bearing blog

Grab it and go.

An unexpected side effect of not being a glutton anymore is that it is easier to
eat simply and appropriately for special circumstances.

Let me give you an example.  Our family went on a day hike yesterday at Afton State Park.  We planned to eat lunch on the trail.

Once upon a time, such a day would have been all about the picnic lunch.  I would have planned it on my grocery list several days earlier.  I would have made fancy sandwiches -- pressed Italian hoagies; or brie and ham on baguette; or roast beef, red pepper, and smokey cheddar on onion kaiser rolls.  I would have brought baby carrots and celery.  Fresh fruit, possibly cherries or strawberries.  Maybe pasta salad.  A cooler would probably be involved.  Fresh-squeezed lemonade.

And of course, since we have to keep our strength up, there would be trail mix and jerky and granola bars.

You should have seen what I brought for a weekend camping. 

Nowadays my thought process is a little different.  Rather than the hike being an excuse for a fantastic picnic lunch, the hike is... the point.  And instead of "Ooh goody, a picnic!  What kind of fun picnic food do I want to eat?"  I am thinking, "What's convenient to carry in a pack on a hot day, won't spoil, provides enough calories for the hike, and can be eaten with minimal fuss and not much to pack out, so we can get back to hiking?"

Obviously it has to appeal to the kids, but other than that, those are the main requirements.

So what is hiking food now?

• Little red-waxed cheese wheels.
• Triscuits.
• Possibly apples.  (If there's room.)
• Water.

All you need is a knife.

Instead of trail mix, we now pack peanut M&Ms.  (No more eating the chocolate and leaving the nuts!)

If we want to give the kids another choice besides cheese and crackers, we might make a few peanut butter sandwiches.  Unlike the fancy sandwiches I used to make, there's no concern about them going bad in the heat.  And I don't know about you, but a PB&J (or PB&H) that's slightly squashed at the bottom of a pack tastes pretty good when you've been hiking all morning. 

This isn't to disparage the families who came to the park ready to have a traditional Memorial Day barbecue.  On our way out we passed a man and a woman each gripping one handle of a heavy picnic cooler.  A man with a bulging paper grocery bag in one hand and a big sack of charcoal briquets up on his shoulder.  A woman carrying the baby while her older teens pushed a stroller laden with food and soda and lawn chairs.  True, an appetizing aroma of cooking meat drifted through the park.  Condensation formed on cans of ice-cold soda as they were pulled out of coolers and passed around.  Even the bags of baby carrots and cauliflower chunks looked pretty good after a day of hiking (the tubs of stagnant ranch dressing, not so much). 

The picnics I used to make were, objectively speaking, "healthier" than the trail food I pack now.  They were balanced.  They contained fresh fruit and vegetables.  Usually it was all homemade, with few processed-food items.

They were also enormous, a lot more trouble, and the biggest problem?  They were the center of my attention.

Sometimes, an objectively "less healthy" food experience is mentally healthier.  For all the tsk-tsking about our grab-it-and-go culture, occasionally grabbing and going makes a lot of sense.  There's more time to sit down and enjoy the simple food we've brought, out under the sky, if we spend less time fussing about it back in the kitchen.

A few new cookbooks.

Since I'm in losing-the-baby-weight mode, I decided to add a few new cookbooks to the kitchen, all with healthful overtones.  Having some new books around, and new recipes, always helps motivate me.  I thought I'd post a brief review of the books I checked out from the library and decided to buy.  Two are nutrition/diet books with a recipe section, one is a cookbook through and through.

The Flexitarian Diet, by Dawn Jackson Blatner. 

 I've been eating "flexitarian" for a couple of years now, without knowing it.  The term "flexitarian" is variously defined.  Some say it means "flexible vegetarian," i.e., you're basically a vegetarian but you're flexible enough to graciously accept a meat dish when it's offered to you.  Others say it simply means a reduced-meat lifestyle:  vegetarian most of the time, meat some of the time.  At our house, we love meat and eat it frequently; but we have learned to use it in smaller quantities.  I generally serve it either as a flavoring, or as a dish served in modest portions as part of a meal.  

