Cooking Dinner

About six weeks pre-op, I increased the amount of vegetables that I was eating in an effort to make sure that I was getting all of the vitamins and minerals that my body would need going into surgery.  I got bloods taken about a month before to confirm that everything was looking good.  Even though this wasn't a big concern to anyone but me, making sure that my body was as healthy as it could be just made sense.  I've always been a big fan of fresh food and I made the time to make sure that I was eating well every day.

I didn't eat this well while I was in hospital as they don't really cook with a large selection of anything fresh.  It was something that I really looked forward to coming home for.  Since I've been home, I'm getting back to my pre-op eating habits.  My favourite at the moment is a lot of stir fried vegetables with bean thread noodles.

One of the things that I missed out on yesterday was the stir fry that I had planned for dinner.  Since last week's market run wasn't very successful, I was craving a good fresh mix of vegetables and when I missed them on Friday night, they moved to Saturday.  That's actually a lot of days for me not to have a fix.   Now that it is winter, the selection is less and the quality isn't as good.  This week's shopping expedition was actually quite successful and I managed to get a good selection.



The interesting thing that I found when I was out shopping were purple carrots. I thought that I would give them a go as apparently they are the new super food.  I'm not sure where I heard that and even if it isn't completely true, I'm a big fan of using as many colours of vegetables as I can when I'm making stir fry.  They feature front and centre in the veges that I pulled out to cook dinner with tonight.   I was a little surprised when I cut them to see the white rings.  I'm not quite sure what I expected.  They taste like orange carrots.  More like baby carrots than the larger ones.  They are a quite sweet.

I used the cutter that I normally do when I add carrot to stir fry.  It kinds of cuts them like little noodles.  I added some regular carrot in as well just to see how different that they tasted after they had been cooked.  I used chilli, garlic, ginger, soy and oyster sauce as I often do at the moment.  I'm a huge fan of bean vermicelli as well which I added in.  The weird thing is that the carrots released more liquid than orange carrots do and it turned the sauce a bit purple.  My noodles also ended up a bit purple too.  

The whole thing was just a little bit too sweet.  I'm not sure if I overcooked them, used too much or just needed more chilli and soy to balance the flavour.  I have leftovers for tomorrow that I might try to fix as I don't think that I want it again as it is.   It will be interesting to see how the flavours come through overnight.  It might be even sweeter tomorrow.  I hope not!  If it doesn't work out this time, I have two more still in the fridge so I can try again from scratch later in the week.

[Edit:  I recooked with extra chilli and garlic and it took away enough of the sweetness.  Noodles and mushrooms were very purple today]