three bowls

I keep waiting until I have a block of time to try to post something substantial but it's looking like that will be June.  So instead, here are a few things that I have learned/tried over recent weeks that have been making the meal-making process tastier and/or easier. 

While the first phase of the Cooking It Myself project was solely focused on the cooking part (no matter what the dish was), now I am back to wanting to also incorporate focusing on making healthy choices back into the mix.  In other words: less risotto. 

And - although I'll still always probably love me a cook-a-thon - sheer necessity has meant I have had to choose less time-consuming projects.

Cooking with these objectives (health and time) normally feels like a major buzzkill, and a shortcut to frustration or boredom and off-wagon-falling.

But somehow this so far has had both an enjoyable process AND results, so here are some of the things that have been working.

1. Quinoa makes a decent replacement for brown rice in a stir fry.  I am not a fan of the slightly bitter flavor of quinoa, but due to its rep as a lower-carb carb, I keep buying it and making myself eat it. 

Usually I look forward to a brown-rice stir-fry dinner because it's a little sweet, so the combo of sweet and starchy satisfies my carb-obsessed brain. 

But I somehow had the discipline with my last stir-fry (salmon, broccolini and portobello) to make myself use the already-cooked quinoa I had on hand instead.  With all the teriyaki flavors, the meaty mellowness of the mushroom and salmon, the quinoa was able to fulfill the textural role of brown rice without asserting that nasty bitter edge.  So this is one way to cut some carbs and up the protein without going whole hog. 

Quinoa also freezes well so it can be at the ready for this quite easily if you make a big batch.  I usually make it in a rice cooker, but tried this double steaming method (the parts up until the flavoring is added) with also nice results.

2. Oh right: soup!

A little while back, David Lebovitz posted that he had made soup during a fit of procrastination, and, he wrote, "I realized that I really like to make soup. But later remembered that I really don't like eating it."

At the time, I was all, "OMG, me too!  I've never admitted that to myself!"  So many vats of soup carefully prepared and poured into single serving freezer containers, only to be met by an utter lack of enthusiasm every time I wandered to the fridge in search of a meal.

But apparently, whatever knocked me on the head that's making me like vegetables is also making me wildly passionate for soup lately.  I think it was that unsuccessful Sunburst Squash and Mushroom Soup.  I made it again, with extra potato and mushroom in place of the sunburst squash, and rather than tell you in descriptive words how good it was, I will give you this anecdote. 

I came home late from a weekday evening class at the store, a time during which I am normally exhausted yet oddly wired and usually want something like a glass of wine (or three) or cigarette or entire pint of ice cream to help calm me down since I need to get to bed to be up for the other job soon. 

Instead, I found myself rooting in the fridge, saw the leftover mushroom and potato soup and said, with utterly sincere enthusiasm "Oooo!!  Soup!!" 

To sum up: an itch that previously only some kind of vice can scratch was sated with soup made out of vegetables.

What is also so great about it - especially when you are trying to watch what you are eating - is, of course, all that liquid which is so filling without being, say, a bunch of bread or something.

I also made this Soba and Spinach Soup from Epicurious and despite the lack of anything sounding even remotely sexy or sinful in the ingredient list (it's a roll call of virtue), it was utterly yummy, especially along with that admittedly giant piece of teriyaki salmon there.

3. Oh right!  Protein!!

I think part of why I have felt confused for years about what the heck I should be eating is because years of vegetarianism combined with a distaste for vegetables meant that my life was one big pot of beans and starches.  Ergo, meal preparation was generally this multi-step process, lots of chopping, simmering, long-cooking, etc. Although I've been eating seafood for years now, I am still not enough in the animal protein mindset to really make it the centerpiece of a meal. 

However, in recent weeks, I've been looking super haggard.  I'm no great beauty, but everyone has their own personal baseline of expectation for attractiveness and I have been falling way short.  Everytime I passed a mirror, it was one big WTF?  How was there such a rapid decline in just the past few weeks?  Is it all over?  Is this some kind of lifestyle thing or am I like perma-haggard now?

I started thinking again of trying the Dr. Perricone ("Wrinkle Cure" dude) "Three-Day Facelift," which mainly involves avoiding simple carbs and eating lots and lots and lots of salmon.  Turns out I am too scattered right now to really follow a program but I can at least try to eat more salmon.  QFC had a great price on Coho or something, so I stocked up and started having it for dinner every night.

Do you know what you have to do with a piece of protein?  Cook it!  That's it!  I rinse it off, stick it in a pre-heated cast-iron skillet, throw some salt and pepper on it and walk away.  Five minutes later, I stick under the broiler for a couple minutes and it's done.  One major part of the meal, finito! 