Blatner's cookbook/diet book offers five full weeks of controlled-calorie menus, plus recipes.  The recipes are all given for single-serving portions, use a lot of convenience food, and come together quickly.  Canned beans feature prominently.  This book is especially good for those who are looking for some new ideas for quick and simple, healthful meals; those who'd like a lot of one-person recipes; and those who would like a pre-written meal plan.   Like most diet books  these days, it stresses low-fat eating more than I like, but that's easily fixed.

One that doesn't stress low-fat eating at all, and so suits me very well, is Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less by Mollie Katzen and Walter Willett, M.D.  Yes, that Mollie Katzen, of Moosewood Cookbook fame.  I  have had Walter Willett's book Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy on my shelf for a long time -- his nutrition work comes from the comprehensive Nurses' Health Study.  The writing is very compelling and common-sense, and earned my respect because he was not afraid to write "We don't know" where necessary.  Anyway, when I discovered recently that he had collaborated with uber-food-writer Mollie Katzen on a diet book with recipes and meal plans, I snagged it.  And I'm very glad I did.

Mollie fesses up:  she is not a vegetarian after all!  Here we have recipes by Mollie with meat in them.  (not very many -- most are vegetarian...)  And not just recipes, but meal plans.  There are three weeks of controlled-calorie meal plans, plus one week's worth of a "portable plan" that can be eaten on the go or prepared with minimal kitchen equipment.  

The nutrition advice is sound.  There are nine "turning points" (things like "eat lots of vegetables" and "stay hydrated"); a new-and-improved food pyramid with veggies on the bottom where they belong and a special slot partway up that's just for dark chocolate; and a score card for ranking how your habits are improving with time.  I wholeheartedly recommend this one.  It's one of the best diet books I've read.   Oh, I should add that many of the recipes are of the sort that are easily adapted for allergies and food intolerances -- swap one grain for another, that sort of thing.

Finally, a pure cookbook:  How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman.  I hesitated before buying this because I already have How to Cook Everything.    I thought there'd be so much overlap that it would be a waste of money.  

It's  true that there is some overlap:  the pizza sections in the two books, for example, are very similar, and both books contain lengthy discourses on cooking basics (which makes sense, given the title).  But there is enough new material in here to make it worth buying the new book, I think.   There are several techniques that are new to me in this book -- have you ever heard of "stuck-pot rice?"  I hadn't -- think a sort of stovetop paella with a crispy crust -- and lots of new recipes, even in sections that you might think would just overlap, like desserts.  And there is plenty of new material of the sort that Bittman does best:  lists of variations on a theme, menu suggestions, charts that show you how to put together combinations of ingredients.  Plus there's lots of good technique instruction, and introduction to some more exotic things like making your own seitan (that's mock duck) or cooking with sea vegetables.

What all three books have in common is this:  they will help you cook and eat with less meat, while refraining from moralizing about it.  And that is something I really appreciate.

Sweet potato mole with a bit of sausage.

Recently there've been a slew of cookbooks out with the "light on the meat" theme:  recipes that work with or without meat, or with a smaller amount of it.   This meshes pretty well with our family's recent culinary history, at least before my pregnancy, and since that's not going to last forever I decided to start thinking about getting back on track with that again.  I checked a bunch of cookbooks out of the library this week, hoping to find a new gem. 

Tonight I made a variation on Sweet Potato Chorizo Mole, from Almost Meatless by Manning and Mataraza-Desmond.  It was really good, and low in common allergens to boot (no gluten or eggs; there is cheese, but I honestly thought it would be pretty good even without the cheese, or with a substitute.)  I divided  the casserole in half, one for the table and one for the freezer, another habit I need to get back into after the baby.  Worked fine, maybe because two of three kids wouldn't eat it.  Too bad, the grownups loved it, and we will see it on our table again.

Here's my version (full casserole size in a 9x13 pan)

• 3-4 oz bulk pork sausage (recipe called for chorizo which I didn't have)
• 1 very small onion, diced small
• 1 small minced chipotle in adobo sauce (compensating for lack of chorizo)
• 3 cloves garlic, minced (recipe called for 2, still compensating for lack of chorizo)
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 - 28oz can whole peeled tomatoes, juices strained and reserved, tomatoes chopped coarsely
• 1 Tbsp cumin
• 1 Tbsp chile powder
• 1 ounce Ghirardelli 60% cocoa bittersweet chocolate chips (a kitchen staple!)
• 1 cup frozen corn kernels
• 1 fifteen ounce can black beans, rinsed and drained
• 2/3 c water
• 2 orange sweet potatoes, 1 and 1/2 lbs total, sliced into 1/8" disks
• Several handfuls shredded mild cheddar cheese (recipe calls for 8 oz)
• Cilantro for garnish

Preheat oven to 375 F and spray 9x13 pan with cooking spray.

