MetaCookbook

I last updated everyone on my attempt to eat in a week into the challenge. I’m now three and a half weeks in, and I thought I’d give another update.

The week spanning 18 April to 25 April was basically good, but I ate through two of my meals on the 24th & 25th. One of them was intentional, as it is my monthly meal out with a couple of friends. The other was an embarrassing mistake that wasn’t really worth it.

In essence, Bill talked me into splitting a couple of cupcakes with him, pointing out that snacks out aren’t meals out. Cupcakes are, quite frankly, my biggest weakness and I have struggled most (internally) with snacks. Overall, I have not been inclined to hold them against myself, but I do think my friend Jen would have a point if she called it ‘out of bounds’. It didn’t matter, however, because we each bought one cupcake and split them (so a total of one cupcake each), and this particular shop’s cupcakes are enormous, and I ruined my dinner.

Cupcakes for dinner. After talking myself into them. You can’t get less intentional than that. Especially when they turn out to be basically mediocre, and thus regrettable.

Anyway. That’s embarrassing to admit. But it did help me figure out, for myself, where my boundaries are for snacks, meals & intentional choices.

From 26 April to today, I have eaten out twice more. If you do the math, yes, that is one more time than I had aimed for, and yes, I have a week to go. However, I’m surprisingly comfortable with these two choices, and all the times (like last night!) when I managed not to give in to the severe temptation of eating out.

My fourth instance of eating out was unexpected, but once I found out about it, I would not have missed it barring extreme circumstances. I found out a week ago one of my friends from my old lab was defending her dissertation, and about to become Dr. Jenny this past Wednesday. In our lab, the tradition is a celebratory dinner after the defense. So, I scheduled myself to be at her defense seminar (and she utterly nailed it – one of the best defense seminars I’ve ever seen), and then to join the lab at dinner that evening. The food was mediocre, sadly, but the company was exhilarated and amazing. The conversation sparkled, I met two of the nicest nine-year-olds ever (her nephews), and it was truly a great evening.

No regrets. Celebrations are not to be missed.

The fifth instance of eating out was this morning. Ever since I introduced this challenge, Bill has wanted to go to his favorite breakfast place, Sweet Maple Cafe. It’s perceived scarcity, I suppose. When I was in Kenya in 2009, and Bill had just moved to Chicago (without me!), he used to eat there at least once a week. When I came back, we walked there almost as often. But once we moved out of the area, our frequency dropped dramatically. At this point, we may go once every three months. Maybe less.

However, the threat of not being able to go bothered him a hair, at first. As it did back in February, when I tried this before. One of the reasons I set my goal at four meals out was to allow for some chance to go eat breakfast with him, since I knew he’d want to go. When I ruined my dinner with cupcakes, he was genuinely bummed. He thought all my meals had been scheduled, and so he’d accidentally replaced Sweet Maple with cupcakes – not a trade he’d ever intentionally make.

I assured him he hadn’t, not yet knowing about Jenny’s dissertation. And, because Bill is a wonderful guy, when he found out about the dissertation dinner, he didn’t even blink. He understood that had to be meal four, and was prepared to wait again. But, in the end, I felt that we should go. I’d promised, and we both wanted to go. And, frankly, at about once a quarter, his Sweet Maple Cafe habit is not was breaking the caloric or monetary budget. So, we went this morning, and it was fun, tasty and lovely.

I almost stumbled yesterday, though. Hard. The weather in Chicago has turned amazingly gorgeous, and patios are opening everywhere. Bill invited me to meet him as his one-day training was ending, and walk home with him. Which, unfortunately, was a walk that would take us right past Bill’s favorite restaurant in Chicago, and its newly open patio. As well as a few other quite loved restaurants, also with patios.

We have a balcony, but we don’t have patio furniture for it. It’s not like we could have easily eaten on our own patio. And I was pretty hungry – lunch had been a big salad, but it had not been enough.

Luckily, Bill said, “We should go home.” And so we did. And he cooked up a stellar stir-fry with CSA greens, carrots, onions, tofu and rice. It was amazing.

And that, my friends, is why this challenge finally feels like it’s working out for me, even though it started as more of a struggle than I’d like to admit. But I feel like we’re finally getting our footing. We started getting a CSA three weeks ago – none of it has yet gone to waste, even though I get tired of lettuce and other greens faster than you can blink. We can make the choice, with minimal hardship, to forgo the tasty restaurant and its glorious patio and come home and make a killer meal.

It isn’t yet perfect, but I’m getting there. It feels great. I feel like the forces of intention, too much perishable food in the house, support from each other, and deliberate choices have really put us back on the path we want to be on. I think we’ve gotten into a new and better groove.

So now I’m left wondering what to do about this challenge, given I do have to travel. One line of thinking could be that I’ve already failed, so maybe I should chuck it all. That’s not really my style, though. Especially since I feel like the “failing” meal was, in fact, a success. Another line is that I should keep going, and see if I can keep it to only five meals out.

The third, and I’ll be honest, the one I’m leaning toward, is to close it down tomorrow. I head to New Mexico tomorrow, without Mr. Bill (sadness!), to help out some family there. I’ll be gone for about ten days. My original intent, if travel interrupted the challenge, was to suspend the challenge and then pick it back up and extend as needed. I can, and may still, do that. However, I wonder if having an explicit end date means anything anymore. Or, worse, if it’ll just encourage going back to being less intentional.

I don’t know. I’m going to consider everything. I’d love to hear your thoughts, in the comments.

My freezers are perpetually full. I think this is a regular complaint here on MetaCookbook. No matter how hard I try to get them a little emptier, it seems I end up with freezers full to bursting.

One of the issues I normally have is stock. See, making stock is something I always think of as a way to clear out the freezer. Typically, this is because I have three to five chicken carcasses¹ stuck in there, as well as chicken trimmings and the trimmings of veggies. My thinking is that this will get that stuff out of the freezer. The bags of trimmings, the big plastic containers of bones.

I never manage to consider how much stock will end up back in the freezer. Oops.

So, on Saturday, I realized I wanted to try my hand for the first time at beef stock. I had beef bones from previous meals. I had beef necks from way back that I realized I didn’t want to cook into food². And I was walking to a butcher shop when I made this decision, so I was able to buy two huge and gorgeous knuckle bones. I was excited.

I mixed it together with roughly a metric crapload of water. I set it on to simmer and let it go. I skimmed foam off the top. I watched it carefully.

Many hours later, I checked it and realized it didn’t seem terribly warm, for all the foam I was getting. I touched my hand to the side, and found it merely warm to the touch. I turned the heat up a lot, and started polling my friends.

Long story short? This was a great way to empty out my freezer. Because, in the end, I decided to dump the stock.

In truth, I was pretty sure that a good, hard boil would take care of any nasties I’d grown in the time I’d not paid close enough attention to the heat.

But then my friend Jen found this link on food safety. She said (and I mostly agreed) that Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus cereus were the major threats. S. aureus makes a heat stable toxin and B. cereus produces a heat-resistant spore. From there, I considered how likely I thought each pathogen was³.

Honestly, I was pretty sure my food-handling made S. aureus a non-issue, and B. cereus didn’t seem terribly likely either, given it’s association with starchy foods, rather than meat (and, unlike my chicken stock, this had no veggie trimmings in it, just meat and bone). So I was tempted to risk it.

