I promised a while back that if anyone wanted to hear about our recent forays into new and exciting vegan recipes, I would share them. Well, one person did ask, so I'll go ahead and share. However, there are a million beautiful and detailed vegan food blogs out there, and all of them totally dedicated to the genre. I won't try to talk technique or recipes here, but just talk about how my family has come to this place of having Adventures with Food.

I grew up in a home where the focus was very much on what was HEALTHY. By healthy, I suspect strongly that my mom meant "low calorie." Like many, many women in this culture, she was terribly concerned with being overweight, and when I hit puberty, she became very concerned with me becoming fat. She told me quite often that she had been heavy as a teenager, and that she did not want me to go through that. (Side note: I recently had the opportunity to spend a few hours with my mom's first cousins, who are younger than her, and when I mentioned this to them, they looked at each other, puzzled, and said, "We don't remember her ever being overweight.") I remember distinctly being told to watch what I ate in the months before I had my Bat Mitzvah, so that I would not be fat and pimply for the occasion.

This sounds horrible and scandalous to almost everyone, and in many ways it was, but I can also see the side of my mother who really did find being overweight to be a traumatic experience, perceived or real though it might have been. She wanted to spare me that trauma. Instead, though, she created a different trauma, where I looked in the mirror and saw a skinny kid, and wasn't sure exactly how many cookies it would take to make me otherwise. Was it two? Was it four? I didn't want to deal with the comments about what I ate, so I often biked to the gas station a couple of miles away, bought a handful of candy bars, and ate them in the bathroom sitting on the toilet. Years later, I still associate solitude with an opportunity to eat junk food. It's an association I would love to break.

My mother made healthy, really delicious food, though, and she continues to be a phenomenal cook. She enjoys the process, and this is something I'm happy to have inherited. The difference is that I want the healthy food to taste good more than I want the healthy food to be low-fat or low-calorie. Sometimes it works out that way (big wonderful salads with hearts of palm, fresh peppers, and balsamic dressing; vegetable soups) and sometimes it doesn't (fried corn fritters, macaroni & cheez). I've had to force myself to disassociate "unhealthy" and
"fat" as it relates to cooking. It's something my mother has never been able to do, though she has finally relaxed her eating habits to include treats without too much guilt.

So now here I am, finding myself the cook in a house with two daughters. I really was a little chubby as a teen and remain so now -- nothing truly unhealthy, but certainly on the soft and cushy end of the spectrum -- and I honestly don't care if my girls are X pounds above or below the norm, as long as they're healthy. It is much more important to me that they are aware of how GOOD non-junk food can taste, and how important it is for our bodies to eat a variety of foods, including some junk food just because it's fun. Neither has mentioned people being fat or food being fatty or anything like that yet, but I absolutely know it is coming. It's too pervasive in our culture. I just want to set them up with a good base of knowledge before that hits.

That's a long road I just took to get to what we've been cooking these days -- but it's worth telling, because it explains the variety in our diets in a way that a list of recipes and photos could not. So here we go! If anyone wants the recipes or info on the cookbooks where we got them, let me know!

Pumpkin & Carmelized Onion Baked Ziti with Sage Bread Crumbs - holy shmoly was this a pain to make, but it was the most delicious thing we ate in the last two months.

Leek & White Bean Cassoulet with Biscuits - this might have been Shmoo's favorite. The biscuits get baked right on top of the beans & leeks...so downhome good!

Crock Pot Seitan Pot Roast -- this was pretty, and the flavor was spot on, but no one liked the consistency of the homemade seitan. Bummer. We'll have to try a different recipe.

Corn Fritters -- this wasn't vegan (three eggs), and it probably was a little too greasy to be called healthy exactly, but these fritters sure were delicious. Shmoo almost snorted them through a straw!

Miso Soup with Udon Noodles & Chickpeas - This will be an absolute staple next winter. We made it with some mushroom boullion, and that gave it a hearty and rich flavor that had a friend of ours swooning in the street outside our house, where she ate a serving of it out of a washed-out yogurt container I had on the counter.

Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies - I made these for Doodlebug's birthday party, and they were not pretty, but everyone raved about them so much that I had to make them the next weekend for a graduation party too. They are vegan and none of my meat-eating, milk-swilling in-laws noticed!

Chickpea Cutlets - these are so fantastic I can't even begin to explain it. They are quick to make, the kids love them, they make good sandwiches or pasta toppers or eat-em-cold-out-of-the-fridge food.

Garlic & Sesame Sauteed Purple Cauliflower -- I don't know how they grow purple cauliflower, but thank goodness that they do, because the kids think it's magical. Cook it in a frying pan with sesame oil and garlic, and everyone will eat it gleefully!

