All treats, no tricks

Okay, so it's been two weeks. GP has been working late recently, which typically means I capitalize on leftovers, but I've captured my dinners for the past two weeks to share a sampling of my ovo-pesco-vegan diet. (As a side note, please forgive the poor quality of the photos. I unfortunately don't own a fancy camera and the flourescent light in my kitchen makes everything an ugly yellow.)

To start off, a big batch of chana masala via Smitten Kitchen. GP and I both love Indian food and chickpeas, so when I realized that such a thing as chickpea curry existed, I knew I had to make it. I will say that this receipe left the chickpeas a little dry, so I'd add some more water, but otherwise it was tangy and delicious. I ate it with some jasmine rice and Trader Joe's garlic naan.

With some extra rice, GP and I made this crab fried rice from a little book of Chinese recipes I was given. It was very light and fragrant, with bean sprouts, leeks, crab, egg and lime juice.

This is one of my new favorite recipes, pumpkin rotini from Hipster Food's Chickpea magazine. Though the blog's name is cringe-worthy, Hipster Food is a good resource for tasty vegan fare. This pumpkin rotini is, in my opinion, the perfect vegan substitute for mac 'n cheese. The sauce is a seasoned mixture of pumpkin puree and rice milk, and has all the ooey-gooey creaminess and warmth of a bowl of classic Kraft.

Sauteed mushrooms and kale over polenta. I found this recipe at Epicurious, used Trader Joe's pre-made polenta, nixed the pancetta and cheese and swapped vegetable broth for chicken broth. Maybe it was all of the modifications, but this dish was pretty bland and boring, and still required me to use 3 pots and pans! All it was was kale and mushrooms, seasoned and cooked down in broth, over warm polenta. I could probably find ways to improve upon the recipe, but overall the end result isn't worth all the cleanup.

Fall is here and I'm thrilled to take advantage of seasonal vegetables and get into the harvest/Halloween spirit. With extra pumpkin puree from the rotini, I made these pumpkin spice cookies working off of a recipe at Group Recipes. They turned out moist and tasty and I made sure to share them with co-workers, lest I eat three dozen by myself.

GP likes to pick on my general lack of knowledge when it comes to seafood. His father is an accomplished member of the industry, so he grew up eating and learning about a lot of aquatic creatures. I've never really liked seafood or fish in any form, but I've forced myself to open up and eat new and different kinds of seafood with more frequency, in order to take advantage of the excellent health benefits. However, as GP points out, I tend to pick the most complicated, exotic types of seafood that end up making me frustrated and nervous. Instead of trying a simple, versatile whitefish like cod or mahi mahi, I buy shell-on prawns and oysters. This past summer I excitedly made paella and was introduced to mussels. While they did make me a little nervous (How do I keep them alive in the fridge? What if I eat a bad one?) they were tasty and fun to cook and eat. Now that seafood is a main source of protein for me, I'm trying to make it the centerpiece of 2-3 meals each week. So I tried mussels again, and worked off of a recipe in the Good Housekeeping Cookbook, cooking them with wine, herbs and alliums and serving them with crusty bread (and more wine). The meal was light and felt oh-so fancy.

As I said, fall is here, and I'm trying to work in a lot of seasonal vegetables. Food bloggers the internet over seem to be squealing about brussel sprouts. I'll be honest, I had never had brussel sprouts before, but I was eager to try them. I made several meals out of two recipes. One was roasted potatoes and brussel sprouts from The Kitchn (nix the bacon) with a side of Trader Joe's Harvest Grains Blend (I love this stuff). The other I found at the fabulous blog The Bitten Word, which was for sauteed brussel sprouts with sriracha and cashews. The sprouts with potatoes and grains is a hearty (albeit starch-heavy) rib-sticker, while the sriracha and cashew stir fry is hot, nutty and crunchy. Two thumbs up for both.

