In for the Winter

I love semester break. As a college instructor, it allows me to get more time to sleep in (if the dogs let me), re-commit to my exercise routine (I never really left it, just don't have enough time to do as many sessions as I'd like), and cook. Since I became a vegetarian right about the time this past semester took off, I haven't had nearly as much time to experiment with new recipes this past two months and change as I'd like, and especially since my cookbook retinue has just about doubled since then as well.

Over break I plan to spotlight a few of my new favorite recipes and cookbooks, as well as hone my repetoire. This week I am planning to cook through several recipes of seitan and compare, as well as start working on a little project of mine... collecting all my favorite, regular recipes in a binder for easy access. Each recipe has to be time tested (cooked at least 3 times) before landing a slot.

Today I'm making my favorite veggie split pea soup, a recipe from Robin Robertson's Vegetarian's Meat and Potatoes Cookbook, with a side of Brussels sprouts. Mmmmm. Both of these are new favorites from this year as well.

Favorites from 2010

I have done a lot of growing as a cook and a person over the course of this year. I discovered I actually liked vegetables. And salad. I became a vegetarian. I lost 17 pounds. I started doing theatre again after an absence from the footlights of over 13 years. I've taught some of my favorite classes so far and grown as a professor. I got a new puppy. It's been a grand year.

Yet since this is The Picky Gourmet and not The Picky Actor or Picky Prof, I've decided to recap some of my favorite new dishes that I've picked up this year.

Today I'm starting with what might be my favorite new comfort dish that I discovered this year which is as healthy as it is tasty, Colorful Kale Salad.

I've written before that my hubby and I decided this year to purchase a share in a CSA for the first time, and I learned a lot from doing so. I was forced to find recipes to make use of veggies I may not have decided to bring home on my own, and sometimes more than one or two recipes, in the case of veggies that seemed to come by the pound or the bushel. This is one of those recipes.

The original recipe came from a book called Greens, Glorious Greens by Joanna Albi and Catherine Walthers. It is a great little book that I found a variety of recipes for the generous greens I got this May and June, but Colorful Kale Salad, with a few tweaks, has by far seen the most action in my regular kitchen rotation. I now wonder how I ever lived without kale.

You start out with a large, flat and shallow pan. I use a cup or so of garlic broth, but the recipe uses water. I find that the garlic broth adds just a little extra depth of flavor, though when they were coming in our share too, I used a cut up garlic scape in water. Boil the water, and put in it the corn from about 1 cob and 1/2 cup of shredded or matchstick carrots. Place the lid on the pan and let it steam and simmer for 5 minutes. Then lift the lid, and place about 3 1/2 to 4 cups of kale on top, place the lid back down, and let it steam for 4 minutes. When it is done, serve right away with a slotted spoon to allow any leftover broth to remain in the pain, and sprinkle sea salt on the top to taste. This really makes enough for 2 or 3 as a side dish, but I put it all into a mixing bowl and eat it all at once. It's comforting, and cooked without added fat.

Kale has become a common ingredient in my kitchen, and although at first I thought I'd be overwhelmed by the stems I collected and froze to add to veggie stock, which I make home made weekly, I also discovered that my dogs love them too. When I cook kale they gather around my feet hoping for scraps. Any stems I reserve for stock which are left on the counter are liable to be stolen from that counter the moment my back is turned.

That is probably my favorite new dish of the year, especially when considering the nutrient to calorie ratio, but as I continue to reminisce, who knows what dishes might appear?

Changes

It wasn't a tough decision to make, and looking back, it seems as if I was headed there all along. About a month and a half ago, I became a vegetarian.

How is this a pre-ordained path? I'll re-examine for you some of the steps that led me here. Keep in mind that I'm a picky eater to begin with. There have been a long list of things that I don't eat. I don't like eggs, and will only ate them when they disappeared into a baked good. Most times, I don't like ground beef. Chicken is often prepared in very boring, tasteless ways. I hate fish. I don't like sausage, and refused to try things that have sausage in it.

Additionally, I knew that animal products are generally high in fat, lower in nutrient density, and combine that with the poverty I experienced in my twenties, I am not as experienced in cooking meat, and tried to add to my anorexic cooking skills and repertoire with vegetables more than with meat. I did this by venturing into vegetarian, and even vegan cooking. I owned no fewer than 4 or 5 vegetarian/vegan cookbooks when I went veggie, and already was experienced enough to have favorites out of each book. My CSA membership this summer took me a bit further into these experiments as well, forcing me to cook more with veggies.

Finally, I love animals. I love my dogs. One of my hobbies is reading books about dog behavior and psych, and a lot of these books also add info about the intelligence, emotions, etcetera, concerning other animals including the kinds of animals that we eat in the standard American diet. This has slowly added to my knowledge of those animals, simmering away at my conscience. I read a couple books about pigs in particular. But when I read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safron Foer this fall, I finally could not take it any more. The explicit passages about the common practices in slaughterhouses and the factory farming industry pushed me the rest of the way. As I sat crying about how live pigs are tortured by slaughterhouse workers, it was time. I became a vegetarian.