Crumble the sausage into a skillet (add oil if necessary) and brown with the onion, 5-7 min.  Add garlic and oregano and chipotle pepper and cook a bit longer.  Deglaze pan with tomato juice.  Add tomatoes, cumin, chile powder, chocolate, corn, and beans.  Simmer and stir 10 min.  Add water.  Taste and correct seasoning with salt and black pepper.  There's your sauce.

In the casserole, layer 1/3 of the sweet potatoes, half the sauce, and a third of the cheese.  Repeat layers, ending with remaining sweet potatoes.  Reserve last third of the cheese.  Cover tightly with foil (pressing foil down on top of sweet potatoes) and bake 1 and 1/2 hours until sweet potatoes are tender.  Remove foil and top with cheese; bake uncovered for 10 min.  Remove from oven and let rest 10 min before serving, sprinkled with chopped cilantro.

-

We had this with a simple green salad.  I think it tasted great, sweet and spicy both, and it could also have been served (with extra water or broth) as a stew or chili, the sweet potatoes diced and simmered in the sauce base and the cheese passed at the table as a topping.  Maybe a good crock-pot type meal.

Pork chop skillet dinner with Italian flavors and a sourdough comment.

Oink!  Mark picked up a hundred pounds of custom-cut hog from the farm yesterday.  Because nobody felt like grocery shopping, I promised I'd figure out dinner from the pantry and freezer, and that was definitely a reason to inaugurate our half-hog.

When Mark and I were first married, one of our favorite meals was a one-skillet dish of rice and boneless pork chops in tomato sauce with green beans and basil, topped with cheese.  For some reason I made it less and less as time went on.  But not too long ago when we started eating smaller quantities of meat with our meals, we discovered that, although the original recipe called for a pound and a half of meat, it's really very easy to adapt it so the meat plays a smaller role.   Also, I prefer to use millet or quinoa rather than the white rice called for.  I think any grain that cooks "like white rice" would work, maybe bulgur or couscous even. 

It's truly a quick, one-pot meal, and very much a kid-pleaser in our family.  Here's how we did it tonight, with a few notes on possible variations.

Italian-flavor skillet pork

• 3 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 lb and 4 0z bone-in pork chops (that's two inch-thick chops), OR 1 pound boneless pork chops.  The amount of meat can vary anywhere from a half-pound to one and a half pounds.  (You may wish to have it sliced so that each person gets "a piece of meat;" or you may elect to cut the meat off the bone after cooking, chop it up and return to the skillet.  Either way works.)
• 1 cup quinoa soaked in cold water for 30 minutes and rinsed and drained, or 1 cup white rice or millet or similar. 
• 1 fifteen-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes, roughly chopped and drained, the juice reserved and water added to the tomato juice to equal 2 cups liquid
• 1 fifteen-ounce can tomato sauce
• 1 and 1/2 tsp basil or oregano or combination
• 1/2 to 1 cup chopped red or green bell pepper
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 12 ounces frozen green beans (French-cut, cut, or Italian)
• Salt and pepper
• 4 to 6 ounces of provolone or mozzarella or monterey jack cheese
• 2 to 4 Tbsp of freshly grated parmesan 

Heat the oil in a broiler-safe skillet that can later be covered, and brown the pork chops well on both sides; remove to a plate and pour off the fat.  Season the chops with salt and pepper. Add the water and tomato juice and stir, scraping browned bits off the bottom of the pan.  Add 1 cup of the tomato sauce, the quinoa or other grain, the basil and/or oregano, the bell pepper, the garlic, and 1/2 tsp salt.  Bring to a boil over high heat, then return the pork chops to the top of the mixture, cover, and simmer on medium-low heat about 20 minutes until the grains are tender or nearly so and the chops are cooked through.

