Sunday Food Prep: Blueberry, Lemon and Mint Tea

This week is going to be delicious!

This morning, while my brunch (parsnips, sweet potatoes and carrots roasted with bacon and topped with a fried egg and some avocado and hot sauce #sogood) roasted away in the oven, I tackled all of my weekly food prep. Today’s prep included hard-boiling eggs, chopping veggies for roasting (carrots, sweet-potatoes and butternut squash), cutting up an entire watermelon, making a big salad with lots of bell peppers, and making a pitcher of blueberry, lemon and mint tea (recipe below!)… For whatever reason, all of these tasks feel easy on Sunday mornings and so so daunting when I get home late from work on Tuesday nights. Anyone else know this struggle??

Food prep also involved organizing the fridge to make sure that healthy foods are in sight and easily accessible. Here is the end result:

Strategic Fridge Moves: When I open the fridge, I want to be visually triggered to eat healthy things, and there should be lots of healthy options that are easy to grab, so I put the food I need to eat in the most visible and accessible locations.

This week, I decided to make a batch of Blueberry, Lemon and Mint tea that will be great for taking on the road in the morning. This recipe takes 10 minutes or less to come together and will make your mornings 25% more joyful!

Blueberry, Lemon and Mint Tea

Ingredients:

• 8 cups of hot water (straight from the tap is fine) plus 1/2 a cup for the blueberry mixture
• 3 large cold brew iced tea bags (you can swap out hot brew bags, but just follow the directions on the package)
• 1 quart of blueberries
• 1/3 cup of lemon juice
• 6-8 large mint leaves, roughly chopped
• Ice
• Optional garnish: lemon wedges or more mint sprigs
• Optional sweetener: honey (personally, I find the berries sweet enough, but taste it and adjust to your preferences!)

Directions:

Follow directions to steep tea as usual (for me, this meant steeping three large tea bags in 8 cups of hot water for about 5 minutes, but may be different depending on your tea brand). While tea steeps, heat blueberries, lemon juice, mint leaves and 1/2 a cup of water over high heat in a medium sauce pan. Allow the mixture to simmer for 2-3 minutes. Remove from heat and either:

• Blend the mixture in a blender until very smooth, and then pour the whole thing straight into your tea. This option gives you the benefit of all the nutrients in the berries, but will make your tea a bit thicker.
• Use a mesh sieve to strain the juice from mixture (use a spoon to get as much juice as possible out), then pour the juice into your tea and discard the solids.

Stir your tea, taste it and add honey or another sweetener if desired. Serve over ice and garnish with sprigs of mint or a lemon wedge.

Local Prawn Scampi with Zucchini Linguine

MAKE. THIS. NOW.

I live in catfish country. Catfish farm country, that is. The Mississippi Delta has historically been home to a huge number of catfish ponds and processing plants, so much so that a nearby town, Belzoni, MS, has been declared the Catfish Capital of the World. In recent years, however, the US catfish industry has suffered due to competition from foreign producers and catfish farming is becoming less and less common in the United States. In fact, between 2007 and 2013, US catfish production dropped from 164,000 acres of catfish farms to just 83,020 acres. Some of those newly available acres are located in my town, and a family of local entrepreneurs have repurposed their catfish ponds to raise freshwater prawns. I”m inspired by the way that the folks at Lauren Farms are innovating and building on the strengths of our community to provide greater access to healthy, local, delicious food!

I grabbed a bag of frozen, extra large prawns at the Leland Pop Up Shops last weekend, and was excited and a little intimidated, to try cooking with them this week, since I’ve only ever cooked with shelled and de-veined shrimp before. (For the record: prawns are very similar to shrimp, except for a few small things about their shells. My prawn-monger (lol, I have a prawn-monger. #fancy.) told me that they have a lighter, almost lobster-like flavor, but I think she is partial. Gross but important fact: she also told me that prawns don’t have a sand vein that you have to remove. I’ll be honest: peeling the prawns was gross enough for me; I don’t need to add veins to the mix. #nosir

The recipe I’m sharing with you today is actually my second attempt with prawns. For my first dish, I revisited my Pesto and Squash Noodles Recipe with very delicious results. I recommend Pesto Prawns with Squash Noodles so so much, but you smart people can figure out how to add prawns to your pesto dishes on your own, so I’m not writing about that today. Instead, I have a prawn version of shrimp scampi that is pure magic:

Local Prawn Scampi with Zucchini Linguine

Ingredients:

• 4-6 Extra Large Prawns/Shrimp per person (thawed and peeled. To peel, pull of the legs, use your thumbs to peel off the sides, and then you can leave the tail on or take it off depending on your preference. For a tutorial on deveining shrimp, head here.)
• 1 medium zucchini or yellow squash per person, spiralized or sliced very thin
• 2 TBSP ghee or butter (depending on your tolerance for lactose)
• 2 TBSP olive oil
• 1 TBSP Minced Garlic
• 1/4 cup fresh chopped parsley
• optional: lemon zest and thinly sliced lemons
• lemon juice, sea salt, red pepper flakes, and black pepper to taste

Directions:

• Melt the butter and olive oil over medium-low heat.
• Add the garlic. Sauté for 1 minute, being careful to not let it burn.
• Add the prawns, and season with salt and pepper and saute until they have just barely turned opaque (this will just take a few minutes!).
• Toss in your spiralized noodles and let them wilt just a bit (takes about a minute) and then remove the pan from heat. By this point, your prawns should be just pink.
• Toss in the parsley, lemon zest, lemon juice, lemon slices, and red pepper flakes.
• DEVOUR A.S.A.P. #nom

Breakfast of (Whole Food) Champions!

