Just food...

Having being home late every evening for about 3 months due to my daughter's play rehearsals and my own extra work; my meals were planned ahead and quickly executed to avoid falling asleep in my kitchen.
I want to apologized for not writing down the recipes; I'm what my friends called a "bit of this and a bit of that" cook.
When it comes to the foods that I prepare for my family, I try my best to use local products from either the local markets or organic products from my local Publix or Whole Foods stores.

This is my vegetables mix; you will see a similar plate of vegetables with all of the meals I prepared this during this week. It was easy to make and I had all the vegetables on hand so I didn't have to go to the store.
The avocados were on sale at my local market and because I'm the only one in my house that eats them they last me a while. They are kept in the refrigerator until the morning that I'm going to use cook with them.
I bathed my salad in olive oil, dry and fresh cilantro. My youngest daughter had a simpler salad without the avocado or all the cilantro.

I don't use already made pastas sauces,  because I grew up making my own with my mom.
As a young teen I was terrible about helping my mom in the kitchen. Once she left the dishes for me to do and they were in the sink for 3 1/2 days before I decided to go ahead and washed them, and it was mainly because she hid all of the other plates and I didn't have a clean plate to served myself with!

These extra wide whole grain noddles are cheaper than the white ones and taste so much better when you add your seasoning to it.
One thing that I did and do love to make with my mom is preparing sofrito (a mixture of cilantro, garlic, unions, salsa, oregano, black pepper, salt, recao leaves and some ajies dulces -semi sweet small peppers).

Another bunch of vegetables cut into small pieces and overflowing the salad bawl.
It was a serving of two, so you can imagine how full we got with all of our greens and wide noddles!

I use my mom's sofrito mix with some Goya tomato sauce to created my salsa for this whole grain linguine.

This night I cooked my vegetables with some organic balsamic vinegar, 100% extra virgin olive oil, a bit of black pepper and roast vegetables spices blend from my local grocery store.

We ran out of brown rice and I didn't wanted to go the store so we ate Uncle Ben's long grain white rice. I seasoned it with dry cilantro, 5 pieces of garlic cut extra small, olive oil and small amount of sea salt.

This was another non-meat dinner; with the rice and this two side dishes.

By the way, I always prepared the dinner the same night. We rarely eat left overs and I make the salads and vegetables the same night as well. If there are any left overs I take them to work with me for my next day lunch.

The red beans were in my refrigerator in a pot with water since the night before so they faster to cook. I only buy Goya dry beans; again I don't like to use the canned ones.
This day, I did visited my local supermarket in order to get some brown rice, some organic meat and coleslaw to add to my veggies.

We finished the week with some organic chicken slowly cooked in water, Cajun spices seasoning and a pound (just kidding!!) of fresh garlic.
This is cheap mac and cheese from the box; both of my kids refuse to eat the organic or the whole grain ones!
I added butter, a small amount of fresh garlic, pepper and some milk to the box mixture to give it my own touch.

This is from my table to yours; I hope that you have a great, healthy, fun and stomach filling week!
With Love,