IT'S ONLY ONE INGREDIENT!

I can't get over how much easier this makes my life.  I made a little batch of this delicious and super simple Mustard-Dill Vinaigrette one night, stuck that in the fridge, and used it to top several pieces of simple pan-roasted salmon for a couple of nights.  Total fancy-times dinner taste, total fast-food times effort.  I just can't get over it. 

4. Investing in ingredients really does help.

This whole culinary journey started a couple years ago when book clubber Carolyn looked in my fridge and told me I had no food.  I had no idea I had no food. I thought I had food.  I had like six cans of Progresso soup in the pantry and some yogurt in the fridge.  Isn't that food?

And I would wonder what was wrong with me that I didn't have the discipline to eat my assigned can of Progresso soup every night and would instead succumb to the siren song of Take Out or Fast Food.

For the past year or so, I've been buying slightly willy-nilly every time I go to an ethnic and/or fancy grocery store.  Some dried chilies.  Dried mushrooms.  Sherry.  Bunches of different vinegars.  Noodles.  My pantry was super-stocked by the time I started the CIY Project back in Feb or whenever.

And now I am reaping the reward.  When I look at many recipes now, I am not having to make page-long grocery lists because so often I have the majority of the stuff on hand.  Having the stuff on hand makes me about 90% more likely to move forward with actually making the thing. 

This is something my boss talks about at the store a lot, but like many things people tell you, you have to sometimes actually see the results yourself before you truly get the a-HA! epiphany.

5. If you really want to learn to cook, force yourself to cook as often as you can for at least a discrete amount of time.

I was cleaning out my freezer the other day, and came across the packets of disappointing vegetarian jambalaya I made way back at the start of the CIY Project. 

I felt like I was looking at a kindergarten project or something.  I couldn't imagine ever picking that same recipe to make now, with everything that I learned during those intensive weeks when I had to make every single thing I ate. 

During that time I feel like I learned a lot about how to tell from looking at a recipe whether or not it was going to be satisfying, how complicated the process would wind up being and how much bang for the buck of my effort I am going to get out of the whole thing.

It's not to say that I know a lot in comparison to, say, someone who has been cooking since they were a kid or even just for most of their adult life.

But the amount that I learned and the skills I gained in that short intensive period of time, compared to any growth over previous years of clumsily attempting to learn how to feed myself...it's night and day.

Cooking is starting to be less of a major daunting project and more of a quick thing to do to give myself interesting and tasty sustinence so I can get on with my day.

So now, with my move back to trying to be concerned about overall caloric intake, the nutritional value of what I'm eating, etc., I actually feel like maybe now, at my advanced age, I might actually have the skills and basic know-how to finally figure out how to keep myself fed in the best way possible.

On tonight's episode of Top Chef (here's the recap)...

Spike Mendelsohn to Nikki Cascone when Dale Talde and Lisa Fernandes tell them to buy the rapini: "What's rapini?"

Me, waving my hand excitedly at the screen: "I know!!  I know!!  I got to know it!!"

Below are some other recent Top Chef articles I didn't have the chance to post last week. 

• Top Chef Episode 4.8 Gourmet or No Way
• Interview with Eliminated Chef Mark Simmons (sadly, no audio)
• Top Chef Episode 4.8 Recap

I have been too busy to otherwise post, but I am happy to report getting to know some other vegetables via cooking and eating if not researching/posting.  Made friends with kale!  Today I caught myself thinking "Ooo yum, I have some broccolini in the fridge!"  Was I knocked on the head and just don't remember it?  What other explanation could there be for this weird turn of events?

I don't want to say this too loud.

Normally, any too-enthusiastic declaration of a new healthy habit usually jostles said healthy behavior right out of place.  It breaks off to roll under the couch, never to be seen again behind a dusty collection of diet coke bottles, single stick cigarette containers and empty pints of ice cream.

BUT...(come closer and I will whisper this in your ear) I think might be turning a corner with vegetables. 

Friday is the day that I get to see what is coming in my produce delivery and I spent a few happy minutes playing around with what was in my cart like...like I was shopping for summertime espadrilles or something.

And so today my bounty arrived:

 

Very exciting! 

Until I realized that every single item (other than the onions, lemons and pear) also came with its own opportunity to highlight how little context I have for fruits and vegetables.  (Oh, wait, I guess I don't have any questions for the rabe, because we've met, and I already know what I'm doing with the whole lot of it - yum!)

