Maybe I should also add, “be less defensive.”

On the topic of resolutions, I have resolved to lose a little fat this year. I wasn’t planning on making this a goal, but plenty of holiday cheer in the form of cookies has made this a sad necessity. Well, necessary in that I would like to fit in my pants ever again. It’s cold. I need my pants.

Pre-enlightenment, I never ate salad. Ever. Or anything green, for that matter, unless it was wrapped around my sushi. Now all I crave is a fresh, zingy salad (I’ll blame the gloomy and freezing winter we are having) and it’s definitely going to help me achieve this goal. Also, is it weird that I crave summery food in the winter? I think most people lean towards soup. Not that I ask, I just assume. Soup is also good. My short attention span is now fixated on soup. Give me a minute to get back on track…

Okay, better now.

I tend to stick to the same formula when I eat salad at home. It’s simple (simplicity being another lofty goal for twennyten), damn tasty, and best of all, highly nutritious. I eat a variation of this every night for dinner and I’m not lying when I say from about 3:00 PM on I am HIGHLY anticipating it. So without further ado:

Basic Salad:

2 – 3 cups fresh baby spinach
1 cup of beans, chickpeas, and/or lentils
1/2 cup millet, quinoa, and/or brown rice

Recently in the salad: SPROUTED LENTILS! These were so yum, I’m going to do a repeat next week.

Since I cook the beans and grains ahead of time, I usually put them in the bowl first and then nuke them for a minute before adding the spinach. If I have tomatoes or other salad-friendly veggies, I’ll put them in. Usually I just eat this salad all basic style. Ooh, maybe I will add walnuts to tonight’s salad…and there goes my short attention span again.

I’m back.

My salad dressing is not measured out, I just mix as I go, and I tend to make about a week’s worth at a time. Here’s a list with approximate amounts:

2-3 T tahini
2-3 T olive oil OR flax seed oil
2 lemons worth of juice
3ish cloves of raw garlic
2 T Bragg’s Liquid Aminos OR wheat-free tamari
Dash of sumac, chili powder and/or whatever other spices I’m feeling.
Splash of water to thin
1 tsp miso, if I remember

I use an immersion blender to, uh, blend everything, and then I pour it into a clean jar to keep in the fridge.

 It’s only 1:46, and I can’t wait to eat my salad tonight!

Hummusy Black Bean Dip

1 can of black beans, drained
1 can of garbanzo beans, drained
Some bean juice from the above cans
a few cloves of garlic, depending on your level of garlic lust (mine is high)
A tablespoon or two of tahini
Half a lemon’s worth of juice, or 2 tablespoons
3 Tbsp olive oil
Some water, for thinning out

Rinse your beans, if desired, and throw everything above into a blender. Eat.

I sat down and thought about what my goal is, what my needs are, and what tools I have, and I came up with the start of a diet plan. Well, a general idea and one week of diet plan.

Goal: To lose 6 pounds in 9 weeks. This works out to something like 3/4 a pound a week (sorry, but despite what they say, not all Asians are good at math), and when I put it that way it doesn’t seem too hard to do.

Needs: To not die of starvation. Kidding, slightly. Hunger is unendurable for me and if I feel the slightest bit deprived not only can I eat the entire contents of my pantry, but I want to as well. Including the flour. Man, that shit is gross on it’s own. So, five small meals a day. Plenty of raw fruits and vegetables. No processed sugar. Sounds…great.

Tools: Lots of ingredients. My kitchen is bursting with wholesomeness. Any remotely sugary or junky foody has been given to the Boy Scouts for their food drive (sorry, Boy Scouts! Enjoy the gluten-free cake mix!) and I’ve made enough dried fruit to survive a few weeks of zombie apocalypse. I also have the above mentioned vengeful calorie counter. No shit, this thing makes me feel like I’ve punched a baby every time I see the daily intake go into the red.

Thus “armed,” so to speak, I busted out The Master (aka my obnoxiously anal-retentive to-do list) and executed the following breakfast recipe:

Crockpot Oatmeal

Basic Tasty Version Ingredients:
1 cup steel cut oats
5 cups water
½ cup dried, unsweetened apple slices
1 cup unsweetened apple sauce
1 – 1.5 tbsp. pumpkin pie spice
1 tsp. vanilla
Powdered stevia, to taste

Directions:
Take your dried apple slices and chop them up a bit. I like having a little bit of apple slice in every bite, so I cut them up into pretty small bits. More like a dried apple flake, if you will. Set those aside for the time being.