But then I considered two things:

1. If it’d been chicken stock, I would have dumped it the moment I realized it was merely warm. It was only because I was making stock that I make much more rarely and had cost me actual money (if in small amounts) that I started considering risking it. In light of that, I figured I should at least be consistent.
2. Whether it’s comfortable to admit or not, I live in a land of food excess. I had, just a few days prior, been talking with a friend who feels terrible about food waste because there are starving people in this world. My counter to that was that I cannot directly send this food to them, and in my life, the biggest risk is taking in too many calories. Thus, if something isn’t healthful and/or tasty, it’s “not worth the calories”, and I don’t beat myself up for not eating it. If food can be thrown away without weighing on my conscience for merely not being “good”, taste-wise, I should allow myself not to hesitate to throw it out if it presents a reasonable risk of illness. I can feel bad about mishandling my food (and I do), but once that has happened, further guilt about tossing the food is pointless.

My big freezer is a little happier today, as it’s not so full. I’m a little happier, as I can get to things in and out of it more easily.

That said, I’ll be more careful in the future.

¹ Okay, I’ve only once had five carcasses in there. Normally I try to make stock at three.

² I don’t think I reported back on that experiment. I will! Now that I’ve realized the missed post.

³ This post was edited to change Clostridium perfringens to Bacillus cereus. When I went back to look at the link and remind myself of Jen’s concerns, I was sure she said C. perfringens, even though my whole focus before deciding to dump the stock was B. cereus. I thought this since C. perfringens is associated with meat where B. cereus is associated with starches. So I was convinced I was mixed-up. Nope. I had it right. Turns out the thing that’s missing from the link is that, like it’s buddy Clostridium botulinum, C. perfringens is anaerobic bacterium, so she wasn’t terribly concerned about it. I’m not anymore either.

Last year, my friend Theresa convinced me to take a wine and food pairing class with her and a couple of her friends. It was a huge amount of fun, and by the end, we were all pretty friendly. We decided we should continue the tradition, and so we now meet about a month to try new foods and wines we think we will go with them. Previously, we hadn’t had any sort of organization, but we’ve recently decided we should have a “theme” for each night.

The most recent hostess decided that we should have Asian food as our theme, partially because it’s a difficult pairing, and partially because she’s Korean and wanted to share shopping and cooking with us. As you can imagine, I figured it was the perfect time to pull out my Asian Cook cookbook and try something.

I did, and it was delicious. However, I cannot post the recipe for you. I no longer own the book, and I’m glad of this.

When I pulled out the book, I drooled over every photo, just as I always do. I dreamed of making almost every recipe in the book (except the shark fin and black chicken). I looked long and hard for the perfect appetizer for this group.

And I realized, this book does me almost no good. It requires a lot of specialized ingredients and, worse, equipment. It’s gorgeous, but it’s not for me. So, I picked out a recipe that looked easy, tasty, could pair with wine and contemplated getting rid of it. I showed the cookbook to Bill and asked his opinion. He agreed that it didn’t suit us, though was sad too.

The day of the party, I packed everything up and hauled it to the hostess’s house to cook the appetizer there¹. I got there, made an amazing appetizer, had a mediocre pairing (I liked it well enough, another attendee loved it, the rest had no opinion or didn’t like it), and overheard the hostess mention she knew some Korean recipes, but had never owned an Asian cookbook, and hoped to someday.

Well, obviously, my course was clear. Bill and I gifted it to her on the spot. She was initially taken aback, as she had truly not been hinting, but once Bill and I made it clear to her that we had honestly just been discussing donating it to a thrift store, she was thrilled.

This, actually, was a part of this overall challenge I never considered. Obviously we considered the possibility that someone might give us cookbooks, but never considered that we might want to get rid of a cookbook, or what the protocol would be, with regards to this blog.

That said, I’m quite content to have done this. Part of the problem we had, back in 2008, was rampant purchasing of cookbooks (or “rampant”, as the case may be – I’ve come to learn we own practically NO cookbooks compared to some). Another part was that we both have a problem evaluating if something deserves a place in our lives.

This cookbook didn’t, but it’s found a home with someone who will love it more than we do. I’ll update recipe numbers and requirements in a couple of days, once I figure them out. As a small book, it won’t have much impact on our overall challenge numbers.

¹ With her blessing, of course.

This post started out as part of the progress report I gave on Wednesday. However, that post became so long, I decided to splinter this off into it’s own post (because it was guaranteed to be long). I think this turned out to be a good thing, as the last post had a comment from one of my good friends commenting on the apparent number of grey areas in this new self-challenge¹.

She’s not wrong. There are a lot of grey areas, and they do lead to potential loopholes which lead to rationalizations (or potential rationalizations). Part of the reason things were derailed last time was because of these grey areas. I solved them (I thought) which is why I thought I had this “eating in” thing down this time around. I thought I had the confusion defeated, and the only true challenge would be my own desire to eat out².

This time, even in the first week (and a bit), there have been other challenges, potential loopholes, problems and sets of confusion. This post is going to detail the questions that have come up so far, and the decisions I’ve made in each case.

Challenge #1 – Royal Pies.

It started with a realization and a tweet. Namely, I realized I had very little food in my home that I knew how to (was willing to?) throw together for meals. I was thinking about Bill’s lunches, and how I’d, months ago, purchased him two Pleasant House Bakery Royal Pies to take for lunches, and he’d discovered they’re completely inappropriate for reheating at work³. They require baking, specifically, and for long periods of time. His office has toaster ovens, but 20 – 60 minutes of reheat time isn’t going to fly at work. Thus, one lonely pie has been sitting in our freezer for months, and it was probably going to be up to me to eat it.

So. I have a Royal Pie. I’d bought it at Downtown Farmstand, which is very much a grocer and not a restaurant. I’m reheating it at home. BUT, I am reheating it, not baking it, and it was made very explicitly by a restaurant. Is it restaurant food or home food? I actually wasn’t sure. It’s just not something I’d ever before thought about.

This led me to, on a whim, ask my Twitter followers the question.

Angelique (who I hope will comment and flesh out what I’m about to say) said to me via IM that it was “home food”, but partially because I’d had it for a couple of months by the time this started. She said it would feel different, to her, if I’d purchased it during the challenge month for the challenge month.

I only got three responses⁴. Two that said it was “home food” (but only one that you can see), and one that asked why it mattered.

Why does it matter? Well, mostly as a thought experiment. Because this whole thing is something of a thought experiment. I was (and am!) curious what others think. I hadn’t had to consider it before, and I wondered if others had. Hell, to be honest, I wonder(ed) if it mattered.

I concluded that it was “home food”. In the end, the comparison ended up being similar to a Marie Callender’s Pot Pie. If I’d purchased that, in a Dominick’s, some people might accuse me of being lazy in my “eating in”, and certainly they’d be right, but no one would tell me it was restaurant food. If I’m wrong and you would say a Marie Callendar’s Pot Pie is restaurant food, let me know in the comments.

That was just the first challenge, and came up the first morning of the first day. Later that day, two more were thrown at me. They involved lunch.

Challenge #2 – What to do about leftover restaurant food?

I didn’t actually think particularly hard about this. It turns out my want to not waste food, my want to have a lunch when I know I’m going to be facing a ton of kids, and my knowledge of microwaves won the day and I took it for lunch to my first day of volunteering (aka took it for lunch the first day of the challenge).

