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And there it went, a year

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It’s been a year. Or has it? Was it really a year ago when I scratched an idea on the back of a napkin, committed my kids to a far-fetched food challenge, and threw myself into the blogosphere? My WordPress dashboard says that it’s true, but I still have a hard time believing it.

While this blog started as pseudo experiment, it’s grown into something more. I’ve discovered a love of storytelling and its ability to convey through words and images my thoughts about two important subjects: food and family.

This blog has given me the opportunity to do so many things – to connect with people from around the world, to support local businesses, and to help nurture people’s interest in cooking at home.

It’s a fitting time to share some of my favorite moments from the past year. The moments that made me laugh out loud, the touching moments, the highs and the inevitable lows. So here they are, in no particular order. Although the first one really was the best.

1. I got a smiley face from Deepak Chopra.

Deepak

2. We completed our 52-week challenge. Favorite phrases: “This tastes like garbage”, “my fruit smells like salami” and “I don’t want to lick the eyes.”

3. I landed on Google’s first page for search terms like “cukeasaurus” and “why birds won’t eat crumbs out of a bowl”.

4. My dog became my muse.

JacksonCollage

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Back where it all started…

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All good things must come to an end.

It was a great month to test out Vegan eating. I was inspired, I learned, I tried all kinds of new foods and new preparations.

But in the end, Vegan eating just isn’t for me.

I never intended for my Vegan cleanse to be a diet or help me lose weight. Initially it was a response to my overindulgent holiday consumption. A way to jumpstart my body back into its usually healthy rhythms. But I’d always secretly wanted to test it out – to see if I’d feel healthier and have more energy. To find out whether I could cure my occasional insomnia.

But here’s what ultimately happened: I felt like I was missing something. I felt out of balance and not completely myself. Despite the guacamole and French fries, I felt like I was on a diet, and not a particularly healthy one.

This was the most eye opening lesson about my Vegan cleanse: yes, you can be Paleo, Vegan, Dairy Free or Gluten Free, but don’t expect those diets to be inherently healthy. You still need to make smart food choices.

Before my cleanse, I had a vivid impression that my month of Vegan eating would transport me to a fruit and vegetable fantasyland; a land where food choices are made wisely, automatically, and temptation is minimized.

Fruits and vegetables certainly live in this place, but on your journey you’ll encounter white breads, heavy oils, tortilla chips, candy and alcohol. And you might find yourself reaching for these items more often than you’d like.

While I had the purest intentions as I set out on my cleanse, I realized that given my busy schedule, convenience is a huge driver of choice. And I’m not talking about McDonald’s. I’m talking about cracking two eggs into a pan, making some toast, and in less than 5 minutes, a hearty breakfast or lunch is ready.

For a snack, cheese on whole grain crackers, yogurt, or a few slices of salami once did the trick. This month, I tended to reach for fruit or vegetables, hummus, or avocado. I quickly tired of hummus and avocado, and found that fruit or vegetables alone didn’t satiate. I’m sure that far more Vegan-friendly snack options exist, but this, in the end, is what I ate. These are the foods that felt the most intuitive. The easiest, the fastest, the types of food that are closest to what my former self would have eaten.

Eating Vegan also meant that I had to think more about meal planning. And the more I thought about food, the more I ate.

Having come from a diet-heavy period in my 20s, I now realize that the reason they failed was because they took too much work and conscious planning. I was always thinking about food, getting hungrier by the minute.

Food shouldn’t feel like work. Poring over ingredients and food choices is work. Combing through cookbooks and weeding out recipes that call for cheese or meat: work. Heading to the grocery store knowing that I can’t buy half the items stocked: work.

Let me be clear – it wasn’t work in the negative sense of the word, often it was fun work. But work that made my diet feel less natural and made me eat more? That just didn’t compute.

