It's Not Easy Eating Greens (but it should be)

I love Dr. Andrew Weil, the integrative medicine guru.  Well, I love his philosophy and his recipes, which are based on mostly organic, mostly vegetarian, unprocessed foods.  Last Friday, he offered his 2011 newsletter for free through a download and I sat down and read every word.  And I made my shopping list as I was reviewing his recipes.  This gets a dietitian excited.  Marched myself to the indoor farmers market after work with the vision of cooking all day Saturday.  I may have been a little overly ambitious--picked out 8 recipes and color coded the page tabs (yeah, dietitians are like that)--but I made 6 items so far and plan to make the other 2 sometime before the remaining veggies go bad.

I laid out my beautiful, colorful veggies on the countertop to keep me focused.  I'll always remind you of the importance of fresh veggies in your diet.  Buzzwords like phytonutrients, fiber, antioxidants are all there in these plants.  You gotta eat this stuff, and, as we get to know each other better, I'll remind you to toss out that crappy food in your pantry and fridge.  Told you I was going to start speaking my mind.  So anyway, here's the celery, parsley, onions, garlic, potatoes, leeks, carrots, red pepper, beets, 2 kinds of 'shrooms, parsnip, turnip and cabbage.  Oops, the lemons aren't veggies, but they still look great in the pic.

I decided to try my hand at Dr. Weil's recipe for homemade broth for the first time, primarily to cut down on the amount of salt in the canned/boxed varieties.  The broth was then used in 2 of the other recipes.  Here's the pot of cut up veggies for the broth.  Pity that the cooked veggies get strained out when you're finished, so that you wind up with just the clear broth.  (But I munched on the cooked carrots from the mash while I continued cooking).

And, here's what was created from these glorious veggies...

So, even though it doesn't look like a lot of food here, there's good, nutritious, filling food.  Got 2 ½ extra quarts of vegetable broth to put in the freezer and use another time, cabbage & mushroom saute, roasted root veggies, a pot of mushroom barley soup (top right-hand corner of the pic) and roasted balsamic beets.   Everything was so de-lish.  And nu-trish.