Making Love in the Kitchen

After the Vegetarian Food Festival last weekend, I was all soyed out. Seriously! Soy was served up in every little shape and size they could dream up. From icing on cupcakes, to dried out beans covered in sugar and cinnamon, they could almost change the name of the event to the Soy Food Festival.

What did I eat the weekend of the event? I kicked it BYOS- Bring Your Own Salad/Smoothie. Now it’s not that I hate soy… Okay, I do. I do hate it and all the ways it functions like plasticine- getting moulded and blended and cooked and baked into all kinds of things. Soy on it’s own, in it’s whole organic form is a-okay though. I will actually eat it, love it and feel okay after.

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We all have those veggies we don’t really like. The ones we know are great for us, but for whatever reason, they just aren’t the ones we would ever reach for when we are staying on our game and desiring a healthy snack.

For me, it’s carrots and celery. I wish to bits that a handful of carrots were a desirable snack for me but they just aren’t. Maybe it’s because they’re so freaking hard and I have wires cemented to the back side of my front and bottom teeth, a souvenir of the years of braces. Every time I bite into one of these shard-of-glass like veggies I am fairly sure they are going to crack off that cemented wire and I will find myself back in the orthodentist’s chair with one of those big plastic speculum type deals stretching my mouth unnaturally far from my face, all while surrounded by twelve year olds.

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When some people don’t want to consume hot dogs (and meat in general for that matter), they often turn to the vegetarian options. And what might these be? Veggie dogs! There are also veggie burgers, veggie deli meat, veggie turkey, veggie ground beef, veggie chicken pieces and the list goes on and on. From the looks of it, it seems that vegetarians have no problem replacing meat since there are so many options readily available for them. They can have some faux bacon for breakfast, followed by a mock salami sandwich for lunch, rounding things off with a chicken-less “chicken” stir fry for dinner. Oh, and don’t forget about soy pudding for dessert!

How easy was that? By consuming these fake meat items, vegans and vegetarians can pick up right where they left off with the real stuff. Can you tell yet that I’m joking?

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How it makes my heart sing when I can go to a regular restaurant and order my lover of a food, tempeh. Now, when I say regular restaurant, I’m not talking about nonsense places with names like “Wings and Things”, or “Deep Fry It So You’ll Try It”. I mean restaurants where their overall values- eat organic, local, seasonal etc.- make sweet love with my own.

So wasn’t I over the rainbow excited to see a veg menu with tempeh on it. And this wasn’t the kind of tempeh you might find at most veg/vegan restaurants where it’s kind of just cooked to a crisp and served over a bowl of rice. This tempeh was prepared as if it were the leanest cut of gold labeled cow (do cows come with with gold labels?).

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Holy tempeh testicles, my fair weather lovers! How is August looking into its last sweet half? I don’t know about you (and feel free to tell me), but I feel like suddenly I have to summer it up to the tittles. And in that spirit, I’ve been spending as many minutes of the day outside as possible. I am not back and ready to rock it on my bicycle just yet (still in accident recovery mode), but walks are sweet, as are evenings on our porch, eating, laughing and just plain old loving the loveliness.

As we do spend many an evening on the porch, with the sites and smells of our neighbourhood wafting over, meat seems to be the scent of choice most often. Even as a non BBQ meat eater (hi cancer, you’re not invited to play with me), I do still get cravings.

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Back in the day, before working and playing in this fine Kitchen, I used to work at an organic grocery store. I had loads of fun but apparently I was the only one who enjoyed that place because it went out of business shortly after I started working there (was it something I did?!)

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Last week I discussed the mystery of the hot dog. We learned what it’s made from and realized that all it really amounts to is highly processed meat with a boat-load of preservatives. Not edible in the least! Today, we’re embarking on some new and equally frightening territory. Hold on tight.

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There are two common questions we get when summer time rolls around:

1. What’s the best camping food and trail mix?

2. What’s a great veg friendly summer BBQ recipe?

The camping/trail mix thing I’ll share with you next week, but the BBQ thing- I have an answer for you right here and now and wozers is it delicious.

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Like the burrito last week, there is something amazingly fun and freeing about creating a recipe for a food that you know very little about. Anything involving chili peppers, I know very little about.

When I was 11 or 12 years old, on holidays with my family in Jamaica, we were visiting friends who were staying in a villa nearby. Out in their back yard was a tree with the cutest little red peppers I had ever seen. What did I do? Of course- I plucked it from the tree and took a bite, than scratched my face, maybe rubbed my eye in the process- next thing I knew, I was in tears begging to have my head removed from my body as I was sure it was on the verge of complete explosion. I had never felt such a searing discomfort before in my life.

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A few things you may not know about me.

For one, I’ve never in my life had a McDonald’s Hamburger. Now, this is not because even at the age of 5 when I was going to McD’s birthday parties I knew they were filled with toxic filler and the food equivalent of toxic waste. It’s because I was sure they also caused Chicken Pox. I’ve never had either and somewhere in my weird, creatively eccentric child mind, there was a connection.

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We LOVE these kind of ‘work’ assignments around here. The kind that invite us to put on some tunage and rock out while making massive messes in the kitchen. And then we get to look at each other and be like-

this is our job! Yaaaay!

Kristin and Jen came by yesterday morning, picked up the shopping list and spent an hour out and about gathering ingredients. It was then time to divide and conquer the recipes and get cooking. These recipes were being created and tested for a major Canadian Magazine and will be appearing in their October issue. The theme… foods normally made with meat, made without meat. As you can imagine, the beans, tofu, tempeh and mushrooms were abundant!

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Up until recently, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you either. Barley salad? Who on earth eats pearl barley other than my grandmother? She actually never really made it into a salad. She usually added it to her vegetable soups and I stopped eating those after she inadvertently poisoned me with MSG.

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Happy Friday! Congratulations to all of you playing along in the 21 Days To Health group challenge. We are almost at the end of week one and? How are we all doing? I am loving it! Be sure to join me here tomorrow at 2:30pm EST (by clicking on the Live Tv button on the bar below or heading over to justin.tv/loveinthekitchen) to join in our live chat where I’ll be doing a little juicing demo and answer your questions LIVE styles! So fun!

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Trying new food is fun. Or at least it should be and it is one of the most fun parts of travelling- getting to try local goodies that are only available far away from home. This of course is therefore not particularly useful to you, but its’ interesting and will definitely pique your curiosity.

Ackee is awesome and I would love to lift it up into the realm of one of my favourite foods but it grows a little too far away for that. If it were eggs that kept me from being totally plant-based in my diet, than ackee would surely be the best solution. Ripe, boiled and then pan fried ackee is like the perfect mix of scrambled eggs meets firm avocado for texture. Forget tofy scramble- ackee fruit sauteed with some onions is the best scrambled egg replacement ever.

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It couldn’t be a week in the tropics without my delving in to one of my simultaneously least and most favourite superfood. I hate it because it’s bitter, it’s slimy, it stains things purple and it smells like arm pit. But I love it because of the amazingly ability that bitterness and slimyness has on turning the engines on high in the digestive tract.

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