Maybe if I’d given it a chance, eating a Vegan diet would have started to feel more intuitive. But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Barring holiday over indulgences, I have a fairly healthy diet. I eat plenty of salads, lean proteins, and don’t go overboard on sweets. I avoid preservatives like the plague, I favor homemade versions of store bought staples, and I’ve done enough cooking to know that it’s actually faster to make dinner at home than order takeout.

And now comes my gut-wrenching confession: because I wasn’t feeling as clean and renewed as I’d hoped, I started to cheat.

It all started with some eggs. Fresh from the farm, each egg a different size and a different color. The outside of the eggs smudged with a trace of dirt. I saw them at the store and knew that I needed them. Even if it meant keeping them in my fridge untouched for the remaining week of my cleanse.

But my craving for the eggs took over. I had conversations in my head, I weighed pros and cons. In the end, 10 minutes after I arrived home with my groceries, I gave in. I poached an egg and inhaled it with a slice of toast.

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Welcome to the vegan vortex

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We’re three weeks into our vegan cleanse and I thought it would be a good point to update you on what we’ve been eating. Full post-date wrap-up to come next week, but to give you a snapshot, here goes….

Fake cheese and lots of it. Not Velveeta of course. Treeline nut cheese has a faintly acidic taste, but overall it isn’t too bad. I have yet to try the White Alder that I bought after seeing a rave write-up in Food & Wine magazine, but will crack open that package this week.
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Assuming that any vegan worth his or her salt eats plenty of salad, we jumped on the bandwagon and have been eating our greens. This was the best use for nut cheese so far; a little goes a long way and you don’t have to give up creamy salad dressings. Loved this version with butter lettuce and pomegranate seeds.

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As you might have read in this post, I’ve been trying desperately to get my hands on anything that resembles steak, from mushrooms to eggplants, to big fat slices of cauliflower. Meat love dies hard.
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Hummus has taken over as a major food group – my favorite combo being with tomatoes and pickled onions. So now instead of 3PM dairy bloat, I have a pregnant belly from too many legumes. Either that or somebody hasn’t told me something…

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Fake steak

I must be a carnivore at heart because this week it was all about meatless meat. And I’m not talking about little veggie crumbles that look like meat. I’m talking about steak-style food. Thick cut, the kind of food that needs a serrated knife. There’s a reason I go by the nickname “the meat chef” in our house.

In early 2012, Bon Appetit magazine published an issue that featured a full-fledged cauliflower steak. Until that point I’d only seen cauliflower cut into dainty florets. But here was a cauliflower, unapologetic in its manliness, chest bulging, mustache intact, ready to ride its Harley into the sunset.

In other words: cut into slabs, seared, roasted, and drizzled with a hearty dressing.

And it was one of those life-changing moments. The kind of moment where you realize that by God, vegetables can be impressive. Cut them like they’re supposed to be cut, not into tiny little pieces, but into great big beautiful slices, and there you have it: a vegetable main that can win over the heartiest of appetites.

The problem is that I’d never actually experimented with prepping my veggies like this. No need, I had steak! And so I continued….trimming and slicing my way through my vegetable prep, primping and glazing them with a touch of soy here, a dash of cumin seed there.

But now that I’m vegan for a whole month, nothing is holding me back. By default, veggies need to be the main event. Veggies, start your engines, it’s road trip time. Here are a few fake steak recipes that scratched my steak itch last week.

1. Cauliflower steak

I dug up the old Bon Appetit cauliflower recipe for some inspiration and got to work. I followed the same basic principle, roasting and searing it  for a crisp exterior and soft but still-toothsome interior. And I updated the dressing, going for a Mediterranean style, with capers, olives, pickled onions, and a combination of olive oil + red wine vinegar.

The surprise result was that cauliflower does masquerade well as steak. It was meaty, rich, filling, but didn’t result in the gut buster feeling that so often accompanies meat.