Remove the chops and stir in the the green beans, mixing well.   If desired, cut the meat off the bone, chop it, and stir it into the skillet, then top with grated cheeses; or, if the pork is sliced into serving-size pieces, return the slices to the skillet, top each slice with sliced provolone (or mozzarella or monterey jack) cheese, and sprinkle the skillet with grated parmesan.  Pass the skillet under the broiler to melt and brown the cheeses.

We served this tonight with steamed Brussels sprouts and a jar of Grandma's home-canned peaches.  Plus a bottle of Shiraz.  The kids added ketchup to theirs.  Enough was left over for Mark's lunch tomorrow.

Now a note on the sourdough.  I had been mixing my dough in the bread machine on the dough cycle, letting it have a long, cool second rise, and then trying to shape it all into boules or baguettes.  The results had been less than fantastic.  It all tasted great, but the dough is so darned delicate, the shaping step was destroying a lot of the structure.  I could feel the dough deflating under my fingertips, no matter how carefully I tried to handle it.

So the last time I mixed up a sourdough bread -- in this case a white-rye combination -- I decided to let the dough have a long cool second rise, covered, in the bread machine pan, and then -- get this -- I left it in the bread pan and baked it in my oven. 

You know, it doesn't look all rustic and wonderful the way a beautiful sourdough boule or baguette looks.  It looks like a loaf of sandwich bread.  It's not fancy and beautiful.  It's practical and down-to-earth.  Meaning, er, you can make a sandwich out of it.  

But you know what?  It's a loaf of really good, sturdy, well-risen sourdough sandwich bread.  I just may have to live with it.

(Rough recipe:  1 cup fresh sourdough starter, 1/2 cup water, 1 cup rye flour, 1 plus 1/3 plus 1/4 cups bread flour, 2 Tbsp fat, 2 Tbsp dry milk, 1 and 1/2 Tbsp sugar, 1 and 1/2 tsp salt, no yeast.  Covered the pan with foil, started the dough cycle at bedtime, then transferred the pan to the oven in the morning and baked it to an internal temperature of 208 degrees.  375 made it a little bit too brown.  I'll try 350 next time.)

Perhaps the perfect hot dinner for Family Gym Night: Rice cooker technology.

Thanks to Jen at Conversion Diary for pointing it out -- one of those ideas that's so brilliant you wonder why you didn't think of it yourself.

The boys' swimming lessons were so timed this spring that our family had to leave for the Y at 5:35 p.m. and arrive home a little bit after 8 p.m.  We've been eating dinner late rather than early.  After exercising, we're all really tired and really hungry -- almost any kind of food will do as long as it can be shoveled into our maws immediately.  But then we all want to go to bed.  So:  very little mess is allowed too.

I tried "making sandwiches."  It takes too long.  This kid wants mustard, that kid wants plain cheese, the other kid pouts if the sandwich isn't on toast, I like lettuce ... Sandwiches are too personalized to be a quick dinner. 

Soup in the crock-pot, served with crackers, would seem to work pretty well, but somehow it fell flat.  I think that's because the sorts of soups that do well in the crock-pot just aren't my family's favorites.  We like a rich bone broth simmered in the crock-pot for 48-72 hours, but then we like it made into soup where the individual vegetables are still apparent, like minestrone.  Noodle soups don't do too well in the CP either.  I mean, they're good *enough,* just not ... perfect.  The other thing is that most slow-cooked things have to be put together much earlier in the day.  Sometimes that works out for me and sometimes it doesn't.

Cold salads of pasta or grains and legumes, made ahead, may become a staple in the summertime.  I can think of two off the top of my head:  a lovely salad of pasta with tomatoes, tuna, mint, and capers, dressed with lemon and olive oil; and a salad of lentils with red peppers and red onions in a balsamic vinaigrette.  The whole family loves both of those.   As of now we are still enjoying hot food for dinner.  

I have occasionally left things baking in the oven while we're gone, when the baking time matched the expected time of being gone -- cabbage rolls once, that worked pretty well.  But the truth is that this makes me nervous.

I'd forgotten about the rice cooker!

