Veganista Salad

I know fish isn't vegan but I'm going to call what I've been doing "vegan" because I can't stand the pretentious word "pescatarian," defined as someone who will eat fish but nothing else from an "animal."  Since the beginning of September I haven't had in my regular diet any sugar, dairy, eggs or meat of any kind, except for a few emergency tuna salad sandwiches with mayo while traveling in places where there was nothing else.  I did eat a few mini bite sized snickers bars at Halloween.  I do feel a lot better but I haven't lost any weight. I'm trying to eat as little bread/crackers/pasta as possible but it's hard not to use these as quick fixes when I'm busy and eating fish, fruit and veg means cooking almost everything myself.  I have been cooking a lot of Quinoa which is great and I highly recommend it.  It is a complete protein that works like rice or cous cous in a dish.

I've been doing the co-dependent freak show of cooking 3 meals every night, one for my husband, one for my kids, and my "veganista salad," as my family calls my veggie style dinner.  Some nights my husband and kids eat the same thing but it is rough going.  If you wonder how you could ever give up meat, dairy and eggs, it is hard if you don't really want to, and I do want to because I started totally skeeving all of it.  No idea why, maybe my body was telling me something, but heart disease and diabetes are all over my family and animal products don't always work well with those diseases, so let's see how long I keep skeeving and I'll go from there.  I'm not making a statement or being green.

If you look at a family photo of my dad's side of the family, many of us from all the generations have Asian-y almond-y shaped eyes.  My mother is convinced that when Marco Polo brought some Asian men back to Venice, they propagated in the area where my father's family is from and that's why we look like we do and many of us have problems with meat and dairy.  Don't get me started with alcohol.  Many Asians and Native Americans (originally from Asia) have bad physical reactions to alcohol and therefore don't drink much.  If they do drink it causes problems more readily.  I can't drink at all because it makes me totally sick the next day, a glass of wine does me in like drinking a bottle of tequila during an all night dead show bender.

I just finished reading Dr. Christiane Northrup's Women's Bodies Women's Wisdom, and Mother Daughter Wisdom.  I highly recommend both to women of all ages.  One thing she studied is that the further people are removed in generations from a hunter gatherer system of eating, the easier it is for them to eat mass produced and processed food and not gain a pound or have it effect their health as much as it would a person closer in generations to a hunt/gather way of life.  My great grandparents ate hunt/gather which makes me close to the source.  Many skinny waspy supermodels haven't had a family in the field in hundreds of years.  This isn't an exact science but her theory makes sense.

Michael Pollan also asserts that you shouldn't eat anything that your great grandmother would't recognize.  My next quest is to give up salt.  I already started to use Herbamare instead of sea salt to season food when I cook and I don't notice the difference.  The biggest challenges are when we order pizza, if I make a big crispy roast chicken, and of course, bacon.

Seizing Summer

I'm back at my blog, sorry about the delay and sorry about the weird amazon ad, I'm working on fixing it.  Many years ago one of my best friends told me that as a New Englander, you have to seize July, you have to take it and show it who's boss, because the weather turns a little funny in August and you have to squeeze as much summer out of July just in case.  I did the cape (bourne, sandwich, mashnee, cataument and pocasset only), maine (damariscotta/pemaquid/bremen baby), the vineyard (up island) and squeezed in a little marblehead, duxbury, and public garden swan boat action.  Ate a lot of lobster, got my kids nice and brown and cuddled and fed and improved their swimming in the mix.  I wanted to take advantage of this summer because I am doing a full time job search after a few years of consulting part time while I have been home with the kids.

My son still eats nothing and my daughter is still dreamy and sweet and a pretty good eater these days, she is much hungrier after so much swimming.  Tonight I was craving spicy asian so I went off the reservation and made coconut green curry cod with broccoli and water chestnuts and jasmine rice for me and the great husbando.  He loved it and actually said, "this dinner makes me happy".  But just as long as I don't cook gourmet every night...(hi Gina)

This summer I have been doing an elimination diet to try and solve insomnia and other ailments and so far I am off sugar, eggs, dairy, and I eat almost no meat.  I've been cooking a lot of fish for dinner and I do feel a lot better, the sugar and dairy have proven to be bad news even in small amounts.  Lunch is salad with tuna or leftovers, breakfast is blueberries and kashi with rice milk, hummus and veg for snacks, and watermelon for dessert.  I don't tortutre myself with this if I go out for a nice dinner. (a nice piece of...)