I have been experimenting with more new recipes, getting more new books, and learning a lot about nutrition as well as cooking in general. I've dropped another couple of pounds. I've learned about the American food supply system things that I wish I didn't know. But as I look back on the last few weeks, I don't miss meat. I've cut eggs out of my diet as well, and am still eating cheese and sour cream, but I'm trying to eat less of them, and attempting to find alternatives as much as I can. I'm not ready to be vegan yet, but I'm doing something now rather than nothing at all. I'm glad to have a kinder diet, a healthier diet, a greener diet.

Addict

Various people will attest to it- for many years, I was a Taco Bell addict. It all started innocently enough, a bean burrito here, a bean burrito there. My mom would sometimes bring me one when I worked evenings at the thrift bakery and I'd open a package of Frito chips to eat with it. I'd squeeze out the middle and then use all but the thin layer of beans, cheese, and red sauce left in the tortilla as a dip for my chips. It was lovely. In college, one of my meals every day was one of these, with a Dr. Pepper, maybe two burritos (and sometimes, maybe two of my day's meals.) Maybe this seems a bit excessive, but it was a cheap meal (usually under 2 dollars), I found it tasty, and as time has gone on, I have even discovered I may be genetically pre-disposed to Taco Bell addiction. My uncle and grandfather are both big addicts as well, my grandfather even is known by name at his regular store. Needless to say, my family weren't going to give me an intervention.

After moving to a house and starting a graduate school many miles from the nearest Taco Bell, my Bell meals went down to 3-4 a week, sometimes less. I had just gotten married, and along with it received all the attendant kitchen gadgets, some new cook books, and even a bit of Suzy Homemaker leaning that made me feel that I should cook more. It didn't hurt that my new kitchen was bright, beautiful, and three times the size of that in my apartment, a kitchen that was so small I couldn't open the fridge door from some angles. Of course, there was the 7-week frozen fried chicken addiction which also distracted me from the Bell, but that is another story.

As time went on, I kept to a 3-4 Taco Bell meals a week regular schedule, phasing in and out of other food addictions. Bread Company vegetable soup. Trader Giotto's cheese pizza. Trader Ming's mandarin chicken. English muffin pizzas. Homemade Red Lobster cheddar biscuits. But change was in sight, no matter how unexpected. I started (after a divorce, of course) to date a man who could cook, and did. He knew a little something about cooking, and used quality ingredients.

At first this inspired dissatisfaction in me; my old stand by foods no longer tasted very good to me, and as of yet, we did not live together, so I didn't have an in-house cook to replace those foods with something better full time. This meant that I started cooking new recipes for myself more often, inspired by the boyfriend, now Husband, to use these quality ingredients and more healthful options. When we finally married and moved in to our new house with our lovely kitchen, this helped inspire me even further. Since we married, I believe I've only gone to Taco Bell a handful of times, and those times were when I didn't pack a lunch for work. They weren't very satisfying. Since we bought our house over a year ago, I don't think I've been to Taco Bell at all.

The happiest part of the story, is that I've found my replacement for my Taco Bell fix, and a much more satisfying and healthy one. In Viva Vegan by Terry Hope Romero, the Drunken Beans are an excellent filling for a home-made bean burrito. Toss it on a tortilla with a little sour cream and a veggie side dish, and this is a quick meal I can stand behind. The recipe takes all day to make (mostly sitting back and letting the beans cook time), and involves pre-making some seitan chorizo, but the quantity yielded is enough for me to make about 30 burritos, something that was very helpful when I was heading into tech week with the show I am currently in. It's a five minute dinner; reheat beans in mic, heat tortillas, and then eat. It's also a good alternative for when I've eaten soup for lunch or the last couple nights in a row since soup is usually what I eat for dinner if I'm busy.

Asian Dinner

Somehow I feel a little wrong cooking a vegan or vegetarian recipe with a side of meat, but it happens a couple days a week now that I'm finding so many good recipes in vegetarian and vegan cookbooks like the collards in Vegan Soul Kitchen and the tamarind lentils I made tonight from Veganomicon that it happens more and more. As long as I'm eating healthier on the whole I don't think it's incredibly bad.

So, tonight's dinner was tamarind lentils, mentioned above, and one more Robin Miller pork recipe, hoisin pork chops. One dish was more Indian inspired, the other Chinese inspired. I used a few new ingredients tonight, which was interesting. Tamarind is a nice flavor, garam masala also helped to round out the spicy-sweet lentil dish, and hoisin sauce is a pleasure, at least mixed in with a little orange juice and balsamic vinegar.