This is the story. Bill and I ordered in the night before the challenge. We’d ordered Thai, and he’d had all of his, and mine had about one meal leftover. This exact scenario was explicitly called out as eating “out” when I defined my terms, and “restaurant food” was what “[needed] to go”. So, when I didn’t finish all of my dinner on the 10th, I definitely felt a twinge of, “Well, what now?” I decided I’d figure it out as I went along. The next morning, I decided I might as well finish it off as lunch. I would count it as “in”, but “in with an astrisk”.

The next challenge actually saved me from that.

Challenge #3 – What to do about provided food?

I arrived at Girl Scouts with a lunch in hand, only to be told that Girl Scouts was (this time) providing lunch. In fact, the lunch was hot dogs, cooked by one of the folks in charge. I eat hot dogs. Eating the home-cooked hot dogs would keep me from eating my indulgently purchased leftover Thai from the day before.

But it left me in a conundrum for the following day. Because the next day was ordered in cheese pizza. And I knew it was going to be, as I left the building.

I was in a state. Because, as I left, that was clearly “eating out”, and I still didn’t have a lunch for the next day. I didn’t really want to burn one of my four, precious meals on pizza from some unknown place, but scrounging up lunch for the following day was going to be a trick.

Bill and Angelique actually convinced me that “provided food” is probably okay for the sake of the challenge. It was a hard sell, but the logic was that feeding volunteers is part of what organizations such as Girl Scouts do. So food that’s “supplied” by a friend taking me to a restaurant is in clear violation of the spirit and letter of the rules. But, in the instance of “thank you for helping us not only deal with, but teach science to, a hundred children, here’s your cheese pizza from a place you would never in a million years order from, but is good for feeding a ton of people”, is probably okay.

This one? It definitely gets “eating in with an astrisk”.

Challenge #4 – What about our favorite bagel shop?

Bill and I regularly buy bagels for the freezer from New York Bagel and Bialy. These make great and fast breakfasts for the mornings. When I pull them out of my freezer, I have no doubt I’m eating at home.

But what about if I ask them to cut, toast and cream cheese a bagel there? Bill asked me this one, and I realized I had no idea. I still don’t. We can’t eat the bagel there (usually we go back to the car and eat it there, before we get back on the road). We aren’t eating anything I wouldn’t eat at home, and call home food in another circumstance.

No idea. I didn’t have a bagel, but that isn’t because I judged it “eating out”.

Challenge #5 – What about snacks?

This entire time, I’ve been focused on meals out. Meals are where the calories mostly come from, meals are where the cost mostly is, meals is where I get most lazy and feel the most bad about eating “out”. Meals are where I feel like I “should” have paid more attention and had a different plan at home, or where I “should” have explicitly planned to be out (as I do with my monthly dinner).

Snacks? Snacks in the world almost never happen, for me. I’d given them exactly zero thought.

So, honesty time. This is also the time where Jen’s comments really ring true. I didn’t have a bagel at the bagel shop because we, without considering it, bought & split a pastry there too. Which we ate in the car. I didn’t even think about it until after the fact. I didn’t come to any conclusions about snacks.

Wednesday (I think) Bill invited me to share a cupcake from a cupcake stand with him. He even asked if it was eating “out”. I said I didn’t know, but I had one with him anyway. Cupcakes are a fiendish weakness. It was really good. I don’t think I regret it, even if you all convince me that it was eating out⁵.

In Conclusion

Man, hell of a long post, eh? It’s just because this is a bit complicated for me.

When Jen asked, “Why?”, my internal answer was, initially that it was just for the hell of it. To see if I could.

That’s partially true. It was (and is) dressed up in things like “saving money” and “eating better” and all of that. That’s because those things are true.

But, and this is what Jen’s comment really made me consider and think about, in the end? This challenge is almost like a mini-challenge as relates to this whole damn blog. So then I answered her with that.

It’s about becoming more intentional. It’s about thinking more before consuming. It’s about saving money, and it’s about eating better, but overall, it’s about enjoying eating out more. Making eating out more of an “event” and less of “an option”.

When I tried and failed in February to do this, I had not heard of Cathy Erway of Not Eating Out in New York and The Art of Eating In fame. Except to link for your edification here (and one recipe that I cribbed from completely without looking at any other part of the blog including the blog’s name in early January), I’ve not at all looked at her sites. I met her, briefly, at Edible Institute 2012 (she wouldn’t remember me). I follow her on Twitter, because of Edible Institute. I don’t plan to do so until I’m done with my own month-long challenge. I figure, I have to figure out my own rules and my own whys before I crib from someone else.

I do think, though, that it’s only fair to share with you guys those links, since I know they exist. Maybe they will change your judgment and input on what I do, and that’s fine by me.

I’ll be most thoroughly checking out Erway’s blog on 12 May. Until then, I hope to hear what you guys have to say about snacks, leftover restaurant food, bagels, provided food and Royal Pies (or Marie Callender’s). I hope that if something hits you in terms of a hypothetical you’d like to pose to me, you do so.

In the end, this is a challenge to be more intentional, and it’s a thought experiment to see where boundaries lie. I deeply appreciate your help in both regards.

¹ My answer to here is also there, of course, but this post will echo what I wrote in response. By the time it posts, she may have further responded. WHO KNOWS?

² Which, as established, is very high. Enough so that this has become a real challenge.

³ Thankfully, he’d discovered this at home, when he decided to eat some lazy food. So he managed to eat one of the special treats I bought for him.

⁴ Four, actually. However, the fourth was from Pleasant House Bakery saying they didn’t understand the question. I’m going to e-mail them (eventually) and re-ask in more than 140 characters. Or maybe I’ll just e-mail them this post. But then this wouldn’t be a nearly secret blog anymore. OH, THE QUESTIONS.

⁵ The pastry? I’ll totally regret the pastry. Even though I had less than half of it.

When I announced that I was trying again on my “Eating In Challenge”, I mentioned that I’d had questions about if drinking out was okay, or if I would accept a restaurant meal paid for by someone else, and that I’d come to the conclusion that “no” was the appropriate answer for these things.

So, first a confession. I’ve already gone out to a bar for drinks. I went out with a friend for a few beers after she had dinner at our house. I’m surprisingly comfortable with this. I had said “no” to drinks out because they lead to food out. This very much did not – we had a solid meal at home, then went out for drinks and had only a couple of beers. So while I will still be very cautious about “drinking out”, I found I am okay with a more planned excursion. Namely, one that I know will not result in eating out.

Second, a progress report. I am a week into this challenge, have been tempted to eat out at least three times in that time, and I have not eaten out once yet. I’m pretty pleased with this. I’m especially pleased because the start of this challenge was timed poorly, and I still made it work.

I should have started this challenge Monday the 16th, I think, rather than last Wednesday. I started it on the 11th because Bill and I were going to be out of town until the evening of the 10th. I wasn’t going to try to demand we eat “in” on a travel day, but the next day seemed perfectly do-able.

It turned out to be do-able, but it was rather difficult, and the difficulty was largely my own damn fault. First, Bill had been out of town for five days prior to my leaving to meet him. I don’t tend to cook much when Bill’s not around, but I also don’t tend to eat out. Basically (and this is true of my daily lunches, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts), when Bill’s not around, I tend to eat easy food that’s in the house. I minimize the number of dishes I have to wash, and eat kind of weirdly. Second, I intentionally wanted to eat down the freezers, fridge and (to a lesser extent) the pantry. It’s never any good to have food go bad while you’re gone. Finally, I had laid in a store of easy to reheat food, but didn’t think about the fact that I’d have a house-sitter and told her to eat it (which, thankfully, she did since she wasn’t charging us to stay at our place).