Getting a little lazy and cooking for one, I made a couple of omelets, a huge veggie one and a kale and mushroom. With the veggie omelet I re-heated a weekend attempt at sriracha hashbrowns I invented. Shredded potatoes with chopped onions and jalapenos, seasoned with cayenne pepper and sriracha. I thought the idea was pretty good, but even after many attempts, I cannot make crispy, flavorful hash browns. Mine end up soggy and all the flavors are masked by oil. Anyone have some pointers?

Pasta pasta pasta! I tried a new pasta dish called 'Harvest Primavera' from Whole Foods, and turned to an old favorite from The Kitchn, soba noodles with wilted bok choy. I was skeptical about the Whole Foods recipe, as I've had a 50% success rate with their recipes in the past, but this was a winner. Seasonal vegetables mixed with a pound of penne in a tangy, spicy tomato sauce. As you can see, it made enough to feed me for quite a while and I never tired of it. The night on which I made the soba noodles may not have been the best, it was freezing rain outside and this is a cold, slimier dish, but it's easy, light, healthy and delicious.

Of the few types of seafood I did grow up enjoying, scallops were second only to shrimp. I love their delicate, distinct flavor, and the fact that they are visually unintimidating, like the seafood equivalent of a chicken nugget (not to insult the scallop). They are tender, juicy bites of yum. I found this recipe for smoky scallops with fennel at The Kitchn. I love fennel, I love scallops, I also love wine and tomatoes, so this sounded amazing. Unfortunately, it turned out very bland. Both scallops and fennel have very light, delicate flavors which I think were lost in the cooking and the wine base. Everything also lost it's color and looked a bit grey. I omitted the tomatoes as GP doesn't like them very much and served everything on brown rice. I wish this turned out better, but it fell short.

Lastly, the first recipe I've tried by Mark Bittman, practical healthy-eating advocate, author and food writer at The New York Times. He is one of my four 'food heroes' as I call them, Mark, Mike, Jamie and Joel, otherwise known as Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver and Joel Salatin (please Wikipedia as necessary). But more about them later. Bittman has written several compendiums of '101 recipes' for the Times, which are lists of quick, cheap meal ideas following a certain theme - Thanksgiving, summer, salads, etc. This is #4 on his summer recipes, a simple mix of seasoned white beans and shrimp. I added some crusty bread and thoroughly enjoyed this light but savory dinner. The leftovers also made a fantastic lunch.

So there you have it, my dinners (and most lunches) for two weeks. For breakfast I consistently eat either cold cereal with rice milk, or fruit, so that's my ovo-pesco-vegan diet. I'm even more excited about the upcoming meals I have planned. I'm diving headfirst into hearty fall cooking (I think I was forced to, considering it snowed two days ago) and making stuffed pumpkins tonight for a Halloween dinner, followed by Ribollita soup, sweet potato and black bean chili, puttanesca pasta, and a squash and egg skillet.

To close, I'll share this year's jack-o-lanterns: a portrait of my cat, Count Rugen, and Me Gusta.

I've enjoyed carving the annual jack-o-lantern for as long as I can remember. However, I think I was in middle school when I discovered the magic of jack-o-lantern stencils, and every year since I've made at least one detailed carving - everything from Jack Sparrow to Gollum to Barack Obama to Eric Northman. This year I kept my focus more at home, choosing a picture that looked like the real  man in my life, Rugen, and what can I say, Me Gusta was made to be put on a pumpkin.

Happy Halloween!

Ovo-pesco-whuh?

I don't know whether it's official or not, but October seems to be the month for food-related events. Last weekend was the Boston Local Food Festival which GP and I attended. It was a huge event full of local vendors and organizations with lots to eat and drink! There was a special local craft brew tasting event held at the Daily Catch where you paid $25, got a cup and got two hours to taste as many samples of local beer, wine, mead and cider as you could handle. Considering we hadn't eaten breakfast when we showed up, we took it a little easy, but it was still delicious and fun.

