stir-fry, the ol' dinner fall-back

Bittman over at Bitten- A Good Stir-Fry Hides a Lot of Faults. He talks about how he chopped up leftover veggies in his fridge, some of which were not totally "fresh" by whatever standards, tossed 'em in a pan with some tofu and ended up with a tasty meal.

Brussel Sprouts: we meet again.

Yesterday I traveled with my mom through the picturesque woods of Chardon, Ohio to go to my aunt Donna's house/alpaca farm for T-Day dinner, and it really was grand. I told her on the way back how much more I enjoy family get-togethers as I get older, and how I really wasn't a big fan of them as a kid because my cousins are either five years+ older or five years+ younger. I was stranded in no-man's conversation land.

But now I can relate to everyone on some level or another. And now there is an adorable BABY SYDNEY (courtesy of my cousin Jen) whom I love in all her squirmy poopy goodness. First baby in the family since I was barely a not-baby myself. It is glorious. And she is too.

But on to the food. Pretty basic yet delicious: turkey, smashed taters, baked yams, cranberry sauce, stuffing (which I didn't eat), zucchini and yellow squash, Waldorf salad (which is just a fruit salad with apples, grapes, walnuts, and celery all mixed up in mayonnaise or yogurt), pumpkin bread, and brussel sprouts.

And mid-dinner I realized something very important: Despite every forked attempt, despite the valiant efforts of butter, I cannot like brussel sprouts. My aunt has a vegetable garden in her backyard so she went out and picked fresh brussel sprouts immediately before cooking them (she either boiled or steamed them I believe? I was in the living room at the time so I'd have to check my sources on that one), so I was like Okay, I have to give it a shot (again.) I mean they're so fresh! And my mom and aunts were talking them up, so despite the pleas of my fellow b sprout-hating cousins not to sell out, I tried one. It was sort of how I always remembered it: like a stronger, almost nuttier tasting broccoli, but bitterer. My mom said she always thought they were sweeter, so I tried a few more for good measure. Regardless of what they really taste like, my gag reflexes were acting up by the end. That was the clincher. Had to will myself not to yak all over the table.

So, childhood vegetables hated:
Asparagus. Now lovelovelove.
Brussel Sprouts. ...Sorry dude. Maybe if presented in the tastiest package ever, to the extent that they barely resembled their former selves. But I think that might be cheating.

Pilgrims and (real) Indians

Although my stepmom dragged us by our pigtails to Middle Eastern restaurants and other foreign-like places when I was little, I didn't really start appreciating the rich spices of the Orient until I came to college. (I know, pretty typical: "Hey guys! Let's go get Indian and smoke a hookah and drink cheap red wine and discuss Nietzsche's effect on post modernism, because we go to college!" I mean I guess it's better than that other option: trudging through a sea of Natty Light and sweat and bad decisions in the basement of some fraternity.)

Now I am admittedly not very learned in the vast array of Indian dishes, but I do love me some curry. And I found a video from Mark Bittman's blog over at NYTimes (can't embed it, sorry) in which he makes a simple turkey curry from bird-day leftovers. He also throws in some spinach in the hopes that it might resuscitate you from the throes of a meat-and-carbs induced coma.

The intro is a bit wacky and over the top zen-like, but if you can get over that, the recipe seems to be good. I've never actually looked up the recipe for curry so had no idea it was just rice milk, tomatoes, and spices like cumin, coriander, and turmeric. Pretty simple; maybe I'll have to host a little curry party to try it out. (That's how you get your friends to come to your apartment when it's not within walking distance--lure them with treats.)

Quality ingredients to shove up your gobbler

Remember when I said I was going to start a series decoding the chemically-sounding ingredients in common foods? And how I posted one entry? And haven't since? Yeah. Well, that's mainly because (believe it or not) that entry involved about 4 or 5 hours of work total. It was grueling, in the instantaneous blogosphere. I have since shied away from such research-heavy endeavors, leaning on personal anecdotes that, while taking at least an hour to write (the lengthier, more introspective ones at least), are so much easier. On my brain.

But I'm not satisfied with just these types of posts because there's a big world out there and other people talking in it that should be heard. That's blogging, right? So several days ago I thought, "I need to subscribe to health news, or just get disciplined enough to read it daily."

So I did. Well, just right now. I guess "once" isn't really "daily" (yet); whatever.

The New York Times, besides being regarded as a modern-day dinosaur by the Daily Show in one of their always-hilarious sketches, has a website that is really more of a labyrinth of news and blogs and multimedia and other things with words that is intimidating yet alluring. Its most prominent health blog is Well, which I mentioned in the Pollan post. Now, Well is extremely informative, and it would probably benefit me to read it regularly, but my only problem with it is a lack of personalness or personality or humanness. I.e. it reads like news, not really like a blog.

But nudged next to Well on the Health and Fitness homepage is a weekly series (a blog? is it in the paper too? I'm not sure) called Recipes for Health.

