Animal Writings

[Updated 1/11/2008, 10:57am]


Okay, you've got your equipment, the dishes are all put away and the sink is sparkly clean, you walked the dog—you're ready to cook.

But first...

Two More Mini General Tips
These are the last ones, I swear.


• You can eat cooked vegetables as a snack. Not all the time; I know sometimes you need pretzels or a late-night bowl of cereal. But put them in the rotation. For instance, the other night, while watching five straight episodes of CSI:Miami, I ran downstairs, opened up the refrigerator door and stared at it, opened up the freezer door and saw Green Giant Immunity Boost vegetables. I microwaved the "broccoli florets, julienne carrots and red and yellow sweet pepper strips in a garlic-herb infused extra virgin olive oil seasoning" and dumped it into a bowl. Hit the spot.


• I realize this may sound ridiculously obvious, but read the cleaning instructions for your cooking equipment, especially your pots and pans.
  
  Gentle scrubbers in pretty colors.
  If you don't have the instructions handy, Google them. For pans and perhaps pots and other vessels in which you cook food, take care not to use brushes that are too abrasive or you'll damage the finish. I usually use something resembling the mild scrubbers in the picture. Cleaning your pots and pans and similar items in the right manner will make the clean-up job easier, extend the life of what is probably your most expensive cooking equipment, and improve safety.

My Cooking Background and Biases
I never cooked a thing—not spaghetti, not burgers, not oatmeal—until I was 19, and offered to cook for my three roommates in the apartment we had just rented, as a way to get out of doing dishes. They agreed. I quickly determined that, apart from fancy things like making shapes out of radishes, anyone could follow a recipe and make a decent meal. I enjoyed it, and have been cooking ever since, except for a three-year period where I lived in a tiny efficiency and was a workaholic.

I can improvise but I don't have the talent to create recipes. I prefer a blueprint. It's great that there are so many people out there coming up with excellent, tasty recipes and publishing them; the rest of us can take advantage of that.

I like simple, quick recipes that don't create a whole lot of dirty dishes. If a recipe calls for marinating something overnight, I marinate it for 20 minutes and call it a day. (I put the ingredients in a tightly-sealed container and shake it around a bit; I figure that speeds up the marination process.) If a recipe says "peel and dice 4 potatoes," I skip it or halve the recipe unless I have a sous chef helping me. There are infrequent exceptions: Major holidays or gatherings, or occasional winter Sundays when I feel like spending the afternoon making a big pot of soup. By the way, if you do have a helper, and you get along, that expands the number of things you can make and recipes you can follow.

(Tip: If you have friends or family coming over, I've found that they often genuinely enjoy being given small kitchen tasks. It gives them something to do. Making a meal with friends, shooting the breeze, and maybe pouring some wine or beer and making a couple of impromptu toasts can be quite pleasant.)

I appreciate gourmet food but tend to cook more down home stuff like veggie burgers, hash browns, noodle casseroles, and chili. My tastes have widened considerably, though, especially in terms of ethnic foods, since becoming vegan.

I have a small kitchen that doubles as the dining area and laundry room and has very little counter and cabinet space. When making dinner there's usually a very sociable cat at my heels wanting to be fed or petted (his food and bowls are in the kitchen, too). I wash my hands a lot.


Preliminaries For the Veg-By-Veg Section
I'm not going to talk about every vegetable out there, because I don't have time. I will, however, go beyond the six or seven vegetables that seem to make up 80 percent of the vegetable portion of most Americans' diets.

I'll go through them in roughly alphabetical order, from asparagus to zucchini.

For each vegetable, I'm planning on presenting one or more of the following:


• A super-simple way to prepare the vegetable. Might not be the most flavorful or fancy, but it will work.


• Variation(s) on the above. Maybe a different cooking style, or different spices, or adding a new ingredient.


• A new quick and uncomplicated recipe that I will have just found on the Internet through searching—and tried out—to show easy it is to find useful, doable, tasty online recipes.

I'll assume that if a vegetable is widely available in frozen form, that's what we'll be using. There will be a couple of exceptions to this rule of thumb.

Look-ahead: May as well buy some asparagus. One bunch is all you need. That's our first vegetable. The weekend's coming up, so you might have some time to cook. Asparagus is one of those vegetables that I recommend buying fresh if you know you'll be eating it soon, because there is little or no chopping required in its preparation.

To be continued...

Labels: cooking, diet, vegetables