OK, I'm not promising this is really a gourmet selection, but here's how I adapted Jen's recipe (scroll down) for super-easy rice and beans:

Make brown rice in the rice cooker, ahead of time (so that it will be done at least a few minutes before I have to leave).   I used 1 and 1/2 cups of short-grain brown rice, and filled the rice cooker up to the "3 cups" mark (my rule of thumb, in the rice cooker, is to use double the water for brown rice that I would for white rice).

When the rice cooker clicks over from "Rice Cooking" to "Keep Warm," dump in the following (don't bother to drain):

              1 can of Black Beans With Cumin and Chile Spices
              1 can of prepared kidney beans (mine contained both sugar and salt)
              1 can of Muir Glen Fire Roasted Diced Tomatoes.  

 Stir it up and close up the rice cooker, leaving it on "Keep Warm," and go away for a couple of hours.

Serve  in bowls topped with shredded cheese.

Nobody is going to mistake this for gourmet cooking, believe me.  It's kind of bland; you could use two cans of spicy beans, or a spicier variety of beans.  But.  For a healthful, meatless dish you can come home to,  and  for "my kids gobbled it up and asked for seconds," it is very hard to beat.  Obviously there is room for personal variation in seasoning.

 The next day, the leftovers make a nice side dish, or my personal favorite use for rice pilaf type dishes:  for breakfast, topped with a fried egg.

The rice cooker may be my go-to implement for Family Gym Night, because it cooks things quickly and then keeps them warm for a couple of hours.  Compared to the slow cooker, it just seems... much more... nimble! 

What else could you make in the rice cooker that might work?  You'll be wanting to avoid meat that needs actual cooking.  We could certainly have porridge for dinner -- steel cut oats with brown sugar and raisins.   I would think that you could make a vegetable curry with a bag of frozen vegetables and some curry powder... especially if you made coconut rice to start!  Hannah told me of a recipe she used to make in college, involving rice, peas, onion, and tuna; I'm not sure the kids would like it, but it certainly sounded workable.

Fajitas.

We grilled steak for dinner last night, and since I defrosted a 1.4-lb sirloin, I kept a big chunk of it back for the next day.  Part went into Mark's lunch, but the remaining six ounces became skillet fajitas.  This is a great way to stretch a little bit of meat to feed the whole family.  Sliced onions and bell peppers, plus tomatoes either fresh or canned, are required; but the rest of the veggies?  It's clean-out-the-crisper time. Tonight's fajitas included mushrooms, red cabbage, and thinly sliced carrots. 

Do you really need me to tell you how?  Stir-fry the peppers, onions, mushrooms if you got 'em, anything you want to get caramelized, and any hard veggies (e.g. carrots) until they're tender.  Stir in a few cloves of minced garlic and some oregano and cumin, and maybe a minced chile if you have one.  Then put the soft veggies in, with water -- maybe a half cup -- and some salsa from a jar -- not much, a couple of tablespoons.  Let it bubble till the liquid is mostly gone and stir in what little meat you've got.  If it doesn't look substantial enough you can always throw in a can of well-drained beans of any sort.  Warm up some corn tortillas and you've got a meal.  If you happen to have sour cream and guacamole and chopped lettuce and cilantro, so much the better, but these things are not at all necessary.

I boiled up some plain turnip greens to have on the side; no reason, it just feels weird by now not to have a plain vegetable.  They're pretty good with salsa, did you know that?   And I also sliced oranges into half-moons.  I don't know why, but sliced citrus fruit always seems like the perfect side dish for salsa-based dishes.

I had two tortillas wrapped around the fajita filling, and two helpings of greens, and two orange slices.  I finished off my day with a quarter-ounce of Dagoba dark chocolate with chiles and cacao nibs, and then a nice hot cup of decaf.

I did not count calories for this meal.  When I choose to count calories, recalibrate my portion sizes and so on, I generally don't do it through dinner unless I have some reason to be exceptionally careful.  Rather, I count everything else, keeping it low enough to have a comfortable margin going into dinner.  Then I just try not to overdo it, relying on my eight-and-a-half-inch plate, and declining second helpings.

More falafel/beef burgers.

Last week, I tried mixing one pound of beef with one box of falafel mix and grilling it as burgers.  It worked okay.  Since it made too much food anyway, I decided to try half a box of mix to one pound of meat tonight.  Will let you know how it turns out.