So far I have discovered a lot of new foods, healthy foods, as I have experimented. Granted, I have not commented on them as such during the course of this blog yet, but my palate and nutrient base has been expanded. Instead of eating only one kind of green in two dishes (a soup and a salad that used baby spinach) now I also have several recipes for cabbage that I enjoy such as won ton soup and cayenne coleslaw, and citrus collards, as well as experimenting with mustard greens and kale. I enjoy a couple of tempeh recipes so far, with home-made barbecue sauce, and hoppin' john. I've been making my own vegetable stock almost every week to have it on hand, using collard stems and other basic ingredients, which has also been more fulfilling to used than the boxed stuff.

Husband and I are getting a share in a csa this summer, and the first box comes next week. I am even more excited about trying new recipes I wouldn't have thought of without getting some fresh from the farm. In addition, I've started to make a list of recipes I will be trying this summer so that I branch out even more, and don't have to look too far to find one that I've been interested in trying out.

I feel like worlds are opening up before me. For many years, when I would agonize over what to eat for dinner, and settle for Taco Bell, a baked potato, or cereal for dinner if I didn't have money for a frozen pizza or want to spend money on one from a pizzeria. Occasionally I would make meat loaf or spaghetti, or make dinner from a loaf of bread. I've been cooking for years, but it was usually confined to breads and deserts. Now, however, my horizons keep expanding further and further. I like more food than I thought, and I'm eating better, too.

Friday's Sins

I almost have a whole weekend of leftovers in the fridge at present. I shall conquer my Friday dinner experiment first.

Two of my favorite cookbooks are written by Robin Miller, who has a show on Food Network that I have not seen. Though I don't like her most recent book much (too many fish recipes) I make frequent use of Robin to the Rescue and Quick Fix Meals. My recipe for balsamic pork loin came from the first. I made it, in part, because it is a "morph it" recipe, in which one overmakes a main dish, such as pork loin, and freezes extra portions (or refrigerates,depending on how many days in the future you want to use it) to make an even quicker recipe later in the week. Wonton soup and pork sloppy joes both come from this recipe.

My side dish was stir-fried greens. It is a recipe from my vegan cookbook, Veganomicon. Should I feel bad I made a vegan dish with pork to go with it? It smelled good, and tasted good, but knowing this made me feel a little dirty as I ate my stir-fried kale.

The pork roast tasted better than the kale. The balsamic vinegar, honey, and mustard made a nice sauce, though I dropped the roasting pan, causing a minor mess. I did not lose the pork loin to the floor, but a good portion of the sauce splattered all over the kitchen, my shirt, and my hair. Even though I quickly grabbed a towel, my dog was also still able to help me clean up the mess as well. She liked the sauce.

She also liked the kale. Whenever I dropped a piece (as I was stirring vigorously, as I was chopping) she ate it off the ground lickety-split. I liked the kale as well, though the mirin, garlic, and oil were not as evenly distributed as I would have liked. The mirin really made it much tangier and less vegetative.

Mission Statement

Inspired by the film Julie and Julia, as well as the blog 101cookbooks.com and my own attempts to eat a larger variety of healthy foods while still catering to my particularly picky tastes, I have decided to venture out into the food world a little bit more and try new recipes from cookbooks I already own and from the internet.

Some ground rules, shaped by my particular tastes are as follows:

1. No fish. No matter how many times the nutrition and diet books recommend it, I don't like fish and have no interest in spending my limited calories on them.

2. No desserts or snacks. At present, I already like plenty of desserts, so I will be attempting to expand my main course, side dish, salad, and soup recipes, not desserts.

3. I would like to make sure at least half of the recipes are vegetarian or vegan.

4. Whole grains should be used in place of refined when possible; whole wheat pasta, brown rice, etc.

5. 95% of recipes should have calorie counting (as well as taste) in mind. I wouldn't mind learning some new special occasion or holiday meal every once in a while, but I'm already running as many miles a week as my knees will take. I want to create a sustainable, tasty, and healthy diet for myself.

I have lost about 5 lbs so far with my gowearfit and calorie counting, and I want to keep going for about 15 more, and then sustain my weight loss with healthy and tasty foods in the long term. I am not overly fond of vegetables, so I am hoping that this experiment will introduce new veggies into my diet, or find more ways of including veggies in general.

Since my husband also enjoys to cook, and since I already have a few healthy favorites, and since I'm in rehearsals for a play right now in addition to teaching 8 classes and running 18 miles a week and taking 4 kickboxing classes, you can expect that I will not be able to cook a new recipe every day of the week. My goal is 3 recipes a week, though I might share with you some of my old favorites, some weight loss and exercising experiences, and general life-ness.

Wish me luck! If you, too, have a favorite healthy meal or cookbook to recommend, let me know.