In other words, we got back to a fairly barren apartment. Which would have been fine, actually, except I’d agreed to volunteer at Girl Scouts for five or six hours, two straight days. The first two days we were back.

I didn’t consider the fact that to “eat in”, we’d need to have food in the house. Ingredients, at least. Like, say, milk. Whoops.

I also didn’t consider that after five to six hours on my feet, dealing with about 30 fifth graders at a time, I really wasn’t going to be in the mood to do any meal planning or grocery shopping. Double whoops.

Let’s just say that Wednesday and Thursday of last week were quite challenging. I did, Wednesday, manage to buy milk and toilet paper, but that was it. And probably only because both stores were on the way home.

So, here’s what I did for the first two days of the challenge.

Wednesday was helped, I admit, in that I knew I had appropriate dinner plans that evening, doing the last Soup and Bread event of the season, specifically to support my friend Ellen and her friend Grant in their new project, One Hundred Meals, and I knew I’d be eating at least their soup¹. I felt comfortable with this as eating “in”. All of the soups are homemade (see the link) and donated by their makers, which I feel falls into the same category as, “going to a friend’s house for a meal he or she personally prepared”, even if the location was a bar². I did not, for the record, have any drinks there. I brought my water bottle and had that. I did make a donation while there to their current charity. Bill said he’d eat my Thai leftovers from the night before (the night we arrived), so Wednesday dinner was taken care of.

Thursday, Bill’s company was feeding the employees, so I only had to feed myself. The Downtown Farmstand had tweeted on Wednesday that they’d have ramps in stock on Thursday, and I had never had them. Everyone I know who has had them raves about their amazing awesomeness. So I decided, “Screw it. I’ll go plan dinner with ramps from Downtown Farmstand.” I got there moments after the ramp delivery, saw that they had crimini mushrooms on half price, had fresh cream from my favorite dairy, and decided, “Know what sounds good? Pasta in a cream sauce with ramps and mushrooms, and a salad on the side.”

Which, of course, means I bought all that stuff, told Bill about it via IM, and he decided he wanted in on the ramp action. So that got moved to Friday night with a couple of friends. This turned out to be a good thing, as apparently all my traveling and volunteering caught up with me Thursday night, and so rather than eat dinner I collapsed into bed at 7:30 pm and slept for twelve or so hours. Maybe more. I suppose that’s not technically eating in, but it’s very much not eating out either. I have no idea what Bill ate, though. Probably he just snacked on some of the snacks we had around the house.

Friday and Sunday, I did all the grocery shopping I needed for the weekend meals, and now we’re back to being in good shape for this challenge.

¹ If you’d like, you can read about the One Hundred Meals “soft launch” at Soup and Bread here. See if you can find yours truly in the second photo!

² If you disagree with this being eating “in”, please let me know why in the comments! Friday’s post is all about the challenges I still didn’t foresee, so it will all go very well together.

Have I mentioned I’m resolved to try to participate in “Meatless Mondays”? I’m doing it mostly for personal health reasons (I’d also like to lose some weight and such), but also environmental reasons. Finally, it’s a surprisingly large challenge for me. I count anything with a face as “meat” and I aim to be completely meatless one day a week. So this means no fish, no fowl, no mammals in the most obvious form – meat – but also in less obvious forms, such as broth and stock.

I’m not always good at this. It’s been touch and go since I started the challenge. I haven’t managed it every week, but I think I’ve managed more weeks than I haven’t. Of course, since I hadn’t been tracking this in any way until a couple of weeks ago, I can’t actually say.

And by “not always good at this”, I mean I can sometimes plan a meal for Meatless Monday and completely miss the fact that the recipe calls for stock. Like I did for today’s soup “Greek Lemon Soup” out of Joy of Cooking. Oops. Luckily, I had vegetable stock around, and that turned out to be a fine substitute (though noticeably different than I was expecting).

So, today’s meal was Vegetarian Greek Lemon Soup and fresh baked bread.

Ingredients

3 c stock (Calls for chicken; I used vegetable.)
3/4 c cooked rice or cooked fine noodles
2 – 3 tablespoons lemon juice or wine (Seriously. It just says wine. No other descriptor.)
2 eggs

Instructions

Mix the stock and the rice, and bring to a roiling boil. While waiting for the stock to boil, beat together the lemon juice and eggs, just until they are basically uniform in color. It’d be smart to do this in a measuring cup or other container with both a spout and a handle.

Once the stock and rice are boiling vigorously, dip out about 2 tbsp of the stock, and temper the eggs by slowly dribbling it into the egg mixture while stirring constantly. Once the eggs are tempered, pour the egg mixture into the stock/rice mixture, slowly and from rather high up. This should allow the eggs to “shred” and became something like that soup you got as a kid at Chinese restaurants.

Cooking and Consumption Notes

Cooking

This? This is super easy. The hardest part, for me, was cooking the rice. I used white rice, and I’m good at making white rice, so even that was a breeze.

I used the full 3 tbsp of lemon, and I’m glad I did. This soup had a potent lemon flavor that was on par with what I remembered lemony, “Greek” soups to be.

A great deal of the rice seems to dissolve in this soup, and the color goes from fairly clear to somewhat opaque. I have no idea if that was a mistake I made or if that’s normal.

Consumption

This was simple, and very tasty. I would say, however, that if you aren’t avoiding meat for whatever reason, use the chicken stock. I think it would just taste a touch better.

That said, the instructions in JoC call for the soup to be served immediately, and I would not do so. Immediately upon serving, the veggie flavor of the stock was more potent than even just a couple of minutes in. This could have been just me getting used to it, but I think it was actually that the flavors were simply melding a bit better, and the acid of the lemon was toning down the intense VEGGIES!!!! flavor.

I would use brown rice next time I make this. I think the grains will hold up better.

Finally, this meal was surprisingly filling. I had a slice and a half of homemade bread and maybe a cup of soup (maybe less). I filled up just as I was finishing off the soup and haven’t had an urge for snacks or dessert.

So, overall, a win. I’ll make it again. With chicken stock.

One of the more interesting panels at Edible Institute this year, was all about recent non-fiction food books. Three authors, Barry Estabrook, Terry McMillan and Jonathan Bloom were all there to talk about their experiences.

Estabrook, who wrote Tomatoland and maintains the blog Politics of the Plate mostly asked questions of McMillan and Bloom, but did put in a few words of his own.

McMillan wrote The American Way of Eating and does not appear to maintain a blog. ETA, 3 April 2012: It turns out she does, but the way I looked for it didn’t turn it up. Anyway, she blogs here.

Bloom wrote Wasted Food and maintains a blog of the same name.

I’ve read Tomatoland, and it was fascinating and educational. Angelique and I will be running an online book club of the other two soon. Right now we’ve decided to wander into fiction, as our last few books have been non-fiction food books. (Or non-fiction-type. I’m not sure how a book that’s somehow a cookbook with significant amounts of memoir thrown in is classified.)

Wasted Food is, frankly, my current interest right now. I’m really looking forward to reading it, because I expect to learn a great deal. I learned a great deal from Tomatoland and expect to from The American Way of Eating as well, but Wasted Food makes me think it will give me something to really put my hands in. Not just things I can buy, or not buy, or letters and emails I can write, but actual actions I can take in my home.

