three bowls

A couple months ago, Sarah was over for a visit while I was cooking.  She had just made some seitan from scratch, and we talked about fake meat and my history of a disappointing experience cooking with it. 

If I buy something that is highly seasoned and processed, the fake meat equivalent of a Dorito, then I enjoy it just fine, as I do all junk food.

But if I took something in its basic form – say, plain tofu – and tried to cook with it, I invariably seemed to end up with that kind of thin-tasting, unsatisfying meal that, until recently, had been the hallmark of cooking for myself.  

Prior to…well, really, the learning experience that has been this blog, most of my cooking experience has resulted in an end product that has been as hearty and satisfying to eat as a stick of celery.

Is it food?  Sure.  It has volume, texture, some kind of flavor.  But on the Hearty Satisfaction Scale, it’s about a 2.

Maybe it is all a question of umami. 

While I do eat seafood now, my cooking life has always been primarily vegetarian and often lo-cal focused.  When you cook primarily vegetarian/lo-cal food, it’s just not…automatic that what you produce will click with the savory/heart/umami receptors in your brain. 

This is what cooking very often seemed to result in for me.  It’s also one of the reasons why – despite my interest – I never stuck with it until I had a blog. At least with a blog, I could write about my failures and feel creatively fulfilled, even if the food was one big vat of celery-stick disappointment.

Until the past couple of months.  Something has happened with my cooking.  I think it started right after the Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Dessertaganza.

The President of the Debate Club and her hubs were here right after the New Year.  She’d last been here at the end of September.  I cooked for her then and I cooked for her this trip and she could taste a difference.  

The story of Mama Cass getting hit on the head with a pipe and expanding her vocal range is most likely apocryphal.  But I feel like the story, even if it’s untrue, is an illustration of a truth, which is that sometimes you toil and toil and make no progress, then suddenly experience tremendous progress that just feels like it happened TO you as opposed to being the result of any work on your part.

I think this maybe has happened with my cooking, some kind of development that, like most things in my life, I unthinkingly stumbled into, got it to work and then retroactively articulated it to myself. 

The epiphany: to a person with my sorts of taste buds, (ta da!) satisfaction is an investment.

What does that mean?  Basically that if, like me, in order to feel satisfied you’re going to need some richness, some umami action, some depth and body to your food, it isn’t going to come cheap.

It could require fat: butter or oil.  And so, if calories are a concern, this means you are spending them on satisfaction and ergo won’t have as much currency left over for quantity. 

This is an important distinction for me, because, as I wrote about recently, sometimes the main thing I do want is quantity.  I want a big bowl of something, not a little sliver of savory or a ramekin of richness.  I am hungry in such a way that only an actually large physical volume of food will make me feel satisfied.  So I need a bunch of vegetables with a little bit of something on top of it, or something else.

But if what I’m looking for is that complex umami action, then that I could eat my way through that bowl of vegetables and feel like I missed the boat.  So if that’s what my hankering is for, maybe it is the time to spend the calories on butter.

At other times, the investment is time, as in the case of making stock.

I have the patience of a cranky toddler.  In my cooking world of days past, making stock – 45 minutes for ONE ingredient in something else??? – seemed beyond the pale.  God just buy a box of it.  Then I found Mark Bittman's Roasted Vegetable Stock.   (His version is here, my go-to version with a couple of tweaks is below.)

It’s actually even more time-consuming than a regular stock in that one must roast the veggies for around 45 minutes.  But for some reason, Bittman’s description convinced me to try it once, and after that, I was convinced to continue making it all the time.

Where previous all-veggie soups or stews started out with the highest of hopes, only to end up watery-tasting and being eaten out of sheer duty only, things I made with this stock were satisfying in a way I previously associated only with eating out. 

Ergo, now it’s a staple in the Three-Bowls kitchen.  I make and freeze it on a regular basis. 

One of my tweaks from Bittman’s original to double the mushrooms.  I don’t feel like it makes it particularly mushroomy, just that it adds to the overall savoryness.  I use it as a base for almost every vegetarian soup or stew that I make, cook grains in it if there isn’t a lot of flavoring in the recipes, etc. 

If you cook a lot of vegetarian food and also find yourself slightly underwhelmed by your home-cooked stuff compared to processed food or what you eat out, try this and see if it might make a little difference.  While it is a time commitment, this cranky toddler finds it worth it.  

Tofu photo via Flickr user Rick.