MC and I got together yesterday to make an awesome grain-free brunch, where MC made this life altering breakfast pizza and I made the Carrot Muffins from Practical Paleo. All that brunching got me thinking about the quick and delicious (and hearty and protein-packed!) breakfasts that I’ve been eating lately. In the Whole 30 world, one of the common pieces of advice that is given is to stop thinking of breakfast as breakfast, and dinner as dinner, or, in other words, you can eat chicken and leftover soup for breakfast and it is fine as long as your body is getting the nutrients it needs. That being said, I still really love breakfast foods (and bacon. Lord, do I love bacon.), so I thought I’d do a quick round up of breakfast hacks that save my day on the regular.

Roasted Veggies + Avocado + Egg + Hot Sauce = Oh. Em. Gee.

1. Roasted Veggies and Breakfast Sausage: This has been my go-to breakfast this week because it is so easy – a one-pan dish that basically cooks itself. I prep it first thing when I wake up, before I do any other parts of my morning ablutions (10 points to Gryffindor for word choice??), and then it does its magic while I’m in the shower.

• The Recipe: There isn’t really a fancy recipe here. Basically, I just roast sausage links and veggies drizzled in olive oil, garlic salt and cracked black pepper at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until those particular veggies are tender with crispy, caramelized edges. The magic of this recipe comes in its speed and versatility and how DELISH it always is when you are done.
• Notes On Veggies: I usually use frozen veggies (frozen broccoli, butternut squash, beets and brussels sprouts are all favorites), I also usually use part of a sweet potato, so I like to chop sweet potatoes in batches and keep them in a bag in the fridge or freezer to avoid sweet-potato-chopping-fatigue which is a real thing in my life. I also use baby carrots (usually sliced in half, to cut down on the cooking time, since carrots tend to take much longer than many veggies to get tender). On that note, the one thing that you have to be careful about is balancing the cooking times of different vegetables. You can do this by thinly slicing denser veggies like beets and carrots to about a 1/4 to an 1/8th of an inch thickness (a mandolin can help with this!). Sweet potatoes can be bigger – closer to 1/2 inch rounds. Broccoli, brussels sprouts and butternut squash should all be in as large pieces as possible so that they take a bit longer to cook. If you buy them pre-chopped and are worried that they are too small and are going to burn, you can substitute the sausage for bacon and lay the bacon over the more tender veggies to roast. The bacon will crisp up and will protect the veggies from burning as they cook.
• Notes on Sausage: I use Applegate frozen sausage links – they aren’t Whole 30 compliant because they have a little added sugar, but I love the flavor and I haven’t found an alternative in my area grocery stores. Read your labels!
• Add Ons: Top this with some Louisiana Hot Sauce, half an avocado and/or a fried egg if you are feeling fancy! Trust me, you’ll love your life if you do because the egg yolk and hot sauce will run all over everything to make a great sauce, but a bowl of veggies and sausage will be very delicious as is, too!
• Variations I’ve Made Recently:
  • Sausage, Sweet Potatoes, Baby Carrots and Broccoli with hot sauce (pretty standard for me)
  • Baby Carrots and Bacon with hot sauce (this is great for when you are running low on time or groceries because you can just dump some carrots on a pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, layer on some bacon and leave it, and I almost always have bacon and carrots in my fridge, even when I’m out of most other things.)
  • Butternut Squash, Cauliflower and Sausage (this one didn’t take long to cook at all because it had no dense veggies)
  • Broccoli, Sweet Potatoes and Bacon (#nom)
  • Beets, Sweet Potatoes and Sausage with hot sauce and an egg and avocado (Had a few extra minutes this day. So much deliciousness.)

2. Homemade Coconut Lattes: For me, one of the hardest things about doing the Whole 30 was giving up my daily McDonald’s McCafe vanilla latte (as I’ve said before, I know, I’m fancy.). Eventually, I acclimated to drinking black coffee (especially on the go, since there are no coffee shops in the Delta that sell coconut milk, and I’ve heard that Starbucks’ coconut milk isn’t Whole 30 compliant so that is out on the off chance I travel to a city with Starbucks), but for my morning coffee, I splurged and bought a very basic milk frother so that I could make my own coconut lattes at home – it takes 90 seconds and feels so luxurious compared to drinking my coffee straight.

• A note on what coconut milk to use: You’ll get different amounts of foam depending on what kind of milk you use. I use coconut milk from the can – usually Kroger brand full-fat coconut milk. I shake it before I open the can, use a little for my coffee, and keep the rest in a mason jar in my fridge for the rest of the week. I always have several cans of coconut milk in my cupboard, usually a couple of different brands because they all have different fat contents and therefore I use them for different things. For your latte, you want coconut milk that has actual cream in it – the stuff out of the carton usually won’t foam very much – but you don’t want a brand that has so much cream that it is completely solid (save those brands for making coconut whipped cream or frosting!).

3. Egg Cups: Growing up, my mom always made egg cups for special occasions. Her recipe uses bread, so it isn’t really an option on the Whole 30, but I’ve found many variations that are great. These make awesome breakfasts because they are so good right out of the oven, and they also keep well for the week.

• Recipe: Preheat oven to 350 degrees and spray a muffin tin with olive oil or coconut oil. Line each muffin cup with ham slices, bacon, or prosciutto. Layer in veggies of your choosing: I like bell peppers and onions or asparagus and green onion. Crack a whole egg into each muffin cup and sprinkle each one with sea salt and black pepper. Bake for about 20 minutes or until the egg has set. Eat one as soon as you can get it into your mouth without burning yourself. Save some for the week to eat with fruit for breakfast, or as an afternoon snack.
• Variations: There are so many possible variations, depending on what vegetables you want to put in there. You can also skip the bacon all-together and try Avocado Eggs (shout out to my roommie for the suggestion!).

Go forth and breakfast well, my friends!

-MM