I am not going to lie, eating better has not helped my mood. Stressing about meals. hoping they aren’t too boring. By boring, I mean filled with at least 12 ingredients and 2 hours cooking time. I am a sadist and apparently I cannot do anything the easy way. In my last post, I talked about how much the book Eating Animals changed my outlook on food. Outlook is still changed, but now there is guilt. About everything. Fear not, it is not constantly, it just pops in every once in a while. We live in a society that affords us the luxury of making choices about what we put in our bodies. Yet, it is hard to make that decision. Maybe it is economic, organic always comes with a heftier price tag. Convenience is a nasty one as well. Sometimes you just don’t have any time. I have a friend, who I will not name, that is so busy there are undiscovered strains of bacteria growing in her fridge. She has her heart in the right place, but if you aren’t home, how the hell are you supposed to cook all of this expensive organic mess?

Since I read that damn book, we have been trying to eat at least half of our meals vegetarian. We aren’t going gluten free, Jesus one thing at a time! We feel better, C comments on a regular basis how much better he feels. I guess I see what he is saying. Although, nothing feels better to me then being weighed down by pork. The food we are eating IS better, the minute you eliminate meat, the calories come down. I have some tips and recipes on the way. We are also ordering our fruit and veg online. We just signed up for New Roots. It’s a local delivery service that brings you a bin of randomness once every two weeks. (Or every week if you are a rabbit) I am kind of excited to try things I have never cooked with. I also like getting presents, especially if it is food. So what if I am paying for the present! I won’t know what’s in there!

Needless to say, just read the book.  It is up to you to have your own reaction.  Maybe only chronic over reactors like myself woudl feel implied to change.  I will say, regardless of any inconvenience changing our eating habits has had, it does feel good to be sticking it to the man.  Take that Tyson!  In yo face Smithfield!  You are only invited into my fridge 50% of the time.  Mindless shit talking is over.

I have been reading an eye opening book, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.  It has been keeping me up at night.  Seriously, I cannot stop thinking about this book.  Foer himself is a veggie eater, but he isn’t trying to convince you that eating meat is wrong, he just makes you feel like a heartless asshole.  The book is full of facts about the factory farming and its impact on our health and our planet.  It has been changing my life these past few days.  I can’t read it in one sitting, I feel ashamed.  Now I am not a book critic or even a very good book reader.  This book is making me feel differently about food then I ever did before. 

C and I are major meat eaters, it is not a complete meal if I have not eaten some form of animal.  I have been known to pick out entrees because of their meat to whatever side they are giving me ratio.  So reading this paperback has been hard on me.  Because I don’t know where to draw the line.  Foer gathers perspective from poultry farmers to PETA members to vegetarian meat suppliers.  I am eating pork sausage while I type this because I don’t know what is going on in my brain and I am feeling a sense of hoarding/panic.  I ate a salad before this, so shut up.  I don’t think, and pardon the pun, I could give up the meat cold turkey.  I am shaking my head because that sounded so cheesy.  I know for a fact C had teryaki for lunch.

So do we find a farmer that will raise animals and slaughter them in the nicest way possible?  Or is the allure of $5 whole chicken too great?  I will end up knawing on C’s ankle if we try to go vegetarian to soon, I need to be weaned.  (A-yo!  Another farming reference!)  Read this book, borrow it from me.  Get it from the library.  Learn anything you can about the impact that factory farming has on disease and pollution.  I think animal rights activists turn some people off because they seem to value animal life higher then human life.  Listen, when you are an organization that threatens the family members of a chef that cooks goose liver, you are an asshole.  Yes, animals are suffering and it is cruel.  Good on you to be a voice for them.  But another side is the impact it has on our own health.  The factory farms that are so deep in pig shit, they are polluting wherever and whenever they can.  Why not?  They have the money to pay a silly fine.  Strains of virus that are bred in the cramped pens of factory farmed animals.

I’m not sure where our stance is on any of this, maybe I will lose interest in a few weeks.  We will go back to eating anything we want.  It’s not just about animal cruelty.  Not just about disease control.  The ridiculous amount of pollution and carbon emissions.  And the list can actually go on and on.But I wanted to put it out there, just in case I am a stronger and better person then I think I am.  This way C and I can look back and remember when we took a stand for something that was really a bunch of somethings that saved our lives.