Jackpot. If there's one thing I'm lacking, and know damn well I'm lacking, it's recipes. Maybe because I'm only 21, don't have a family or boyfriend to cook for, a lot of money to spend on food, etc. Maybe I'm making excuses (probably). But that doesn't mean I shouldn't still talk about it!

This week, in lieu of Thanksgiving, the writer Martha Rose Shulman posts an alternative recipe for stuffing. Now, I have always been a big anti-fan of stuffing. I'm not sure why except I think it was one of those things I tried as a child and then just decided I hated. Maybe because it cooks inside the carcass of a dead animal and even at seven something about that rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe because it often has random animal parts in it that you would never see anywhere else on a dining room table (Dear, can you pass the liver?), parts that I am not particularly comfortable ingesting.

But this recipe has no necks. Just some veggies, herbs, spices, almonds, chicken stock and--best of all--wild rice. If you've never had wild rice, please do. My sister and I made enchiladas with it once and it was phenomenal. Wild rice, besides the color appeal, is not as sticky and mushy as white or brown rice, and nutritionally it is a tiny step above brown with 2 more grams of protein and a few less calories. But mainly it's pretty.

And in my book, pretty beats full o' chicken parts. This is something I might actually be able to stomach. Except--I'd probably make it the vegetarian way. No turkey ovens for me.

the bread machine of wonders

Last year my mom cut gluten (part of the wheat germ) out of her life, because her doctor thought it may have been causing the debilitating migraines she had been suffering several times a week for decades. Well, it ended up being attributable not to gluten, but to a hormone called progesterone, but I still got a bread maker out of the deal.

My mom has had this machine since I was a kid, but she got a new one because this one was gluten-contaminated. So I told her (asked politely) to hand that sucker down.


I don't know many other people who have bread machines, but everyone should, because these things are quite nifty. They combine the best of both worlds: the ease of minimal effort and the wholesome satisfaction of eating something you yourself made. I mean it when I say these things require no baking skills. Or mixing skills. You just measure ingredients and pour them in the pre-formed bread pan. The machine does the kneading and rising and baking for you.

And, of course, there's health benefits from baking your own bread, but if you already buy your bread from a baker or minimally-processed whole-wheat loaves from companies like Brownberry, it is primarily a feel-good look-what-I-can-do thing (like when you give quarters to the Salvation Army Santa... you walk away smiling because you are such a good person but how much change is a few quarters gonna bring?) But, if you're eating squishy white bread, you'll definitely be doing your body a preservative-free favor.

I make it with a ratio of 5 parts whole wheat flour to 1 part bread flour (because it doesn't rise as well with all whole wheat... but once I drag my ass to a health food store and buy gluten, I'll make it 100% WW.)

But when I was a kid, my mom used to bake white loaves for the PB & J's she packed in my lunch. I can't remember if I voiced my distress at the time, but I hated it. Not because it tasted bad (it didn't) but because it looked different. And all the prying judgment-filled eyes of my peers noticed, and everyone asked why it looked so funny, and while I still ate it, I would hold my sandwiches under the lunch table, embarrassed, wishing I could just be like all the other kids with their pristine, blindingly white Wonder Bread.

Because even kids know this is weird (although this is wheat... so imagine it a few shades lighter):

And this is normal:

Which, now that the years have stacked up, strikes me as quite an odd dilemma in the life of a kid. Who cares what your bread looks like? I also got teased for having (and eating) apples in my lunch. Is this food-related ridicule universal? I went to elementary school in an area where a larger-than-average percentage of adults were poor and pretty uneducated, and for whom the struggle to be able to tame hungry little bellies overrode the need to make sure that sustenance was healthy. (Or, perhaps in some situations, the culprit was more ignorance and contentment with ignorance than lack of money. That's worth arguing.) So most of my friends ate a lot of Little Debbie or her generic counterparts. Was it different in more affluent areas?

This is dipping heavily into a topic I'd like to discuss more in depth at a later time--how to feed kids healthy things they'll like, and what factors other than taste affect their detestation of certain foods. Because, whenever the day comes, you can bet my kids will be carrying the same funny-looking sandwiches in their futuristic lunch pails that I carried way, way back in the prehistoric 1990s.

<3 pEaNuT bUtTeR!~!~!~

When I found out I had high cholesterol, one of the things that was suggested was to eat more oatmeal, or anything made from oats. (I know we've all seen the Cheerio's commercials about lowering your cholesterol if you eat like 500 bowls of Cheerio's every day for the rest of your life.)

Which, you know, was no big deal. Oatmeal's good. But--my idea of "oatmeal" was a sugar-doused flavored product. Even when my mom made me real Quaker Oats as a kid, I put a lot, a lot, of brown sugar on it. Like it was essentially sugar with a coupla lone oats tossed in.

So what to do now? How to make it appetizing without reversing the health benefits? I started by adding raisins, which plump when you cook them and add some natural sweetness, but I couldn't help but sprinkle a packet of Splenda on there too. When I became a little more informed and thus wary of artificial sweeteners, I stuck to just raisins. And it was okay, but I honestly had to force myself to make it. Like I would never wake up craving it, or even really wanting it, but I would shove it down my gullet anyway, reminding myself of its artery unclogging powers.

