Then, I guess I’ll be diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and we’ll take it from there.  It’s not the end of the world, which is what I keep telling myself in an attempt to stay rational. 

But irrationally…I’m pissed.  I’m at a healthy weight for my height, and haven’t gained excessive weight in pregnancy (I’m almost 29 weeks and up 16 pounds).  I eat healthy.  I’ve stayed active, exercising almost every day through weights, walking, and yoga.

It just doesn’t seem fair.

Earlier today, after we’d gotten the results of the first test, I found myself thinking, “Oh, maybe I can trick the three hour test by only eating pure protein for the next two days! Maybe I can jog before the test!” 

Obviously that’s a bad idea.  If I do have gestational diabetes, I need to know about it, for my health and definitely for the health of Lila.  The truth is, no one likes feeling like they’ve failed something, and you definitely don’t like feeling like you’ve failed your unborn child.  I keep wondering if there is something I should have been doing throughout the pregnancy to ensure that this wasn’t an issue…but I don’t know what I could have done.  Again, I eat healthy, I exercise, so if I have gestational diabetes, I have it.  The body does strange things in pregnancy, and so much of being pregnant has taught me that there are going to be times where your body is simply out of your control—and that’s a scary feeling.

Like so much else that’s happened thus far, I’m just going to do my best to roll with the punches, and to remember that at the end of all this, we get the best gift in the world—Lila Scott. 

Here’s a 28.5 week bump shot—officially in the third trimester!

(and fresh from a workout ). 

Have a great day!