MJ Monday: MJ Meals-Mediterranean Turkey Wraps

These wraps became a summertime staple for us last year. I keep a batch in the refrigerator nearly every week. They make a quick and easy lunch on the run. My husband will grab one before he heads out to a baseball game. I packed them when we went to our film festival last year, making for an easy, inexpensive lunch one of the days.

Here are the ingredients:
1/2 c. softened cream cheese
1/2 c. softened feta
1/4 c. Kalamata olive spread
a few generous dashes of onion powder
fresh chives
fresh oregano
spinach
8″ tortillas
good sliced turkey from the deli (not prepackaged national brand)

 

Mix together the room temperature cream cheese, feta (try to get out as many lumps as you can), Kalamata olive spread, onion power, snipped chives, chopped fresh oregano. (I love going to my garden and plucking the herbs I need).

 

 

Spread the mixture over all of a tortilla

Place a slice of turkey on one half of the tortilla.

Cover the turkey with spinach leaves

Starting with the turkey-spinach side, roll the tortilla as tightly as you can.

Wrap each rolled tortilla tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least two hours before eating.

They’ll last for a week in the fridge. So easy to grab and go.

The recipe makes as many wraps as it makes. It depends on how thick or thin you spread the cheese/olive/herb mixture. I usually get between five and seven wraps per batch. If you use larger tortillas, your yield will be less.

Enjoy!

MJ’s Monday–Meals: Asian Veggie Buddha Bowl

My friend Kris introduced me to the concept of Buddha Bowls. This recipe is my variation on one of hers.

I used quinoa instead of rice for my grain base.  Quinoa can be a pain to clean and cook, so when I discover this, I was ecstatic.

I also keep precooked chicken in the freezer for convenience.

Kris taught me about chopped Asian Salad, too.

Here’s how it goes.

Boil the quinoa according to package instructions.

In the meantime, open the bag of salad. Take the dressing from the kit and add it to a frying pan. Set aside the noodles and almonds. Add the rest of the salad to the frying pan and stir fry.

While the quinoa and salad cook, thaw the chicken in the microwave.

When the salad is nicely stir-fried, remove from the heat.

Drain the quinoa according to package directions.

Mix the quinoa, chicken, and stir-fried salad together in a large bowl.

Kris made a marvelous tahini-orange dressing for her version of this, but I have never been able to replicate her success with the recipe, so I use dressing from a bottle.

Mix well…

and serve. Top with the noodles and almonds from the salad kit if you’d like.


There you have it. An easy, filling meal in less than 30 minutes.

 

What’s in a Name?

I have all kinds of baby name books. I’ve always been fascinated by names. Even in elementary school, I would take name books out of the school library. There were a few pages of names in the back of my parents dictionary. They were in tatters because I studied the names so often. Even now, with the Internet and the great Social Security website for names, I still like to peruse books.

I just finished writing a book in which the heroine had two different names before I decided on a third.  Once I  had that name, the rest of the story flowed. I know several authors who have experienced the same phenomenon: until the character’s name is right, the writing goes poorly.

I knew I’d always have a difficult time naming my children, especially when my husband and I have such different tastes in names. If our second child had been a boy, I doubt very much he would have a name even now. Fortunately, she wasn’t.

When I was bearing children, we didn’t know the sex of the baby until it was born. ( I knew them, because of my dreams, but that’s another blog post.) We settled on a girl’s name almost immediately (and used it a couple of years later when our daughter was born–except we did give her a different  middle name). Agreeing on a boy’s name was challenge.  We had a list of criteria: the naming traditions of my husband’s culture; no names with multiple spellings (something that has haunted both my husband and me throughout our lives); Biblical names, but not one of the weird ones; not too popular, but not unique; names our children could use in the boardroom or on stage or on the spine of a book; something traditional.

My husband and I leafed through baby name books in stores. There was one that said the name Woody was the past tense of the name Willy. I cried. I also cried when I realized that if we had a son, no one would call him by is first name because our surname was  so easily converted to a guy nickname. My husband assured me only once did someone do that to him.

At the time I was pregnant, big corporations were purchasing naming rights to everything from massive sports complexes to Little League fields. My husband and I decided to name our baby, if it was a boy, after a college in exchange for an education. How would we approach these institutions of higher learning with our generous offer? My tears turned to giggles as we contemplated the names Canisius,  Cornell, and Colgate.

We finally settled on a good name: his grandfather’s name. We used my great-grandfather’s name for the middle name. Strong names. Manly names. Everything we wanted for our son.

 

 

 

#UpbeatAuthors: The Face of Perseverance

This is Laurence. He was once an intern at the TV station where I worked. Back then, we called him “L-Train.”

The next time I saw Laurence, he was manning the Breast Cancer Awareness Booth at the local baseball stadium. Passionately.  It seems a very good friend of his died of multiple carcinoma.  Remember the movie The Blues Brothers? The characters claimed they were on a mission from God. Well, that’s Laurence when it comes to breast cancer.

Most recently–for several years–Laurence collects bottles and cans for their five-cent deposit and donates the money to breast cancer research. He’s found a place that will give him six-cents for every can/bottle, one penny more than the state deposit. Laurence knows every penny counts.

Here’s an article from 2015.

And another from 2017, which talks about his connection to the Carol M. Baldwin Cancer Research Fund.

Laurence is serious. But he gets discouraged. I follow him on Facebook. There were incidents several years ago when he had a deal with a car-wash franchise to retrieve the bottles and cans customers tossed in the garbage. Yes, Laurence picks through garbage to retrieve every nickel he can.  Customers complained. Even after the management explained the situation, customers complained.  So Laurence couldn’t “scavenge” there any more.

In August, the Great New York State Fair happens. Laurence gets his signature pink cans into the fairgrounds for people to donate their cans and bottles. But people can’t read or don’t care. They toss dirty diapers and other disgusting bits of garbage into those pink cans. Laurence has to sift through the crap for every five cents. He has a room at the fair to store his daily take. In past years, it’s been broken into, his hard work stolen. This year someone damaged the lock trying to break in.

I took the above photo at a concert in July at the local amphitheater. Laurence and his team of volunteers went around the lawn seating area and retrieved as many bottles and cans as they could. When my husband and I handed Laurence our empty water bottles, he said, “Another six cents for cancer research. We going to beat cancer one bottle and can at a time.”

Sometimes, on Facebook, he lets his frustrations out. He says he’s going to quit. People mock him and are mean to him. They insult him. He gets discouraged. But he never quits.  He is not only the face of, but also the personification of perseverance.

 

 

 

 

Music in Our Schools

A co-worker, speaking of her daughter, once said: “It’s only band.” As in, “it’s not as important as <<insert name of sport. Any sport>>.”

I was livid. It’s that kind of attitude that’s behind funding cuts for arts in the public schools–funding cuts that that aren’t as deep when it comes to athletics.  All students need outlets. Not every outlet is physical. Painting and composing are as important as knocking down another player.

Research indicates that music education:

  • increases  IQ
  • improves spatial-temporal skills
  • improves test scores
  • helps develop language skills and reasoning
  • increases hand-to-eye coordination and other motor skills
  • pattern recognition

Band and chorus are as much a team activity as football or basketball…except no one ever suffered brain damage from playing a tuba or singing soprano.

Why shouldn’t the arts be funded as generously as athletics?