Vegetarian Pleasures

This vegetarian thing has me in its grip. Oh, I ate a sausage patty for breakfast and enjoyed it, although it was a little too salty. I ate it because I won’t waste good food and there was sausage in the meat and cheese drawer. But interesting ideas about meatless meals keep popping into my head.

My friend and neighbor Laurie went vegetarian a long time ago and is the picture of health. She also serves delicious meals to lucky guests like me. I must have inquired about recipes because she loaned me a few of her favorite cookbooks by Jeanne Lemlin.

As soon as I began exploring the first book, Simple Vegetarian Pleasures, I was intrigued. The recipes seemed familiar to me because they feature ingredients I use frequently and enjoy. These recipes just don’t include meat. Jeanne hardly ever mentions tofu, either. I believe it’s tofu that has prejudiced me against vegetarian food in the past.

The first recipe I tried was “Portobello Mushroom and Caramelized Shallot Omelet.” I picked that one because we still have a lot of nice shallots from last summer’s garden. I also had a log of goat cheese, another of the ingredients. Eggs we have aplenty. All I had to buy was the mushrooms. It was delicious.

The next day, because I still had some goat cheese in the fridge and last summer’s tomatoes in the freezer, I made “Baked Goat Cheese and Tomato Polenta.” I always have Hodgson Mill’s whole-grain cornmeal on hand and was pleased to see that the recipe calls for plain old cornmeal. This dish, too, has been delicious, even as leftovers.

My cookbook library now includes three of Lemlin’s books: Simple Vegetarian Pleasures, Quick Vegetarian Pleasures, and, in today’s mail, Vegetarian Classics. I’m also getting ideas of my own. For example, I want to make the tomato polenta dish using roasted sweet pepper slices, black olives, and feta cheese. That’s probably because I roasted some red and yellow peppers today.

It’s been a chilly, rainy day, so for supper tonight I’m making an extemporaneous soup using black beans and rice left from last night and other ingredients to make a meatless chili. Vegetarian cooking is proving to be fun. I’ve been cooking this way for nine days now and I still haven’t run out of ideas or had to resort to tofu.

Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer

The Road to Vegetarianism

I grew up in a meat-eating family.  At least twice a day, usually the midday and evening meals (dinner and supper), we ate pork, beef, or chicken, the beef and pork grown on Dad’s farm and the chickens that Grandma raised in our back yard in town. (The farmhouse had burned to the ground, so we bought a house in the village, a half mile from the farm.)

Dad’s hogs had cozy little houses for raising their litters, plenty of dried corn from the corn bin, and a pond with ample mud for wallowing. They lived in hog heaven until the day they died. Dad’s cattle lived in a lush pasture with another pond, good not only for drinking but also for standing in on hot days. Dad’s hogs and cattle had good lives until he loaded one into his truck and took it to Oak Grove to be butchered.

The butcher cut the meat into roasts, chops and other forms, sealed them up in heavy white freezer paper, and stamped then package “Hamburger” or “Pork Chops.” The butchery had a large walk-in freezer room where people could rent freezer space. That’s where our meat was stored.

Once a week or so, Dad drove three miles to Oak Grove to get a supply of meat. Many hot summer days I went along. The temperature difference between the inside of Dad’s truck and the big freezer room was staggering.  We could see our breath. Immediately I was shivering. Dad wore leather gloves when he pulled out the freezer drawer and rummaged for the cuts Mother had requested.

Grandma, who was in charge of chickens, also was in charge of dispatching them. When fried chicken was on the menu, Grandma went outside about an hour before the meal, grabbed a chicken by its head, and swung the bird in a circle. The head popped off, leaving the headless body running around until it collapsed. Quickly Grandma had the carcass de-feathered, gutted, cleaned, cut into pieces, floured, and dropped into a skillet bubbling with hot lard.

These images of how meat animals are raised persisted in my mind for many years, but when Dennis and I began making treks to Colorado through western Kansas, I was shocked to see (and smell) the huge feedlots of cattle living in their own filth, eating feed unsuitable for their ruminant stomachs. That’s when I began to back away from eating beef, but I still had pork and chicken and sometimes fish.

Since then, I’ve learned that most hogs are raised in boxes scarcely larger than their bodies. So are many laying hens. These creatures can’t even walk around. Fish are farmed and fed disgusting things.

I’ve now backed away from mass-produced meat altogether. If we eat beef it is grass fed. If we eat pork or chicken, it was humanely raised. If we eat fish it was wild-caught.  This is hard on the pocketbook. If our old dietary habits were to persist, we would go broke.

One approach to changing dietary habits is to use small amounts of meat to flavor another dish, such as navy beans cooked with a ham hock. I’ve gone that route, but recently I’ve been drawn to making meatless meals, thanks to Laurie, who has been a vegetarian for many years. Laurie serves up delicious meatless meals time and again, meals that provide tastes and textures that delight the palate. Vegetarian recipes had always seemed a bit weird to me, but Laurie introduced me to cookbooks that completely changed my perception of vegetarian food.

