magic onions!

So recently I learned through the Power of the Internet that if you put the white parts of green onions into a glass of water, they will magically regenerate and you will always have green onions. I figured it was worth a shot, so the next time I used green onions (for miso soup), I put them into a small glass of water. And lo and behold!

 I took that picture last week so the onions are even taller now and ready to be sliced up the next time I'm peckish. Never ending onions! Thank you, Internet! Now I have to ask...do those of you who have green thumbs have any other tips like this? Is there another vegetable that will magically regenerate if I put it in a glass of water? As crafty as I can be, I've never been able to get into gardening because I make plants die.

In other cooking news, I managed not to succumb to the siren song of sushi takeout, and made myself a quick soup. Can of white beans, onions and red bell peppers that were already chopped up and leftover from another dinner, a whole head of garlic (yeah, that's right), can of green chiles, veggie broth. Boil, simmer, eat. I like it when it's simple.

good eater

I was wondering recently about what makes someone a "good" eater. I guess by that, I mean someone who is health conscious and will happily opt for vegetables over something fatty as opposed to someone who eats mostly fast food and will only order a salad because they're "supposed to" and will eat the whole thing with a grimace on their face. As I said before, there's no such thing as a "perfect" eater because there is always someone out there who eats better than you. Can I put more "quotation" marks in this post? Let's see if I can!

What I usually hear from people who think that healthy eating is a punishment is that that's how they grew up. I get that, because that's how I grew up too. Just to give my mom some credit, that's not how she wanted me to grow up eating. She would always tell me that she bought whole wheat bread when I was little, then we moved to Chicago to live with my grandma and she only liked white bread, so suddenly nothing but Wonderbread would do for me. Between my mom and my grandma, we always had a home cooked meal and ate together as a family. It wasn't their fault I was a super picky eater who would only eat chicken with a side of dessert.

I didn't eat much better in college either...I drank pop instead of water, ate fast food and thought fries were a vegetable. That was when I started branching out, though. I started trying ethnic food and discovered that it was delicious. My best friend and I would go to coffeehouses when we wanted to be fancier than Dennys, and that's when I tried hummus and veggie burgers and they didn't kill me. In fact, I wanted more. I may have even dipped the occasional carrot stick into the hummus when I ran out of pita bread.

Around that time is also when I lost my sweet tooth. Or rather my sweet tooth turned against me. I used to love chocolate, and would hit up vending machines for candy bars and eat more dessert than dinner. Then my teeth became very sensitive...no cavity, just one tooth in my mouth is completely intolerant of biting into anything sugary. Suddenly sugar = pain to me, and that cured my addiction pretty quick. I still eat sweet stuff, but in small doses, and I can barely choke down a whole cookie.

My eating habits did a 180 when I moved out of my parents house. I bought all my old stand bys of pop and chips and white bread, but I wasn't even consuming much of it because I was hardly ever home. It was a really cold winter that year and I didn't want a cold glass of pop, I wanted tea. I didn't want to waste my money on stuff I wasn't eating, and I didn't know how to cook yet, so I would buy tea and soup and yogurt. My roommate was vegetarian and from her I learned about things like rice milk and whole grain bread and stir fry.

Trench wasn't a much better eater than I was. He and his brothers grew up with the most plain palette ever, even more so than me. His mom didn't like cooking that much and didn't want to have fights about dinner, so they all grew up eating mac n cheese and applesauce. Trench's palette expanded when he spent a college semester in Asia and learned to love Asian food. He could do a pretty decent stir fry, but before moving in with me he pretty much lived on Ramen. We learned how to cook together and he took off with it. I can cook, but he's definitely the chef.

After losing my sweet tooth, I became a big fan of savory food. I haven't kicked all of my bad eating habits. If I really let myself loose, I'd probably still buy things like Cheetos and nachos with the bright orange microwavable cheese. I keep that at bay by not buying them, and instead snacking on corn chips with hummus or salsa or guacamole. My Achilles heel now is bar food. As much as I want to be all, "I eat so well, everyone should eat like me, la la la", it all gets undone when I'm at a bar, drinking beer and munching on fries. Oh tater tots with cheese, why are you so good after midnight with booze? This wouldn't be a big deal if it was an occasional thing, but Trench and I get together with various friends for food and drink at least two or three times a week. So I'm currently cutting out beer and fries at bars (hey, it's better than cutting out going to bars, at least in my opinion). We'll see how long that lasts. Now if you excuse me, I'm going to make a smoothie with almond milk, frozen cherries and spinach, and it's going to be delicious.

