EatingFood

So my two goals for the next week or so are to make:

• vegetarian sushi
• cheese

I’ve been told before that making cheese isn’t terribly hard. Of course finding rennet could be challenging… but one step at a time. There is a beer and wine making supply company in Kirkland that also sells cheese making supplies. And I want to make some bread. I think I need to get my Laurel’s Kitchen bread book out again. At least now I know where it is. This book is really inspiring me, taking me back to the things that are important to me.

So, I read my previous blog post to Mark, and his first response was “Good luck!” And of course, I got a bit frustrated because that’s the sarcastic (for those playing along at home, yes, he was being sarcastic) response I dread when I talk about trying to be greener and eat more healthy. But after we talked for a while, we came up with an initial game plan:

1. Salads for dinner – Three years ago we implemented the plan of having a pitcher of water on the table for dinner every night. This has become so ingrained that we will sometimes end up with two pitchers because he puts one on at the same time as I do. So, the new plan includes salad every night. I am in charge of the salad.
2. Getting a new food processor – The only one we have is a tiny 3-cup model that I got when I was in college. It has served us well (okay, it really has served us just okay, but we’ve been too cheap to get another) for the 13 years we’ve been married. But I want hummus! And other things you can make only in a nice big 9+ cup food processor.
3. Getting rid of the bread maker – Of course, in our tiny kitchen, getting a new appliance means getting rid of something else to make room. And the fact is that we never use the bread maker. We mostly use it for kneading, and we have a dough hook on our KitchenAid mixer, that we use more often. Neither of us like the bread mixes you can get and bread baked in it tastes dull and boring. Do you know anyone who wants a bread maker? Hardly used!
4. Getting rid of other things we don’t use – Finally, we’re going to go through our clothes, the kitchen cabinets and even (gasp!) my books and the storage shed; giving away or selling anything that we don’t use. This should free up a ton of extra space!

Determining a game plan is a great way for me to feel like we’re on the way to where I want to be. Then reading about the cynicism of Monsanto and the loss of heirloom seeds and the pro-corporate greed of our “representative” government is a little less depressing.

I am reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver right now. And at the same time, I have been regularly reading The Zero Waste Home (a blog). What’s interesting to me is that I started both of these reading projects by reading some reviews and comments about them. And the comments I read went along the lines of “this is impossible!”, “what you’re asking me/us to do is not possible except for crazy zealots,” and “I don’t believe that your kids are all that thrilled by this plan for (zero waste or growing all your own food) as you imply they are.” And I admit that I read both the book and the blog with those thoughts in mind myself, kinda like I was watching a train wreck and couldn’t stop myself from rubber-necking on the side of the tracks. The problem isn’t that the ideas in these books/blogs are impossible - clearly they are possible as at least two families have made it happen. But the problem is that I don’t like to feel guilty and I don’t like to feel hopeless and that’s what both of these things do to me. I know for a fact that my home is still going to be producing waste and buying food from the grocery store a year from now. I know, with relative certainty that my son, husband, and I are all still going to be eating cookies, chips, and french fries in 2012. And I’m fairly confident that while I’ll have a garden again this year, I probably won’t be able to get much enthusiasm from my son or husband for eating what I grow. So here’s what I need:

Jaryth liked licking the icing. I also learned that marshmallows must be eaten on a stick (courtesy s’mores we had last summer). He yelled “stick! Stick!” over and over until Mark gave him a toothpick.

So, I’ve started cooking again. I figure it’s not good karma for me to let Mark do all the cooking forever. ☺ But in order to facilitate this, I’ve started looking at online recipes. And I have two questions:

1. Why does Cooks.com get listed so often when their recipes are all the same?
   I did a search for something the other day, and was excited to see that there were like 20 recipes listed on Cooks.com. Of those 20, there were exactly three different ones. Three!?! I think Cooks.com is one of those user-generated content sites, and it’s obvious in this situation that there are no editors doing anything there. I mean, how many times do I need to read the same recipe? Even if they have slightly different titles, they are the same and once I’ve decided I don’t want the first copy of it, finding it again 10 more times just makes me leave the site without using any of the recipes. Lame!
2. Why do people, when rating recipes, give a recipe a 5 star rating and then proceed to explain how they completely changed the recipe?
   For example: “This was an awesome recipe! My family loved it! I replaced the chicken with tuna, added tomatoes and green onions (for color), and got rid of the garlic and onions (my family doesn’t like them). Oh, and I used cauliflower instead of potatoes.” And this is on a recipe for chicken-potato pie. It sounds to me like she made tuna-cauliflower pie.

Any suggestions for great, easy recipes are welcome! Please comment.

[caption id=“attachment_178” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Buttery Sticks - Margarine is for losers!”][/caption]

Yummy!

It’s sad when marketing has decided that “margarine” isn’t yummy sounding enough.

Psst: Nucoa people… Buttery sticks makes it sound like I’m about to use twigs that have been basted. And, personally, I’m not a huge fan of twigs.

I know, I don’t need any more sweets in my life. But Pepperidge Farms hit the jackpot with me with their Chocolate Goldfish Grahams. Jaryth doesn’t like them, but that’s okay, I do. :-)[caption id=“attachment_139” align=“aligncenter” width=“99” caption=“Yum!”][/caption]

I saw this advertisement today, and it made me laugh. King county decided that all restaurants must put calories on their menus so people have a better idea of what they are ordering. A year or so later they decided to see if this had changed how people order. It did. Now they make their kids eat more healthily while ordering the double-big-mac-large-fries-chocolate-shake for themselves. I’m taking my first step to be a better role model - I’ve made a dentist appointment (and haven’t cancelled it yet).