Tonight our evening meal will be meatless for the fourth time in as many days. I’m venturing onto the road toward vegetarianism.

Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer

My Camera(!) and Cauliflower Soup

Lordy, my camera has been messed up for three weeks, going on four! Somehow I’ve changed the settings and now all distance shots are blurred. Because I can’t use pictures to tell my story, I’ve been tongue-tied. My camera has become an essential part of my voice.

Consequently, I’ve not written about the removal of ugly old evaporative coolers from the Tucson houses. I failed to report on the spectacular burning of a huge pile of dead cedars in our Kansas pasture or the less dramatic burning of the pasture’s prairie grasses and forbes*. There’s been no commentary on the glorious forsythia and daffodils. Currently I can’t write about the narcissus, tulips, and lilacs that are in their full glory.

I’m frustrated, but the finicky camera still takes close-ups so I can write about the delicious accidental soup we had for supper yesterday. The day before I had roasted cauliflower florets with olive oil and about 3 teaspoons of mixed curry and turmeric. I thought they were tasty but Dennis said he prefers steamed cauliflower with cream sauce. There was plenty of leftover roasted cauliflower and the next day was chilly so I thought of soup, curried cauliflower soup. I had never eaten such a thing, but it seemed right. (Lousy photo, but the soup is all gone, so it's too late for another go.)

After you’ve cooked for 60 years, you aren’t afraid to wing it making soup. What veggies were in the fridge and which ones would work in a curry? I found a quarter of a big onion, a quarter of a red bell pepper, and couple of stalks of celery, so that’s where I started, adding another teaspoon of curry and minced garlic, and slowly sautéing everything in olive oil, then a cup of water. Finally I added the roasted cauliflower and a can of coconut milk, heated it, and pureed the soup with an immersion blender.

The soup was delicious. Dennis ate two bowlfuls. No cream sauce required.

Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer

Where e-readers Fall Short

I've owned a Kindle for a year or two (I really can’t remember exactly – that’s how important it has been in my life) but hadn't read much on it. Then when I flew to Tucson for a six weeks’ stay I opted to take my Kindle instead of real books. I started reading quite a few books on it and actually finished reading some of them. Over the six weeks I learned several things about what I like and dislike about ebooks.

First of all, when purchasing ebooks, I no longer buy nonfiction. A great limitation of the Kindle is the enormous difficulty of flipping back through pages to re-read something. I know, the reader can bookmark a passage for easy retrieval, but how does one know in advance which part one might want to refer back to? I’ve started several nonfiction books such as a biography of Winston Churchill but haven’t finished any of them. I’ve bought two or three cookbooks but haven’t even opened them.

Consequently, for me only fiction is appropriate for ebooks, and not even all of that. A historical novel, for example, probably contains maps and/or family trees. In a real book one can put a bookmark on the map and easily flip back and forth between the text and the map.  That is too awkward with the Kindle. What’s more, on the Kindle the maps are too small to read.

Finally, I’ve observed again and again that self-published ebooks are badly in need of editing. The author of a book I recently started and abandoned used many words inappropriately, such as “when I eclipsed the gate…” How does one eclipse a gate, I ask you. These authors usually do not understand the difference between “set,” “sat,” and sit. They don’t know how to use pronouns such as “I” and “me” correctly. Sorry, I was an English major in college and these failings in an author make me lose interest in what he has to say.

Not all my Kindle reading has been in vain. I’ve discovered a couple of authors who are both entertaining and literate. Julie Smith, in her series featuring a six-foot policewoman in New Orleans, spins a good yarn evoking the taste, smell, and sights of that doomed city.

In the end, there’s simply no substitute for a hardback book, held perhaps with one finger marking a previous page. There’s no need to turn it off before you fall asleep, either. It will be right there, possibly with a rumpled page or two, resting on your chest open to the right page when you wake up.

I won’t discard my Kindle, but it is mothballed until the next time I travel.

Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer

Neither Here nor There

After six weeks in Tucson I’m back in Kansas, but I’m neither fully here nor fully there. I wander through the house renewing my acquaintance with all the decorations and deciding which ones would fit nicely into the casitas in Tucson.

This painting by my pal Linda definitely will be going to the new place.

I tour the garden to admire Dennis’s lettuce, spinach, and escarole crops, but I wonder how the various squash seeds I started in Tucson are faring.  I’m happy to see friends here again but I miss the energy of my young housemates in Tucson. When I take loaves of bread from the oven I’m imagining how it will be to bake bread in a tiny kitchen.

It wouldn’t be correct to say that I left my heart in Tucson, but a piece of it remains there. I don’t feel diminished one bit. My heart has just expanded. This is a time of growth and renewal. Happy spring, everyone.

Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer