This morning for breakfast we had Pillsbury crescent rolls and bananas. The kids drank their usual rice milk, and I had coffee with coconut milk creamer and a bit of Starbuck’s Vanilla Spice flavoring.  Again, this is a typical breakfast for us.

Lunch was the highlight of today’s meals.  It was cold this morning, but by the time lunch came around the weather was just gorgeous, so we turned lunch into a picnic in the backyard.  We had falafel from Trader Joe’s, pita bread, grape tomatoes, and a cucumber-dill yogurt sauce.  For the yogurt sauce I placed all the items below in a food processor and pureed until smooth:

• 3 tablespoons of plain coconut yogurt
• A 5 inch piece of peeled and seeded cucumber
• one clove of garlic
• 2 tablespoons of fresh dill
• 2 tablespoons of parsley
• The juice of ½ of a lemon
• Salt and pepper

This meal was a hit with the kids, especially the sauce. They dipped everything in it.  Then they came up with their own sauce.

Zachary bit the top off of one of his tomatoes, squeezed the tomato juice/pulp on his pita bread, and declared he made his own sauce.  It wasn’t long before the twins caught on, then all three were doing it.  The wind picked up halfway through lunch, so we also enjoyed dandelion seeds and blossoms off the apple tree with our food as well.

I don’t know what I was thinking for dinner.  I had it in my mind that I was going to make black bean patties, sweet potato fries, and confetti corn.  Then I decided it would be cute to put the black bean patties on a bun to make it look like a hamburger.  Sometimes I make things more complicated than they need to be.  Instead of buying fries or chips, I decided to make them.  Dinner took me nearly 2 hours to get on the table.  Next time I will buy the sweet potato chips or fries, and perhaps prepare the black bean patties earlier in the day, and cook them in the evening.

I used 3 tablespoons of the leftover coconut yogurt from lunch as a replacement for the egg whites in the recipe. I also added cracker crumbs to make the patties stiffer, and coated them in flour instead of cornmeal.  The last time I made this recipe we all agreed we didn’t like the texture of the cornmeal.  I didn’t do the rice with the recipe this time, but it is delicious as well, and you can easily substitute olive oil, corn oil, or any other type of vegetable oil for the butter.

Making the sweet potato chips did bring me back down memory lane.  After digging the sweet potatoes up out of the garden, Grandma Ease with clean them, peel them, and slice them with her very not sharp knife with the piece of the blade broken.  I’d steal raw sweet potatoes out of the bowl and she would swat at my hands like I was a fly.  Hehehehe! She’d fried them and put them on paper towels to get the grease off.  We would eat them piping hot sprinkled with a little salt.  By the time she got to the last batch everything she had cooked previously was gone.

Dinner was okay.  The patties were much better without the bun. It was just too much of the same texture with the bun.  I should have stuck with my original plan.  The twins cleaned their plates twice and Zach ate everything except a tiny bit of his burger.  The burgers were made with the black bean patties, dinner rolls, tomato slices, and bbq sauce.  They were served with a side of sweet potato chips and a pickle.

Let’s see what tomorrow has in store!