vie a la table

I looked good today, and so did my food!

Continuing the nutrition project for school tonight, Kris and I experienced an ovo-lacto vegetarian meal.  This was another three course meal (appetizer, main dish and dessert) incorporating eggs and/or dairy.  It was surprisingly difficult to balance the carbs, protein and fat content of this meal, but what I came up with was pretty swell.

We started with a traditional Greek food, and one of my favorites – falafel.  The appetizer was just a small bite into the glorious world of falafel, and if you’ve never tried it… call me, we’ll talk.

This mash of ground up chick peas and seasoning is traditionally served in a gyro (pronounced – yee-row) which is kind of like a Greek burrito.  It’s usually filled with parsley, hummus, onions, tomato, tzatziki and of course, falafel.  You can get them with pork, lamb, beef and other meats, but falafel is my top choice.

I opted to make the tzatziki sauce from scratch since I found a great recipe on a food blog I follow called Kalyn’s Kitchen.  It was extremely simple to make and has such a succulent taste!  Maybe some of you will get to taste it this weekend…   I’ll write about just tzatziki later.

The falafel I made was from a mix.  Most high-end grocery stores (and even some low-end ones like ours) sell a mix you can buy or they sell it in bulk.  It’s also pretty simple to make from scratch – just pulverize some chick peas and spices a food pro and presto!  I used a pretty general mix and add some chopped parsley because… well, i like it.  I molded them into patties and set them to deep fry in my oil set at 360 degrees.

The beauty in this dish was the fresh, and simplistic composition.  It just looked so great in it’s neat little pile.  Love it!

Since a huge part of this project is the nutritional makeup of our meals, the main course needed to be light.  I chose to do a simple pasta (linguine) tossed with some olive oil, sundried tomatoes and diced feta cheese.

The simplest meal so far, it was as easy as cooking and draining the pasta, draining and chopping the tomatoes, dicing the feta and throwing it all together.

The highlight for us (especially Kris) was the roasted garlic, buttered over fresh toasted French bread (some roasted garlic cloves were also tossed in with the final pasta mix).

Topping the dish off with some fresh, chopped rosemary and it was simple and satisfying.

Dessert in our house just doesn’t seem to go right very often.. at least not when I’m making it.

The idea was something very simple.  Lowfat vanilla ice cream with a couple roasted (with cinnamon and sugar) apple slices on the side.  I think the idea is great, but the apples didn’t roast like I’d hoped.  ..and they kind of looked like they were doused with paprika =/

Oh well, they tasted fine and I didn’t have to feed them to anybody…  The ice cream looked great, I just need to figure out a different way to get thos apples cooked!

So, all-in-all, Greek meal number 2 was a success.  If you ever want any of the recipes for what I make and talk about, email me, I’m more than happy to share.

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food, photos, school, wil by wil