I’m hopeful, I must admit, that there will be at least a few tips that are new to me on how to waste less food at home. That’s what I’m really looking forward to.

I’m also curious to see how he defines “food waste”. Sometimes, it’s obvious, right? That bag of spinach you (I) bought awhile back that got shoved to the back of the fridge until it turned into a bag of black slime, for example.

But what about bones?

When I buy a whole chicken, I keep all the bones and trimmings in a plastic container in the freezer until I have enough to make chicken stock. If I buy chicken parts (which is incredibly rare these days), I also keep any fat, skin or gristly stuff as well. I also keep carrot peels, onion tops and bottoms, celery bits and potato peels to add to it. It makes a delicious stock.

However, I only recently did this with pork bones, and am about to do so the first time with beef bones¹. I never thought about bones from larger animals being “stock worthy”. These days, I do².

So. Where do bones and carrot and onion peels fit into the equation? Carrot peels, I can kind of see being called “waste”, as the peel is perfectly edible AND palatable. Papery onion peels, less so. Bones? Bones have, all my life, basically been trash. Once they’re cooked, we couldn’t even give them to the dogs. And, frankly, given it’s pretty hard to eat bones (usually – I have had bone marrow, and loved it), I’m pretty comfortable with them going straight from the cutting board or the plate to the trash. Even if I no longer throw them away myself.

This is one of the burning questions I have about Bloom’s book. Are bones that are not made into stock or soup waste, or are they acceptably inedible as to be “trash”? Is there a grey area?

Anyway, this is all on my mind because I’m making a boatload of chicken stock tonight. It’s probably the largest number of carcasses I’ve ever put in a stockpot. I think I have four or five chickens worth of bones in there. Unusually, no veggie matter. I’m going to start veggie stock soon, and decided to keep the normal onion & carrot bits for that.

I hope your house smells as good as mine does right now, and I would really love to hear your thoughts on bones and other food waste grey areas in the comments.

¹ Which totally reminds me, I should get the beef neck bones out of the freezer to thaw to make stock tomorrow. I know I’m “supposed” to roast them first, but I’m not going to. I rarely roast bones before making stock.

² And let me tell you, it’s made me seem weird to people, because it’s prompted me to take home bones from restaurant meals. You’ve never seen a server look quite so perplexed as when you’ve asked them for a box to take home the “trash” of your meal. Okay. Okay. I guess by the definition of “weird” as “not within the norm”, it hasn’t just made me seem weird.

Old habits die hard. Especially when they result in rewards like not having to do the dishes.

This blog has been rather silent recently, which happens to it from time to time. I apologize for that – I am not such a great blogger, it seems. Once, it was about the wedding. Sometimes, I just get distracted. This time, well…

This time it’s because we’ve gotten into a bit of a food funk. It doesn’t feature nearly as many frittatas or stir-fries as back when we started this blog, but it features almost as much eating out (or delivery). I think so, anyway.

To be totally forthright, this is not only frustrating and embarrassing due to how this blog came about, but it was particularly so in February. Yes, February. The shortest month of the year and one of only two months in the existence of this blog where I didn’t post the entire month.

February pokes at my conscience because I had privately declared that I would only eat two dinners “out” (including delivery). Bill thought this was a little silly, as did a few people who knew about it. One or two were quite supportive and one even enthusiastic. I had specified dinners because that’s when, most of the time, I am most likely to eat out. I love all meals out, but mostly I eat breakfast and lunch at home. So, basically, I ignored them, assuming I’d just do as I had always done and eat those two meals at home every day.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of why, but February was an unmitigated disaster in terms of eating at home. In honesty, I think we ate out MORE in February than average. I certainly did, as I had several breakfasts and lunches out. After enough attempts to not eat out and failing, I finally gave up and stopped thinking about it. That didn’t help either.

We did very little cooking in February. I completely failed in that goal, and it makes me intensely grouchy.

So, I’m going to reboot and try again. This time, I’m trying in April and May. This time, I’m not just quietly telling a few friends that I’m going to try to do this. This time, I’m telling everybody. And, this time? I’ll be a bit more prepared for the traps that came up in February.

Here’s where I’m recording it. I don’t promise you a blog post daily, but I’m going to work toward making sure you see something Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I’ll let you know if I succeed or if I fail. The exact details:

I will eat no more than four meals total “out” from 11 April 2012 to 11 May 2012. This IS more generous to myself than February, but still keeps it reasonable, I think. Four is to allow for some each of breakfast, lunch and dinner. I have one dinner “out” scheduled every month that I have no intention of missing, and then three other flexible chances to eat out. Hopefully, I’ll manage to eat out no more than two times, but we’ll see.

There’s a possibility Bill and I will be traveling in this time. If so, I’ll suspend the “eating in” challenge until we return, and extend it by the appropriate amount of time. Unless I can manage to successfully “eat in” while traveling. Then you poor bastards who follow this blog are going to hear some real crowing. And possibly a snap or two as I try to pat myself on the back for a week straight.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, I have what I think is a clear definition of “eating out”. Namely, it’s about paying for restaurant food. And not just me paying for it, though the money is part of why I decided to take on this challenge. So, going to a friend’s house for a meal he or she personally prepared is not eating “out”. Ordering Thai food and watching a movie in my yoga pants is eating “out”. In February, I didn’t know if I’d accept an invitation to eat out on someone else’s dime. I now know that, for a month, I won’t. I’ll happily schedule for 12 May 2012, or invite that person to my house and I’ll cook, but as part of this challenge is about eating “better”, restaurant food needs to go for a bit. I also didn’t know if drinks (but not food) “out” was acceptable. The answer is no. The first slip-up I had in February came from going out for drinks and ending up staying for dinner.

Besides, I have a rather well-stocked bar, a collection of beer (including some of my own homebrew!), and several bottles of wine. I think my friends and I can manage to have a drink or two at my place, save some money, and still enjoy ourselves.

I was speaking to Krysti yesterday via instant messanger, and was telling her how difficult I found writing up Edible Institute. It’s been tough. Last year, I took some notes and got a solid, single post out of it. This year, I found I took no notes, but probably have at least two posts to put up.

Of course, the Keynote Speaker, Nikki Henderson, gets a single post all by herself. That’s part of the issue.

That said, I didn’t want to leave you all (especially those of you not on Twitter) with the feeling that I just went to California and sat on the beach drinking beach cocktails all weekend. So I figured I do a quick (maybe) post on 5 random tidbits I learned while at Edible Institute.

1. It’s possible for a non-profit to find a way to be more successful, but less flashy, at their mission, and see their funding go down. I’ll touch on this more tomorrow, as it was part of Henderson’s speech, but it was surprising enough that I wanted to share it.
2. Roughly 40% of the food produced in the US is not consumed, but rather wasted/discarded. This captures the waste from all the points in the production stream from, as they say, farm to table (and beyond). Jonathon Bloom, who shared this statistic with us (and is the author of “American Wasteland”), says this is enough food to fill the Rose Bowl Stadium every day.
3. There are places where it’s illegal to “throw away” organic matter (meaning send it to a landfill). These places also, it seems, have area-wide composting facilities and pick up. I did know places were moving toward requiring composting – I learned about that in San Francisco after Edible2011. However, when I was in San Fran, it was clear the requirements were only regarding certain kinds of organic matter. Bones, for example, were still perfectly acceptable to landfill. Bloom indicated that this is not the case in other places.
4. As much as I appreciate a nice cocktail, there are times of day when the thought actually turns my stomach. I discovered this with wine about a year ago as well¹.
5. I like lamb. Probably. I’d been avoiding it because I really can’t stand mutton, but I had a chance to have a nice, medium-rare lamb chop during the “party”, and it was delicious.

