Vegan Before Dinnertime: Day 10

My fresh fruit and vegetable intake has skyrocketed. I'm not sure I've ever eaten this much produce in such a short amount of time. And I'm really digging it. Reasons:

1) It's been a whole new experience, walking into a grocery store and restricting myself to the produce section. There's a lot - a LOT - I have habitually overlooked. I have, for example, rediscovered kiwis. I also hope I am slowly learning how to pick out the best and freshest fruit and vegetables. I hadn't realized how much my knowledge in this area was lacking until I took home what turned out to be a very sub-par honeydew melon. Need to read up on how to pick those.

2) As a follow-up to #1, I think spending a lot more time with fresh produce is helping me as a cook. I find myself thinking of ways to use, say, carrots - when I definitely was not doing that before! Either as the main focus of the meal or as a side - I am giving produce much more attention in meal planning than I was before.

3) I suspect my stomach is shrinking a little, which means it's now taking less to make me feel full. I've been slowly moving away, anyway, from 2 or 3 large meals to smaller meals and more snacking, but trying this vegan thing is accelerating that process. I hadn't really realized the extent to which this was happening until Matt and I had dinner at Chipotle over the weekend. My standard Chipotle order is three crispy tacos, and I had usually felt just full enough after all three. This last time, though, I was starting to feel full after the second one, and I had been really hungry when we walked in!

4) It's great not having that post-lunch lag! No more feeling sluggish or comatose in the afternoon after a big lunch. I'm not really eating "lunch" at work - just snacking all day - but nothing I'm eating is heavy and I feel like I gained a chunk of the day back.

5) I enjoy dinner more now - and actively look forward to it - since I know it's my treat. And I don't feel guilty about whatever I'm eating for dinner, even if it's takeout Chinese food or a fried fish and chips basket. Related side benefit - I find myself wanting to cook full dinners a little more often since scrounging in the fridge isn't very satisfying when it's your one "anything goes" meal of the day. So Matt is loving this, since it means he has to scrounge less. :P

6) I don't beat myself up on the days where I don't stick entirely to vegan food before dinner. Last week, for example, I had the rare opportunity to go to lunch with my dad, so I took it. I didn't restrict myself to the salads on the menu, but at the same time the heavier dishes - pastas, etc. - just didn't appeal. I ended up selecting something light but not vegan (fish tacos, if you're curious). So I don't adhere to the vegan dictum perfectly every day - the code is more a set of guidelines than actual rules. But what I want to eat even when I'm not adhering has changed.

7) All this fresh fruit and veggies are giving my intestinal system a good scrubbing. Enough said.

8) I feel better overall. Not in any particularly definable way, but just *better*.

I think I need to do this a while longer before I see any benefits in terms of weight loss. Although I also need to fit exercise into the day more consistently than I do.

Chili

Chili is great and can only be made better by beer, right?  Yes.  

I have never found a good standby chili recipe, but then I haven't looked very hard since Richard doesn't care for chili.  This recipe was Richard pre-approved because it forced me to buy stout.  

This proved a good basic recipe but I did alter it a little.

First of all, the recipe as written is enormous.  Five pounds of beef?  I definitely don't need that much.  So, the first thing I did was to cut the recipe in half.  Even then, however, the proportion of beef to beans/chili seemed off.  So this is what I did.  I replaced ground chuck-which of course cooks down substantially-with leaner ground round.  I also used only one pound of ground round, which was just the right amount.  An added benefit of the leaner meat is that you don't have to drain it.  

From the perspective of the vegetables, I thought the recipe would have been better served written in cups rather than pounds.  I used about 3/4 of a large white onion, and a whole medium red and a medium yellow bell pepper.  

We bought a four-pack of the Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, so I used probably less than 1/4 of the bottle, which I thought was just right.  

Seasoning-wise, I added some salt and a little more cumin.  I also added just the slightest touch of cinnamon, which I think helps warm up the flavor a bit.

Delicious result.  

Vegan Before Dinnertime: Day 2

I got the idea for trying this from Mark Bittman. The idea is simple - go vegan during the day, no meats, dairy or otherwise uber-processed foods - and eat pretty much what you want for dinner.

