About Making New Food Choices

I'm not on a diet.
This is a choice.
I'm not feeling deprived.
There are not foods I "can't have."
I am choosing to eat a certain way.
I am choosing to change my life.
I don't miss cheesy pizza.
I don't miss pecan pie.
I don't miss feeling stuffed and kludgy.
I have more energy.
I have fewer mood swings.
I do feel hungry sometimes and that's ok. It's normal. And I will survive.
I want to have a better life and I'm making choices to make it better.
There's no way to "cheat" because then I would be the cheated-upon.
I don't care what you eat or don't eat.
I just want you to understand that you don't have to feel bad for me, hide what you're eating from me, or express pity for me.
I'm fine. I feel happier about food than I have in a long time. This is a path I want to be on.

PS Down 13 pounds in 5 weeks.

Dump Cake: Food of the Gods

Thanks to Duncan Hines for sponsoring my writing. There's no limit to the baking possibilities, so grab your favorite Duncan Hines mix and Comstock or Wilderness fruit fillings and Bake On! www.duncanhines.com.
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Oh, yes, the irony of being selected to write a post about dessert just after I joined Weight Watchers. I KNOW.

When it comes to dessert, I'm all about the butter. A good shortbread cookie can make me buckle at the knees. One time Angela from Fluid Pudding brought me a Gooey Butter Cake from St. Louis and I ate most of it with my hands in a San Francisco hotel room.

The other day at work was the first time I felt a twinge of regret at trying to lose weight because someone brought in Dump Cake and the delicious smell permeated the office, all buttery and warm and oh my. I love me some dump cake. You know what it is, right? The simplest thing on earth. Powered by massive quantities of butter.

You put a can of crushed pineapple with juice into the bottom of a 9x13 pan, put a can of Comstock cherry pie filling in, spread a box of (of course) Duncan Hines yellow cake mix on top, put two whole sticks of cut up butter on top, toss some chopped pecans or walnuts on if you must, then bake the weird looking mess for an hour at 350 degrees. Voila. Dump Cake. The top gets all crusty and buttery and the pineapple juice bubbles up throughout and caramelizes and it still looks a little lumpy and misshapen.

Is it good? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I'm not just putting this recipe here because it involves both a Comstock product and a Duncan Hines product, even though that works out pretty nicely, doesn't it?

No. I am putting this recipe here because if you make it for any holiday party you go to - party at a friend's house, church or work potluck, a little get-together - people will rave. You will be the star of the show.

You invest 10 minutes of work time (if you're slow), a few bucks in ingredients, and people will love you more than if you brought the strawberry shortcake pictured above (which was a little dry, if you ask me).

It's all about the butter.

I'm pencilling in a piece of dump cake for Christmas 2012. Until then, I'll be over there by the vegetable tray, dreaming.

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Remember to check out Duncan Hines' website www.duncanhines.com to find some great recipes for your holiday get-together! I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective.

Adventures in Cuisine with Mom

Cross-posted from Suebob's Red Stapler

Mom needed nutmeg and I needed cinnamon, so I placed a Penzey's order. If you like to cook and you don't know Penzey's, you NEED to. They have the best, tastiest, freshest spices at really reasonable prices.

No, they are not paying me.

ANYWAY - Penzey's sent me some free stuff in the order, including some salt-free spice mix. I gave it to Mom and she said it sounded delicious and that she could not WAIT to try it.

Cut to the next day.

Now is where I should perhaps mention that my mother is a terrible cook. I don't know how she does it, but she has the culinary equivalent of tone deafness.

So. She says "Do you want to taste the carrots I cooked with the new spices?"

Sure, I say. I take a taste and LIKE TO DIE.

Mom didn't use the salt-free spice blend. She used the cinnamon and nutmeg. She threw in some honey for good measure. What on earth, people.

"Gack!" I spewed.

"You don't like it?" she said.

I don't know how she does it. It's horrible. It's like me trying to sing or something. It just should not be done.

Photo from Flickr by Funadium (Marco Bernardini). Used under a Creative Commons license.

Perks

Shao Bing at Buddha's Belly

One of the perks of being a food blogger is that sometimes you get asked to go to fun events, like a blogger dinner at Buddha's Belly in Thousand Oaks.

When you get really lucky, you get to do it with bloggers whose company you enjoy a lot. Look at these beautiful women:


Margaret of Nanny Goats in Panties and Kim of House of Prince.

If you go (it's in the Oaks Mall, next to the Cheesecake Factory, on the side away from the freeway) have a Zen Garden drink - refreshing and fruity and made with gin. These are a few of my favorite things.

Defeated

I tried my best, but the wet chile relleno burrito defeated me. I thought I had it vanquished, but then the tortilla chip and salsa assist pushed it over the top.

Until next time.

Bad Omens

The other night my pal C.C. and I went to a pub for a beer after seeing "The Ides of March." It was a depressing movie and we needed to recover a bit. I ordered a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and C.C. got a Coors Light.

