poor vegetarian meanderings; also, soups
commodorified is running a blog post carnival on "Cooking for People Who Don't: Food Security Edition." The idea is based on the World Health Organization's definition of food security as existing "when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life."
Food security is built on three pillars:
- Food availability: sufficient quantities of food available on a consistent basis.
- Food access: having sufficient resources to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet.
- Food use: appropriate use based on knowledge of basic nutrition and care, as well as adequate water and sanitation.
Overall lessons learned:
- If time is at a premium, it hardly ever makes sense to cook a single serving of anything, even if just one person is eating. There are economies of scale here. I usually end up making double-batches of main-dish meals so there will be leftovers for everyone to eat. With rice,
ccommack makes extra and freezes it in single-serving batches. Microwaving food to eat it when you get home from work and are ready to collapse is so much easier than having to actually cook, and much faster than trying to convince someone else to cook for you.. - Allow yourself little luxuries, especially if they stretch. Living cheaply doesn't have to mean foregoing things that taste good, and little things with strong flavors go a long way. A big container of sundried tomatoes, a jar of capers, or a tube of goat cheese will make everything taste exciting, even if your staple foods are cheap and boring.
- Potatoes. I know, they're starchy, and starchy foods are out of fashion. But besides having calories, they actually have vitamins and stuff, and you'd be surprised how many vegetables mostly don't. And they're super-cheap. It takes about 5 minutes to microwave a baked potato, and cut-up pieces of potato in soups and stuff cook quickly and are useful.
- Eggs. Not as cheap as potatoes, but are a higher-protein kind of perfect food.
- Lentils. Cook quickly (~30 minutes) from dried, lots of protein, super-cheap.
- Dry beans. Taste different from lentils so we don't go crazy. Take longer to cook from dried than lentils do, but if you soak them overnight and make a huge batch on the weekend, they're pretty good to have around. They taste better than canned beans, too, as long as you add salt when they're cooking, and maybe a little vinegar when they're almost done. (Black beans especially need the vinegar. I learned the hard way, though, that adding vinegar before they're done makes them take forever to cook.) Another benefit of cooking dry beans regularly is that they actually don't take as long to cook when they're relatively new - old unused beans from the back of the cupboard that have been sitting there for years take hours and hours to cook, but if you're actually using your beans after buying them, it's a lot faster.
- Salt. I know people tend to have strong and varying opinions on the use of salt, and some people have dietary restrictions, but around this house it's generally acknowledged that the main reason we think of home-cooked food as not being as good is that it often doesn't have enough flavor, and the fix for that is often just salt.
- Sesame oil. Makes Asian food magically taste right. Used sparingly, unless you want everything to taste like sesame.
- Instant broth stuff. Because the one flavoring agent that I always want in food is basic chicken-like soup-broth flavoring. Our local Vietnamese grocery store usually has some vegan options, while our local American grocery store has only meat-based instant bouillon. My current inelegant strategy has been to buy all the veggie broth options and taste them at home to figure out what's a good substitute for what.
Cooking implements I discovered as an adult that I wish we'd had when I was a kid:
- Vegetable peeler. Would've avoided a ton of cuts and scrapes peeling potatoes and apples in my childhood. Also useful for making thin shavings of carrot that cook quickly and won't overpower a stir-fry.
- Nylon spatulas. You can actually get all the stuff out of the mixing bowl. Who knew? Of course, if you get it all out, that makes licking the bowl harder and less necessary.
- Big sharp chef-looking knives for chopping things. It is easier to chop anything when you've got the right kind of knife, and things like root vegetables are a lot easier to chop when you're not trying to do it with a little $1 steak knife from the grocery store. I'm pretty sure it's faster and safer, too.
- Rice cooker. I know, you can boil rice just as easily, and it's kind of specialty thing that's only useful if you eat rice pretty often. But a rice cooker takes away all the paying attention so you can try to figure out what you're going to eat with the rice.
- Microwave. I know, this is super-obvious, but I really didn't grow up with one. Or rather, we had one when I was a kid but my mom was worried about radiation leaks so it lived in the basement and never got used. Makes baked potatoes actually feasible within human timescales, and allows you to reheat stuff without getting a million dishes dirty. The summer I spent in Russia, my host mom did all her cooking on weekends, and served me microwaved reheated food all week, and it meant there was always food, it was always there when I was hungry, and there were a lot more dishes than anybody could pull together all in one night.