For example:

• Nantes Carrots: Soooo...what's your deal?  I put you on the list because if I have eaten you, I didn't pay attention. I think you are supposed to be sweeter than regular carrots, but so what?  I mean, like are you special and ergo should be saved for some kind of special carrot dish and would it be wasting your specialness to put you to work in a stock?  
• Kumquats: For serious, I am supposed to eat the whole thing?  I have before; why can't I accept that as correct?
• Kale: Crap, what am I going to do with you?  I mean, I have a ton of options, but what is the best way for me to make peace with your...kale-y-ness? I need some equivalent to the broccoli rabe bulgur recipe, a kale recipe that will make me fall madly in love with you right away. 
• Rhubarb: Do I even have time to deal with you this week?  How long will you last?  Are you going to force me to make a pie crust or will I just resort to a frozen dessert?
• Spinach: Ditto my comments for kale.  Also: are you going to make my stomach hurt? I went through a weird phase four years ago where spinach always made my stomach hurt, or at least appeared to.  Is it the oxalic acid?
  
• Avocado: Look, let's face it, you're going to be made into gelato.  But will I be able to discern just the correct ripeness in order to make this odd dessert as tasty as possible??

These, and other burning produce questions will be answered over the next few days, and I am hoping to have time to do a Getting-to-Know-You or two. 

For now, I'm going to go spend the next two hours washing vegetables, fretting about whether or not I should be washing them eat if I am not sure if I am going to be eating them soon, and/or distractedly paging through every reference book I have.  Thank goodness I'm only partially employed this week.

There's no suspense to this entry.  I've already made my feelings about sunburst squash clear: I'm no fan.  So ultimately this recipe for Sunburst Squash and Mushroom Soup didn't work for me, but I think it does still have potential. 

The mushroom flavor with the potato is delish.  But as I ate it, I kept noticing this weird final note of grapefruit that I did not enjoy, though. I actually forgot to add the lemon juice or vinegar, so I couldn't figure out where the acidic tang was coming from.  Later, when I ate the sunburst squash solo for the first time, I realized that was the off-note in the soup.

I think if I could find another squash without that tang, or another vegetable that could bulk this up in a similar way (maybe add more potato?), I think the other flavors are great.  So recommended for sunburst squash fans as is, or with a replacement vegetable for those who, like me, are not.

So I am a little late with following up with the results for the Passover Lemon Cheesecake I made from my friend Sarah's Seder last week.  While it had a lot to compete with...

...I think it turned out pretty well and that people were happy with it.  I think it was the first cheesecake I've ever made, or if I have made one before, I've obviously lost track of it.  The almond/matzo crust was delicious, and the filling was a solidly tasty cheesecake fillilng.  As I mentioned earlier, I doubled the zest and added a splash of lemon extract, and I am glad I did; I don't know if the cake would have tasted discernibly lemon without it.

The table is groaning under the weight of all that dessert, as you can imagine.  In addition to the cheesecake, Sarah's friend Tonya also brought a flourless chocolate cake and a special chocolate-matzo layer cake that is a recipe handed down from her mom.  Sarah also set out a chocolate Seder plate, which was cute, but nowhere as pretty as her real Seder plate.

Our friend and fellow book clubber Robin led the Seder, which was shorter, I gather, than most, but still special.  Much of the group has been celebrating together for several years, and one of their traditions is to have everyone say something that they would like to be free of in the next year.  It was touching to see how honest and open people were, even those, like Sarah's partner's older parents, who were experiencing this for the first time. Answers ran the gamut from the light-hearted (procrastination, a George Bush presidency) to the abstract (imbalance) to the very personal (self-doubt, needless suffering). 

Another book clubber, Shauna, and her fiance Brennan had tracked down a couple of funny Passover props - bags of plagues.  One bag had masks designed to represent each plague (darkness was a black mask, with little slits for the eyes, that was shaped like a cloud blocking a little orange sun peeking out the corner; boils, was, as you might imagine, a plain mask with red and pink polka dots - the first choice of the three-year-old girl in attendance).  The other had gag-type gifts, a squirting frog, a plastic cow with a disturbingly melted face.  It also had two little foam balls that represented hail.  However, we actually didn't need the prop; we happened to have hail that very day.

Driving over to Sarah's in the early part of the day, with the cool weather and happy anticipation of a festive event, it felt like driving to a Thxgiving or Xmas dinner, a feeling I normally don't have the chance to experience in mid-April.  The day was a good reminder of an extra bonus to having friendships with people of different backgrounds, religions, etc: more holidays to celebrate, more new food to try.