Meg and I are trying this for two weeks, starting yesterday.

Since I work full time and don't get to cook dinner every night of the week, cooking separate vegan dishes for work lunches isn't really feasible for me. So I'm doing more or less the "raw vegan" thing until dinner, and snacking pretty exclusively on fresh fruits and veggies at the office.

As of day 2, I've already eaten more fresh produce than I'd eat in an average month. I'm being honest here - I'm not a big fruit or veggie person. But I've done 3 apples, 2 bananas and a 1 lb. bag of baby carrots. Compared to my standard diet, this is significant.

What I am most curious about is how I feel after a few weeks of this - if I have more energy, for example, or think more clearly. We'll see.

Bourbon Pumpkin Cheesecake

I have never been a fan of pumpkin pie, much less pecan pie-which I find revolting.  So at Thanksgiving I'm just screwed.  I will eat pumpkin pie to be polite, but I really don't care for it.  I will under no circumstances eat pecan pie, since I think it would be most impolite to gag.  Solution: Bourbon Pumpkin Cheesecake.  That's right.  Liquor and pumpkin together at last.

I searched for several recipes for this cheesecake, and I have to admit that the decorative properties of this one made the decision for me.

I didn't notice until too late, i.e. after I'd already purchased an 8" springform pan, that she uses a regular cake pan.  Oh well.  I don't think it would make that much difference.

I made the unfortunate error of assembling this cake on a time crunch, so I didn't get to follow the recipe exactly.  Instead of putting the cake in a tented water bath, I put a pan of water in the oven with the cake.  The cake came out plenty moist, but I think the tent would have prevented some of the cracking.  Although the cracking could have been more a result of the cooling "process" I used.  I put it straight in the fridge instead of cooling to room temp in the water bath.

I also did not use the sour cream topping for two reasons: 1) I didn't think I wanted that much extra sugar and calories on something already so sweet, and 2) more importantly, I did not have time.  I didn't miss the sour cream in the finished product, but if I were going to do the decorations (which I intend to do) I would use the sour cream topping just for aesthetic purposes.

So, how did it taste?  Very good.  It is definitely a superior pumpkin dessert.  However, I do think it needed more bourbon.  One tablespoon did seem too little to me, but I wanted to follow the recipe the first time. Or I could try putting some bourbon in the sour cream topping.  We'll see.

She does recommend making your own graham crackers, but come on...Who's going to do that?  I'm sure it does taste better.  I was not wild about my graham cracker crust.  I think next time I'll make the crust with ginger snaps, to add a little more depth to the finished product.

Overall, it was good, but could be better.  I like my cheesecake a little more on the tart side, so I might replace some of the cream cheese with sour cream.

Curried Butternut Squash Soup

I had never been a fan of squash soup until I tried a curried version at a local tea room.  It was so good and it changed my whole perspective.  As much as I wanted to try to make it, I thought Richard would never go for something so...chicky?  However, we were in the store together last week looking for soup and he saw the V8 squash soup in a box.  He wanted to try it and I said no.  I'd tried that and found it inedible, but I promised to try to make homemade butternut squash soup some time.

Well, squash is in season, and today was the day.

I used Emeril's recipe: Curried Squash Soup.

It called for summer squash but I used butternut, because it has better flavor and color.  I didn't put as much chicken stock in mine as it called for, which turned out to be a good decision.  I didn't notice until midway through the recipe that this soup is supposed to be served cold.  Refrigerating this would make it thicker, but I wanted a hot soup.  So, I mixed a little corn starch into the cream before adding it in, which thickened the soup nicely.

Some reviewers found the soup too spicy, but I'm usually quite sensitive to that and I did not reach the same conclusion.  This may have been because I used butternut squash.   I thought the seasoning was perfect.  It smelled divine while it simmered.  Very, very close to the tea room recipe I was trying to replicate.

Chicken Enchiladas

I would like to take a minute to talk about Meghan's enchilada recipe.

It's really, really good.

