Peter's Cooking Diary #12

So this week was a pretty simple meal to prepare, and it was using leftover turkey from Thanksgiving dinner that I had with my family. I want to make something that was low carb as I am trying to get back on that wagon and trying to lose move weight. This was made more or less freestyle, I didn't have a recipe that I used for this, just combined many different ideas.

The first step to most of my cooking is starting cooking most of my vegetables, and in this case I actually used a lot of veggies. I used the whole pack of celery in this, trying to make it more hearty so it would be filling enough when eating it for lunch.

I didn't take a picture of lightly cooking the carrots before adding them to the crock pot, but I used the whole pound of carrots that I bought, I could have used more if I had bought more, but like I said it was just free style. This is the onions and garlic that I use as a base for just about every recipe.

This is the crock pot filled with onion, garlic, celery, carrots, stock, and some tomatoes that I got from my mom. I also added some herbs like oregano, thyme, and parsley as well as some red pepper flake. I also added a little bit of soy sauce, because I like the depth of flavor it adds to a soup. I think for the herbs you could actually just use some poultry seasoning if you happen to have that on hand as well.

My mom also gave me some green beans that she grew in her garden. I cut them up into about 4 pieces and added them to the mix.

I chopped up the turkey and added it to the pot, not sure how much I had, maybe a pound of white meat? I think you could just as easily use whatever leftover meat you have, or you can even make it without meat if you want to.

The second to last ingredient that I wanted to add was some wheat berries, which I think I have mentioned previously on here, but at least from what I have read they are the whole grain of wheat with the husk removed. They take about an hour to cook, and they need to be rinsed well. So I took some and boiled them almost the entire way to being done, but left them slightly undercooked and added them to the soup. They add a little bit of crunch and pop to the soup that was missing from the texture.

This is after I had added the cooked wheat berries to the pot.

The last thing that was added was some small butter beans because I wanted to add some sort of legume to the soup. I liked what they added to the dish as a whole. I have been eating the soup for lunch all week and have enjoyed it very much.

This is the final image I have, its kind of a bonus. My friend and I had another little food party. I guess the theme for this was sort of breakfast we had bagels, jam, some local Wisconsin honey, pears, apples, clementines, dried fruit that my mom gave me, crackers, goat cheese, some sweet oat crackers and some almonds. We actually didn't even crack into the loaf of bread at all.

Peter's Cooking Diary #4

Well this week I wanted to try something new, I have eaten wheatberries before, but haven't ever cooked with them. For those who don't know what wheatberries are, they are the actual whole intact wheat grain, the bran, germ, and endosperm all together in one piece. They are not all that hard to find, I found them in the natural food section of the grocery store I like to shop at, and nearly 2 lbs was less than $4, so not too pricey either.

Cooking wheatberries takes a long time, the recipe on the package doesn't even have a time listed on it. All in all I think the cooking time for me was about 50 minutes, which is quite a while, but luckily its just a low simmer on the stove, not the most active cooking. Here is a picture of what they looked like when they were done cooking:

Its not too clear of a shot, but it looks quite a bit like puffed wheat. I cooked it so it was not completely soft, I liked it with a little bit of chewy texture to it.

To go along with the wheatberries, I made some taco meat in my slow cooker, once again using a recipe from my cook book for smoky and spicy ground turkey.

I think the turkey turned out really well after the time in the slow cooker. After it was done cooking, I gave it some time to cool, and then I spooned off some fat that had accumulated, there was some added fat in the turkey and also oil from cooking the vegetables that I had added, its a quick and easy way to reduce your fat intake, as well as lower your calorie intake.

The last component of my meal for this week was oven roasted corn, which was a mini-recipe from my cookbook. Putting the corn under the broiler was quickly able to caramelize the corn a bit.

I sliced the corn off of the cob, and added a little bit of butter and cilantro to it, I will be making my own burrito bowls for lunch with the meat, wheatberries and corn mixed together, with some avocado and salsa on top. Even though I cooked a few different things this week, it was quite effortless cooking.