In regard to the delay in posting, right after I started the blog I had a rough month, I fell down the stairs and sprained my ankle, had a tooth pulled and lost a dear first cousin all in one week and I didn't have the mojo to be on here in addition to getting my kids through the stressful end of school.  My daughter starts first grade and she is getting so grown up, I hope she has a better experience with first grade than she did with kindergarten.  She first experienced mean kids which broke my heart, and she first experienced feeling truly famished after school.  I had kept her steadily fed 24/7 for 5 1/2 years and when she went to school she basically starved all day because all she could eat were goldfish, juice boxes, raisins, and soy nut butter and jelly sandwiches.  This is a kid who ate penne pesto with chicken for lunch at home.  Onward.

Jimmy crack corn and I don't care.

Right now my preschool age son is watching Bee Movie with a big bottle of water (healthy) and he is eating yogurt covered raisins (fruit!) all natural corn chips (vegetable?!) and Morningstar Farm veg breakfast sausage (protein/veg?!).  I don't care that it's 9:30 in the morning and he is eating chips.  Why?  Because I sprained my ankle, I cant walk on it and things are just falling by the wayside.

My mom was here the last two days to run logistics while I was on the couch staying off my leg.  Last night was wildcard night so we made a big pot roast right after lunch and left it in the oven all day to braise for dinner.  I add red wine, carrots and potatoes to mine, which I think qualifies as a fruit and two vegetables.  That being said, my son only will eat the meat and gravy (golden mushroom campbells soup base with pan drippings to create the gravy) but I think with all the wine stewed into the meat and the trace elements of mushroom in the gravy, he is actually getting a  fruit AND a vegetable (wine and mushrooms) with his pot roast meat.  My daughter will eat the meat and carrots with potatoes, which is a great way to get your kids some veg, kids love pot roast and you can play around with different veg in it until you find a combo your kids will like.  When my son was a baby he ate the carrot and potato with his meat, but once he was old enough to notice the color in the carrots, now he runs shrieking out of the room and hides his face in the living room pillows if I put a pot roasted carrot on his dish.

My daughter is so starving when she comes home from school at 3:30 because there are so few options I can send her to school with for her snack and lunch because of severe allergies among her classmates.  I think I'll give her a little pot roast sampler as her snack to fill her up today, it is a comfort food kind of day.

Explaining it to your mother

If you are like me and you grew up in the 60s or 70s, you ate what was put in front of you. There was no asking for something else, and if you were a baby and you didn't like your food, you went hungry.   Our mothers were told to toughen us up early.  Many of today's moms (especially the moms of the coddled millennium generation) feel too much guilt for not doing whatever it takes to make their kids "happy" even if it made the moms themselves into short order cook martyrs.  I'm not talking about kids with allergies.

To all of the brand new moms that I know (Anne, Jocelyn, Amy, Vesna, Jill)  I have some simple advice.  Mash up what you eat and give it to your kids as soon as the doctor tells you it is ok to do so.  If they don't like it, they will learn to like it.  I know, easier said than done, but if you had told me that I would be acting out these shenanigans with my picky kids, I would have had that salmon on the high chair tray in a second.

I'm glad I was all confident that I could grocery shop in my sleep, because last night, I fell down the stairs and badly sprained my ankle, I cant walk, I had to summon my mom up from the cape while she is entertaining visitors from Italy, and now, I have to explain all this picky vs. gourmet drama to her.  She is about to go grocery shopping for me, and I just had to rattle off my mental list of what she needs to get to cover a million bases.  She would rather be making us linguine with clam sauce, fresh focaccia and a salad with a la minute dressing, but instead she is shopping for applesauce, plain bagels and turkey bacon.

As I promised yesterday, this is my simplified dinner plan so my husband knows what he is having for dinner with no added drama, and my kids are somewhat nutritiously fed.

Sunday:  About once a month I make a big batch of meat sauce and I freeze it in 4 weekly portions to have on Sunday nights.  I usually make it with a salad and garlic bread.  Everyone eats this.

Monday:
parents: Salmon and asparagus, or Cod/Tilapia and asparagus, or whatever veg you like
kids: left over pasta with meat sauce from Sunday night.

Tuesday: Wildcard night.  Feel free to switch your wildcard night.
parents:  healthy baked potato bar, tuna melts, grilled cheese, meat and veg or veg only stir fry.  Gourmet fancy side veg for me.
kids:  healthy tacos, organic fish sticks, organic no nitrite hot dogs, cheese omelets, salad with ranch dressing for my daughter, applesauce for my son

Wed:
parents: I roast a big chicken and have olive oil mashed potatoes, roasted potatoes, or rice and a gourmet fancy side veg for myself.  I add the leftover chicken to my salads at lunch.
kids:  bell and evans chicken nuggets with peas or salad for my daughter, applesauce and maybe raisins for my son.

Thursday:  BLT night for parents using turkey bacon, Amy's organic cheese pizza for the kids.  Repeat kids veg choice.  Big saute of spinach or broccoli rabe for me.