(I get the beef in one-pound frozen chubs from the processor, so it doesn't really help us use less meat to make recipes that use only part of a chub.  I'll still have to finish it off within a few days, and I tend to use up extra bits of meat in things like scrambled eggs, which I would have had meatless if I didn't have some meat sitting around.)

Someone asked me how I feel about TVP.  So-so is the answer.  I don't want to increase our soy consumption greatly; I prefer to use soy cautiously.  Also, I'm not sure it qualifies as "food" a la Michael Pollan.  But it is on my list of items to try mixing with the burgers.  

The TVP product I am planning to try to mix with the beef is called "Gimme Lean" (undoubtedly a play on Jimmy Dean sausage).  (Side note:  The packages of this stuff that I always used to buy were emblazoned with a banner that read:  "Makes incredible sausage patties!"  I always thought that it ought to read, "Makes CREDIBLE sausage patties!"  But I digress.)  I really like the stuff, and I bet it would mix pretty well with beef.

Also on my list are blander creations of home-cooked lentils and bulgur, and a couple more stabs at meatloaf burgers.  I want to do something quite simple and easy, since I don't make hamburgers because I enjoy their complicated recipe.

UPDATE:  It occurred to me that the implied division sign in my title is incorrect.  Since I am decreasing the ratio of falafel to beef, this post should be entitled, "More beef/falafel burgers."

UPDATE AGAIN:  Yum!  Half a box of falafel makes a big difference.  These were noticeably burgerier, which is what I was going for.  (Not that the others were bad, they just made me ask why I bothered putting meat in them at all.)

Meat-and-veggie burgers.

So, we're eating less meat, you may remember.  For the most part, everyone has been quite satisfied with meals that give each of us two or three ounces of meat or fish, as long as there's plenty of other stuff on the side.  There has, however, been one glaring exception to the satisfied-with-less department:

 Burgers on the grill.

We typically eat one and a half to two pounds of meat, including leftovers for lunch the next day, when I make burgers.  Last time, I made only one pound of meat, and produced seven small, thin burgers, which tasted great but when everyone had had one, they looked around and said:  "But I don't want any coleslaw or baked potatoes or sugar snap peas!  I want another burger!"

Perhaps I should have served them with a mountain of Tater Tots.

Afterward, Mark said I should try to find a way to stretch hamburgers so that one pound pretended to be 1.5 or two.  Preferably an easy, bean-based way.  I happen to have in my freezer about 60 pounds of ground beef, in one-pound packages (local mostly-grass-fed beef!  slaughtered in the Minnesota glass-walled slaughterhouse mentioned in The Omnivore's Dilemma!  no kidding!) So it's time for some experiments. Nice - an excuse to have burgers once a week for a while.

My first experimental burger extender was selected on the basis of "I have a box of this stuff in my pantry:"

 Fantastic Foods brand falafel mix.

I keep falafel mix in my pantry as an emergency vegetarian entree.  I am not bad at cooking Mediterranean food from scratch, but everyone in my family -- including me -- prefers falafel-from-a-box to my from-scratch attempts.

Anyway, last night I mixed up a box of falafel (you just add water), squished my pound of ground beef into it with my bare hands, added an egg (it just looked like it needed one), and pattied it up into ten big fat burgers.  They sat in my fridge for a couple of hours before I got them out to warm to room temperature an hour before Mark threw them on the gas grill.  

We served 'em on buns -- okay, actually "Thomas's Bagel Squares" -- with onion and tomato and mayo and lettuce and ketchup and mustard and pickles.

Result:  It depends.  Do you like falafel?

Because that's what it tasted like.  The falafel texture and flavor dominated.  It hardly tasted beefy at all.  Mark called it "meat-enhanced falafel."  Maybe.  I think you could fool a career vegetarian into eating beef with these things (not that you should).  As I bit into my hearty burgery sandwich I thought to myself, Forget the ketchup -- these things need cucumbers and tzatziki sauce.

BUT.  Bear in mind that falafel does not normally stand up to being grilled.  It's strictly a skillet-or-broiler food.  These beefalafel patties behaved beautifully on the grill:  stayed together, got attractive little grill marks across them, etc.  So we have indeed learned something new:  If you want to grill your falafel, put some meat in it.

