How we got here, pt 2 (now with less depressing!)

So I started digging through cookbooks (actually back issues of Eating Well magazine are my absolute go-tos). And because I was wanting to cook, but also to keep my diet under control, I was gravitating towards less meat or pasta/starch focused things. Which meant I very quickly ran into a slice of reality – if this was ever going to work I needed to break free of the baby carrots – green beans – broccoli ghetto I’d lived in basically my entire adult life.

I started getting hard core about trying new and different vegetables, and new and different ways of doing them. Cauliflower, roasted in olive oil in the oven, was one of my first successes, and remains one of my all time faves. I remembered liking (meaty, greasy, bad for you) greens when I lived in the south so I started playing with them. Zucchini were pretty cheap at the time for some reason so I started playing with that. (Winter squashes were not as successful. I’ve found some preparations where butternut is okay. The spaghetti squash was decent, but a little sweet. Acorn is just a no. Surprising, because I do love me some pumpkin.)

Eventually a sort of process or mindset developed which really became the key. First – I mentally started each meal with the main vegetable. So, instead of saying “I have pasta, what should I have with that?” I’d say “I have broccoli and collards, what should I have with that?” And it turns out that the direction that leads you is pretty different, in proportion if not in kind. I also tried to ask myself on everything “is there another vegetable I could add to this”. This meant that most of the meals I ended up with were a) heavier on veggies than on starches or meats; b) pretty varied in taste and composition and c) bigger – adding a half a zucchini or another handful of peas can make your plate a lot fuller and more satisfying without appreciably increasing calories.

Second – I started really paying attention when I add to which pieces of the meal were really doing it for me. When I found myself chasing around the bowl for the last of the greens while a bunch of pasta was pushed to the side, I made a mental note that next time I should use more greens and less pasta. When I realized I wasn’t really tasting the handful of cheese, I tried to remember next time to leave it out or use something more flavorful. And I tried to break away from the “automatic starch with every meal” thing – the spicy Chinese stir-fry is damn tasty and satisfying without the noodles, so why bother? The salmon and broccoli curry goes great on top of a pile of that roasted cauliflower instead of a big mound of rice. Zucchini pancakes can be nearly as awesome as the potato kind, and I can eat more! Gradually, a lot of things like rice, pasta, cheese, bread became smaller and smaller components of my meals. And since I was following my tastes and instincts, it isn’t a deprivation. Rather, it all seems to snowball – if I don’t have some good veggies with a meal, I feel the lack. I miss it. (That sound you hear is my mother rolling over in her grave, by the way. For serious.)

Third was more of a defensive game – I tried to notice when I was an wasn’t wanting various things and noted two things. I sometimes had instant oatmeal at my desk in the morning, and I started adding a handful of Fiber One cereal to it to give it some crunch. (The Fiber One is an acquired taste, but I’ve gotten to like it. It’s probably the most sticks-and-twigs-like of the sticks-and-twigs cliché of health food.) Other days I’d have a granola bar or a yogurt or something. And I found that on days when I didn’t do the oatmeal/cereal thing, I was much more likely to be wanting/eating things from the unhealthier end of the scale as the day went on. So now that’s an everyday thing, almost without exception. I also know that when I first get home from work, I’m usually hungry, and it’s really easy to convince myself I need something more indulgent or that doesn’t take the time to cook. So I made sure to always have something quick and proteiny that I could scarf down right then to take the edge off and give myself some mental space to actually plan out something more ambitious. Some turkey slices, or a handful of walnuts or something like that.

I also take a slightly different tack on indulgences. In my fridge I have a big chunk of expensive aged parmesan and a wedge of Castello Blue. What I don’t have is the blah supermarket cheese that’s so easy to add to everything and yet doesn’t really add to anything. I have some outrageously expensive small farm bacon in the freezer, but no Easy Mac. I’ve learned to (mostly) save my indulgences for things that are actually, you know, indulgent. Or that give you the bang for the buck – I’ll cook with sausage that gives you a lot of flavor in a little package rather than ground beef that is generally kind of so-so.

A few last points. On substitutes – I generally use egg sub instead of real eggs, though that’s partly because eggs tend to freeze at the temp I keep my fridge. I use Almond Breeze almond milk instead of regular – once again, it’s shelf stable so I can have it on hand, and I’ve never been that huge a fan of real milk. I’ve found a veggie Italian sausage that I actually like, and I try out a lot of veggie burger style things, some better and some worse. A crumbled up Morningstar spicy black bean burger makes an awesome taco. And I’ve always preferred fat-free sour cream to the real stuff, so that’s easy. But I tend not to go there with things like all the 100-calorie packs and things that are intended to mimic snack foods or cakes or what have you. They’re just never satisfying.