¹ In case you’re wondering about when it’s too early for wine, click here and look under the “cooking and consumption notes”.

Last year, in late January, I attended the second Edible Institute conference. I posted that I would be going, and why, here.

Well, the organizers seem to have decided that hosting in late January is a misery, because it’s been moved to March. This upcoming weekend, in fact.

I appreciate this, as last year I got stuck for an extra day in California due to a huge January/February blizzard in Chicago.

Just as I was last year, I’m very excited to be going this year. I’m going to see a few friends I made last year. I’m very much looking forward hearing Mirra Fine and Daniel Klein of The Perennial Plate speak¹. I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to meet them².

Even more than Fine and Klein, though, I’m looking forward to hearing Brian Halweil speak. As I mentioned early last year (in the above linked post), Halweil was instrumental in my thinking about how my food is moved, and what I want to be eating. I even said, in last year’s post, that I was disappointed he was not speaking last year. I lucked out though, because I did briefly meet him again, and thank him for getting me thinking. I didn’t expect that.

Gary Nabhan is speaking again. I’m intensely curious about that. Halweil was the catalyst for changing the way I thought about food, but Nabhan was the seed. So, when I read that he’d quit Slow Food USA over the organization’s $5 challenge, I was a bit taken aback. I have some more reading to do about this (I found some links while looking for this link for you guys), but I’m curious if he touches on this more.

I don’t know if I’ll have ‘net access beyond my phone while I’m gone. I will do my best to update you while I’m there, or not too long after I come home.

As always, I’ll tweet about it from my phone, if nothing else. My feed can be found here. Even if you don’t use twitter, everything’s public, so you can follow along via the web.

¹ Bill and I partially funded the Kickstarter campaign Fine & Klein had to finance their second season. I love reading their blog posts, but I honestly have a hard time sitting still for a video anyone does, even folks like this.

² We actually met them both, individually & very briefly, while they were filming at The Publican in Chicago. They did a special dinner there, and we went and had it. Klein cooked & Fine filmed. Some of the best food I’ve ever had. YUM.

I’ll write this up fully later, but I just wanted to share a couple of photos with you. I’ve been in the kitchen more than my silence might indicate, but mostly doing simply things like hummus. Today’s my first experiment in awhile.

Well, I call it an experiment, but like the cautious cook I usually am, I took Marc Bittman’s recipe for “Braised Oxtail with Garlic and White Wine” and messed with it as I cooked. For one thing, I used beef neck instead of oxtail. It looks just as (if not more) tasty than the oxtails I’ve had, but was astoundingly cheaper. If this works out, I may never go back to oxtail.

His recipe also calls for 4 ounces of bacon. I didn’t remember that before I started quick thawing the beef neck. So I turned to my lard rendered from “that time we bought a hog”. I’m expecting this to be a tasty, but not really the same, substitute. It should have some nice pork flavor (because of the way it was rendered), but it has no smoke on it. I considered using kombu, from my experiments with vegetarian baked beans, but decided to try the lard instead. I considered both, but it seemed like overkill.

These are three ingredients in tonight’s experiment. Tomatoes I canned myself, earlier this year. Lard I rendered myself, in a slow-cooker. The lard has a bit more of a “pork” smell than I wanted, but I realized for savory applications (especially ones that call for bacon when I’m out of it), this is okay. And, finally, pork stock that my friend David and I made, from our hog.

Here’s what went into the oven.

That’s three chunks of beef neck, about 2 lbs, nestled into tomatoes and their juice, a cup of white wine, carrots, onions, garlic and celery.

My house smells insanely good right now. Dinner’s not for another hour, at least. I’m going to try to serve this with polenta and kale.

Hello everyone! So, as I mentioned a week ago, our friend Krysti declared her interest in cooking from our fridge. Something about it having more content than her own fridge. I agreed to let her cook for us on the condition she wrote a post about it for you all. I thought having someone else’s thoughts & comments might be a fun change. Upon reading this (and adding my commentary in the footnotes), I am now SURE having someone else’s thoughts & comments is a fun change. Hopefully, you all will encourage Krysti to do this again, and I can convince some of our other bachelor friends to do the same. IT’S AN ADVENTURE.

Thus begins Krysti’s quest…

Natasha and I have toyed with the idea of doing a guest blog post in varying degrees of seriousness the past few months¹, then all of our dreams suddenly came true last week. My way of cooking is a complete 180 degree shift from Natasha’s approach. She puts together delicious meals that I have never tried before and I often happily leave with leftovers. I use whatever I can have on hand, rarely plan ahead, and use Mrs. Dash like it is going out of style. You may call it lazy – I call it efficient. Get ready.

Note: Throughout this post, lines preceeded with “#BachelorCook” are tips (also on twitter) I was offering throughout the night. Memorize these and you will learn the ways, grasshoppa.

Over the course of Wednesday morning, 04-Jan-12, while I was trying to forget about work (again), I messaged Natasha with, “Raw green pepper and Redbull do not taste good together². I want to cook your food. Maybe Sunday.” She essentially replied “Tonight or bust, afterwards the fridge is going to be barren.” I may then have suggested that a moldy fridge will feel just like home.

The last comments we had that morning brilliantly foreshadowed the night’s cooking adventure:

“You like white wine?”
“Ya!”
“Ok good I have a lot…”

Now before we begin, let’s take an aside to look into the dregs of my own fridge for comparison’s sake.

Crickets.

Don’t worry, you aren’t missing out on anything in the doors – I think there’s an ice pack at the bottom of the freezer door from back when I tore up my knee. That’s it. This is my typical grocery list:

1. Peppers
2. Mushrooms
3. Tomatoes
4. Spinach
5. Onions
6. Chicken
7. Tuna
8. Bacon
9. Cheese
10. Eggs
11. Diet coke

These 10 (11th is a bonus) ingredients can get you through just about meal. Breakfast is a quiche or a can of tuna, lunch is spinach/tomato/cheese salad, dinner is chicken stir fry, periodic snacks are raw peppers, cheese, or bacon. All very easy to put together. Pro-tip: to gut a tomato of its gooey seeds, bite off the butt end (not vine end) and stick your pinky in each of the four partitions to scoop out the seeds. Now that I have you convinced of my #BachelorCook-dom, let’s continue.

Jesus mary holy leaning tower of food! You will notice the blur of my hand as I quickly try to take inventory of whatever the hell is going on inside that freezer. I still don’t know how two people can accumulate that much food³. My work is cut out for me.

The explosion of the fridge wasn’t much better.

#BachelorCook looks for mold on an “on demand” basis. Meaning, as she grabs each turnip⁴.

I settled on whatever-the-heck-it-was tuna (Coho?) salmon (Uno?) fish (Yoko Ono?) with veggies. I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re a true bachelor and would never think of thawing the meat earlier in the day. Hell, I often don’t know what I’m going to have for dinner until I see it on the shelf. Therefore, the first task in any bachelor dinner is to thaw shit out from the freezer where it’s been sitting for who knows how long. Unless vacuum-packed, unwrap the meat and put it in a ziplock bag. Here comes the fun part: now you need to make it like the meat was vacuum-packed the whole time. This means suck all the air out of the bag. Trust me, the salmonella is worth the thawing time you’ll save by not having air as an insulator between the meat and the outside world⁵. Now run cold water over the bag, turning every once in awhile. It’s thawed when you can bend the center, or when you can’t feel your fingers anymore from holding a frozen ziplock bag under cold water for so long.