Staple Cookbooks:
Neither of my two main cookbooks is strictly a vegetarian cookbook. One of them is Joy of Cooking, which is boring and functional, but has tables of all kinds of useful equivalences, and is a good go-to if you just need a basic recipe to make a basic thing, like chili or brownies or pie. Also if you've found a deer or a lobster or some kind of weird vegetable and you want instructions on what to do with it. Nothing super-creative, but a good go-to utilitarian cookbook.
The other non-vegetarian cookbook that's super-useful is More-with-Less, which is a collection of cheap, simple recipes put together by Mennonites. It's awesome in a number of ways. They understand the value of protein and nutrition, and also healthfulness, and this leads them to the conclusion that, if you're going to eat ice cream for dessert, why not just make ice cream the protein source for your meal, and not worry so much about having a full dinner to go with it? And there are some recipes in there that are very obviously some random things someone threw together once, and it worked, so it should be immortalized in a cookbook. But there's a lot of consideration for health and cost, and the dishes are usually surprisingly balanced, flavor-wise, for how random some of them look.
There's a table in the front part which I think is neat, listing cheap and expensive sources of protein, based on Western PA supermarket data from 2000, but I doubt the relative costs have changed all that much. The costs are per 100g of protein, not of total food.
Expensive sources of protein:
Bulk pork sausage ($5.53/100g)
Frozen pepperoni pizza ($5.56/100g)
Meatless breakfast links ($6.26/100g)
Firm tofu ($6.56/100g)
Frozen haddock ($6.67/100g)
Pork link sausage ($7.70/100g)
Bacon ($8.11/100g)
Cornflakes ($8.22/100g)
Golden Crisp cereal ($9.00/100g)
Cheap sources of protein:
Dry split peas ($0.49/100g)
Dry lentils ($0.56/100g)
Dry pinto beans ($0.78/100g)
Dry soybeans ($0.78/100g)
Canned mackerel ($1.03/100g)
Beef liver ($1.09/100g)
Peanut butter ($1.47/100g)
Young whole turkey ($1.50/100g)
Chicken legs ($1.52/100g)
Large eggs ($1.68/100g)
I showed my boyfriend and he was really surprised at how expensive things like vegetarian meat substitute foods are. I was sort of surprised he'd bought things without bothering to look at the price on them. It does give some perspective and context that the idea that eating vegetarian is cheaper. It can be, but it definitely depends what you eat. And I know, it's not all about protein, but protein's a start. I know that my metabolism gets unhappy when I don't give it enough protein, like when I try to subsist on the pasta-and-cheese-based foods that everyone seems to think vegetarians ought to accept as a substitute for meat.
Anyway. So More-with-less is awesome, even if most of the recipes aren't actually vegetarian, there are enough gems that are that it's worthwhile. My two favorite Vegetarian cookbook series (each of them has two volumes) are Moosewood (with its sequel Enchanted Broccoli Forest, which has awesome friendly thorough breadmaking instructions), and The Vegetarian Epicure, which has a Book Two.
Recently we have been doing a lot of soup, because it's cold and soup is warm and also awesome. We've been making huge pots of soup and letting them sustain us through the week. Or at least trying to (the chili went fast). Here are a couple of the ones we'll probably end up doing again:
Lentil Soup (More-with-less)
Combine in a big soup pot:
2 cups lentils
8 cups water
1 teaspoon cumin
Cook for 30-45 minutes, until the lentils are soft, adding water if it seems like it's becoming more like a pot of lentils and less like a pot of lentil soup.
After I set the lentils cooking, I chopped up a couple potatoes and carrots into just-smaller-than-dice, and added those to the soup, too. They take a little bit less time to cook than lentils, and they weren't in the recipe, but they added color and hopefully nutrition. (And besides, the carrots were starting to look old and sad and using them up was becoming important.)
Chop up two onions and two cloves of garlic. Put 2 tablespoons of olive oil (or cheap non-olive oil) in a skillet, and saute the onions and garlic until they turn yellow. Add two tablespoons of flour to the onions and garlic, and cook for a few minutes.