a post about what I made for dinner turns into a rant about vegetarianism

I just made a pretty damn good dinner if I do say so myself. There are so many times where I go to look up a recipe on the web and then get sucked in looking at pictures of delicious things to eat until my blood sugar sinks so low that I'm ready to eat hummus with my fingers and call it a night. I really can cook a good meal, I swear I can! And I've successfully followed recipes from smitten kitchen, fatfree vegan (um...I usually add a handful of cheese to these recipes. Shh! Don't tell!), and 101 cookbooks. Trench is definitely the chef of the family and I've been bugging him for about three years to start a cooking blog, but like a true philosopher, he hasn't gotten past pontificating about the blog in order to start one.

Usually when I get home from work, I just can't handle making a full on meal, and so I rely on a one-pot recipe instead. For a long time, this meant pasta. Farfalle with olive oil, diced cherry tomatoes and feta cheese, or fusilli with butter sauce and shrimp. All delicious, but probably not the most nutritious on a nightly basis. Finally I've discovered that 1 Grain + chopped up veggies + 1 protein = healthy, delicious and quick to make dinner. Tonight it was quinoa with chopped up swiss chard, pre-cooked and marinated tofu (thank you Trader Joe!), can of diced tomatoes, and a can of chickpeas. Really good, and just one dish was more than filling.

I don't think I've written about it before, but I'm a vegequarian, meaning I eat mostly vegetarian with an exception for fish. Yes, I know the technical term is "pescatarian", but I like "vegequarian" better. Giving up meat was a very gradual process for me. We didn't eat very much of it to begin with because meat is annoying to cook, with the thawing and meat juice that gets everywhere. My mom once gave me a George Foreman grill because she was worried we'd become anemic, and we mostly used it to make grilled cheese sandwiches. About six years ago I was feeling slightly ill from Thanksgiving turkey and realized I was feeling that way whenever I ate lunch meat, so I decided to take a break from eating meat. I didn't miss it, so I never went back to it.

I'm starting to feel guilty about the fish. The more I read about the modern methods of fishing, the less I want to support that industry. I don't want to give up fish though. Yes, I could finally take that step and become vegan, but there's such a rabbit hole when it comes to healthy eating. A 100% meat-free vegetarian might look down on my diet, but a vegan would snub them. (The authors of How It All Vegan refers to them as "lazy vegetarians".) The vegan might feel pretty good about him/herself until a raw foodist comes along and points out all the enzymes they're destroying by cooking perfectly healthy vegetables. Then a fruitarian who lives off fruit that falls from the tree might snap that vegetables don't want to be eaten and it's just as much murder as eating a lamb. (I'm imagining fruitarians as being very snappish and pissed off all the time because they're so hungry, but I'm sure if you asked them they would talk about how much energy they have during the day and how much sleep they get at night and that really the human body doesn't need much more than an apple and a handful of grapes to be healthy.)

Honestly, I have absolutely no problem with people eating meat, I just don't like the idea of supporting factory farms, I think they're a holocaust for animals. I'm jealous of people who live on the west coast because it's so easy to support local farms. Or perhaps you could do it the way a couple friends of mine did and buy your own farm where you raise and slaughter your own meat, knowing that the animal had a good life and was killed as humanely as possible by your own hands. As for me, I'm considering sticking with fish that's local. I live in Illinois. This probably means eating a lot of cod. However, next week I'll be visiting New Orleans. Bring on the crawfish!

some nights you should just order in

I got home a little early last night, before Trench, who has been sick lately. I was starving and knew exactly what I wanted to make for dinner...homemade Chinese fried rice, made with the leftover rice from the last time we ordered Thai food, and stir fried with egg, shrimp, onion, garlic and soy sauce. I had plenty of time so I just snacked and indulged in some after work downtime. Finally I sauntered into the kitchen and looked for the rice in the refrigerator. And looked. And looked some more. Damn! Either Trench had eaten it, or we had accidently thrown it out.