Friday night:  I either make pizza or we eat out.  Making your own pizza is very east and economical.  I either buy pre made dough in the deli area of the supermarket or you can get the pillsbury dough boy kind.  Olive oil your sheet pan, roll the pizza dough out and place on pan, season dough with salt, pepper and olive oil, pre bake it a little, then add your toppings and bake.  The kids love to help with this.

Saturday night:  Eat out, have leftovers or add another wild card night.

Tomorrow we'll talk about snacks and dessert, a great place to add in extra fruit and veg...

Peace out.

But what do I get out of it?

I have friends whose babies went right from the boob or bottle to eating mashed up salmon, broccoli and roasted potatoes on their high chair tray. I have friends who make their kids eat steamed brussel sprouts and stay at the table until they are consumed. I have friends who give their kids a tiny scoop of vanilla frozen yogurt for dessert if they eat all their vegetables or if they try something new. You will hear more of these stories in depth as you read this blog, but for me, I learned early that my kids needed a lot of sleep (some kids don't) and that the key to their sleep was having them get enough to eat.

So, if they weren't going to try something new or eat any fruit or vegetables of any kind, I had to come up with the next best thing that they would eat before going down the junk food and Chef Boyardee route just to fill them up. Applesauce, raisins and black olives: that's all the "fruit and vegetables" they would eat. Occasionally they would eat corn or corn on the cob. And of course, popcorn. I tried sneaking vegetable puree into their food. No. I tried breading and frying everything. No. I added extra carrots to my bolognese sauce. Too orange mommy, too yucky. We're talking sauce with pork, veal AND beef, tons of garlic and basil and a little extra carrot. No.

So what do I get out of all this work? How can I have any outlet for my culinary leanings? I sneak vegetables to myself.

I eat an egg white omelet with last night's veg for breakfast and a big salad with a protein for lunch every day but that's not a creative end. Every night for dinner, I cook myself a "gourmet-style" vegetable to have for myself on the side of the plain food I have to make for my family. I feel like I'm cooking, it's good for me, and it may eventually be a good example for my kids. Roast asparagus on Monday, broccoli on Tuesday, spinach, peas or salad on Wed, and broccoli rabe on Thursdays. I generally make a big fruit salad to munch on Fri-Sun. For the vegetables I do mix it up based on the season or if I am craving something different.

I also make a lot of chips in the winter. Kale, Sweet Potato, and Turnip are good. So this is what I get out of the simple meal plan, I just make something on the side for myself.

Tomorrow will feature the 1950s same day of the week dinner plan.

Happy Sunday!

Inaugural Post for PopcornVegetable

Welcome to PopcornVegetable, a Gourmet's guide to cooking for families of picky eaters. I'm a former professional line cook and pastry chef who can bake anything, knows good wine and can cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner without recipes. A lot of good it does me, I am in a family of picky eaters. I want to make citrus and rosemary grilled lamb with sweet corn polenta for dinner, but instead I make B.L.Ts.

My husband takes umbrage with this and doesn't think he and the kids are picky. I guess it is subjective. I grew up eating "Gourmet" every day, but he only wants to on special occasions. Fair enough. Sound familiar? All of my friends think I cook all the time because I am always talking about food on Facebook, but in reality I only post around special occasions or if I find a recipe I think my other "former gourmet moms" will like.

The goal of this blog is practical cooking for diverse eating styles. No glossy pictures (the julie/julia project never had them) Nothing celebrity-related (we all love Gwyneth, Jessica Seinfeld and Amanda Hesser, but not for every day planning).

I got the impetus to start this project this morning while reorganizing my magazine cut out recipes, and I realized that I needed to re-categorize them. I only cook "specially" around the holidays, when I have to bring something to someone's house, or when my husband's family is visiting. Another impetus came with a conversation I had with my gourmet cousin whose family is even pickier than mine. She thought that because I was a chef that I cooked like a chef for my family and that made her feel like she was missing out. I adjusted her perception by telling her that I cook the same specific thing for each night of the week like a 1950s housewife. After she picked her jaw up off the floor, I told her I couldn't fight it anymore, I had to stop wishing they would want gourmet dinners, and now I can grocery shop and cook dinner in my sleep. As a semi-freelancing but generally stay at home mom with no help, I'm all about having one less thing to think about.

I hope my guide can help you. I make simple things, they are generally good for you, tend not to have too many allergens, and are somewhat economical. I pray to the food altar of Bethenny, Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Anthony Bourdain and Gabrielle Hamilton. I read cookbooks and "food and travel writing" voraciously, I love movies and U2, and when I get a day to myself I try to devise ways to take a day trip to NYC in my allotted time.

Why the name? Popcorn is a vegetable to my son. (I know it is a starch and I know it isn't really a vegetable)

Good night and good luck!