I’m sure I will change my mind on this a million times in the next few days.  I just needed to get this out there.  Thanks for writing this book Mr. Foer.  To be continued…  

p.s.  I get it if this seems like a bunch of nonsense.  But please forward this to anyone you think might wanna know more.  I will be back with more info.  The title link will direct you to a website with excerpts or just visit the website http://eatinganimals.com/

I feel good. It feels good to be back here and excited about the things happening around me. I know I’m a little different, but if I wasn’t after all this time not posting, I would be a little worried. Seattle, turns out, is an awesome place to live. So much so, I forgot to write anything about it. Just a quick post, saying hello to old and new friends. I’ve missed you. A lot of shit has happened!

It has been rather gloomy here in Minnesota.  It would normally not bother me, but I have been needing some sunshine and hope. This doom and gloom bullshit is killing me. That being said, I am reading a new book. The Foie Gras Wars How A 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired The World’s Fiercest Food Fight by Mark Caro. Not the most pleasant reading so far. The animal rights activists are giving me nightmares. Beware. 

I am guilty of not reading as much I would like and what I was reading was pretty craptastic literature. I am engrossed in this book. There will be a pretty lengthy review once I am done, which should be done in a few days. What I will say is that it is turning out to be some enlightening stuff. My mind is on foie gras overload.

So now I have fowl on the brain. I spoke earlier about having purchased some cool proteins at the local Asian market. One of those was quail. Now I am trying to decide a way to prepare them that doesn’t me to require some sort of Michelin chef inspired skill. I wanna go simple and really taste this bird. I implore you wise food and non food readers: What would you do?

There have been a few requests for the pork belly recipe I used that fateful night.  I loosely followed Gordon Ramsey’s pressed belly recipe.  Seeing as how we got the pork from an Asian market rather then a butcher, the piece wasn’t even on all sides.  Wonky, wonky.  Needless to say, pressing the pork belly became kind of impossible for me.  I tried weighing down the pork with every heavy can in the kitchen and it just got too ridonkulous.  Ugh. 

They say the belly shouldn’t sit on the bottom of the pan, so I used some carrots and celery to keep it lifted along with the head of garlic.  Don’t forget to convert the temp from Celsius to Farenheit.  The crispy skin is the best part, so let it sit in the oven for the last stage of cooking till it gets nice and crackly.  Some bubbles will pop up.  Pork rinds… yum.

I hope you like this as much as I did.  It is a fatty dish, but it’s pork belly, live a little.  I am working on doing some Asian dishes with pork belly.  Will keep you posted! 

Recipe from Gordon Ramsey’s the F Word.

Trying new things can be a daunting experience. The fear and apprehension can grip your senses like a vise. Nonetheless, in the past two weeks I done quite a few things for the first time. This juice fast was the first. I posted earlier about the pre fast, but I don’t think I mentioned how great I felt pre fasting. I had clarity of mind and was flying high. A diet of fruit and veg was quite nourishing. Getting into the actual fast was a whole other story…

The diet I am on is outlined from the book JUICE FASTING & DETOXIFICATION by Steve Meyerowitz. He details everything from what to juice you should drink to what equipment to purchase. He gives a realistic take on what your body can handle and the benefits and dangers of such a regime. Now I think I was too cavalier going in to fully grasp what I was doing. Up until then I was stuffing my face full of calories and then BLAMO! a diet of less than 800 calories a day, easy.

The first few days became a blur. I was a juicing machine and the novelty of the whole process kept me going. It wasn’t until my first morning of detox that I hated the world and mostly myself. Through the various green tinged juices I drank, my body was and is cleansing itself. Those toxins gotta come out sometime. I was sweating with fever which would immediately be replaced with a horrible chill. I was too weak to lift my head and I cried a little. Really, little tears came out on the pillow and everything. Beau made me some juice and I fell back to sleep. A few hours later I felt right as rain confusingly enough. The next morning wasn’t as bad, but I was dizzy enough to fall down the damn stairs. The remedy? More (cringe) juice.

Even though the detox has passed, I still have these horrible mood swings. Beau has been dealing with headaches and the occasional grumpiness. As I write this I am on Day 9 and I know I won’t make it much longer. 3 cups of juice a day and a couple of bowls of broth do not a happy girl make me. And let me tell you strained miso and veggie broth has never been so delicious. Both were purchased at an organic shop and when cooked with some cayenne, heaven. Regardless, I’m tired of juicing the parsley, celery, lemon, apple, spinach, carrot… I could go on and on. Although the wheatgrass we purchased looks really cool on the counter. Cleaning that damn machine makes me want to throw it out the window. There is a monotony to my life that I have never experienced before… and it kind of sucks.

