Sometimes, you just need to be really productive. And, sometimes, being productive means clearing your sink of its dishes, doing a few loads of laundry, organizing your closet, going through your mail, and cooking yourself some yummy meals. That's what happened last Thursday; it was wonderful. The day hit a high when I received a surprise bouquet from my beau! It was a pretty good day.
And last week I cooked up a storm! I made delicious baked sandwiches, french onion soup, and a pumpkin spice bunt cake! It was the perfect marriage of deliciously fall foods. And I felt like a big girl when I asked the boys at the deli counter to slice my block of cheese that I picked up in the "specialty cheese" section and they honored my special request! After all, a perfect layer of uniformly golden, bubbly gruyere is must have for any respectable french onion soup!
So I ate a lot of cheese this past week. Gruyere, cream cheese, Kraft singles on my egg and cheese breakfast bagels (I won't judge you if you won't judge me). And just in case I hadn't hit my maximum cheese intake this week, I had a grilled cheese for brunch! It wasn't planned, you see. The Bloomington Handmade Market was today, and I'm a sucker for cute, thoughtful Christmas gifts. So I headed over after my Bollywood dancefit class, and saw The Big Cheeze Food Truck! I couldn't resist. I don't think I've ever gotten to eat anything from a food truck! But it's okay because my cheese was served with some chicken and bacon...and ranch. So it was well-balanced...right?
Now, I'm a fan of good food, both in terms of taste and quality, and I like to use fresh, seasonal, and mostly nutritious ingredients. But, I also love my carbs and sweets. And cheese! So I'm not much of a calorie counter. I just try to supplement my "good" eating with some exercise and am happy to indulge in ice cream and the occasional doughnut when the need arises (I may have indulged a bit too much in Lancaster...I think I had 4 doughnuts in a week!)
So, now's the perfect time to bring in Mike. He's a bit more...balanced in the food department. Within our first few months of dating he complained that he'd had more dessert than in the past few years (we'd only had dessert together six times, six!). This will be the first of his "Mike's Corner" posts, and I promise I'll be back with that sinfully delicious pumpkin spice bunt cake recipe! Pumpkin is nutritional, no?
Mike’s
Corner: Reflections on a Vegetarian Diet
Since I make the
occasional cameo in Nicki’s posts on here, she suggested that I pull my weight
and contribute a post of my own. This blog’s culinary theme is right there in
its title, so I’ll introduce myself by talking about some of the ways in which
I think about my own diet, and I’ll conclude with two versions of my favorite
recipe.
I’m approaching my second anniversary as a vegetarian. I don’t remember the exact
date when I decided to stop eating meat, but it was very soon after
Thanksgiving 2011. I still have a hard time articulating exactly why I made
this decision. Part of it had to do with my increasing awareness of the
damaging economic and environmental effects of industrial farming. My own
health and family medical history was a factor as well. Although I’m a
philosophy professor, the philosophical work on animal rights was not much of
an influence, although to explain why would take too many words for this post.
(Maybe next time.)
In
any case, for the past two years, I’ve abstained almost entirely from both meat
and fish. (I’ve eaten fish on a couple of occasions when there was no other
option, and chicken once at an event that had no veggie or fish options.) As a
result, I’ve had to pay close attention to my diet. This is because I’m an avid
weightlifter, and this imposes nutritional demands on my body that go beyond
what is required for ordinary healthy subsistence.
In
particular, protein is extremely important for anybody engaged in regular
intense exercise. It’s especially important for anybody who does strength
training. One word that shows up a lot in weightlifting circles is
‘overtraining’. This condition occurs when the body is worked beyond the point
where it can recover and rebuild normally. One way to overtrain is to work out
too much without allowing for sufficient time between trips to the gym, but
another way is to withhold what the body needs to rebuild the muscle fibers
that get broken down by lifting weights. In order to do this rebuilding, the
body needs protein above all.
Of
course, when most people think of protein, they think first of meat and fish.
This becomes very apparent if you watch a lot of cooking shows on TV, like I
do. In the culinary use, the word ‘protein’ has a precise meaning that doesn’t
correspond to its nutritional one. It seems to be used to refer to meat and
fish only. (In a way, the word ‘fruit’ is similar. A tomato meets all of the
biological criteria of a fruit, but in the kitchen, tomatoes are vegetables.)
So, since I don’t eat these, I’ve had to work to develop a vegetarian diet that
provides me with enough of the protein (in the nutritional sense) that I need.
There
are a lot of protein supplements out there, and I do make use of those. A lot
of them are dairy-based, but since I haven’t gone fully vegan, I don’t shy away
from them. (There are vegan protein supplements, and I have tried them. For a
variety of reasons, however, the dairy-based ones are better.) I typically get
between 50 and 100 grams of protein per day from shakes that I mix. For my level
of activity at the gym, however, that isn’t enough, and the rest has to come
from food.
I
have a number of high-protein vegetarian recipes stashed away. One of my
favorites combines two of the best plant-based protein sources: beans and
quinoa. I’m sure that beans are quite familiar to you. Quinoa may be too, since
it’s been a fad over the past couple of years. It’s one of the best plant-based
sources of protein around, and it can be used in a lot of recipes. I tend to
used it in place of rice a lot, including in the recipe below. There has been
some controversy about the economic effects that quinoa’s increasing popularity
might have on the farmers in South America who cultivate it, but this appears
to be much less of a problem than some initial reports about it suggested. So,
I’ve felt comfortable continuing to cook with it a lot.
The
recipe below actually comes it two varieties: a play on Cajun-style rice and
beans and an Indian curried-chickpea style. I’ve provided the recipe for the
Cajun version; below it, you’ll find the modifications to use if you want to
make the Indian version. Keep in mind that I like my food to pack a punch, so
be sure to decrease the amount of chili sauce and cayenne pepper if you like
things milder.
Cajun-style quinoa-and-beans
4 cups low-sodium vegetable stock or broth
2 cups uncooked quinoa
2 cans low-sodium black beans, rinsed and drained
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1 medium green bell pepper, seeded and chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp. ground cumin
2 tsp. cayenne pepper
2 tsp. Louisiana-style hot sauce
1 tbsp. salt
½ tbsp. black pepper
1 cup frozen green peas
Canola oil
Heat a bit of oil in a large pot. Sauté bell pepper, onion, and
celery until soft (about 12 minutes).
Add garlic, sauté everything one more minute
Add quinoa, cayenne
pepper, and cumin, and stir until the spices coat everything
Add stock, hot sauce,
salt, and black pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat, cover, and simmer
for 15 minutes.
Stir in peas, cover
again, and simmer 5 more minutes.
Add beans, stir
everything together, and cover for a few minutes to let the flavors mix.
For the Indian version,
make these changes:
- Replace the black
beans with chickpeas
- Replace the cumin and
cayenne pepper with 1 tbsp. curry powder
- Add 2 tsp. minced
fresh ginger (sauté with the garlic)
- Replace
Louisiana-style hot sauce with sambal ulek (an Indonesian chili sauce) or
Sriracha, and use at least 1 tbsp.