I doubled the recipe but only ended up with about 10 enchiladas - so I suppose I'm filling each one more than I need to? Minor thing, though, since they taste fantastic. I had marinated the chicken overnight first in my favorite chicken fajita marinade and then cooked them simply on the stove. Once shredded, I mixed the chicken with pepper-jack and sour cream per the instructions. I used scallions in place of regular onion since that's what I had in the fridge, and also threw in a few spoonfuls of green chilis and another few of chopped jalapenos. And a healthy pinch of salt. I used a medium green enchilada sauce, and only poured about half of the can over the enchiladas instead of the full can, since that seemed like a lot. On top, after the enchilada sauce and sprinkling of more pepper-jack, I scattered more chopped scallions. (Why not?)

The men devoured them and added salsa/more jalepenos/tobasco as they wanted. This recipe is absolutely going into the standard rotation. Thanks, Meghan!

Chicken Creole

I was really inspired by a visit to New Orleans a few years back and finally got around to making one of the classic regional dishes: Chicken Creole. Well, it's really "Fill-in-the-Blank Creole" - I used a recipe written for shrimp creole, but used chicken instead of shrimp and chicken stock instead of shrimp stock. You could also have Crawfish Creole, Turkey Creole, etc. etc....substituting the proteins however you want.

The recipe called for the chicken to be "seasoned and browned," so I made up a batch of the Creole seasoning blend from the same recipe site, rubbed the mixture into both sides of four chicken breasts, and then cooked the chicken on the stove in 50/50 olive oil & clarified butter. (I had the clarified butter in the fridge, so why not use it? I love that stuff.)

Meanwhile, a TON of veggies needed chopping. I blame all the Chinese food I've been making - I got into a zen kind of rhythm with chopping onion after pepper after onion after pepper - and was kicking myself afterward for not remembering that I have a food processor that would have made that process much easier. The precision of the cuts isn't nearly as important in an application like this one, where things are sweating and simmering. Alas - next time.

The recipe is pretty simple. The chopped veggies sauté gently for a while, and then all the other

ingredients except the chicken are added and the pot is set to simmer. I didn't have the two Louisiana regional hot sauces the recipe lists as optional, and I forgot to roast garlic so I didn't

use that either. I used slightly less than the called

-for six cups of crushed tomatoes - the big cans of crushed came in 4 cup increments, and I had no idea what I'd do with half a leftover can of crushed tomatoes in the fridge. So I stuck with one can - 4 cups. Excepting these items, I did everything else as written. The chicken is added closer to the end of the simmering process, and when done, the creole is served over rice. Use bowls - this is soupy!

I have two and a half complaints with the recipe. One is that 2-3 pounds of chicken breasts is nowhere near enough for the amount of Creole this recipe makes. Considering my pot was full to

within an inch or so of the top, and you serve a ladle or two at a time over rice, it goes a looooong way. And the four chicken breasts in all that sauce meant you got a bite of chicken rarely. I seasoned and browned another eight chicken breasts a few days later and added that, and the ratio of chicken to everything else became a bit more satisfactory.

The other thing I didn't care for was the overall sweetness of the flavor. The creole sauce has a nice depth of flavors - with all the different spices and seasonings that went in - but the predominant flavor was sweet, most likely from all that ketchup and tomato paste. It was a good thing I'd seasoned the chicken and didn't just cook it plain - the spice coating on the chicken pieces helped cut the sweetness a bit. The roasted garlic, if I had remembered to add it, would probably also have helped - although I doubt a few cloves of garlic could offset an entire container of ketchup. It was still good - and we enjoyed the many bowls of this we've had - but I'd prefer a more savory, more spicy creole.

The "more spicy" part is my half-complaint. I'd like a little more heat in this dish, although that's a minor thing that can be easily remedied with another poblano pepper and a few more shakes of

hot sauce. As written, there is hardly any heat - you occasionally get a tiny bit if there's a piece of chopped poblano in your spoonful, but otherwise, it's not spicy.

So overall verdict: good for a crowd, if you use about 3 or 4 times more chicken than is called for and season the heck out of said chicken before cooking and chopping it and throwing it in the pot. I can see what this dish will be great for once perfected - it's fantastic cold-weather food - a great and hardy variation on soups and stews. I will, however, try a different recipe next time - this recipe is not "the one." :)