Why, hello again!

I've been so slack about posting on this blog! Not that anyone has been particularly complaining about it, but it pains me to see it languish, when I've had so much fun with it in the past.

So, I'm resolving to post more often! Today's post arises from a few inspirations:

• The realization that it's cooking healthy meals at home that has been instrumental in helping me shed nearly 50 pounds* since October 2011, and has helped my Beloved heal from his recent surgery and lose at least 15-20 pounds (so far) during his recovery;
• The knowledge that planning meals and doing the grocery shopping makes it easier to cook healthy meals at home;
• An interest in new recipes and new foods, and new ways to tempt both my own palate and my (very picky) husband's

That being the case, I thought I'd use this blog to plot not just my cooking adventures, but this little family's journey down the road to health and weight loss, the Paleo Way.

This week's plan for dinners!

Sunday: Steamed Brisket¹, green salad, homemade Szechwan green beans.
Monday: Leftover Chili², rice, green salad
Tuesday: Meatza, green salad
Wednesday: Roasted pork loin with herbes de Provence³, roasted root vegetables, salad⁴
Thursday: Leftovers
Friday and Saturday we normally go out for dinner, either on our own or with friends, so no need to plan for those!

Notes and observations about this plan:

1. Paleo eaters generally eschew processed food, including processed meat. My Beloved is fairly new to the paleo way, and is still finding his footing. As mistakes go, Dunn's Famous Brisket is probably not as bad as others he's made (and will undoubtedly make in the future) as he adapts to the new road. The brisket is high in sodium from the curing process, but as we are learning, salt is important for human health (too little can also be harmful!). And I'm pretty sure the two of us are not getting too much salt, because the other food in our house is generally fresh, raw, and unprocessed, and thus doesn't include sodium until we add it. 
2. Full disclosure: Monday's chili is, in fact, leftovers from a big pot o'chili I made last week. Mondays and Thursdays are the days I hit the gym after work, so leftovers are a big plus on such evenings.
3. Yes, I know it's June. But we live in Vancouver, BC, and summer has yet to settle in this year. This week's weather forecast is abysmal - wet, grey, and blah. So although doing a roast pork (tender)loin and root vegetables sounds like a rather autumnal or wintry kind of meal, it's not out of keeping with the environment. (If it were grillin' weather, I'd do it that way and think of a different vegetable accompaniment for it.)
4. We eat a lot of salad. I love salad, and eat it at every meal except breakfast, usually. My Beloved is less keen, but since I do most of the cooking, he takes what he's given, and as long as I don't put cucumber or avocado on his, he doesn't really complain.

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*there will be party here when I pass that milestone, believe me!

Been cooking up a storm, but...

Such an opportunity I've missed! I've been cooking virtually every meal my Beloved and I have eaten since March 30th, and not one have I documented here. Shame that. Perhaps I'll change that, now that I've got a bit more time to devote to this blog.

On March 29th, my Beloved tore his Achilles tendon off the bone. (The medical term for tearing the tendon off the bone is "avulsion", by the way.) He had surgery to repair it on March 30th. It's a same-day-discharge kind of surgery, so he came home that evening, and my stint as Chief Cook and Bottlewasher began in earnest the following day, as Beloved started six weeks of no weight-bearing on the operative leg.

For various reasons - healing, overall health, weight control, and because it's how I eat - my Beloved switched (or got switched) to the Paleo way of eating pretty much overnight. There was some bread in the bread bin, but once it was gone, it stayed gone. And he didn't even squawk about it, really; the reality check of having to haul his entire body weight around using primarily his upper body strength, and the spectre of the possibility of Type II diabetes were strong motivators, I guess.

It's been seven weeks now. He went from a plaster/fiberglass cast to a walking boot/air cast two weeks ago, and can do a lot more for himself now that he can put weight on the operative leg. He has lost weight. We don't know how much, because we haven't put him on the scale. But the fronts of his dressing gown overlap by at least six inches more than they did the first week post-op.

Lazy Long Weekend Sunday Food Activities

So, hot on the heels of yesterday's chef-guided tour of Granville Island Public Market, I was super-stoked to go to the inaugural 2010 session of the local farmer's market. I pumped up my bike tires on Saturday afternoon, put the panniers on the bike rack, and readied for adventure!

The market opened at 10 a.m., but when I showed up at about 11:00, having taken a full three or four minutes to ride there, there were a few stragglers still setting up. It started at the corner of Bayview and 7th Avenue, trickled down that block and through the parking area next to the Steveston Hotel, and up and across the footpath to the parking lot for the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site. I got through it all pretty quickly, I'm sorry to say, because in amongst the handmade jewellery, jams and jellies, coffee trucks, homemade soaps, masseurs, and artisan breads, there wasn't a lot of what I was looking for: produce. Turns out the big growers won't be there until next time, which is two weeks from now. *le sigh*

Once home again, I attacked the never-ending task that is keeping the kitchen counters clear and clean. I opened up the pantry cupboard to put the new hot sauces away, only to discover that there was no room for them on the shelf entirely dedicated to hot sauces. I brought this to Beloved's attention, and he decided to cull the hot sauces. He emptied that shelf, and I wiped it clean (let's not do things halfway, after all!). And since the shelf below - the one with all the horrible brown mucky spreads on it - was quite dirty itself, I moved those bottles to the clean, empty shelf, and wiped it off, too. And in removing the shelf to wipe it down, I discovered that something on the top shelf had expired, and leaked all down the back wall of the cupboard. (I know! Ew, right?)