Well, this put a damper on my dinner plans. I had no idea what else to make since we were getting pretty low on groceries. I considered ordering from grubhub, but I was hungry and it was already late, and I didn't want to wait 45 minutes to get dinner. I decided on an easy mac n cheese recipe, where the pasta is cooked in the dish with the cheese mixture. I had all the ingredients (except I substituted cream cheese for cottage cheese because cottage cheese just isn't something we keep around the house) so I combined them in a bowl and mixed it all up with my immersion blender. Then I took out a casserole dish, and started to pour the mixture into the dish. This is the moment where the dish slipped out of my hands, fell with a clunk on the stove and sprayed cheesy-milk all over me and the kitchen.

RAAAAARRRR!

Okay, so the bowl was probably slippery. Or maybe my hands were, I don't know. It's one of those dumb little things that happen. But I was (and still am) absolutely convinced that something in the universe made this happen just to fuck with me. The fact that my blood sugar was low and my stomach was screaming for food didn't help.

I cleaned myself and the mess up as best I could, and there was still plenty left for the dish. I put it in the oven and then looked at the recipe to see how long it would take, figuring it would probably be about 20-30 minutes. SonuvaBITCH! The damn thing cooks for an hour! I totally could have ordered food, not gotten splashed with cheese-milk, and gotten it sooner than it would take this thing to cook!

I figured by the time it was done, it would be 9:30, and that just wasn't happening. I decided that would be lunch/dinner for the next day and that I would make scrambled eggs for dinner, and Trench would just have to fend for himself. I had just gotten the eggs mixed up when Trench came home with groceries, including raviolis. Dinner is saved! I covered up the egg mixture to use for the next day too, and boiled water for the raviolis. I tried explaining to Trench how miserable my dinner-making experience was, which he totally wasn't getting because he was sick and just wanted to sit down with the laptop. I boiled the raviolis and went to drain them in the colander. Two of them slipped out and fell into a dirty dish. The colander threatened to tip over the rest of them and I gripped it with two hands, shouting, "NOOOOO!" I saved it. I brought food out to Trench, had delicious but not entirely satisfying raviolis, and eventually put the mac n cheese in the refrigerator for later.

Next time I'll order Chinese fried rice instead.

soup

Let’s take a break from packing so I can write about my absolute favorite type of food to make…soup. When I was a kid I had terrible eating habits, and I don’t think I ever had soup apart from chicken noodle when I was sick. Maybe this is why I didn’t like soup? Even as an adult I didn’t like chicken noodle (before I gave up eating farm animals). Being served it whenever I was sick gave me that association so I couldn’t handle it when I was well. It’s also likely that I didn’t like soup because it was food that was “mixed together” and I was the type of picky eater that needed all my food to be kept in its own separate sections on my plate.

Once I got older and started branching out in my food choices, I discovered that I liked soup. It has my two favorite elements…it’s hot so it keeps me warm in the winter, and it’s savory. I love salt, and the sodium-fest in a can of soup kept me very happy. I would order french onion soup at the cheap diners my friends and I would go to. I think french onion soup is like a gateway soup…even if you’re not a fan of onions, you might just order it for the cheesy bread that tops it. Mmm…cheesy bread. Where was I?

So between french onion soup at restaurants and canned minestrone at home, I still wasn’t an adventurous soup eater. I had a memory today (what inspired this post) about a trip to Ireland I took with a friend after college…specifically visiting the Kilmainham Gaol and stopping for lunch in their cafeteria. I ordered a vegetable soup, and was presented with the Best Soup I’d Ever Had. It was savory but not too salty. Full of vegetables cooked just right. A little bit of sour cream. Remembering it, I just realized that that was probably the first homemade soup I’d ever had.

The first year I moved out of my parents house, I lived on canned soup, yogurt and boxed pasta (with some fruit here and there to ward off scurvy). Then-boyfriend and now-husband Trench moved in after year one and our attempts at cooking together weren’t much better. I remember a lot of Annie’s mac n cheese, and cooking to us was slicing up vegetables to put on frozen pizza. That year for Xmas I told my family that I wanted a cookbook…a “how to boil water” type of cookbook. My aunt bought me “Help My Apartment Has a Kitchen”. This book honestly taught Trench and I how to cook. We made our first pot of chili and took off from there. Now Trench is practically a gourmet. I simply increased my love for one pot meals, and cooked my way through the chapter on soups. Once you start making homemade soups, you can’t go back. Chili, soups, stews…I’m all over it. I’ll leave the tilapia with mango topping and roasted kale to Trench, and thank the fates for linking me with someone who considers that to be “lazy cooking.”