Now mix up your applesauce with the powdered stevia. If you are using pre-sweetened applesauce, you could probably skip this step. Since I was freezing my oatmeal to carry to work, I thought I’d add a little more sweetener than I would if I were not cooking a commuter breakfast. HINDSIGHT: I could actually not have even bothered with this, as all the sweetness was gone by like, Tuesday, and I was left with just a weird stevia texture. Ah well, you live and learn.

Dump everything into the crockpot before you go to bed, and cook on low. In the morning you will have an awesome and healthy breakfast ready to be packaged into a container for quick work lunches. Or if you’re normal or something I guess you could sit down and have it for breakfast right there.

 Nutrition Facts:
4 Servings

Amount Per Serving
Calories 234
Total Fat 3.2 g
Saturated Fat 0.1 g
Sodium 8.0 mg
Potassium 56.6 mg
Total Carbohydrate 44.5 g
Dietary Fiber 6.7 g
Sugars 11.9 g
Protein 6.4 g

XTREME Tasty Version Ingredients:
Handful of raw almonds
Few squirts of raw honey
Handful of chopped dates

Conclusion: screw you, stevia! Also, steel cut oats are going to require more experimentation before I commit to them. Rolled oats are my favorite, but I want to like steel cut since the internet tells me that they are healthier or something. I may have shot myself in the foot by using the stevia, but I’ll keep trying and see if these will grow on me.

 My current sprouting fad is chickpeas and, as I have a crippling addiction to hummus, it seemed to make perfect sense to apply my new agricultural interest to the monkey on my back. I mean, if I’m going to be shoving hummus into my eating hole, maybe it should be the healthiest hummus I can find, amirite?

 In the background are leftover homemade gluten-free corn pancakes that I toasted in the toaster oven to make chips. Making my own chips is another quirk I’ve adopted recently, because fresh chips > ALL OTHER CHIPS. And for dieting purposes, making my own chips severely reduces the amount of chips I eat. Woot. I guess.

Sprouted Hummus

1.5 cups of sprouted chickpeas (started out as 3/4 or 1 cup of dried chickpeas)
1 Tablespoon tahini
1 Tablespoon olive oil
4 cloves of raw garlic, minced or put through a garlic press
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
Salt and pepper to taste

After sprouting the chickpeas, I boiled them for about 5 minutes. This was actually not long enough, as you can tell by the unrefined texture of the finished hummus. Since your chickpeas here are sprouted, your cooking time will be a lot less than usual, I think maybe 10-15 minutes of hard boiling ought to do it. While boiling your beans, combine the rest of the ingredients in a dish.

Once fully cooked, drain the beans and add them to the bowl. I used an immersion blender, but a food processor or regular blender (if you have a good one and not the cheapest model Target has to offer like some writers of this post own) would work a lot better.

I probably shouldn’t leave you hanging in regards to the chips recipe. Here you go:

Easy Corn Cakes
(lifted from this recipe)

1 cup yellow corn meal (I used an additional 1/4 cup, see note below as to why)
1/2 cup hot water
3/4 cup rice flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes (I didn’t use these)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. Ener-G Egg Replacer (I used 1 egg)
1 cup soymilk (I used regular skim milk)
2 tsp. lemon juice

Mix the corn meal with the hot water until crumbly. Add the remaining dry ingredients, and stir to combine. Mix the soymilk with the lemon juice and pour it into the dry ingredients. Mix well, and set aside while you heat your skillet.

Spray a non-stick or cast iron skillet with a little canola oil. Get it hot, and then cook the corn cakes like pancakes, allowing about 1/4 cup batter per corn cake. Cook until well-browned on each side.

Makes about 8-10.

Notes on this recipe: My batter had a very watery consistancy, which I believe was due to changing some of the ingredients (I suspect the egg), so I added more cornmeal and ended up with about 13 pancakes.

For the chip-itizing, I took a couple of leftover pancakes and popped them into the toaster oven, which I had set to max (I think mine goes to 450 degrees). I toasted them this way for about 10-15 minutes, basically the amount of time I used to make the hummus because I am efficient like that.

