Food; Weeks 7 & 8

I'll do another 2-week food recap here. Some staunch readers of my blog have made it known that food entries are not as interesting as family-related ones, and even I will admit that the family ones are more interesting to write. (Not to mention that the video component of my blog is much better suited to family entries.) So this journal of sorts has taken a turn away from my food issues (read that however you want; there are many possible interpretations!) and more towards my daily stories about Celia and Andres.

But that is not to say that I have given up cooking. Quite the contrary, actually--I think I have settled into a good routine, and I've been trying some new things recently. So onto a recap of the past couple weeks.

I was on a bit of a roll last week. On Monday I made my regular baked salmon, Tuesday (as previously reported) I cooked up bean chili, and Wednesday I made potato and pineapple curry on a whim (though I had to find a good recipe for it, so I don't know if that lowers the "whim" factor). I had a bag of potatoes, coconut milk and pineapple handy, and I also was able to find some sesame oil in the fridge, so I did not have to leave out any ingredients. I thought this meal was pretty good--less spicy than I had imagined (I added red pepper flakes and more curry when I reheated it the next day), but a nice alternative to many of the regular meals that I cook. Natalia reported that she thought it was pretty good as well; she especially liked the pineapple and didn't seem too disappointed by the relative mildness.

Friday I dove into my (small) e-mailbag of recipe suggestions and tried porotos granados, courtesy of reader Gareth. While I was a little apprehensive at first--specifically when I read the instructions to "cook until the stew reaches the consistency of pancake batter"--I persevered and was rewarded with a very tasty stew. The flavor of the butternut squash really makes this one work; in future iterations I'll be quite liberal with the "2 cups" suggestion, perhaps pushing it up to over 3. I also substituted red and cannellini beans (which I had in the pantry) for lima and great northern beans (which I did not). My taster-in-chief especially enjoyed this recipe and I ended up reprising it this week as well.

Finally, my new slow cooker came a few days ago, and I put it through its maiden voyage with Spicy Black-and-Red Bean Soup from Cooking Light. I have made this soup before, and I must say that it tasted very different coming out of my new Hamilton Beach--my old Rival crock pot ran so hot that the soup's broth would have been evaporated after only 5 hours of cooking, but my new Hamilton Beach kept everything cooking at a lower heat and produced an actual soup, not a hot stew. (The veggies did seem to retain more of their consistency as well, meaning crunchier onions and carrots...I think I found this preferable to the alternative, but I'm not fully convinced yet.)

So, all told, lots of vegetable-based soups and stews the past few weeks. Kind of weird given the nice warm weather we have been having here, but I'm finding that soups keep well for a few days, are easy to make, and use a lot of the foods I have available--and they are healthy, which is a nice bonus. The only meat-based dinner I've had this week was Monday when I grabbed a rotisserie chicken from Russo's.

In other food news I finally finished reading The End of Food by Paul Roberts. Not exactly a fun read, but interesting and topical and, in my opinion, very important. I've seen a few of the recent crop of alarmist food movies (Super Size Me, Fast Food Nation) but this book really filled in a lot of the gaps--why processed food is so cheap, why it keeps changing, and why a lot of what we do in the name of "eating" is unsustainable. Roberts doesn't offer any easy answers to any of the problems he describes in the book, which is also unsettling...in fact, he seems to argue that the only way change will ever take place is after a food-related calamity has taken place. Not exactly an optimistic forecast.

But that's a downer, and I don't want to end on that. I have two weeks left before I head back to work...I need to keep taking advantage of my kitchen while I have the time!