Add the sauteed ingredients to the pot with the lentils. Bring the soup to boiling, stirring occasionally. After the soup boils, remove it from the heat and add:
4 tablespoons lemon juice
salt and pepper until it tastes right
Chili (Joy of Cooking)
This was easier because we had a massive batch of kidney beans I'd cooked from scratch over the weekend, mostly to use in burritos. If we hadn't had that pre-cooked, we might've had to use cans of beans, which are more expensive and don't taste quite as good. Or we could've cooked the beans as part of the chili, but that would've taken forever.
Chop up some of the following vegetables:
1 cup carrots
1 cup chopped red bell peppers
1 cup chopped green bell peppers
1 cup chopped onions
2 minced garlic cloves
I didn't have any peppers, so I put in 1 cup of carrots, three cups of onions, and two garlic cloves. It was fine. Carrots are totally a legitimate chili ingredient, because they use them at the Cincinnati chili chains. My sister was skeptical about the carrots, but I convinced her.
Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large saucepan. Cook the vegetables in the oil, stirrin, until the onions are golden, 12-15 minutes.
Then add:
1-2 fresh green chile peppers, seeded and finely chopped (we used jalepenos from a jar, and I'm sure it wasn't as good, but it was fine)
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin
Cook, stirring, for two minutes. Then add the rest of the soup ingredients to the pan:
1 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes, coarsely chopped, with their juice
1 cup tomato juice (we used water to rinse out the cans of diced tomatoes, and used that dilute juice, because more liquid was clearly needed)
4.5 cups of cooked beans (the recipe suggested 1 16-oz can black beans, 1 can canellini, 1 can kidney beans, but we had huge quantities of kidney beans, so we used those)
Salt to taste
Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the flavors are blended, about 45 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings.
If you are the Joy of Cooking, serve with sour cream and cilantro.
If you are from Cincinnati, serve over spaghetti, with grated cheddar cheese and chopped fresh onion on top.
Greek Egg-Lemon Soup (More-with-less, heavily modified)
This is supposed to involve chicken, but we skipped that part because I don't eat chicken, which makes it faster. We made a double batch, so you could probably make half of this and it would be totally fine. This soup is not really a standalone meal, unlike the first two.
Bring to a boil:
10 cups water
1 bay leaf (actually we didn't have bay leaves so we skipped this)
A dash or two of pepper
Add whatever instant broth stuff you have, in the recommended proportion, or until it tastes like broth.
Add to the broth and cook until it's tender, something like 15 minutes:
1 cup dry white rice
Adjust the seasonings (add more salt or pepper if it seems useful), then heat it to boiling, and turn the stove off.
In a small bowl, beat until light:
4 eggs (the recipe said 1 egg, but we doubled it and omitted the chicken)
Stir into the egg:
Several tablespoons hot soup
Juice of 1/2 lemon (I put in 3 tablespoons of lemon juice from the bottle in the fridge)
Stir the egg mixture into the soup. Serve immediately with pars ley sprinkled on top.
(Or, if you don't have parsley, randomly add 10 ounces of frozen spinach at the end. I'm sure this is utterly inauthentic, but it turned out really good anyway.)
Egg Drop Soup (from the instructions to my wok)
This one is really not filling, but it's awesome, and it's something I really miss from my pre-vegetarian days. I don't think I've run into a restaurant that does it without chicken broth, but it does still work, because corn starch is magic. Apparently all my soups that don't have beans in them have egg in them, though, which is kind of weird. Despite having egg in it, this one is really not a main dish.
4 cups of some kind of yellow broth
Some, or none, of the following, or other things which are generally like the following:
2 large mushrooms, diced
1 cup shredded cabbage, or 1 cup well-washed shredded spinach
2 sliced scallions (I keep using half a sliced onion, instead, and it's not nearly as good, but it works)
1 shredded carrot (shavings made with a vegetable peeler work well)
Combine everything in a cool wok (a soup pot probably also works) and bring to a boil. Cook for five minutes.
Combine 1 tablespoon of cornstarch with 2 tablespoons of cold water, to make a smooth runny paste. Add this to the soup, stirring constantly. Cook until thickened and clear, so it has that weird egg-drop soup texture.
Beat an egg thoroughly. Slowly pour the egg into the cooking soup, stirring slowly in a figure-eight motion with a long-tined fork or a chopstick. It should cook as it lands and swirls, forming into long threads. Remove from heat and serve.
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