Then this past summer, I was at Kelsey's house one morning and she was making oatmeal for me, her, and her boyfriend George. When she asked George what he wanted in his, he said peanut butter. I remember doing a double take. Peanut butter? In oatmeal? I asked her who the hell she thought she was mixing these two things. She laughed at me.

Since then, I've embarked on a love affair with the union of these two previously disparate foods. I was already shacking up with peanut butter, have been for a long time. But now oatmeal's invited, and for the first time I really want him there.

If you've never had this, and you like peanut butter, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try. I mix about a half cup of oats with a cup of skim milk (but you can make however much you want) and usually just pop it in the microwave, but if you are cooking for more than one person, I'd recommend the stove. Then mix in about a tablespoon of peanut butter while the oatmeal's hot and it will sort of just dissolve. This breakfast has about 18 grams of protein (if you make it with skim milk, which I don't know how anyone eats it with water without barfing), about 335 calories, and, yes, about 11 grams of fat, but only about 1 1/2 grams are saturated; the rest are either polyunsaturated or monounsaturated (the good-for-your-heart kind.)

And if you use almond butter instead of pb, its extra monounsaturated fats serve up a double whammy sucker punch to lower LDL cholesterol (the bad one). Unfortunately, almond butter is a quite a bit more expensive. Thus far I have only picked it up wistfully in the grocery store, set it back on the shelf with a sigh, and slowly pushed my cart down the aisle, looking over my shoulder with big, cartoonish eyes. Someday, we will be united.

chef I am not

Someone asked once, a long long time ago (like a few weeks), whether I cook or not.

The answer is yes and no.

To me, saying "I cook" denotes a pattern, a regular occurrence. Which it is not. Also, to say "I cook" indicates recipes, and ingredients, that result in prepared "dishes". These are rare.

What I do cook, rather, are separate foods, which I often combine post-stove top. Like tonight: I sautéed some tofu in olive oil and soy sauce, boiled some quinoa, and steamed/simmered some collard greens with olive oil, onion, garlic, salt, and pepper.

My cooking is pretty simple. Usually because of lack of time, necessary ingredients, and confidence in my multi-tasking culinary abilities. Thus, I tend toward things that you put in a pot on the stove and let sit and there you go: food.

But honestly, I'd like to get more complicated. I'd like to learn how to cook things that involve lots of spices and ingredients, things like the Indian dishes my vegan friend Ashley makes. Savory things.

Before that happens, I need to find someone to cook for. Because currently my only client is lazy and hates doing dishes.

adventures to smoothie-land

So I bought that Greek yogurt earlier this week with the sole intention of using it in smoothies. If you've ever had Greek yogurt, you'll know it has a biting taste more like that of sour cream than what we associate with yogurt, which I'm sure causes most non-nutrition obsessed customers to turn up their noses. But funny fact: Greek yogurt is what plain ol' yogurt used to be until the days of additives and thickening agents. The only ingredients in it are skim milk, cream, and a plethora of good-for-your-belly cultures. Because of this, it has substantially more protein than regular yogurt (24g per cup vs. 7g per cup in Yoplait light vanilla). But, you're a real trooper if you can handle it plain. I can't. They sell different flavors in small containers but they are more expensive. So instead I bought the big one and a bag of frozen mixed berries (I already had frozen mango chunks) and decided to try my hand at the art of smoothie-making. What I got was more like frozen yogurt. I was so giddy about the delicious results I decided to post this pseudo-recipe in the hopes that you will try it out!

The only thing I really measured was the yogurt (not because I'm a fantastic chef by any means, I am just lazy and hate doing dishes) but I eyeballed the approximate measurements of the rest:

2/3 cup plain Greek yogurt
~10 chunks of frozen mango
~1/2 cup frozen berries
drizzled honey over it all
splash of skim milk (maybe 1/2 cup?)

Then blend blend blend. If you have a super shitty hand-me-down blender like mine, this could be... a process, mainly because this smoothie is pretty thick. I probably should have given my ancient appliance a break by adding more milk, (I realized while digging mangled mango chunks out of my dull blender blades), but I didn't, mainly because I got really excited when I realized it was like ice cream. But you can feel free to add more milk, different fruits, whatever. It's your discretion.

Which is probably the greatest part about home-made smoothies: you can make them however you want! To hell with recipes! And if you put in healthy ingredients (yogurt instead of ice cream, frozen fruit instead of ice cubes), you're gonna get a smooth, guiltless treat. I know smoothies are and have been a huge health craze for awhile, but if you buy them at some fancy shop they are usually pretty expensive and can add extra crap and calories. But if you make your smoothies at home, then you know what exactly is going into that blender and how much. No surprises there (except the extra cash in your pocket).

And remember, just because you are drinking it doesn't mean it's not a meal/snack. I think our waistlines all learned that several years ago from Frappucinos.