Recent noms I have loved, etc.

Hey everyone, here are a few things we've eaten/drank/snuggled with around the house lately for your possible viewing pleasure (I don't want to get presumptuous :)).  

Woke up kind of late one morning and needed to fix some fast, easy lunch for work.  Usually I like to have a salad but we didn't have any greens in the house, so I threw some quinoa, lentils, broth, and curry powder in the rice cooker first thing after getting up.  After I'd finished getting ready, the quinoa/lentils were cooked, and I stirred in some cashews, frozen peas, and cilantro (raisins would have been great, too, but we were out of everything! It was a Friday, what can I say?).  It ended up being a really easy, healthy lunch.

This next dinner was tasty but nothing special (Melomeal's magic three ingredient burger, fries, and broc). However, I did want to comment on the "cheese" sauce on the roasted broccoli, which came from Joanne Stepaniak's uncheese cookbook, which I bought awhile ago and have barely used. The awesome thing about this particular recipe (which is called something like "instant cheese sauce") is that it really is virtually instant, but still totally delicious.  This broc was BEGGING for a sauce, but everything else was about ready to serve. I thumbed quickly through the cookbook, not expected to find anything fast, but there it was, and it was indeed fast and delicious!!!

Adorable kitty break. That is all. 

This next dish came from your vegan mom. It's the hot dog reuben!!!!  We have actually been trying hard to eat more healthfully over here for the past year, so this felt like a bit of junk food (I haven't had a sandwich on two pieces of bread in awhile!).  Boy was this good, though. I did make a loaf of homemade rye bread, which is at least partly why this sandwich looks so monstrous (I can never slice homemade bread very thinly).  Sauerkraut, avocado, and Tofurky dogs inside. Sauerkraut, I was wrong about you all those years. I apologize for all my rude comments about your smell. 

This may or may not spell something.

Never choose your whiskey based on what they drink in all those trashy Italian giallo movies.

This last thing was gnocchi with pesto, tomatoes, and peppers on greens with roasted squash.  The pesto, tomatoes, and peppers all came from our summer stash of things we froze. 

Which brings me to my last thoughts for this post. How does eating seasonally/locally (I'll treat them as interchangeable terms, although they aren't really) fit into your cooking? This is on my mind for two reasons: first, Ingrid recently posted some very delicious-looking eats from Terry Walters' book, Clean Food, on her excellent and inspiring blog, and it got me thinking about this cookbook.  Let me say that while I really do think it's a great book, it's predicated on cooking seasonally, but often misses the mark in that regard.  I still love the book and highly recommend it; I just think there are some inaccuracies WRT the seasonality of some of the ingredients.  This is probably out of necessity: no one but the most hard-core locavore is going to want to make recipes that consist solely of cabbage, winter squash, and potatoes all winter.  But still.....I think for seasonal eating, Jae Steele's books are a little more accurate.

The other reason this is on my mind is that it's starting to be that time when the growing season is winding down for pretty much all of the US and Canada. Don't believe me? Check out this handy map.

It may not be clear from previous posts, but we are pretty serious gardeners here at SCB and we try really hard to eat seasonally.  One of the main reasons I initially started eating vegan was for environmental reasons.  I know that one person's food choices are not going to undo the damage a meat/dairy-based diet has done to the planet, but I didn't want to be a part of the wholesale environmental destruction the food industry imparts anymore (or at least I wanted to reduce my role in it).  However, veggie crops, especially those that come from large-scale convention farming, also have an environmental impact, and soon it will be that time of year where if you want to eat something green, it is unlikely to be local, and it gets harder to balance a plant-centric diet with eating locally.

Anyone who has perused my blog will readily be able to find examples of non-local eats, but most of what we eat here produce-wise comes from our garden and local farmers (every veg in this post other than the frozen peas and avocado, in fact).  At least, this is true 8-9 months out of the year.  But in February, there will be a time when a bunch of arugula trucked in from Texas will probably look too good to say no to.

Anyone else out there obsessively fixate on this stuff???