#BachelorCook As long as it’s the same texture and density and will cook the same? Surprise!

I diced a lot of turnips. The recipe called for 3 cups. I got to 9 cups before I even hit the second bag from the fridge. (A keen eye will note the tupperware full of turnips in the fridge self-portrait, earlier.)

#BachelorCook says when the veg sticks to the knife, it’s efficient. That way all you have to do us shake the knife over the bowl.

A recipe, you say…? Doesn’t this go against all of the laziness that #BachelorCook stands for?! Please note the complexity of the recipe – the bachelor version is as follows:

1. Dice as many turnips as you have (or up to as many as you feel like dicing).
2. Slice a few carrots.
3. Chop an onion. The size of the onion pieces is inversely proportional to the onion-to-turnip ratio. AKA Fewer turnips = cut the onion into smaller pieces so it’s not so “holy shit I just put an entire onion into the pot”
4. Wish you had cheese⁶.
5. Combine #3 with #4, sorrowfully. Pretend the tears are involuntary from chopping the onion. We all know the truth.
6. Boil #1-3; while (still not done?!) {keep getting drunk; keep boiling}
7. You’re done.

The balance of any recipe is typically accounted for in one simple step: Mrs. Dash. Also known as the bachelor’s spice-rack-in-a-bottle⁷.

This is about the time I start telling you how I actually cooked these things, rather than just how I prepared them. Ahahahaha. Enter: The Faucet.

You will notice how the handle is pointing dejectedly towards the sink, not upward as one may expect with the water running. The plastic-Made-in-China special finally bit the dust. Fuck.

#BachelorCook says “The bathroom is now the auxiliary kitchen.”

Guess who got to run to the hardware store at 9 o’clock at night.

He was thrillllled (to say the least). We called it an adventure at the outset (bad things make my optimism go into overdrive). Before we left Natasha asked how I was planning to cook the fish. “I was going to put it in a pan… then turn it over.” I got a blank stare in response. He and I hastily made our way out the door, leaving her with bachelor-cooking instructions (#1 Do not over-complicate things) and she continued to tweet and cook.

When we returned home with new faucet in hand, Natasha finished making the dinner! So tasty. The salmon was a bit tough from being in the freezer for. a. year., but nothing a little salt and some beer can’t fix⁸. Next time I would cut the carrots thinner so the counterpart turnips didn’t get so soft while boiling.

After dinner, the real fun began… Replacing the faucet. A selection of tweets from Natasha (@MetaCookbook) who was so gracefully staying out of harm’s way, watching from the couch:

#bachelorcook has just asked for a hammer, a wrench & “a thin flathead screwdriver”. Also she said, “I bet if we just hit it with a hammer…”

“Maybe if we stare at it long enough, it’ll fix itself.” —@kmlesch, the #bachelorcook on my broken kitchen sink.

OMG @BillWeiss AND @kmlesch ARE DISCUSSING CUTTING SOME PLUMBING WITH A BREAD KNIFE. #seriouslynotenoughboozeintheworld

It’s a bad sign when @kmlesch goes looking for safety goggles because she’s afraid @BillWeiss is going to slice his face off. Right?

She’s not joking RT @kmlesch:#bachelorcook-ing with wine in 1 hand, drill bits in the other. Didn’t expect to be spending my Weds night like this.

“This is going to be a GREAT ‘you’re doing it wrong’ story.” -– @BillWeiss

Tipsy tweeting and everyone else doing the plumbing is, quite possibly, the best thing. cc @kmlesch @BillWeiss

HOLY CRAP, I HAVE A FAUCET AGAIN! And it’s far prettier and more useful than the last one.

And that, folks, is my first adventure in the land of #BachelorCook. I can only hope the next is as exciting as the first.

¹ Months. A week. It’s really the same.

² This is a surprise?

³ We’re like ants. We pack it away for the winter.

⁴ Here I thought I needed to ask an experienced little old lady how to decide what’s usable. Bachelors know it all, I guess.

⁵ Krysti’s next Christmas gift.

⁶ No one but Krysti will be surprised to read we had at least 7 kinds of cheese in there.

⁷ Krysti persevered admirably in the absence of Mrs. Dash in our kitchen. If she wants it, she’d best bring it next time.

⁸ And more wine, pre-beer. And a lemon & oil honey-mustard sauce I threw together knowing what she didn’t. Namely, that the fish had been in there a year or more. And SHE’S the lazy cook?

I had plans for a special post today, but it turns out life gets in the way sometimes, and you have to make a totally different post. Namely, life got in the way by Hostess (of Twinkie & Wonderbread fame) filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Now, I don’t know if you all recall my semi-shameful admission hidden in this long post here, but I love(d) me some Hostess Cupcakes.

Interestingly, after I went to the conference I posted about there, my Hostess Cupcake eating dropped dramatically. I left the conference to visit a good friend, who had driven 6 hours to come pick me up. On the 6 hour trip home, we stopped at a convenience store and I grabbed my faithful friend, the two-pack of Hostess Cupcakes. I ate them, but basically realized they don’t taste all that good. And they’re really bad for me, the environment, and just generally not good. I ended up having no interest in eating them for about six months, maybe more. I’ve had one or two since then, and my enjoyment is creeping back up. However, it turns out they aren’t what I want any more.

But I’d still be sad to see them go. Only them, though. Twinkies are vile abominations that should cease existing post-haste.

I recently had a birthday. Like, less than a month ago. Just after my birthday, I made a list of things I wanted to get done or have made into habits by the time my next birthday rolled around. One of my “habits” to be formed is that I want to start participating in “Meatless Mondays”. Sounds good, right?

Well, I had my list made just before New Year’s Eve, which means there’s only been two Mondays I’ve been challenged to so far. And the first one was a holiday & we went out to breakfast & I totally stole some of Bill’s corned beef hash.

Oops.

However, that’s no excuse to give up. I have to push on & keep trying. Only, really, I suck at both vegetarian cooking and, more generically, meal planning. So I’m looking for recipes and tips.

What are some of your favorite vegetarian recipes out there?

What do you do to make a meal come together? Are you, like my friend Marty (I’m told), set on the idea of “a meal consists of at least one each of the following: starch, protein, veggie”? Or are you more like me and occasionally say, “Meh. I just roasted a butternut squash and we can eat that.“ Do you do anything special if it’s a vegetarian meal rather than a meal with meat?

Thanks for your advice, folks!

This recipe is a tale of two seasons: summer and winter. Summer being when I first enjoyed this dish. Winter being when it’s most convenient to defrost my freezer and make discoveries like, hey, I have a chunk of salmon in there! (Including a very long aside about the current weather and trials and tribulations of defrosting.)

I first had this meal at Rosa’s house. Rosa is now my mother-in-law, and she’s a really wonderful person. It was in May of 2011, and we were in New Mexico to meet our new nieces (Hazel on Bill’s side & Zoey on mine), visit our families, and plan a wedding. Or get started on planning a wedding.

