Prepping - Part 1

So I did a bunch of my shopping during the week and then rounded it out on Saturday morning with frozen vegetables and anything else that I had forgotten.

That included rye crackers (I went with Ryvita), shitake mushrooms, goat cheese and organic 65% dark chocolate, among other things.  I think buying the cheese made me happiest.

Until the protein for later in the week.  Would it be wild white fish, steak, lamb, venison, duck, chickpeas or egg white. Seriously?  Like those last two are even in the running.  I am going to pick steak since I have some nice organic grass fed beef in the freezer already.

Because we have a "long weekend" here in Canada on July 1, which happens to land on a Wednesday this year, I decided to only prep recipes for Days 1 and 2 on Sunday morning. Then I can cook a whole chicken on the rotisserie on Wednesday and do the roasted vegetables at the same time. Maybe all on the BBQ to save on clean up.

I am going follow Lyn Genet's food prep protocol which can be found here.

First off, I preped the Ginger Carrot soup.  All in it took me about 10 minutes to prep and chop the vegetables, then maybe another 2 minutes to assemble, then 25 minutes on the stove top (some of my larger carrot pieces were a little firm at 20 minutes) before I put all of the ingredients into the blender and puréed.

I did read on a number of blogs about The Plan that people found the soup too gingery so I decided to put my ginger into the soup in large coins so I could remove them before I puréed and then just add into my taste. Saves making something that I don't like the taste of later.

While the soup was cooking, I made the Spicy Coconut sauce everyone raves about.  All told start to finish the sauce takes about 20 minutes to prep and then cook.

I had about 5 minutes chopping and prepping time, then another 5 minutes sweating the onion and garlic in olive oil, then I added the coconut milk, sriracha, cinnamon and clove. I also added 1/2 a tsp of ginger just for a little variety and oomph, then I let it simmer for about 5 minutes to let the flavours meld.  The sauce is tasty but needs a little salt in my mind...sadly not this time.

Instead of adding salt, I tossed in a couple of kaffir lime leaves because I happened to have some in my freezer. They are one of my favourite ingredients and what gives Thai cooking its fragrant taste. Love them.  You can get them here from time to time in the regular grocery store I shop at called Loblaws but otherwise, I buy them at an Asian grocery store and put them in the freezer.  You can sometimes also find them dried but I find frozen preserves their flavour way better.

I will likely also add a bit of fresh basil or cilantro to whatever I am using the sauce on before I serve it as I really love the freshness that they add to anything.

So far, her the timing in her list is pretty spot on and I am pretty confident the way she has it structured that anyone with reasonable knife skills could get through all of this in the 70 minutes she says it takes.

Broccoli soup and Day 1 and 2 vegetables up next.