Boost Your Breakfast with Veggies!

Cooking with veggies is our specialty. Not only do we create new products based around servings of veggies, but we also cook this way at home. We challenged ourselves for an entire week to boost everything we made/prepared with veggies! While lunch and dinner are easy meals to get in those veggies, we thought we would share a few unexpected breakfast ideas you can easily make at home.

Take our 1 week veggie boost challenge! Here are some breakfast ideas:

-pumpkin pancakes, freeze and eat on school days

-yogurt parfait with pureed carrots, we especially liked this with vanilla yogurt

-oatmeal with beet puree mixed in at the end

-toast with cinnamon-sugar and pureed yam spread

-breakfast burrito with a broccoli-egg and cheese scramble

-homefries with herbs and riced cauliflower (sauté potatoes until almost cooked and throw riced   cauliflower in the pan for the last 5 minutes)

-if you can get your hands on dehydrated carrots or sweet potatoes try steeping it with your tea!

Food of the Month - Cauliflower

Cauliflower is the ugly duckling of the vegetable world. To some, she is the bland white, knobby thing that ruins the frozen vegetable medley that we all keep stocked in our freezer. Or maybe she’s that horrible side dish that comes boiled and under-seasoned when you have dinner at Aunt Margaret’s house.  But to us, she’s SO much more.  All you have to do is take off her glasses and add a little lip-gloss and POW, she can be your new favorite vegetable. If you can’t already tell, this month we’re celebrating cauliflower, one of our favorite fall/winter vegetables.

First things first, why eat cauliflower? Not only is it totally de-lish, it’s a member of the cruciferous veggie family. Like it’s brothers and sisters (broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage and kale), it’s loaded with Vitamin C and K, folate, fiber and B6.  Cauliflower also helps the body naturally detoxify and has a strong anti-inflammatory effect on the body.

Now, how do we glam-ify this nutritionally packed veggie?  Here are our top three favorite way to make cauliflower kid/husband friendly.

When you turn a head of cauliflower into this famous junk food staple; you’ll totally turn heads. Check out our delicious recipea for BBQCauliflower wings. They look and taste just like your favorite finger food but they’re all veggie, have a perfectly crunchy outside and a deliciously “meaty” inside and are totally gluten-free.

When you turn cauliflower into this fancy Italian dish, you’ll leave your family singing, “when the moon hits your eye like a big dish of RISOTTO…that’s amore-eee.”  Simply dice up a half a head of cauliflower (dice into very small, rice like pieces) and add to your favorite risotto recipe. Most recipes call for you cook the onions and garlic then add your veggies (before you add the Arborio rice), this is when you’ll add the cauliflower. You want it to cook down and become creamy like the rice. Use a large pot because this will give you more servings of risotto. Most people won’t even know that you’ve replaced a good amount of the main ingredient with a veggie!

And our final cauliflower recommendation is something you don’t have to make yourself. Our FAVORITE way to eat this nutrient powerhouse is via our delicious AND fat-free cauliflower VEGGIE WEDGIES.  A serving of Peas of Mind’s cauliflower veggie fries contain 2 servings of veggies, are gluten-free, vegan and can be prepared in about 12 minutes.  If you want to spice up a bag of fries, check out our garlic fry recipe and get ready for your little ones to ask for seconds and thirds!

BBQ Cauliflower Wings

This month’s reci-pea we are taking an all American classic and transforming it into a meatless, low-fat, gluten-free dish that packs in the protein as well as servings of veggies.  Time to cut up some carrots, celery and grab your favorite creamy dressing because we’re making BBQ Cauliflower Wings!

In this main course (or side dish) we replace the chicken with cauliflower, the batter with gluten-free chickpea flour and we bake it up instead of deep-frying.  Not only is this reci-pea easy and quick to make, the preparation methods are very kid friendly.  So grab your little ones, apron up and get ready to enjoy a healthy version of this American classic.

Ingredients:

1 head of cauliflower

2 cups garbanzo bean flower (also known as Chickpea flour)

1 1/3 cup water

1/2 tsp salt

1 Tbsp garlic powder 

1 Tbsp onion powder

2 tsp paprika

1 cup of your favorite barbecue sauce

Method:

Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees. Cut cauliflower into large bite sized pieces (about the size of BBQ wings). Combine garbanzo bean flower, water, salt, garlic powder, onion powder and paprika in a large bowl and mix together until smooth (you want it to be the consistency of pancake batter).  Cover a large baking tray with parchment paper.  Dip cauliflower pieces into batter so that it’s fully covered and lay flat on tray.  Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown.  Pull out of the oven and check the texture of the cauliflower piece; it should be crispy, if it’s still gooey put back in the oven for another 5-10 minutes.

Once out of the oven, let cool for 5 minutes then place the cooked cauliflower wings into a large bowl. Pour the BBQ sauce over the wings and mix gently with your hands. Serve with cut up carrots, celery and your favorite creamy dressing! Serves 4.