Weekend Update, April 20, 2014

"A goal is not always meant to be reached,

 it often serves simply as something to aim at." 

Bruce Lee

Little dreams get a bad rap. We're told (and we tell our children)  to dream big way before we understand the concept of metaphor, before we understand that dream is a word that can  mean a lofty and somewhat improbable goal, and not just the images thrown together by your sleeping brain. Which is a little confusing, because when you're little, the wrong kind of big dream can wake you up in a sweat, clutching your most heroic stuffed animal. When you're little, big dreams are sometimes awesome-

but mostly awful.

But then we grow up, and we understand that what ever dreaming big is, that's what we're supposed to do, and that dreaming big has nothing to do with sleeping in til noon,

(big sleeping being one of the ironic enemies
of big dreaming.)

 The loftier and more ludicrously unattainable the better. Because no one dreams of doing the diabolical-

well, almost no one

and no one dreams of achieving the reasonable. Well almost no one. It's not that I don't love the idea of being tall, brunette, comfortably famous and fabulously wealthy, but that's not the stuff my dreams are made of. As an example, I offer the small but worthy hope which has often begun my day:

please help me not hurt anyone
with my hands or my mouth or
heavy machinery.

Tiny but attainable. A goal that bite-sized means that at the end of the day, no matter what moved from the to-do list to the undone list, one can crawl into bed at night (no matter how many mountains of laundry one had to climb to get there) and assess daily success with a single question:   No one irreparably harmed? Well then:

Goooaaaallll!!!!!!

Or take a bigger wish- the wish to stay healthy and strong enough to accomplish a million dreams. That wish was broken into dinner sized pieces, and I dreamed last Tuesday of a week of fast, inexpensive, healthy meals that would power us through all we wanted to achieve.  It seemed like such a simple dream too. Here's what happened:

First up, Alton Brown's slow cooker pork chops. A great choice for a busy day. Or it would have been, if I had read the recipe. The recipe that says the pork chops ought to sit in the salt solution overnight. Too late for that, a few hours of brining would have to do. And the recipe calls for dried apples. Which I had forgotten to buy. Ok, there were two apples in the fridge. No time for searing, and no beef broth. The only interesting cooking type liquid in the house was a can of coconut milk. Coconut milk it is...

and do you know what?
They were great!!! What a forgiving and flexible recipe!

And I'd forgotten to make the quinoa ahead of time. Fortunately, this method of cooking quinoa is one of the fastest and most straightforward I've found. Once dinner was on the plate, I realized that the real objective wasn't a recipe, it was a healthy, yummy, inexpensive meal. So, you know-

gooooaaaallll!

After that, the week's tiny dinner-plate sized goals came together a little more easily.

adding radishes to black beans and rice!
Amazing!  

The black beans were so good in fact that we had, and this was a little hard to believe, not enough black beans for the bean part of the pork and black bean tacos. So they turned into just plain

  coconut lime tacos

When we have leftover pork anything except-for-ham-and-bacon, it usually gets covered with barbeque sauce and ladled onto a bun. And that's great, but these tacos are a terrific alternative- very simple sort of street taco stand tacos, with a filling so flavorful that mounds of toppings like salsa and sour cream are overkill. We'll be doing this again.

And if one of your goals is to be energetic and healthy, and your goal-to-get-you-to-the-goal goal is to cut out some fat without depriving yourself of flavor, try this:

Salmon on angel hair pasta with Dijon Butter Sauce.
It takes longer to type than it took to make.
and that sauce!! so much flavor for so little fat!  I can't
wait to try it on broccoli.

There was enough leftover quinoa for the quinoa and brown rice bowl with vegetables and tahini, but no leftover brown rice, and none in the pantry. So, dinner turned into quinoa and quinoa bowl with vegetables and tahini. Because a trip to the shop would have taken longer than it took to cook up dinner, and almost as long as it took to say the name of dinner.  Here's what this super complicated sounding meal really is- it's a veggie stirfry on quinoa, with a tahini sauce (a little like hummus) instead of a soy sauce. 

and avocados. Because avocados are for always.

But what to do with the left over leftover quinoa? Breakfast, that's what! And before you eewww at the idea of something so dinnery making the move to mornings, think of how wonderful it is when breakfast invades  dinner territory. And then read this very fun list of 24 ways to eat quinoa for breakfast. Since there were two cooked sweet potatoes, some kale and a stack of tortillas in the fridge, we brunched on Kale and Sweet Potato Breakfast burritos- and they were the surprise hit of the week:

Vegetarians rejoice! A great tasting portable, protein packed meatless meal.
Carnivores, you're right. It would be even better with bacon.

Even when I dropped the ball, these dinners made a touchdown- the slow cooker pork, the quinoa, the butter mustard sauce- all of them relatively easy, satisfying and inexpensive ways to wind down one day and fuel up for the next.  
And this week, I hope you have time to celebrate
the little goals, the daily dreams.

and that you hold in your hand a few of the
things you're reaching for.
I hope it's a week you're proud of.
And if it's not,
then I hope for you the courage to dream deeper
to reach deeper than the voices that tell you
what your dreams ought to be,

and name the dreams that are.