It was warm, gorgeous and a really fun trip. We made some good memories. Memories of birthday parties in huge backyards, with summer beer. Cuddling little babies. Hanging out with my mother drinking tea. Eating dinner with Rosa.

You know, the kind of memories you hold onto in the dead of winter. Like early January in Chicago. Except…

The weather in Chicago is incredibly weird right now. It’s far too warm.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s chilly out. We do, in fact, live in Chicago, so it’s not a balmy 70F outside and hasn’t been for awhile. But it’s warm. The other day, I think we were in the mid-50s. And, today, 6 Jan 2012, we’re expecting to hit 55F. We’re consistently in the 40s and rarely get to freezing or below during the day. I’ve only recently pulled out my winter coat, and there are days when I do that & I regret it.

It’s warm enough that I have yet to empty my big freezer and defrost it. Which really is unfortunate as it has gotten a much larger than average layer of frost/ice since we had it opening and closing so much the day everyone came to get their hog. Truly, I’ve wanted to defrost it since back then, but I’ve been waiting for the weather to get cold. Once it’s cold out, a couple of coolers on my balcony is akin to a freezer.

Of course, the weather hasn’t cooperated.

The nice thing about defrosting my freezer¹ is that I get a reminder of what’s in there. I’m pretty bad at organization, as this blog may have demonstrated, so even when I am ambitious about making a list of what’s in the freezers (because, yes, there are two – sort of three right now), that list is inaccurate within days of being made. Combine that with the big freezer’s tendency toward frosting over on the shelves? Well, let’s just say defrosting is a good time to discover things that were buried by other food and/or ice.

This leads to me being pretty torn about the current weather, wishing it would just BE WINTER, when I really ought to just be enjoying the hell out of it. I DO live in Chicago, after all.

I find I am also torn about the weather because, no matter how warm it is, I just want it to be summer again. Being real winter would be relatively nice as well, because I could make all those stews and long-roasted things I don’t want to make in the summer. It’s not really cold enough yet. (Seriously. I’m not making beef stew on a 55F day.) But, truly, I just miss summer, even if winter has yet to truly make an appearance. It’s not cold out, but it’s colder than I’d like. There’s sun, but it’s a lying bastard, because it’s still cold(ish) outside. And, worst of all? It gets dark so dang early.

I think that’s the real problem. I think these lovely brisk days would be fine if only it wasn’t dark by 4:30 pm. I can’t fathom living further north, honestly. Winters there might be brutal in a way I could cope with, when it comes to snow and cold, but I suspect the early darkness would just make me even crazier than the Chicago winters do. And now that I am taking (or trying to take) photos for the blog regularly again, the light is really killing me.

All of that’s what prompted me to decide to post this quickie “recipe” and photo today. When I saw this photo, I remembered summer. I remembered finding this salmon in that freezer when I pulled everything out and defrosted before the hog came. I remembered thinking it was going to be a bit off-tasting straight on, because of it’s long hiatus. And I remembered eating a dish at Rosa’s house. A dish I was sure I wouldn’t enjoy, but was so wrong. I liked enough to try to replicate it in my own home.

Hers was better, though.

Ingredients

Note: I get the sense that a typical portion of any given fish is approximately six ounces. We tend toward four ounces each². So, adjust the fish portion as needed. Also note that, because I was throwing this together, all amounts are guesses.

• 2 4 oz filets of salmon (Or, as is common in my household, 1 8 oz filet.)
• 1/4 c pesto (Lay it on pretty thick.)
• Olive oil, for cooking
• Several stalks of kale
• 1/3 c brown rice
• However much water you use to cook brown rice (Since I hate recipes that don’t list water as an ingredient.)

Instructions

Pull the pesto out of the fridge or freezer and bring to room temperature, or as close as you can get it before you are famished and must eat nownownow.

Cook the brown rice however you, personally, cook brown rice. If you don’t cook brown rice, follow the directions on your brown rice package. If you bought brown rice for the first time from a bulk bin & thus don’t have a package with directions to follow, try putting 2 parts water to 1 part rice (2/3 c water to 1/3 c rice for this so-called recipe) in a pan for which you own a lid. Put the lid on the pan, then bring the water to a hard boil (as in, you’re kind of terrified the lid will fly off). Hard boil for two minutes, then without removing the lid remove the whole thing from the heat and allow to stand at least 30 minutes, up to however long it takes either it to cook or you to be done, call it 50 minutes. Fluff it before serving.

Remove the leaves from the kale stems, leaving the leaves fairly large. Steam or saute or cook those leaves in some way that you like. I think I steamed them.

Grab a medium-sized skillet, maybe 12 inches in diameter, and put it on the stove over high heat. Add a couple of swirls of olive oil – some amount that you think looks sane. Allow the oil to become quite hot – not smoking, but maybe thinking about it, then add the salmon filets, skin side down. Cook, depending on how done you like your salmon, just a few minutes. Probably three or so, then scoop that guy up with your turner, and flip him over and cook slightly less on the other side.

Once your salmon’s done, madke a bed of rice and kale on two plates, and put the salmon on top. Smear half the pesto on each salmon filet and serve.

Cooking and Consumption Notes

Cooking

I started to tell you to start with cooked brown rice. Then I decided it was kind of a cop-out. Especially since I’m sure I started with uncooked rice. But, in truth, I couldn’t tell you how to make brown rice. I have, once, made it successfully on the stove top (following the directions I gave). All other times have been abject failures, in both the direction of “crunchy, horribly underdone rice” and the direction of “once, this was rice & now it is charcoal.” (I have also gotten both of these kinds of failures with the directions I gave.) These days, I use the pressure cooker/rice cooker Bill’s dad and stepmother got us for Christmas a couple of years ago. It’s still not perfect, in that it tends to come out a bit wet, but the rice is leagues ahead of what I seem to be capable of stove top. I still wonder why it is so.

I oversteamed the kale. It is sad. Luckily, overcooked kale is still pretty tasty, but (as you can see in the photo) it’s not super attractive. You wouldn’t be thrilled to be served this in a restaurant, both due to color and (somewhat) taste.

You can use commercially prepared pesto, or make your own. I vastly prefer to make my own, but that’s at least partially because I’m pretty finicky and not actually a huge basil fan (Sorry, Grandma!). So, my pesto tends to be lighter than most. It’s also really easy to make and freeze, so it’s a nice thing to have around for future use.

Consumption

I have to say this looks really good, and I know we have more frozen salmon and frozen pesto and brown rice. I think I might also have to make this again, sometime this winter. The pesto is so fresh and “green” tasting, I think it will make me feel more like summer in winter.

Overall, this is something I never would have thought to do if I hadn’t eaten it at my mother-in-law’s house. And, while her pesto is basilier than mine (which Bill really appreciates), it was surprisingly good. She did better on the sides/bed of food, for sure. Hers was sauted onions and potatoes and probably some goodies I’m forgetting.

She also did it all in cast iron, which is a +2 vs cooking. Just so you know, when you’re contemplating cooking.

Go. Eat this! You won’t regret it! (Especially if you have salmon that needs a little help because it’s been in the freezer too long. Fair warning: that kind of salmon is at least a -1 vs cooking.)

¹ Other than it no longer being filled with frost, of course.

² Not because we don’t like fish, as we both really do, but because it’s one of the easiest things to get portioned at the seafood counter/fish monger “correctly” for two people. We’d probably eat other meats more sparingly if portioning were as easy. (Ask how we’ve split many a pork chop.)