Cuban Black Beans and Brown Rice

This has been a crazy week of barbeques and potlucks so I haven't posted. For one of the barbeques I needed to take a salad. I used the leftover Pasta with Roasted Vegetables from a few days before, added romaine, feta cheese and italian dressing, making it a Roasted Vegetable Pasta Salad. I got several compliments on it. Go figure. The original recipe had made so much that everyone was pretty much tired of it by that time. It was a nice little ressurection.

We remade the Sweet Potato Stew again yesterday, but I didn't take pictures since it was included in a dinner last week. We had the Cuban Black Beans and Brown Rice today with Summer's family. Everyone loved it (except Joe who hates tomatoes and Josh who informed us he doesn't like rice). I thought it was very good.

We also made the banana ice cream from Eat for Health. In the jana/drjoel blog, she added strawberries and dates. I thought that sounded nummy so I tried it that way. About half way through blending my VitaMix motor stopped. It was totally dead. Matt drove over to their house and brought back their BlendTec. Before the ice cream was done his blender was smoking and giving him messages that the motor was overheating! We went ahead and ate the ice cream at that point. It had small little pieces of dates in it, but was still wonderful. Unfortunately, it was all so stressful that I didn't even think of pictures. We'll have to try the recipe exactly as it's written next time and hopefully get some pictures. (btw, I read my VitaMix owner's manual and after 45 minutes the machine reset itself and everything was good)

Tomato Barley Bean Soup

On the Jana/DrJoel blog, Jana's husband complains that the meals aren't salty enough. This one was definitely not too salty. I substituted organic low sodium beef broth for the vegetable broth because I thought that sounded good with barley. It was still pretty bland. I think as I get weaned from salt I probably will really like this soup. Mark said he would eat it again. I told Dad to go ahead and salt it if he wanted to. I noticed that he didn't and just ate it as it was.

Green Beans with Gado Gado Sauce

Love this! Andrew thought that this was a great dinner. He loved the flavors in the Gado Gado sauce, but he told me that the green beans were too crunchy and the sauce was a bit bland. I agree with him completely about the green beans. I didn't steam them long enough. I really enjoyed this and I will definitely make it again. The recipe was fairly simple. The sauce was quick to make and it all came together really well. There was enough left over for my lunch tomorrow. Maybe the beans wont be as crunchy after a night in the fridge.

Turkey Spinach Burgers

We took the day off Eat for Health yesterday because we got home late from our Eagle Creek hike. Oops. Doesn't look like we'll finish before I take Andrew back to BYU! Oh well. We'll finish after I get back from Provo at the end of August. I almost took pictures of our Panda Express takeout last night and pretended it was day 3's EFH dinner!

Today was fast Sunday and I just did whatever was quick from day 3. That ended up being the turkey spinach burgers since I had everything ready from yesterday. The burgers were very good! We ate them on whole grain buns with watermelon and the leftovers from the last few days. Everyone agreed that they were very tasty and we'd enjoy having them again.