Oh, I am back to my old tricks.
This isn't a recipe post (though maybe I will do some of those this long cold winter, now that it is sort of cold) but more a food-related musing, so no photos, unless I think of any. I'm just trying to reassess food a bit... good time of year to do so, with all the holiday treats tempting from every side, and this week and last I have been organizing concessions for the high school drama production, which entails looking at a lot of cookies. I did make bagels for both shows last weekend and hope to do it again this weekend, but since they are white flour bagels it's not that much better.
During the set-up I got into conversation with one of the other moms (the one who brought clementines for the refreshments table, bless her) who told me her daughter often brings stuff like leftover kale for lunch, and my son is the only one who doesn't make fun of her for it. I'm proud of him for this, and also determined to branch out into the salads he's been requesting that I never quite manage to remember to pack. To think that only seven years ago, when we spent a few weeks in England and Wales, he ate chicken fingers at (to my clouded recollection) every non-breakfast meal, thus missing out on some really good food (no jokes about British cuisine here); and then there was the corn dog period, which he was just reminding me of yesterday, while gazing into the Trader Joe's freezer at the corn dogged shrimp yes really oh my god. Anyway, the fussy eater is gone for good, hurray.
My husband spent two months this fall doing the Paleo Diet Challenge, and while I have problems with the Paleo Diet (mostly semantic, since it seems to me to be an arbitrary mishmash of modern dietary research and romantic notions about what people who spent most of their time looking for food would and wouldn't have eaten), problems I did not hesitate to express, I have to admit that we ate better during that time, even those of us who weren't attempting to split our plates evenly between meat and vegetables (with no grains, legumes, potatoes, sweet potatoes WHAT, dairy, sugar and I can't remember what else. Oh yeah, booze. No problem there; I can't drink it anyway, migraine trigger). I am even wondering now if I can possibly convince my stomach that fish and vegetables work for breakfast. Probably I could manage a puree of sweet potatoes and apples. Along with my GrapeNuts. My neighbor Anna eats great breakfasts: lots of green smoothies and toast with things on it.
One thing we're doing as a result of this is stocking lots of frozen veggies (it helps that we bought a freezer this fall). The nutritive value may be slightly less compared with locally grown organic produce, but actually eating frozen broccoli (not while still frozen, obviously) is better than saying "oops, I have no locally grown organic produce in the vegetable bin" or "oops, the locally grown organic produce in the bin is now mush." Which happens far too often especially when we have high school drama productions.
I did freeze some of my own garden produce, but not much (next year, in Jerusalem, without groundhogs), though we are well supplied with squash and sweet potato soups, and I've got two more ginormous butternuts (not local unless you consider Trader Joe's to be such) to soupify. Great stuff, endless variety of seasoning possibilities. (Blogger's spell check appears to think ginormous is a word. Good for it.)
On the other hand, the Post's Food section cookie issue arrived today, oh my god lime-Thai basil shortbread, double chocolate coconut, etc. etc. I want to make them ALL. Love comes in many flavors...
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