Coming up, October 24 is National Food Day, sponsored by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. I've been excited about this event since last winter when I first learned about it, and I'm glad that there are going to be a number of events taking place around Boston that day. There is no standard event, the CSPI is simply encouraging organizations, restaurants, schools, governments and the public to host events, large and small which highlight food and the myriad issues surrounding it, namely diet-related disease, farming, hunger, environmental health, junk food marketing to children, and farm labor. The CSPI has been holding monthly webinars which touch on each of the issues and I have been listening in. The CSPI functions as an independent consumer advocacy organization who are basically the watchdogs of the food industry and the government. They step in to advocate for public and environmental health and seek to educate the public about major food issues. I'm appreciative and excited about the work they are doing and about the Food Day events which are in the works. Because it's on a Monday, unfortunately I won't be able to go to any daytime events, but I plan on going to a documentary film screening at Harvard - I'll update once it's happened!

Then there's even more! The weekend after Food Day, October 29-30 is the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival, which as GP rightly assumed, I plan on going to. So yeah, I don't know if it's because of the harvest season with it's last hurrah of agricultural yield before the New England snow hits and the color green disappears from the natural world for a solid five months, but everyone is celebrating food this month. I'm not complaining :)

As for my cooking adventures at home, I finally watched one too many documentaries about the numerous health, moral, economic and environmental woes that arise from eating meat (this one actually) and took the inevitable leap to cutting out red meat and poultry from my diet. A little bit about my dietary history, I've always eaten a pretty average, not extremely unhealthy nor uber-healthy American diet. In high school I was a 'loose' vegetarian for two years, trying it out to support animal welfare and lose weight but I was never fully dedicated to it. I was 'loose' because I'd allow myself a meat-filled dinner of takeout Chinese food or a burger about once a month. I eventually gave it up entirely. My diet changed again when I studied abroad in China for five months. While there, I didn't eat any dairy (it's not part of the traditional diet and is pretty hard to find) and I ate a great deal more fresh fruits and vegetables, along with smaller amounts of less-processed meat. I lost 30 pounds without trying to. Since I returned home two years ago I've tried to maintain the same diet more-or-less which has had it's difficulties. Even if I ate the same kinds of bread and meat as in China, it was inevitably more processed and less fresh, and of course cheese is pretty much inescapable in the U.S., so I've slacked a little and allowed myself a bit of fromage here and there.

But no longer. I'm putting my foot down. Since GP and I have gotten our own place it's much easier to control my whole diet, and with my new healthy food obsession we've been eating better and better. The only junk food we buy is some chocolate and tortilla chips, and the majority of our dinners are vegetable and grain-based Asian cuisine (Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai). I've been balancing our meals as 50/50 vegetarian, so without dairy, we've been eating a lot of vegan meals for awhile. With this new decision to cut out red meat and poultry, I'm technically eating an ovo-pesco-vegan diet, aka eggs and fish are the only animal products I'll eat. I decided to leave these animal products in because I think a strict vegan diet is a little unpractical for me, I won't have to worry about getting enough protein and vitamin B-12, and can still enjoy the many health benefits of eating fish/seafood.

I didn't expect GP to adopt the diet with me, I was more than willing to cook him his own portions of beef, pork and chicken, but surprisingly, he said he'd make the transition too. He is one of those rare people who enjoys eating healthily. His favorite 'junk' food is bread and he loves vegetables and seafood. He also has no sweet tooth which I simply cannot understand as I pine for a cookie after dinner every night. Also, as he pointed out, this isn't a huge change from how we were already eating.

So there it is, we are ovo-pesco-vegans as silly as it sounds. I'm not sure if the terminology is 100% correct, as we're technically not vegans by including eggs and fish, but we're not ovo-pesco-vegetarians, because that would imply that we eat dairy. Whatever, they're all buzzwords anyway. So what do two ovo-pesco-vegans eat, you ask? I'll be documenting what I eat for a full week (dinners at the very least) and will share it in my next post.

Until then!