Okay, I think I am getting the hang of cooking non-icky Eat to Live food. The trick is basically to not cook any recipe that was ever submitted to a mailing list.
This is the best dinner from last week. It looks ugly but it was good.
It is Nacho Cheese-ish Substance on roasted vegetables. The cheese sauce is not like cheese and not even as cheese-like as most of the other fake cheese sauces I have tried, but it made of only ETL ingredients (white beans, salsa, lemon juice, nutritional yeast, onion powder) and if you appreciate that then it is pretty good. It is kind of like tangy hummus. I’m not sure how I feel about its use in a mexican pie, where you put it on top of beans, so it is pureed beans on top of beans. I have not been brainwashed enough for that yet. And it turns out you can spray a tiny bit of olive oil on vegetables with one of those atomizer things instead of giving them a severe dousing and they roast just fine. I did one tray of cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, and brussels sprouts and one of onions, bell pepper, mushrooms and zucchini. Before I was too lazy to cook more than one vegetable at a time so it is exciting to have so many.
Today we had taco salad (+ cilantro) for lunch and it was the first meal that I liked so much that I wanted to eat it again. There are not very many recipes that I make more than once in general though.
And can I tell you how amazing the pressure cooker is. Oh the freedom from the tyranny of canned beans and also the tyranny of having to soak dried beans way ahead of time and then boiling them for hours and they are still hard forever! The only price to pay is a slight fear of a giant steamy explosion whenever it makes a weird noise. That seems to be wearing off though.
For dinner I made a soup that was sort of like Moosewood minestrone with random healthful things added.
Mollie Katzen is apparently all about eating meats now, which is just another reason the dislike Moosewood Restaurant along with how they are always serving fishes and also how it is not good. Believe me, I lived in Ithaca and both times I ate there everything was bland and either over- or under-cooked.
Mollie Katzen: I’ve never been that committed to vegetarianism. There is a difference between eating vegetarian and vegetarianism. I love vegetarian food. One of my favorite things is a big plateful of vegetables and greens with tofu and nuts. That is how I eat about 95% of the time. However, if I’m feeling like I have low blood sugar and I’ve got a long day ahead of me and I am at a lunch meeting and the two different sandwich choices are grilled eggplant or roast beef, I am going to go for the roast beef. This is because if I eat the eggplant, I am going to get faint and dizzy and crash in an hour because I need the protein. So I need to go for the most nutritionally dense food available. I’m also slight and thin and I don’t have a lot of reserve, so I am very conscious of the nutritional density of food. Of course I want it to be pure and I want it to be wholesome and healthy as well.
Poor little thing! Maybe you should put some almonds in your pocket, you dummy. Anyway you don’t need protein, you’re just detoxing.
Nonetheless I do make the minestrone and ratatouille recipes from the original cookbook a lot.
This time I changed it a bit because noooo pasta.
tiny bit olive oil
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves crushed garlic
1 cup celery — minced
1 cup carrot — cubed
1 cup eggplant — cubed
2 small zucchini, cubed
1 green bell pepper, chopped
3 large leaves of kale, ribs removed, chopped
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon oregano
1/2 cup fresh parsley — chopped
some basil
2 cups cooked great northern beans
28 oz can crushed tomatoes in puree
1/2 cup dry quinoa
3 1/2 cups water or stock
3 tablespoons dry red wineIn a soup kettle, saute garlic and onions in olive oil until they are soft and translucent.
Add carrot, celery and eggplant.
Mix well.
Add oregano, black pepper and basil.
Cover and cook over low heat 5-8 minutes.Add zucchini, green pepper, kale, quinoa, water, puree, cooked beans and wine.
Cover and simmer until quinoa is cooked, ~20 minutes.
Add parsley.
One thing I think I am not doing quite right is that I have been eating a crap ton of bananas. The banana is not doing well on the hallowed nutrient density chart. In fact it is worse than skim milk and shrimps! I could just be eating milky shrimps every day! So I’m going to work on my banana habit. So I made Dr. Fuhrman’s YUMMY BANANA OAT BARS…
I added some cinnamon, pumpkin pie spice, and a little bit of agave nectar instead of the date sugar but still I’m gonna say that maybe “yummy” is a bit of an overstatement. Because it’s not like you bite into it and you think “mmmm, yummy!” as happens with traditional desserts. It’s more like “this is not so bad, hey this is kind of good in a way, oh god what has happened to me, this is not a real cookie but it is sort of yummy because I have not had anything cookie-like in so so long.” It is pretty good to have one with a cup of tea. Of course you are not supposed to have tea so I did not have tea, just like I did not have a hanger episode that led to eating an entire 1000 calorie chipotle burrito yesterday. (It was waaaay too salty.) (Hence no weight numbers today.) (Due to the bloats.)