There are some things I have to take a hard line on. I’m not a good cereal eater. I fill my bowl, add the milk, eat the cereal – but then there’s all that milk left over! So then you have to add more cereal to use it up. But then it’s not milky enough so….yeah. I know this is what I do, so cereal (aside from the FO stuff) is not something I usually toy with. Crackers, ditto – I only buy crackers I don’t especially like – wheat thins have no place in my house because I know I can’t be trusted with them.

And when I eat out, I eat out. I tend to gravitate to seafood and veggie-centric stuff anyway, but overall I don’t sweat it. I’m not swearing off of a damn thing, at least not intentionally.

How we got here, pt 1

Okay, now the first thing to understand was where I started from in all this. It was an intensely bad period in my life. I was as heavy as I’d ever been, feeling uncomfortable and ungainly in my body. I was intensely hating my condo and wishing I’d never gone there. Part of that was economic, part of it was dissatisfaction with the actual physical space. But a lot of it was also feeling so alienated from my home and my life that it felt like I had nothing to hold on to. The dog was in her final days, marking the end of six months of brutal decisions, painfully watching her suffer, and, not incidentally, living an almost itinerant lifestyle. I was spending three or four days a week in Milwaukee, living on the couch in my dad’s cramped living room, across the room from my sweet girl while she cried and whimpered all night. When I was at home, I was furiously catching up on a massive workload, covering for the fact that I wasn’t getting much done on my WFH in Milwaukee days, and just cripplingly exhausted both physically and emotionally. I couldn’t get comfortable – with the dog gone, I had basically no attachment to my home or my neighborhood. It was like Sam and Dean in their hotel rooms – living on junk food and takeout, never feeling like I actually had a home. And meanwhile the economic situation got worse and worse. Not mine personally, I was okay, but becoming more and more convinced I’d make a huge mistake in buying and was never going to dig myself out of this hole of depression.

Oh, and did I mention I’d gone off my meds? Well, I had, after some disturbing side effects and some lengthy delays in refilling prescriptions.

So.

It was bad. I was nearly drowning under the weight of three major things – my body, my home and my dog. The dog I couldn’t do anything about. Or rather, I was doing everything that could humanly be done.

But I had reached a breaking point, and I knew I had to do two things – I had to do something to get to where I didn’t actively hate my body. And I had to reclaim my home, make it mine again.

I started to tackle the first by joining weight watchers on line. I knew I didn’t have the time or energy to do actual meetings, but I’d found the tracking useful in the past, and it was a system I understood and could internalize pretty easily. And for the second, I decided to start cooking again. Reclaim the kitchen, so to speak.

It was the confluence of these two things that led me down the path I went. I’d done WW before, and with some success, but I was relying a lot on frozen meals, diet products, granola bars etc – not a ton of real food. And it was okay, and it was kind of fun sometimes, but mostly I remember it being a constant struggle. I didn’t want to go there again. So, cooking.

Pumpkin ginger pancakes

New made-up recipe which was utterly nom.

Because I have it, and also am lazy, this uses pancake mix rather than working from scratch.

1 cup complete pancake mix (the kind where you only add water)

1/2 cup canned pumpkin

1/4 cup crushed up Fiber One cereal

1 1/2 cups water

2 T ground ginger

Tiny shake cloves and cinnamon

So much yum. It makes a very thick batter, and they take a little longer to cook than regular pancakes. Texture is more moist and gooey (this is a good thing, FTR). I wondered about adding some brown sugar, but didn't, and as it turned out they really don't need it. The only thing I think I'd do differently is bump the spices up a bit.

Throw some bacon and maple syrup on the plate and it's a pretty perfect cold morning breakfast. Yay.

ETA: Using a 1/4 cup of batter for each, this makes 9 pancakes, so a serving of 3 is only 2 pts. Double yay.

Son of ETA: Canned pumpkin is the bomb. I made something recently using a fresh baking pumpkin and was it ever not worth the extra time and effort.

Roasted cauliflower

A crucial part of revamping my eating this year was breaking out of the broccoli-carrots-green beans rut and challenging myself to try out veggies that I've never really been into before. One of the biggest successes was cauliflower. I'm still testing out different ways of using it, but this has become one of my go-to meals this year.

