What I know about food

It’s that time of year when the lists begin for all of those improvements we want to make in our lives when everything starts anew. This year I’m going to take a different approach this year. Rather than listing what I want to do, I’m going to make lists that reminds me of what I already know. If I can remember my lessons learned and add to that list at the end of the year, it’s bound to put me on a better path. So here’s what I know about food:


1) Refined sugar is addictive and does little more for me than offer a temporarily tasty treat. I doubt I’ll ever cut sugar out of my diet totally, but I do want to remember that once I eat it two or three days in a row, I’ll begin to crave it. When I go without it for a week or so, that craving disappears.

2) Naturally sweet alternatives make me happy. I can make zucchini bread (with chocolate chips to get my chocolate fix) and one slice will satisfy that urge I might otherwise fill with ice cream or a candy bar. I’ve uncovered several recipes this year that work for me and incorporate some of the garden’s goodness, like sweet potato cake, pumpkin bread and butternut squash muffins.

3) Eating regularly fends off headaches and lethargy for me. I also feel better when I eat small portions rather than one huge plate of food.

4) Waiting before piling up a second helping works best for me. If I take seconds immediately after finishing one plate, I inevitably feel overfilled 20 minutes later. I do better if I wait that 20 minutes, ask myself if I still feel hungry then, eat just a little bit more if the answer is yes.

5) Growing the food I eat and being in the garden is refreshing for my body and soul. Every year I learn more about gardening and I don’t plan to stop.

6) Cooking gives me joy and a creative outlet. If I need to focus my creativity elsewhere temporarily, then I might want to plan ahead with leftovers so I don’t zap the creative well in the kitchen.

I’m game for sharing lessons with anyone who wants to contribute what you know about food. If you have a food lesson learned this year, post it as a comment and it might help us all become healthier in 2001.

Preparing for a week of creativity

I’ve learned that when I channel my creativity into cooking, I direct it less toward my writing. Since this will be a week of finishing revisions on one novel and making progress on revisions of a second, I won’t be able to spare creativity for cooking. In preparation to be able to easily nourish my body, mind and soul, I spent yesterday cooking.

Our kitchen did smell good! First, I baked bread and raspberry muffins, using more raspberries from the garden. Next, I tried a new recipe for pasta and salmon with two garden vegetables—butternut squash and Swiss chard. Finally, Jim made a big pot of chili using our canned tomatoes.

Butternut squash is one of my favorite vegetables. It’s relatively easy to grown and tastes almost like dessert while delivering important nutrients. It’s also easy to preserve. If you cut it from the vine with a small stem still intact, or buy it from the farmer’s market in that way, then you can store it in a cool corner of your house that doesn’t get a lot of light and it will stay good until spring. My winter squash vines gave generously this year so I look forward to eating it throughout the winter.

Swiss chard is also one of the easiest greens to grow and has a fabulous nutritional profile. Check it out at World’s Healthiest Foods, a site my holistic nurse recommended to me for good nutritional profiles of food.

I’ll check in this week with short updates about how our Sunday preparations fared for the taste buds throughout the week. For now, I’m off to let those nutrients that are feeding my brain and energizing my fingers show off their ability to also inspire my creativity.

Learning from the two Marias

I like to experiment with a couple of new vegetables in the garden every year. Last year I tried jalapeno peppers and couldn’t use them all. This year I experimented with ancho peppers. My understanding was that they aren’t one of the hottest peppers but are commonly used in Mexican cooking. When I asked my friend Maria Turner, she said her mother always used them to make chili relleno.

Since Maria’s suggestion is to stuff the chili relleno with Mexican cheese, I thought it would be an ideal time to also try Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda’s Cuban Black Bean Soup. Or rather, her mother’s. I grew black turtle beans a couple of years ago to dry and use in black bean soup. I found the beans so tedious to hull after drying that I haven’t grown them again since, but I still have some stored in a glass jar, then the main ingredient is already in the kitchen.

I figured out I didn’t have an innate Latina cook skill when the black beans didn’t get soft. I failed at the very first step! But I proceeded anyway, trying everything I could think of to soften them and when I could finally bite in without chipping the enamel on my teeth, I added seasoning.

The chili relleno began with roasting the peppers and taking the skin off. That was new to me and also tedious, but I’ll try it a different way next time to see if it’s easier. Here’s the basic recipe I used after listening to Maria and reading a few recipes online when I realized I had more questions. We used one of the many jars of salsa we canned a couple of months ago for the last step.

Chili relleno
Roast and skin peppers.
Combine Mexican cheese with salt, pepper, thyme and garlic.
Whip two egg whites to soft peaks (this was a good amount for seven peppers).
Roll stuffed peppers in whipped eggs.
Roll in corn meal.
Fry in a skillet with enough oil to do cook one side at a time. Turn until each side is completely browned.
Put them in a serving dish then top with your favorite salsa.
Jim’s soup rating: 7, with expectations that the leftovers will improve to 9 as the seasonings continue to go through the soup.
Beth’s soup rating: 7

Jim’s chili relleno rating: 10
Beth’s chili relleno rating: 10 (when I added sour cream to calm the spiciness of the peppers)
Thanks to the Marias and their mothers for the lesson!
This week: Butternut squash and greens pasta