On further investigation, the culprit/victim was identified as a can of artichoke hearts whose age could not be determined, due to the lack of date coding on the can. I could only say with certainty that it had been purchased some time within the last fifteen years. (And now I'm not so sure. Ew again.)

So then I had to pull all the pantry contents and remove the shelves and clean them and the back wall, before I could put them back and reload the cupboard. And while I was at it, I might as well weed out anything that we for sure were never going to eat. And I'm almost ashamed to say how many cans of food I threw out. In fact, if my pantry cupboard were not now lovely and organized and easy to find things in, I might not cop to TWENTY FOUR cans of things varying from Weight Watchers Lentil Soup to tomato sauce (which cans were bulging, and thus spat at me when pierced) to canned shrimp (which, omigosh the pong!) to canned pumpkin to vegetable curry (which had solidified because of all the potato in it).

Yes, I actually opened all these cans, dumped the contents down my garburetor (I love my garburetor), rinsed and flattened the cans, and put them in the recycling.

Beloved was aghast at the dates on some of the cans. The date on the lentil soup was 1995, which means I bought it several years before that (probably in 1991, when I was on WW). That was the big winner. Second runner up was something dated 1997, and third runner up was dated 1999. He could hardly contain his horror when, at one point, I mused that I was pretty sure I had bought a certain item after we were married. "Is that the criterion for deciding whether to keep things or not? God save me!"

Like I've ever poisoned him yet, in fifteen years of marriage. Sheesh. Ya big baby.

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We are still working our way through the contents of the freezer, in preparation for getting our 30 lbs of organic beef at the end of June, and so yesterday we thawed a package of "Ground Meat for Kebabs", which was left over from a dinner last year sometime. (Shh!) It turned out to be just the meat - a mixture of ground beef, pork, and lamb - without any of the seasonings added, so my Beloved changed the game plan from Indian kebabs to Lela's Famous Burgers, based on a Google search for a recipe and an innate trust of Gordon Ramsay's cooking. (This recipe is surprisingly simple, for a Ramsay recipe, I thought. No obscure ingredients, no twelve-step cooking process to ready one ingredient, no bizarre instructions, no pretentious presentation.)

I don't know what the burgers taste like when they're plain beef, but this blend of beef, pork, and lamb was brilliant. We had grilled veggies (red and yellow peppers, green beans, white onion, celery) with it, and it was all the dinner I needed, especially after the Sausage Sampler starter. Which was really just one lamb sausage and one chorizo sausage, that we bought at Tenderland Meats on Granville Island on Saturday, with a variety of mustards and relishes. Verdict: their chorizo sausage is good, and their lamb sausage is outstanding.

What can you do with a picky eater?

I was kind of a picky eater as a child, I admit it. I didn't like onions or mushrooms, particularly, and the trauma associated with green beans, yellow beans, and peas (which were always canned, until they were available frozen) took the better part of forty years to get over. I mean it; it's really only within the last twelve months that I've approached green beans with anything other than fear and loathing, and even then, I'll only speak to fresh ones. I don't even know if they still make canned green beans. I hope not.

I liked roast pork, but not pork chops (though that might have had something to do with the mushroom-soup sauce my mother insisted on overcooking them in), and I liked everything to do with beef - including liver - except the tongue roast my mother tried to slide in under the radar that one time. I liked lamb any way I could get it, but didn't like any kind of fish except salmon. And we ate a lot of bland, baked white fish (cod, halibut, sole) because my dad had an ulcer, and we were still 30 years away from identifying heliobacter pylori as the cause for all the pain, and were still treating them with bland food and milk to drink.

But that was all when I was a kid. I grew up, and so did my tastebuds, and I learned to appreciate the onion's contribution to flavour, the mushroom's fantastic adaptability and variety, and even the taste and texture of a properly cooked fresh green bean. I like all kinds of things now that I didn't then. Exceptions include kidney (as in steak and kidney pie), canned or frozen beans or peas, and bland white fish. I kind of fell in love the first time I tasted broccoli; I was fifteen, and at a friend's house for dinner. And I fell in love again with cauliflower.

Fifteen years ago or so, I fell in love with another human. And I married him. And I slowly discovered that I'd married an eater whose pickiness put my own childhood aversions in the shade. I am reminded of this because I've been surfing cooking websites, finding recipes that sound fantastic to me, but that contain one or more ingredients that would put My Beloved right off his feed. The first to fall were broccoli and cauliflower, followed quickly by Brussels sprouts; any kind of chicken on the bone, other than wings; any chicken other than breast meat; turkey in all its forms, unless it's Christmas dinner, and then only the one meal; any kind of squash, summer or winter; cucumbers; pretty much all fruit unless it's in a fruit salad or over ice cream; goat's milk and its products; avocado in any form except inside a California roll; spinach, unless it's in things like lasagna; eggs unless it's breakfast time; chickpeas... the list grows every time I whip something new on him.

Between his vegetable aversions and my previous aversion to beans, the only green non-leafy vegetable we agreed on, for several years, was asparagus.Which can be horribly expensive, even in season.

He surprised me last night by actually liking the couscous we had with dinner. I'm not sure he's ever had it before, but it turned out well, and he said he enjoyed it. Thank goodness that's one for the "like" list; it makes up for the nose-wrinkling about the chicken thighs (which were at least boneless and skinless anyway). He ate the chicken because he thought I'd be upset if he didn't (I think he confused me with his mother for a minute there), but even though the one thigh he ate was tiny, he didn't want to finish the last one.