Don’t get me wrong, to date I have shed 8 delightful pounds and I feel pretty great right now. I know I got some much needed gunk out of my system, partly in thanks to the colonic, enemas and ear candling I have gone through. More of that in future posts. It has opened my eyes to a world that I think I needed to experience to know that I don’t want to experience it again. Beau always says to me, “It’s not for everyone.” No shit. But I am staying true to my commitment until the urge to murder him has reared it’s ugly head. I would quit if I was starving or going mad, luckily all of those feelings have subsided. I’m taking it one mug of soup at a time, but girl cannot live on miso alone.

I knew it was getting bad when my Beau was rubbing up against me the other night, saying I was like a hamburger and he could cover me in his condiment if I wanted. It was a low point for us, even if he thought it was funny.

image by Arne Mueseler

I don’t know how it happened, but Fabio became my favorite chef last night.  I suppose it has been coming, I love foreign films, so why wouldn’t I love someone who is constantly needing to be subtitled?  He was on the bottom three last night and I almost shit a Vespa waiting to see if he would be eliminated.  I am the first to talk about the cooking on the show and how that should be the most important thing, but when you do a bullshit challenge like a Super Bowl cook off, my heart just isn’t into it.  Regardless, he overcooked his venison and should have been on the chopping block.  Then rewind to when he is on camera talking about being “a 30 year old sleeping in a bunky bed”.  I will never call them bunk beds again.  His mummy is sick and your heart stretched out a bit when he spoke of wanting to win to help pay her physician bills.  It’s like he opens his mouth and fucking puppies are flying out of it.  People like him are what make reality tv great.  You’ve never met anyone like him, but you want to.  He is a competitor, but it hasn’t turned him into the worst version of himself, can’t say the same for the rest of the cast.  Should Fabio not win, someone would be mad not to give him his own show or special.  I would tune in to watch him cook “a monkey arse with bananas in it”.  I don’t even know what he was talking about when he said that.  The subtitles were off.   

That was the highlight of the show for me, that and Carla winning those Super Bowl tics.  

Everything else was pretty meh.  They brought back “All Stars”.  (snort)  Head to head against the remnants of seasons past was pretty anti climatic.  I didn’t remember half of them, other then the ridiculously hyper Andrew and the annoying lad that wears all the hats, Spike.   

The guest judge, Scott Conant, was kind of a twat, but I liked that he had an opinion and stuck to it.  He wasn’t confined to the role of being a “guest” judge.  

I really don’t remember too much of Tom C.  I get more from him reading his blog then on the show. 

Padma was in a referee’s uniform, remember she is a vital member of the judge’s table.  I mean, someone has to keep the score.  It’s like dressing up the hooker before you fuck her in the butt.  

Toby has become, well… limp.  I’m glad he is turning to constructive criticism, but they sold him as some sharp tongued wit.  When is that going to happen?  He is into analogies, right?  Well, Toby Young was like taking a double dose of Viagra.  Just cause it’s hyped up, doesn’t mean it’s really effective at getting the job done, you can’t just stick it anywhere.   We know the medication works, but what happens when it wears off?  What’s left is just a pale, flaccid cock… with glasses.

 
image by Bohman

There is an ABC game going on and brookem assigned me the letter W.   She informed me I was lucky seeing as how it was the last before the letters start to get ridonkulous.  X, Y and Z are going to have to be pretty creative.  Muah ah ah!!

image by stopmangohome

The great thing about cooking shows is getting commentary and info from amazing chefs and professionals.  What the hell is Padma Lakshmi doing on Top Chef?  Is she a chef?  No.  Is she a restaurateur?  No.  Was she in the movie Glitter with Mariah Cary?  Yes.

I understand wanting the host to be a beautiful woman, but to food-centric viewers, that sometimes isn’t enough.  I cringe every time she says something, because I know her opinion doesn’t mean shit to me.  I’ve commented on other blogs of my disdain for her and some think I’m nuts.  Well I’m not a dude and I don’t want to sleep with her.  Why is she a judge?  If she was merely the host I’d shut the fuck up.  But no, she gets to have a say and her say sucks.  The panel is full of people with culinary experience and she peddles I Love Padma t shirts for Bravo.  She is the only judge not to blog on the show on the Bravo site.  I guess dating old millionaires is fucking hard work.  She’s trying to earn a living I suppose. 

The woman has a cook book out.  “Easy Exotic: A Model’s Low-fat Recipes From Around The World”.  Awesome.  Is it just pages of doing coke in foreign countries?  What do models eat?  So when the Top Chef gravy train runs dry, can we expect her on the Food Network?  They seem to like giving shows to just about anyone lately.   

I’m watching Top Chef tonight, I keep hoping one night I’ll tune in and Bravo will have gotten a clue.  I just have to repeat it one more time.  She was in the movie Glitter with Mariah Carey.  Yikes.