Our waitress was pretty rude. She brought our two beers and sat them down right in the middle of the table.

"Which is which?" C.C. asked.

"The Coors Light," said the waitress, with an undisguised sneer in her voice, "is the lighter one."

I looked at her over my glasses. I don't normally look at people over my glasses because I'm not really looking at that point, since I absolutely cannot see more than a few inches unaided, but I felt in this case she needed to experience the Mean Lady Glare.

I mean, come on. If you're selling the damn beer, don't try to make your customers feel bad for ordering it. Is that too much to ask?

We picked up the food menu and began flipping. C.C. dropped hers about 15 seconds later.

"Mozzarella sticks," she said, and I understood the shorthand. She wasn't going to eat anything there.

Mozzarella sticks are where C.C. draws her line. She says that restaurants that serve mozzarella sticks are just pushing food that comes frozen in a box. Seeing that one item on the menu is a signal that they don't really care about food.

I get it.

I draw the line at the whiff of old grease. I have a nose like a bloodhound and if I walk in a place and catch the smell of stale oil, I walk right back out. I have learned the hard way to not eat there, lest I risk disappointment and/or food poisoning.

Where do you draw your line? What tips you off?

Photo by Jumbledpile. Used under a Creative Commons license.

On Not Having A Fridge

I know this is ostensibly a food blog, but bear with me as I veer off into food politics a bit. I was watching The Daily Show and found this clip from their continuing series on Class Warfare. The quote about the poor beginning about 4:30 in floored me:

"Whe you look at the living conditions of the 43 million Americans that the census says are poor, you see that they in fact have all these modern conveniences...99 percent of them have a refrigerator."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

So now people apparently aren't considered poor if they have a refrigerator. A REFRIGERATOR!

It started me thinking about the last time I had to live without a fridge. I moved into a house with no fridge and had to buy a new one. I'm not poor, or I would have gotten a 30-year-old used one that sucks up $300 in electricity every year like I had back when I made minimum wage.

I bought one at Sears and they said it wasn't in stock and would take a week to deliver. No problem, I thought. I can survive a week without a fridge. I can eat non-perishable food and eat out, because I can afford that.

But if you don't have a fridge and you do want some perishable food, say something nutritious like milk, cheese or eggs, you'll need ice.

I didn't have an ice chest, because I was only missing a fridge for a week, so I just put the ice and small cartons of milk in a dish pan and covered it with a baking pan with newspapers on top for extra insulation. Still, I had to buy ice every day. It was messy and inconvenient and expensive, but for me, with my income, it was a short-term problem and I could easily survive.

If you're poor, you don't have the same luxury of eating out and wasting money on small sizes of food. You also don't have the comfort of knowing a brand new fridge will be delivered at the end of the week.

Ice is expensive. And heavy. So if you don't have a car - which I'm assuming you don't, if you're too poor to be able to afford a $50 yard-sale fridge - you have to schlep 10-pound sacks of ice. Heavy, cold ice.

Hope you're not old or disabled or live more than a few blocks from a grocery store! And I hope you don't need any other groceries, because once you have a couple sacks of ice, it's pretty hard to carry anything else.

I also hope you have the spare $3 a day you'll need to buy 2 bags of ice. You could make ice almost for free but HEY, THAT'S RIGHT, you don't have a fridge SUCKA. So that's $3 a day - or about $1000 a year you'll need to support your non-fridge habit. And since the federal poverty level is $22,000 a year for a family of FOUR, I'm sure you'll miss that $1000 pretty badly.

You could have bought about 750-1000 pounds of dried beans with that same amount of money, but that would be ridiculous. You're poor. You don't deserve a fridge!

And if you do want to cook perishable food, you'll have to buy it in small quantities you can use right away. So instead of buying a pound of margarine on sale, you'll have to buy it by the cube at the corner convenience store, because the market doesn't sell it in tiny quantities. It will cost you about as much as a whole pound, maybe more, but that's the way it goes, right?

You'll probably waste a lot of food, too, from spoilage or getting soaked by water from melting ice, food you can ill afford to lose. But waste is part of the American way! Learn to embrace it.

As you can see, I'm being sarcastic. I'm just hiding the fact that I'm so furious at the numbskulls who think poverty is easy, that it doesn't take cleverness and flexibility and constant scrambling to just get by. They sit up in their studios and have their lattes brought to them by production assistants and talk about how poor people have refrigerators and how that makes it almost like not being poor at all. I have two words for them, and they aren't "Bon appetit."

The Art of the Proper Cheese Plate

Here's the thing with a cheese plate - it's not just about cheese.

Sure, you can slice up some colby and mozzarella and call it a cheese plate, but give me a break. That's cheese on a plate, not a cheese plate.

A cheese plate is a work of art, a fanciful exploration of possibilities. It can go many directions, but to be correct, must remain balanced and pleasing in every aspect. The preparer - for no cooking is involved - must carefully select the cheese plate items for an experience of salty, creamy, sweet, crunchy, fruity, simple and complex.