Steak rating: 3.5 stars

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2. Mushroom sandwich

My step dad is a huge cheesesteak lover, and by proxy, I’ve become a bit of a steak sandwich lover myself. Although I’ve never had his favorite version from Rothman’s in NYC, I’ve smoked out my apartment on more than one occasion charring the perfect strip to wedge between slices of bread.

With the deep freeze temps that have rocked the NorthEast last week, I was in the mood for something hearty. A steak sandwich came to mind but my cursed (excuse me, cleansing) vegan diet was getting in the way.

So I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, splashed some water on my face, and told myself: “self: you can do it, figure this out.”

I headed over to Forager’s market where I bought a mountain of mushrooms, a head of garlic and a fresh baguette. Because if there’s any vegetable that can pass as steak, it’s mushrooms. Which is possibly why they’re such a great combo: you’re basically allowing yourself to eat twice the amount of steak in your sandwich, minus the guilt.

Just cut the mushrooms into big meaty pieces, give them a good sear in plenty of olive oil and you’re on the fast track to steak heaven…So steaky that I almost forgot that I wasn’t eating real steak. 

Steak rating: 4.5 stars

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The vegan kitchen

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Annnnnd we’re off to the races. Vegan cleanse is well underway, and to be honest, I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

Other than the first day when I was suffering from a raging New Year’s Eve hangover and was craving an egg and cheese from the corner deli. But I made do with some terrific quinoa sliders from Bareburger in Chelsea.

On Day 2 of the cleanse I hit Whole Foods. There was no leaf unturned, no fruit unsqueezed (gently of course). It was fun to visit my usual stomping ground with a new lens. All of a sudden the once-neglected veggie burgers in the freezer case became a source for inspection, label reading and indecision.

But it was my healthiest shop in months, maybe years, with far more fruits and vegetables in my basket than usual. Gone were the packs of applewood smoked bacon, pork sausages, and triple cream cheeses.

Heading into my cleanse, I promised myself that I wouldn’t load up on vegan versions of the real thing, the Tofurky burgers and the Vegenaise. But once I was in the store, I started to second guess my ability to subsist on vegetables alone, so I made a few exceptions.

Here’s a snapshot of what I bought this week: 

As expected, a healthy dose of fruit and vegetables, including plenty of citrus, pomegranates, kumkuats, Japanese sweet potatoes, and a week’s pay in avocados.

Knowing that I should be drinking more, I got some detox teas and a few fresh-pressed juices. The French Vanilla soy creamer seemed like an indulgence (and not particularly healthy) but black coffee just doesn’t cut it for me. It has yet to be sampled, but I’m guessing that it won’t be my favorite purchase.

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From my research on vegan eating, I felt I’d be amiss if I didn’t include a truckload of hummus in my diet. I’ve made hummus at home and would prefer to eat a homemade version, but wanted to have enough on hand in case of a hummus emergency. That situation where you’ve turned vegan, you’re starving, and the only thing that you can make quickly is hummus and crackers. And yes, that is vegetarian chopped liver that you see at the top. It’s made with lentils, peas, and all kinds of spices. I don’t even like chopped liver but something about this called to me. My intuition was right. It’s good…Really good.

Like any good vegan/vegetarian, I had to buy a sampling of tofu products. I’m not the biggest fan of tofu, but figured I’d give them another go. While the Tufurky chorizo actually seems appealing, the Asian pressed tofu is an unattractive shade of brown. I’m expecting to eat it the day before its expiration date, swayed by guilt more than appetite.

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And now let’s talk about dairy. I was going to bypass this category altogether, but the fabulous write up about Kite Hill cheeses in last month’s Food & Wine magazine gave me pause. The cheesemonger convinced me to try Treeline as well. Once I’d passed the fake dairy threshold, coconut milk yogurt didn’t seem like a far stretch. I’ll now admit that The Earth Balance buttery spread was  the worst kind of impulse buy. Maybe I’ll fry my Asian tofu in it and call it a day.

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