After a long day of work (during a long week), I decided to make something effortful for dinner instead of heating up leftover rice and quinoa. Pleased now am I with the result of my labors. They were:
1. Yellow Split Pea Soup. Composed of: (rinsed) yellow split peas, water, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, tarragon, soy milk. That's all. Verdict: Texture - too chunky (I should have used a blender instead of just mushing it with my wooden spoon). Color - beautiful yellow. Which seems reasonable, methinks. Taste - actually impressively good! I really liked it! It's sweet, sweeter than I remember green split pea soup to be. I find myself wondering - could I dice parsnips and add them? You know, like people put carrots in green split pea soup. Or put carrots in this one and parsnips in the green? Which color combination(s) would look best? All in all, this made a nice first course.
2. Grilled Chicken. I'm not sure if it's technically grilled when you use a skillet and a little olive oil. But it's not fried, nor baked nor broiled, and results in nice browning, so I'm calling it grilled. This was just slices of chicken breast, olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. (It's not that I don't use any other spices - I do! - but that tonight these three classics prevailed.) What's amazing to me is how moist the chicken is, and how tasty. Also a successful dish. I actually cooked chicken this way a couple days ago, and liked it then, so I just copied myself. Shameless and unoriginal. But good.
3. Chocolate. Topped it all off (after) with a couple pieces of French baking chocolate, aka dark chocolate. The best kind of chocolate.
That was it. As far as I know, gluten free! The soy milk says it is, the chocolate doesn't have any sneaky ingredients, so probably is. All easily found ingredients, almost dairy free (except for the chocolate, which contains milk - I'll cheat for dark chocolate), easy to make, tastes good. Not necessarily balanced, per say, but a little kale salad would solve that, no?
It's strange to be posting about food here. I normally don't. But in the past year, I've started paying much more attention to it, initially out of necessity, but increasingly out of a desire to eat good quality food. No gluten, (almost) no dairy - those are for health reasons. I'm writhing out of frustration with the nastiness of the eggs I'm finding at the stores - are the organic ones really any better looking or tasting than the normal ones? No!! This is ridiculous! And I look for eggs from healthy chickens - that's what I want, after all...
(Warning: short rant ahead)
But all the organic eggs are from chickens that are fed, guess what? VEGETARIAN diets! WHAT!?!? What idiot thought it would be a good idea to turn chickens into vegetarians? They aren't. Chickens eat bugs, maggots, nasty things we wouldn't ourselves eat, but which provide them with a good source of protein which ends up in the eggs as, you guessed it, PROTEIN. Which is part of why I'm eating eggs for breakfast in the first place. Chickens aren't vegetarians. Please, for the love of all things good, beautiful and holy, stop feeding them "vegetarian feed." That means grain. I don't know what kind - but probably corn and wheat (and maybe soy), since that's what this country has so much of. But you know what? Wheat kills me. Lay off the grain. Let your chickens run around and catch bugs and grasshoppers. Your eggs will look and taste better. And I'll be happier and healthier. Anyway. This is actually making me mad when I go to the grocery store. I keep looking for free-range eggs, but every single last one of them have this stupid vegetarian diet thing. (Oxymoron, no? If your chickens are truly free-range, they won't be eating vegetarian. I don't trust your stupid labels. Free range, my sore foot! You mean they theoretically can go outside, but are essentially trained not to, since all the food is inside. Sigh.)
Now, I don't have anything against vegetarians or vegetarianism. But for chickens? Perhaps, if you stretch the "you are what you eat" metaphor in this direction, then eating omnivorous chickens makes the eater of their eggs omnivorous. So if you want to be uber-strict, you'd need vegetarian hens. But I'm not vegetarian. And I really don't like feeding them a ton of grain (especially grains they wouldn't eat if we didn't essentially force them to eat). Especially since I can't eat gluten, and in all likelihood those hens are eating gluten. Does that gluten end up in their eggs? I don't know, honestly. I certainly hope not! It makes me wonder... But not enough to stop eating them. I need protein for breakfast, and what other source do I have? I can't eat cheese, nuts are too expensive to eat every day for breakfast, I'm not going to eat meat that often, and I don't want even more grains.
Oy. Moving on. Eating ignorantly is so much easier and simpler! By the way, have you ever tried kvass? I wonder what the equivalent of pomegranate juice would taste like? Elixir of the gods, most likely. But so expensive!
Time for another piece of chocolate, some more book-reading (The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. Affecting me? Yes. Do I mind? Not terribly much. I've been heading that way anyhow), and possibly puzzle, then bed. Yes, bed... and sleep... mmm. G'night!