There must be at least two cheeses, preferably three or more, of good quality and of a variety of flavors and textures. It helps if they aren't all cow's milk. One cow, one goat, one sheep is an interesting mix. Or one creamy, one semi-soft or firm, and one dry and crumbly.

My favorite would be either one brie or blue, one aged cheddar, and some kind of Pecorino or Parmesan.

The classic accompaniments are bread, fruits (fresh or dried) and nuts. Neglect not olives, though. A development I've seen recently is a blob of honey with comb served with a blue cheese. I like that.

At home, I get creative with different types of crackers, hearts of palm, several different olives, little pickles or cornichons, sliced sweet peppers, dabs of hummus. Dried fruits like raisins or apricots, a thinly-sliced apple.

Tonight's cheese plate featured:
Goat cheese gouda
A strong American blue cheese
Triscuits
Lucques Olives
Plain hummus
Hearts of Palm, sliced lengthwise
Walnuts coated with cocoa and chipotle powders
Apple, sliced thin

The lovely thing about making a cheese plate at home is that it turns cleaning out the fridge into an artistic, creative experience. The fridge and cabinets become sources of hidden treasure. Before, it was a just tablespoon of leftover walnuts. Now it is a cheese plate accompaniment! I am a culinary genius!

Another one off the list

This was not the pizza. This is really good butternut squash pizza.

I go out to lunch on Mondays when I am in the office because I am too lazy to take my lunch. I try to go different places and see what is out there. Culinary adventure. I'm a real Indiana Jones that way.

I checked Yelp and found a pizza place I hadn't been. I found the little place hidden in a non-descript strip mall back off the street. A crap location to be sure.

I was the only customer. I figured Monday lunch, a little late, in a crap location. Ok.

I ordered my food and got an iceberg lettuce salad topped with a those pink unripe tomato slices and a handful of shredded mozzarella cheese. Not so good.

But here's the really bad thing. The old dude that ran the place came over, saw I was reading the newspaper, and began shoving the newspaper aside in an irritated fashion as if he were pissed that I was reading the paper where he needed to sit his salad. I picked up the paper and moved it out of the way. Started eating salad and reading the newspaper again.

Back he came with the pizza plate holder thing and the pizza plate. He again harumphed around as if I were messing with his game. I couldn't believe it. I wanted to have a nice lunch and now some jackass is mad because I dare to do what I want while I'm eating (at a 4-top, which had plenty of room to just put down the food and leave me to my stupid newspaper).

Then he went over and turned on Fox news LOUD despite that Sinatra was also playing loudly. I stuck my fingers in my ears and kept reading. Do you know how hard it is to eat pizza with your fingers stuck in your ears?

Anyway, Fox News was the final straw that convinced me to never go back. It should never be played at mealtimes. In fact, that channel should come with a warning: may induce nausea and vomiting.

Public Service Announcement: Salad

Vegetable Charlotte - now THAT's what I'm talking about

I am a vegetarian and have been since 1986, yet I can count on one hand the times I have thought "Going out to eat? Yay, I can get a SALAD!" I may not even need any fingers to do that.

It always takes me aback a bit when my non-veg friends muse "Is there anything at Restaurant X you can eat? Oh, they have salad!" as if that solves the problem.

Maybe non-veg people look forward to having a nice salad as a meal out. Then again, their salads are usually topped by grilled shrimp or a breast of chicken.

I suppose it is the idea that vegetarian = vegetables and the fact that many non-vegetarians eat vegetables reluctantly, if at all, and often in the form of salads that gives rise to the belief that vegetarians are big salad eaters.

I'm not. I rarely eat salad. My greens usually turn to bags of pre-compost green liquid in the crisper drawer before I ever get around to eating them.

I do love vegetables. I love 95% of all plant matter (the only exceptions I can think of are bitter melon, starchy big lima beans and...that's pretty much it). I love plant matter prepared creatively as soups, stews, curries, stuffed vegetables, tartes, tortas, with pasta and noodles, on sandwiches, tagines, gratineed, roasted, fried, sauteed, steamed and put on pizza.

I even love salad sometimes, just not as the main course. So - here's the PSA part - if you're choosing a restaurant to take your vegetarian friend to and the only non-meat item they have on the menu is a salad, go somewhere else.

I remembered my password!

I haven't posted on this blog in almost a year! About eight of those months have been spent occasionally wondering what email and password were connected to this blog, and being unable to remember.

It came back to me! Glory hallelujah.

Who knows if I will start posting again. I still love food, but I have fallen into culinary bad habits like eating cheese plates for dinner (cheese, crackers, olives, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, maybe a couple slices of Tofurkey lunch "meat") and not cooking anything real.

Here's a food pic that cracked me up. I love Baken!


Thanks for stopping by after all this time. I'll be better, I promise!