Oven-roasted Kale - This is simple, and basically makes kale chips that melt in your mouth. My kids won't eat anything that looks like leaves, usually, but Doodlebug told her friends at school the next day that she ate "cracked kale" and it was "so so so so so so good!"

Boston Creme Pie Cupcakes  - Yes, they were vegan, and even better, True spent four hours making them for me on Mother's Day. The poor guy is not, at heart, a cook, and he was flustered and overwhelmed when I found him in the kitchen that morning. Despite all that, the cupcakes were delicious. Really! REALLY, True, I'm not just saying that, THEY WERE WONDERFUL!

Tonight we're getting take-out food, though!!!!!!

This song was shared with me by my dear friend Dan, who I visited last month for the first time in five years. He has beautiful taste in music -- not always convergant with mine, but we worked hard for an evening at finding things to introduce to each other, and this one was a jackpot for me. I hope he's found some equally moving things in the CDs I shared!

The lyrics here are not transformative, in themselves. In this case, it's the performance and intensity that get me. The video above captures the total surrender of deep love, and, interestingly, I feel it much more closely captures my feelings about my daughters than it does about a more romantic love. I can feel my heart swell with the music. These little people command  my every inch of love and devotion. I am powerless, and the tide that sweeps me along is magnificent. It is as terrifying as it is beautiful, and perhaps each of those things inspire the other. What can we do with something so powerful and glorious in our lives but watch it, appreciate it, and send it beaming out in front of us as fully as possible?

I can't take my eyes off of my daughters sometimes. I can't take my mind off of them, ever.

And then what will happen?

I am always thinking about the effect my actions have on myself, the universe, the people around me, the community, my family, energy/light/g-d. It doesn't always mean that I have to change what I'm doing, or that what I'm considering is a bad or a good idea...just that everything has an effect, and it's worth pondering what that might be.

1. Bike as often as possible (a.k.a. Avoid the CAR!).
2. Visit the beach as often as possible.
3. Eat 90% of what we get in our farm box each week, and either freeze or give the rest away.
4. Be at peace with being dirty most of each day.
5. Try camping with the kids.
6. See or have outings with friends at least three times a week.

Our garden is a jungle of greenery these days, with mild weather and tons of rain. Everything is so tall that I can't even see what could be a weed and what might flower gorgeously later in the summer. It's chaotically gorgeous, and so I think I'll just give up, happily, and marvel at it.

We have several species of wildly proliferating mint and oregano growing there, and so especially in that back part of the garden pictured in the post below, the whole place smells like spicy mint. It's invigorating and lovely, but I am intimidated by the volume. I harvested a handful of stems of oregano and mint last week, sitting amicably next to Doodlebug in the yard as we pulled leaves into piles on the picnic table, but it's all dried now and ready for winter, and there is easily twenty times that amount left in the garden. Any locals reading this can come get whatever they can use!

We also have a good crop of anise hyssop, identified after two consultations with an herb farmer from the local farmer's market and a detailed web search, and then verified by our receiving another bunch of it in our CSA box last week (I traded it in for some extra chard). This is an absolutely delicious herb, making the most fragrant and naturally sweet tea I've ever had the pleasure of creating myself. I'm drying a big bowl of it in the kitchen now, and that little corner now smells delightfully like black licorice and sunshine.

This is all coming as I read the fascinating book Animal, Vegatable, Miracle by novelist Barbara Kingsolver. It is the story of her family's journey to eating only locally grown/raised foods, most of them so locally grown that she grew them or raised them herself! It makes me want to grow more of our own food next summer, though truthfully that has been my goal for several summers. For now, we're growing the herbs mentioned above, plus dill, thyme, basil, raspberries, and two struggling little tomato plants. I meant to do more, but our spring weekends got so busy that I lost my opportunity. I've often wished I had a "Gardening for Dummies" book that would tell me, step by step, what to do and when. Maybe next summer I will. For now, we're getting almost all our produce from the CSA or from the farmer's market, and even though it's pricier, I agree with Kingsolver's questions about that: essentially, how much is it worth to you to have tastier, gentler-on-the-environment, and kinder-to-the-farmers produce?

In any case, more rain is on its way this week. Wet mint, anyone?

Just a reminder to everyone out there who lives ANYWHERE where there is ANY available local produce to go there, buy some, hang out, create community, and SUPPORT IT however you can. Our neighborhood market on Wednesday evenings can currently boast the following:

• Three farm stands
• Monthly (sometimes more often) live music
• An adjacent playlot for the kids
• Space for picnics
• A bimonthly knitting circle
• Weekly informal potlucks of the neighborhood elementary school's families
  

What it cannot boast so far :

• Financial success for the farmers

If we want this market to succeed, we have to keep buying things there. The same goes for your local markets!