There are several things that I have learned through this adventure thus far:
- Recipes are just suggestions.
- 10% of ingredients are optional.
- When it doesn't work out, eat it anyway.
- Three home-cooked meals a day is way too much food.
- YOU CAN COOK FOR ONE PERSON.
1. Recipes are just suggestions.
Many of you may be familiar with the terribly addicting site, Pinterest. For a while, I sat idly by while the people I follow pinned recipes and photos of entire meals and unique ways to cook a vegetable. I'd scroll down and down and wonder why on earth people would post these tempting recipes and not make them. It was probably then that I decided to use Pinterest for its real purpose (aside from finding hilarious photos of dogs with funny captions) and start pinning recipes. Then! dundundunnnnn I was going to make the recipes. gasp!
Once my "food" and "vegan" board were plump with recipes, I began. I started with smoothies. I mean, how hard could it be? Not very, I learned. This is also where I discovered that recipes are suggestions. It doesn't matter if you include one cup of mango or one and a quarter cup or one and some unmeasurable amount of mango that resulted from turning the bag upside down over the blender. Further, who knows how much avocado makes a half cup mashed? The blender is present for the mashing part, so just through in some avocado. This, of course, is referring to one of my favorite smoothies: the mango avocado smoothie. Yum!
How does one make a mango avocado smoothie? Throw in some mango, some avocado, a big glob of vanilla yogurt, a few squeezes of lime juice, a tilt of sugar, and ice. Blend it all. Too thick? Pour in some water or orange juice or apple juice or anything liquid. I like to match the vanilla yogurt flavor with a packet of vanilla protein powder. I just realized how un-appealing I made this smoothie sound. I'm not trying to sell it, but you just have to trust me that it's delicious. (P.S. I don't actually use yogurt; I use cultured almond milk, so in other words, almond yogurt. Kind of.)
So that's how I got into this. And today, I definitely took a recipe and made it my own. It was for creamy potato soup. I've had these potatoes sitting in the cupboard for weeks, and before I went to Arizona, I blanched a bunch of vegetables--peppers, carrots, eggplant-- so I decided it's time to use them. Oh, and I had an open carton of vegetable broth that expired last week, so I figured I should use that up too.
The eggplant was gone (to be explained later), so I thought I'd shoot for a potato soup. I did a Google search for "vegan potato soup recipe" and found one that claimed to be quick (I don't have a crockpot) and simple: that's my kind of meal.
In my efforts to lead a microwave-less life, I boiled the potatoes and got started on the rest. Well, the recipe didn't even call for peppers or carrots or garlic, just onions. Oh well, they were all going in! I heated them all on the stove and sat them aside for later. I warmed up the broth and soaked the potatoes in it for a while. Meanwhile, the recipe called for cashew butter, soy milk, and nutritional yeast in the blender. What I put in? Whole raw almonds and vanilla almond milk. Close enough. As I poured in the vanilla almond milk, I thought, "I knew there was a reason I wanted to buy plain almond milk..." Mmm vanilla almond potato soup...
I blended some of the potatoes and the broth in with the almonds and milk to make a thick, creamy broth. In the meantime, I heated up some black beans and boiled up some Ramen noodles to add; I like thick, chunky soup. When it was all said and done, I had included very few of the ingredients from the recipe, but it still worked out. That's right, even though it had a very strong, sweet vanilla tainting, it turned out to be a perfect balance, making a well-rounded soup. I do have to admit though, the Ramen noodles were a bit much; too non-traditional for a potato soup.
2. 10% of the ingredients are optional.
Now to the eggplant. First off, when blanching eggplant, I learned, just go for it; it doesn't look right (it probably wasn't), but just go for it. While Laura was visiting, I was excited to test out some of the meals that make enough for several people or don't store as easily. Thanks to my college's cafeteria, which made either rice, tofu, rice with tofu, or eggplant parm in the vegetarian section, I immediately knew what to do with my eggplant. The problem, however, was the parm. I once again did a Google search for "vegan eggplant parm" and the results were perfect. I decided to combine a few recipes, but I took the "cheese" sauce idea from one of them and began my search for the ingredients.
Tahini? What on earth is tahini? Awesome; that's what. It's like sesame hummus, and it makes great cheese sauce or a great cracker topping. So I got tahini. Nutritional yeast? Uhh, what's the difference from baking yeast? "Well, there are different vitamins in nutritional yeast that set it apart; also, it is used for different purposes, mainly to..." I zoned out. The girl behind the counter was awfully nice to try to describe it to me, but the point was that she began by saying that they didn't have any. Therefore, it wasn't an important ingredient.
By the end, I blended the tahini sauce, as I came to call it, ingredients into a runny, milky mesh, where, again, the vanilla in the almond milk smelt overpowering. A little wary, I poured the sauce over my breaded and tomato sauced eggplant, stuck it in the oven and waited. The result? The sauce became thick and golden in the oven. I think Laura and I were both shocked by how well it turned out. Who needs nutritional yeast? Not us.
