Sweet Potato and Chard Enchiladas

Sweet potato and Kale Enchiladas

Sometimes life feels more like a race to the finish line than anything else.  Like a cross country ski marathon on slushy snow or a face-first ride on a skeleton sled at 80 mph.  On the craziest days, we might as well be careening over a ski cross jump—one minute we’re in gold medal form, the next, a jumbled mass in the ditch.  It’s exhausting.  Terrifying.  Unpredictable.  And more.  Our to-do list spans multiple pages, but all we really hope for is a clean pair of pants—without too many wrinkles—and a jug of milk in the fridge—that’s not too far past the freshness date—to start the day.  These are times when texting family members in the next room seems perfectly normal.  When dishes pile in the sink and dirty clothes in the corner, and no one notices.  Clearly, we’re just trying to hang on, and at the end of the day, what we need is food on the table without a crash.  Food that’s soul-soothing—because really, that’s what’s getting us through this patch in one piece.

These are enchilada days.  With a bit of homework done ahead (Olympic gold isn’t won without the training runs), the classic tortilla bundles are a cinch to pull together, and receive raves around a hungry table.  How perfect is that?

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Red Lentil Soup

Red lentil soup

Lately I’m obsessed with lentils.  Our pantry shelves are lined with them—bags and boxes filled with miniature rounds of black, green and brown.  To those who rifle around looking for more readily edible snacks, my compulsion is slightly puzzling.  A collection of shoes in the closet or books on the shelf is easier to understand.  But mothers have other odd obsessions as well, best ignored, as teens well know; simply shove the legumes aside and move on to the chips.

Loving lentils makes sense to me, if to no one else.  I cook dinner every day for a vegetarian family, and legumes and beans offer us a rich source of vegetable protein that’s essential to our diet.  And beyond the nutrition, they’re a treasure trove of inspiration as well.  I’ve no doubt I could add lentils to the pot day after day, week after week, and never repeat the same concoction twice (unless I wanted to).  One day it’s soup, another a main-dish salad.  Then on to a stew or dal.

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Almost-Guatemalan Stuffed Squash

Stuffed Summer Squash

One of the fortuitous by-products of writing about food is that friends and acquaintances share tidbits of all sorts.  Emails arrive with bold promises:  Best Brownies Ever!  Incredulity:  Beet Cake?  And practical advice:  Dinner Tonight.  I pour over old family recipes, tips for massaging kale and recipes for tasty green smoothies even kids will love—treasured food secrets, every one.  The more I read, the more I’m struck by what I don’t know about food—and the wealth of what my fellow cooks are willing to share.

The correspondence keeps me plugging away some weeks—like a letter from home invariably will on a lonely stretch at over-night camp—and offers nuggets to ponder just when I’d thought the bottom of the barrel had been scraped.  Earlier this summer I received just such a note from my friend, Liana.  For the past two summers she and her three daughters have ventured to the colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, to spend a month immersing in the language and local culture.  And of course, the food.

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Christine’s Crossing

Creamy Vegetable Soup with Kale

Starting today we’ll be featuring Freshness Farms enthusiast and health coach, Christine de la Cruz in a monthly column called “Christine’s Crossing”.  With Christine’s wellness-oriented coaching you’ll learn how to incorporate Freshness Farms produce into everything from soup to main courses to juice and smoothies—like her sneaky zucchini noodles and vibrant beet and carrot juice.  This week Christine shares how to turn a refrigerator bursting with veggies into a warming potful of vitamins and flavor….

I have a confession to make:  as a health coach, I love to eat and prepare healthy food, but I am a lazy cook.  I don’t really like to follow recipes or spend a lot of time slicing and dicing.  Confession two:  I don’t mind eating soup in the middle of summer.  In summer we have a tendency to mostly eat raw or cold foods, which can be tough on our digestion and cause bloating.  Warm soup is easy on our systems, plus it’s really nice to have a potful of something quick and healthy at the ready when we are hungry!  Making soup is a great way to use up any produce we have overflowing—which we can all relate to in the best possible way.  Right now my fridge is loaded with the last great delivery from Freshness Farms, and I want to use up every last bit, while it’s at the peak of freshness.

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Summer Tomato Vinaigrette

Avocado with Tomato Vinaigrette

I’ve said before that summer is the season when I love to corral my kids in the kitchen to tackle a meaningful project together:  fresh lemonade, bread or a fruit pie, homemade jam, even plain old dinner.  What I haven’t confessed is that one of the often surprising by-products of these adventures is how much I learn from them.  Perhaps as much as anyone, especially considering I enter the room with a slightly overinflated feeling of mastery and general air of food know-it-all-ness.  The person with the ideas and answers.  (What?  There are others?)  Yet I can’t help but take pleasure in the topsy-turvy feeling of being hit head-on by the beautifully simple possibilities that flow through younger mouths.  Mouths that know what THEY like to eat, and with taste buds unencumbered by creativity-stifling notions of what-goes-with-what and why.  And, I must admit, why not?

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