The Post-Punk Kitchen

In the last entry I shared with you my love for my new cookbook "Vegan with a Vengeance," by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. I wanted to also put you in-the-know about her website, "The Post-Punk Kitchen," where she has her cooking show episodes posted for all to see. Even if you're not a vegan, these recipes look quite tasty (I haven't tried them yet). Plus, it's just fun to watch - I'm a "dry wit" girl, and this show is full of it. Check it out.

Risotto, My Love!

For my birthday my husband got me the best vegan cookbook EVER: "Vegan With A Vengeance."

Not only is it fun to read, but the recipes are really accessible. I mean, most of them use ingredients that I've never tried, but wasn't that part of the point of me becoming a vegan? To expand my horizons? I made my first dish from this book tonight - "Mushroom and Sun-Dried Tomato Risotto."

I knew I'd have to make a little jaunt across town to "Whole Foods" (natural grocery store with lots of specialty items) for this one, as it called for several things that the "Bi-Lo" just wouldn't have, i.e. cremini mushrooms, fresh herbs, arborio rice. In the past, although I love shopping at "Whole Foods," I've shied away from it just because it is more expensive on most things. However, I decided that if I was going to be serious about being a vegan and actually enjoy it, I'd have to suck it up and pay a little extra now and then for those special ingredients.

It took me an hour to find everything I was looking for, mostly because I'm so used to seeing my food packaged in a certain way that I didn't recognize it even when it was right in front of me. For example, it took me 10 minutes to find and bag my mushrooms. I saw mushrooms right away, but they were loose in a box in front of a sort of fresh veggie deli counter. And they were $5 a pound. Well, surely these had to be the special mushrooms. Weren't there any more somewhere, perhaps in a shrink-wrapped styrofoam container? Nope. I reluctantly bagged up what I thought was 3 cups of cremini mushrooms, just knowing that that bag was probably worth more than my shoes. Surprisingly, that big bag didn't even come to a pound. In retrospect, of course it wasn't a pound! Mushrooms are primarily air. I just saw the sticker price and freaked out. If the sticker had said "35 mushrooms for $5," I'd have gone, "Oh, what a bargain!"

I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the fresh herbs were much less expensive at "Whole Foods" than I had seen them for at other stores. And I didn't need to use tons of any one of them, so they will last me for several recipes.

The hardest things for me to find were the arborio rice and nutritional yeast (yeast is for another recipe - stay tuned). I was looking all over the store for them in their pre-packaged bags, the way I'd normally find them. But here these items were kept in bins, much like candy in a candy store. As it turns out, "Whole Foods" buys the majority of the nuts and grains they sell in bulk so that they can a) keep prices down and b) reduce the amount of unnecessary packaging that goes on, thus saving even more money and creating less waste. Three cheers for them! Again, the prices on the bins made me a little nervous. But really, nutritional yeast weighs about as much as saw dust.

My point? I didn't go broke at the register today. Although I don't think that it would be financially prudent to do all of my grocery shopping at the health food store, I am no longer scared to walk out of there with a large paper bag full of food. Especially when the food is so obviously better (tasting and nutritionally) than what I could get at my regular market.

As for the risotto, this recipe was so wonderful that even my husband, a self-proclaimed mushroom hater, said he would eat it as a main dish if I was to make it again. It says that it serves 4, but I had quite a bit of it tonight and still ended up with 5 one-cup servings as leftovers. I'm not generally a cookbook girl. Like, I can usually take 'em or leave 'em and I don't use them but maybe on holidays. But do yourself a favor and BUY THIS BOOK and all of the savory pseudo-fancy ingredients that comprise the recipes in it.

That is all.

Ricism Addendum

Just a quick note: in my entry entitled "Ricism" I concluded that white rice isn't necessarily bad for you, just not AS good as brown rice or whole grain. Wellllll......I've since read that white rice actually isn't the best choice because the process of making the rice white removes the alkaline from the rice, causing it to raise the acid levels in our bodies and throw off our pH balance. It breaks down into sugar much more quickly than brown rice, throwing insulin compensation into overdrive, making a person more susceptible to diabetes.

So there ya' go. The naked truth about rice. That is all.

It's Mini! (part 2)

As stated in the last entry, I love all things mini. So it stands to reason that mini-corn is one of my favorite parts of Chinese steamed veggies! A couple of weeks ago, I had forgotten to bring a lunch with me to my girl's house (I am watching a little girl this summer), so we packed her a lunch, picked up some fabulous Chinese food for me, and went to the park to picnic.

As I lifted the plastic from my steamed veggie medley, she peppered me with questions:

"Is that broccoli?"
"Do you like broccoli?"
"What are those round things?"
"Why do you eat it with rice?"
"What's that?"

The last question was directed at the mini-corn.

"That's mini-corn," I responded.

"Why is it mini?" she asked.

"Well, it's not really corn. It just looks like corn. See?" I showed her.

"So what is it if it's not really corn?" she asked.

"Ummm....uhhhhh...." I articulately responded. I really didn't know. I just knew that I could pop the whole thing in my mouth at once and it was pretty tasty. Off to Google I went!

Well, color me surprised! Baby corn actually is just that - baby corn. They just pick it right away when the stalk silks appear. I thought it was some Asian delicacy and it was just called baby corn because it looked like baby corn. Nope. It's corn. As a baby. And it's not a special variety of corn, either. Field and sweet babies end up with the same flavor anyway because it's too early in the corn's life for it to have developed a sweetness.

So what does this mean nutritionally? Well....

Baby corn is high in folate, a B-vitamin; four ounces provides 31% of the RDA. It is a good source of several other nutrients too: the same serving size also provides 13 percent of the potassium, 14 percent of the B-6, 10 percent of the riboflavin, 17 percent of the vitamin C and 11 percent of the fiber adults need each day. (Baby Corn Brochure)

However, we shouldn't trade in all of our grown-up corn for baby corn:

Yellow corn contains carotenoids, which are substances that may help prevent coronary artery disease, certain cancers, and cataracts. In particular, yellow corn is abundant in two carotenoids, zeaxanthin and lutein, which keep eyes healthy. The more yellow the corn is, the more carotenoids it contains, since these compounds provide plants with color. Baby corn, being pale, would carry lesser amounts of these carotenoids than mature corn. (Baby Corn Brochure)

So, there you have it. It's cute, it's healthy, it's important enough to have it's own group of advocates make it a brochure: Baby Corn.

Click here to check out the above picture and others by Krissy.