Further, the tahini sauce proved to be a great addition to other meals. For example, I poured it over a portabella mushroom filled with tomato sauce to make a "portabella pizza". And finally, my favorite, I made a sort of alfredo-style sauce with it for over noodles. Thinking back to my days of making a lot of pie, I remembered using corn starch to thicken the filling. So I added some to the sauce and stirred constantly over low heat until it turned into a thick paste for my noodles. I was pretty shocked that it actually worked.
3. When it doesn't work out, eat it anyway.
Not every experimental attempt at a recipe works out. That's the worst because you're still stuck with it. I really really really hate wasting food, so I try to use everything that I can (hence the crazy conglomerate in my potato soup). As a result, when it doesn't taste quite like it should, three options remain: add something to it to make it better, pair it with something complementary on the side, or just suck it up and eat it.
I made that mistake with one of my smoothies. It was one of my favorite smoothies: green! Throw in some kale, some spinach, a pear, a frozen banana, and some orange juice. Well, with some of the other smoothies that I make, I add flax oil just for the sake of its health benefits. It really is an odd addition because, well, it's an oil. After blending up my green smoothie, I thought, "Why not add some flax oil?", as if the smoothie didn't already offer a wealth of vitamins and nutrients. What a mistake!
As soon as the oil touched my smoothie, it started bubbling! It was like some odd, witch's concoction. I tried to stir the oil in and it sizzled and sent more bubbles to the top. Oh boy. I knew that I still had to drink it, so I decided to pair it with low-salt cashews. The slight salt took away from the bite of the fizz, and though I could imagine it tearing away at my stomach lining, it still tasted good, and at least it had a sort of chaser with the nuts.
Another instance was with carrots. Who can mess up carrots? I mean, really. It was here that I learned that some recipes do require measuring--or at least paying attention to an idea of how much of something to include. I was roasting my chopped carrots in the oven and added some balsamic and some honey--a combination that I was already wary of--as well as some other spices and such. Well, I never did go back to check how much of each I was supposed to put in, but it was clear that something wasn't right. They had this odd combination of being super sweet and then extremely bitter. It was like eating a Sour Patch Kids gummy in vegetable version. While it was an odd taste, luckily, Sour Patch Kids are one of my favorites! It was just a bit embarrassing because I had a friend over for dinner, and I had these ridiculous carrots!
4. Three home-cooked meals a day is way too much food.
Like I said, I've been home a lot. As a result, I was putting a lot of time and effort into each meal. Oatmeal with fresh cut fruit for breakfast; a big salad with tons of toppings for lunch; a smoothie and trail mix for dinner. It's just too much! One of my friends laughs constantly my choice to go vegan.
"You must always be hungry!"
"No! I have just the opposite problem! I eat so much that I'm constantly full! The past few days, I've forgotten what hunger even feels like! It's terrible!" It was then that I realized that I just could not eat three meals a day.
This idea bothered me a lot, and it still does because it's what we're all so used to--breakfast, lunch, dinner. I'm learning, though, that it's okay to snack instead of eating a lot in one sitting. At first, it seemed so easy to justify eating this great meals because they're so healthy, and I need to make sure to hit all of the food groups. Being overly conscious of how much you eat and what you eat and if you're eating the right things, though, is a lot of work and enough to drive you mad and just say, "I want a cookie!" and reach for a bowl of cereal to satisfy the sweet tooth. And that's one that I still haven't figure out because smoothies are really sweet; oatmeal is really sweet; why do I still want cookies and ice cream? I've been spoiled by watching years of the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street instead of the "Cookies are a sometimes snack" Monster.
5. YOU CAN COOK FOR ONE PERSON
I was really nervous when I started living on my own that I was going to succumb to Ramen every night and cereal every morning and peanut butter and jelly for lunch. It's an especially easy habit to get into when you don't have many ingredients around. It's taken me a while to get a few essential spices and to have some ingredients that are in many recipes. But now that I do, I've learned that there is so much to be made!
My second query was how to make good meals but not eat it for a week before I made something else because I had too much of that one thing because I am only one person. This is a lot of where the "recipes are suggestions" comes in because I discovered that I could visually half a recipe by just adding less of everything.
One day, I made these lettuce wraps with quinoa and black beans and avocado and peppers and the like. They were delicious, healthy, and I didn't have to worry about eating it for a week because I made enough for a meal and some leftovers for another meal at a later date. This was exciting: to be able to make good meals that would feed me more than once without going bad or getting tired of it.
And that one was especially a favorite because it was delicious, healthy, and pretty! I love the colors! Then again, avocado has a way of doing that to food.
These are all things that I thought about today while I stirred my potato soup. I thought about some of the myths of cooking and some of the ways that I--someone with little cooking experience--decided to tackle the myths and make good food...and sometimes not so good food. I know that if I were a good, interesting creative nonfiction kid, I would have interwoven some personal experience or dilemma with the process of cooking or the variety of meals. Unfortunately, the cooking and recipe-mending are all that I have to share today, and I hope that it is enough and is as filling in words as it's filled my belly the past few weeks.