Roasting vegetables in general has been a revelation - so easy, and the results are (almost) always yummy.

For the cauliflower, I usually break up a half a head, toss with about a teaspoon of olive oil and some salt and throw it in at 425 for about 40 minutes. You want to stir once or twice so that it all gets nicely charred. It's delicious. And despite the fact that it's really a tiny bit of oil, it somehow manages to hit that greasy fried food craving.

Occasionally I'll throw in a bunch of broccoli along with it, or zucchini (added to the pan about 10 minutes in), but most of the time I'll do the cauliflower for about 25 minutes and then add one of those frozen fish filets for the last 15 - 20 and there's dinner.

(Hint - the Gorton's salmon or tilapia filets are much better than their generic "fish" variety, though usually a little pricier.)

Quick ravioli with tomato sauce

I don't eat a ton of pasta these days, so I've found myself going through an unfun pattern w/r/t pasta sauce. To wit: cook pasta, open jar of sauce, use approximately 1/8 of it, cook more pasta, grab jar of sauce from fridge, realize it's been several months and the sauce is crusty and ugh and have to go back to the drawing board.

Waste of money, food and fridge space. Yay!

So this time I went a better route - threw together a quick sauce from scratch instead of popping open the jar. I've done this once or twice before and the end result is the same - why the hell do I ever buy sauce in the first place?

Super simple and easy. Sauteed garlic in olive oil, add a can of tomatoes* salt, pepper, stir and smush at a simmer for a few minutes. Add fresh basil and toss with pasta. I also browned some (Tofurkey) sausage and threw that in. OMG the yum. So fresh tasting and much more satisfying than bought sauce and really not that much more trouble.

(*I've heard that whole canned tomatoes have better flavor than diced. Something about extra additives they use to keep the diced from turning into mush. Diced is what I had, so diced is what I used. Maybe next time I'll try the whole ones. )

Chocolate cookies

Cookies!

So I have these peppermint hersey's kisses, right? Well, actually I also had these peppermint Andes Candies crumbles that I wanted to use up to start with but they were nast. So, the kisses. What to do with them?

Nothing apparently. This started out as a recipe for espresso peppermint cookies and turned into this:

I don't even know.

But damn, they're good.

1/2 cup unsalted butter -- softened
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 3/4 cup total flour and cocoa. I used about half and half, with the cocoa split between regular and dark

Note: I sprinkled some kosher salt on top before baking because it seemed like a good idea. Not actually all that great. (Though it was excellent on the raw dough!)

Bake at 375 for about 8-9 minutes - you don't want to overbake. Crispy chewy goodness.

Chicken tamale pie

I have a ton to catch up on, but let's go with something new. I picked up one of those grocery roasted chickens a few nights ago, and wanted to do something with some of the remains.

I've only bought a couple of these before, and I'm not sure I'm totally sold. The skin is good, but I don't see a lot of flavor. Homemade can be done a lot better.

So far, based on a sample of like, three, my pattern is this. Get chicken home, eat a leg and pick at the breast. Yum. I'm excited about the first bits, and excited about making stock from the carcass. It's the middle part I have some trouble with - what to make with the meat? I don't actually eat a lot of meat dishes, and some of the old family ones I remember aren't really what I want to be eating these days. (The white chicken enchiladas where the sauce is - in it's entirety - a pint of heavy cream poured over the pan; the chicken-rice casserole, which I adore, but requires having ingredients on hand I don't usually have, etc.)

Anyhoo. It wasn't easy coming up with what to do, but I ended up with a winner.

Based on an Eating Well recipe for tamale pie that uses toasted corn, black beans , etc. Inspired by (see above) is probably a better word though, since it really just gave me the idea. I wasn't really sure it was going to mesh this time, but it seriously did. Here's what resulted:

Filling:

Sauteed an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic

Added:

A good couple of handfuls of shredded chicken
4 or 5 sliced chipotles
A few good sized spoonfuls of the adobo sauce from the can
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can black beans
Some hefty shakes of Cholula
Salt and pepper

Topping:

1 cup cornmeal stirred into 2 cups boiling, heavily salted water.

Layer filling in dish, top with thickened cornmeal and smooth out, topped with a good couple of handfuls of (in this case reduced fat but I don't really recommend it) cheese.

In the over for half an hour or so and nom.