It's possible that I simply have the wrong ratio here.  Maybe what's needed is half a box of falafel to a pound of ground beef.  (We certainly had enough food to go around -- there are five patties left over.)  But there are many other mix-ins left to try.   I'm going to try a number of commercial veggie burger type things before I move to from-scratch options that are more complicated than "cook lentils, mix in."

Yeah, I know, I could just make meatloaf burgers.  But I already know what those taste like.  I'm trying to move into new territory (and beanier territory -- we usually already serve our burgers with bread, I don't see how adding bread crumbs is the best nutritional extra.)

Stepping lightly on the planet.

Mark was telling me over bedtime snack about an energy-efficiency presentation he'd been to at work the other day.  "I had to leave just as they were getting to the buy-local part," he said, as he cut an apple into quarters, "or I would have offered my opinion on eliminating the environmental costs of  food transportation."

"What's that?"

"Well," he said, spreading peanut butter on a chunk of apple, "depending on how you figure it out, adding up all the carbon emissions from food transportation in the U.S., that's only 12 percent of the total carbon emissions from food.  Production of food emits far, far more carbon than driving it around does.  So what you're eating matters a lot more than where it came from."

"Twelve percent isn't nothing.  We could still bring it down a bit, couldn't we?"

"Well, yeah, maybe by a couple of percent.  It won't really make much of a dent.  And it's kind of complicated because you've got to figure out where you're going to get all the different things you want to eat, or what to substitute for them."

"And if it's not ordinary grocery store stuff, you have to drive all over the place trying to find them all," I mused, thinking of my weekly drive out to Wayzata to pick up the local-organic-grass-fed-milk for my family and Hannah's.

"Yeah, and when you bring food-preservation into the picture you're stuck trying to make complicated calculations about the relative energy costs of steel-can manufacturing versus keeping frozen stuff cold, yadda yadda yadda.  But," he continued, gesturing with his peanut butter knife, "I can tell you what you can do, one very simple thing, that will make a dent in your food-related carbon footprint that is equivalent to having all the food you eat grown and produced at your very doorstep."

"What's that?"

"Eat twelve percent less."

"Um..."

"Twelve percent less.  Across the board."

"Calories, or volume, or what?"

He shrugged.  "Doesn't matter all that much.  Let's just say, mass or volume, twelve percent less of everything you normally eat, just eat twelve percent less of it."

"So if I normally eat a cup of rice, I should eat seven-eighths of a cup of rice."

"Yup.  Do that with everything you eat, it's the same impact as if you eliminated all the transportation costs of your food."

"Hmm.  Consume less by consuming less.  A radical idea."

"It's kind of like eating less meat by eating less meat.  Or saving money by buying less stuff.  You know, instead of 'the more you buy the more you save.'"

"Hmm.  It's not for everyone, I suppose, but if I went outside and looked around, I think I'd come to the conclusion that it would be a good choice for a lot of people."

"Yes.  Of course, fat people are carbon sinks, so there's that, but I think the total carbon balance still comes out positive if they just eat less."

"Talk about going on an energy diet."

More on less meat.

Apropos my earlier post:  Mark Bittman, one of my favorite cookbook writers, has a NYT column on eating less meat.  The suggestions are exactly the sort of sensible, low-stress ones I'm trying to implement:  

1. Forget the protein thing....For anyone eating a well-balanced diet, protein is probably not an issue.
2. Buy less meat. How many ounces of meat is a serving? For years, the U.S.D.A.’s recommendation has been four ounces a person, yet most of us have long figured one-and-a-half to two pounds of meat is the right amount for four people. ...Change that amount, and both your cooking style and the way the plate looks will change, and quickly.   Remember that most traditional styles of cooking use meat as a condiment or a treat....
3. Get it out of the center of the plate.... If you think of meat stews or soups, chicken pot pie, even lasagna, you’ll quickly recognize that the decision to load them up with meat or to use meat as an ingredient of equal importance to the others is entirely yours. The same is true when you’re grilling. Compare these statements: “We’re grilling a leg of lamb and throwing a few vegetables on there,” and “We’re grilling vegetables and breads, and will throw a few chunks of lamb on there.”     

There's more -- read it all.