Gado Gado Salad

Gado Gado sounds like baby talk but this is not for babies, no sireee! This is a classic Indonesian salad that is a great way to use up all of those scraps of veggies you've got in the crisper bin. Little bits of cabbage, celery, few potatoes and a couple of green beans just hanging around taunting you? Whip up some peanut sauce or the like and you've got some Gado Gado!

Actually, it was the appearance of some free peanut sauce that inspired this meal (another freebie expired item from the co-op, courtesy of my hubbie).  But whipping up some peanut sauce (or other nut butter) is easy to do, especially as the water is boiling for making the eggs, potatoes and green beans.

This is an especially great meal when you realize that veggies have been AWOL from your meal plans in a while. Giving the cabbage a quick blanch makes this meal slightly warmed and less of a plate full of salad. Add whatever protein you choose, tofu is traditional and here I seared some and place it in the middle. Use what you have on hand.

Egg Foo Yung

Eggs and I have not always been the best of dining companions. A very fussy eater as a child when it came to anything besides salad, pickles and bread and butter, my mother once infamously made me eat to fried eggs, which were promptly regurgitated. Not a pretty scene.

Fast forward multiple decades and such food abhorrence's feel antiquated, so dutifully I try to overcome them. Egg foo yung was just one of those that sounded like it would make my tummy queasy again. How wrong can a person be!

This turned out to be a fun bunch meal, complete with the fun Asian BBQ dipping sauce I added, completely untraditional but delicious!

Fast, quick and with some veggies secreted inside, try this the next time you are at a loss for an easy and fun brunch meal.

Cauliflower Parmesan

So that Red Coated, Chocolate Dipped Faux Holiday is a few days away, and you want to make something special for your love, but you don't have tons of time to look up a fancy recipe...So make comfort food! Right! Happy, warm, yummy in your tummy food!

No, not pasta, but close, Parmesan! Cauliflower Parmesan!

(Wait for it...)

CAULIFLOWER PARMESAN?

Yes, you heard right, and why didn't I think of this sooner? Breaded cauliflower doused with tomato sauce, bechamel sauce and loads of parmesan baked to crispy perfection. I will bet the house that everyone will love this!

How can such a boast be made? Just seeing the look on my hubby's face when he spied the cauliflower florets awaiting their breading (it was of total horror) and then cut to him forking said florets transformed into magical goodness into his mouth. "I was skeptical, but this is amazing!" From the mouths of babes!

Morning Glory Muffins with Spelt Flour

What do you do with 3-4 cups of leftover raw shredded carrot and apple salad? Make morning glory muffins, of course!

One of my many fun food jobs is being a free-lance lunch lady at North Coast Preparatory Academy and usually the kids are fairly food adventurous. But too much carrot apple salad was just that, too much. So I found this muffin recipe and used up my leftovers. Voila! Repurposed salad in a hand-held breakfast.

Since wheat flour is out of my diet, I used spelt flour. And despite the original author's admonishments about the "correct" way to measure flour (which I didn't follow), and my need to just keep adding until the mixture looked right (spelt needs less liquid than wheat), these muffins turned out wonderfully! My husband's co-workers thanked me profusely for sending them in with him for the staff lounge.