I baked up the cookies and you know, they were just ok. The additions helped, I guess, and I got to get the warm gooey cookie experience, but overall I think these failed. I really suck at spooning out cookies as my technique is literally, “slap a spoonful on the cookie sheet,” so a lot of them had this weird burned bottom, raw center thing happening. In addition to that lameness, the cookies were really, really greasy. And crumbly. God, so crumbly. I didn’t eat them all (my MO for homemade baked goods), but instead dumped the uneaten, unburned cookies into a Tupperware to bring to class and “share.” Out of the goodness of my heart.

In addition to the weird greasiness and crumbliness, the flavor of the cookies was kind of lacking. I found them too sweet and salty at the same time, although I know I used unsalted butter for these. There was also a grainy mouthfeel I didn’t care for once the cookies were cooled but wasn’t so noticeable in the warm, right out of the oven cookies.

I’ll give this mix a 5/10 because I do blame my most unexcellent dough measuring. Also, as far as giving me a damn cookie, this mix fit the bill most definitely.

Little sponges of awesomeness

This individual serving of soy puff panang curry is a Saturday favorite at the Double Deuce. It’s fast, easy, tasty, and cheap. What’s not to love?

I don’t think my (admittedly light and very vegetarian) version takes the place of traditional, decadent panang curry, but for a fast meal between rushing from school (ugh, yes, every Saturday morning) to the gym, I’m pretty sure I could do a lot worse. No, really, Arby’s is smack dab between campus and condo and I have a Pavlovian response to the words, “curly fries.”

Aw damn, now I want curly fries.

This dish comes together in a matter of minutes. I think about 10 minutes, from ingredients to bowl. I’m going to present this dish the way I first made it (long, long ago), and go into a little detail about how my cheap ass has continued to make it since then.

 For the making you will need:
About 5 Soy puffs
1 tsp Panang curry paste
Instant rice vermicelli (I typically break off a section that would fit between my thumb and forefinger if I’m making the “OK” hand gesture)
2 T coconut milk
Ground red pepper
Basil
Water
(This is truly a one person dish, but it’s easy enough to increase for more eaters.)

For the making, you will need:
A bowl that is large enough to soak your noodles
Saucepan
Wok (or a frying pan will work just fine)

This is what you do:
Start boiling water in your saucepan. While you wait for that, soak your rice noodles in coolish water. Now while you wait for that (mine usually takes about 5 minutes, if that), heat up two tablespoons of coconut milk in your wok along with a teaspoon of curry paste. Get that all nice and mixed up, and add a quarter cup of water to it and some crushed red pepper if you like things on the spicy side.  

Is your hot water boiling? Good, toss your soy puffs in there to blanch. The reason you do this is is to leech out the excess oil in these beauties. Soy puffs, being deep fried tofu, are really greasy if you don’t take this step. Also, being puffs, they will want to float to the top of your pot. I foil their plans by putting something on top of them, lately, a metal steam basket. I keep it real in the kitchen.

While you take a minute or two to blanch your puffs, drain the noodles and add them to the wok. Give it all a good stir, the mixture will probably become pretty dry at this point so feel free to add more water to make it soupy again. The puffs are gonna soak up a lot of the sauce.

Speaking of those puffs, now you can add them. Stir it all up, but you’re basically done cooking at this point, it’s now just a matter of sauce being soaked into the noodles and puffs. “Puff” is starting to not look like a word anymore. Transfer it all to a bowl or plate, sprinkle with fresh basil and enjoy!

Using an online recipe calculator, this dish comes out to about 548 calories, which seems like a lot but I like to console myself with the belief that I’ve lessened the actual amount through blanching the puffs. La la la, I can’t hear you tell me otherwise!

I remember the first time I made this, I was left with most of a can of coconut milk, and a grip of fresh basil. As I pretty much just cook for myself, and that in bulk, I knew that if I were to just put these things in the fridge they’d go bad before I had another chance to cook with them. Enter stage left: the freezer. And entering on stage right: the creative use of baking utensils.

Using a muffin tin, I measured 2 tablespoons into every muffin cavity (that sounds dirty). I washed all the basil and spread it on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and popped both trays into the freezer. Once everything was good and frozen, I tossed the basil into a freezer bag, and dislodged the coconut milk and placed them in a Gladware with sheets of wax paper between them to avoid sticking. It should be noted that fresh basil will darken in the freezer, but the flavor will be fine. And now I can skip measuring out coconut milk, thus shaving precious seconds of cooking time while adding precious pennies to my bank account!