You Ate What...?

So May 5th has come and gone and we are no longer keeping the fast. We found out after a couple of weeks that not eating meat was pretty simple, not eating any animal products was a little more than we could do at this time. Pretty early on we brought back milk, cheese, and eggs after having stomach cramps for several days. We did falter a couple of times when we went to cookouts, but the experience has substantially changed the way we view our eating. We have decided to eat far less meat than we were before the fast. In addition to our realization I heard at work about Bountiful Baskets. It's a cooperative food buying thing where you pay $15 for a basket of mixed fruits and vegetables, usually every other week. It's really a crapshoot on what you get, but I've found some interesting things that caused me to flex my cooking muscles. The first time we did this we also ordered an Asian vegetable add-on. We got bok choy. I have never eaten bok choy, so we were in for a ch...

Been a long time, hasn't it? The other blog sort of fizzled and everyone has alerts for this one, so I'm back here again. Once, a long time ago, I asked my mother if I could try canned spinach after watching some Popeye cartoons. With a look of revulsion on her face, she agreed. She hated the smell of it and I'm kind of surprised she did it. I probably was pretty adamant and threw a tantrum or something. Regardless, I tried it and absolutely was horrified by the taste and texture. Later, my freshman year in college, my roommate made it in the microwave from a can. I couldn't stand the smell then and cancelled it out with my own microwaved can of black eyed peas to which she felt similarly. I do, however, really like baby spinach fresh in salads and have learned to be okay with it cooked on pizza and with alfredo sauce on other Italian foods. We aren't eating most animal products right now (see the note below), so when I got a 2 lb. bag of spinach from the co-op y...

I have seen this drink a lot in some of the stores I have frequented, like Native Roots and Whole Foods. I was totally unprepared for this drink. I initially tried the Original Flavor Organic Raw Kombucha. I expected tea, some medicinal flavor maybe. It talked about probiotics and fermentation. I expected it to be nasty, but entertaining as a blog post. The first whiff was of vinegar and very off-putting. I think it was the fermentation smell that had settled on the cap, kinda had an apple cider vinegar smell. That's the best of the vinegar smells, but still...vinegar. I was totally not expecting the burst of natural carbonation on my tongue. It's powerful at first, but it calms down much more quickly than say the carbonation from a soda. This is more natural. It is sweet, but not cloyingly so. That makes sense. The whole bottle only has 4g of sugar in it. It is also tangy. There's still a medicinal quality about it, but it's not unpleasant. I don't know that ...

I'm moving my blog to more incorporate other interests (and maybe post more often). The new blog will be:  http://stitchbypen.blogspot.com/ Wednesday on the New Blog will be Weird Food Wednesdays and will also be posted here (at least for a while).

I just remembered that I was also supposed to do a thing on kefir, a drinkable yogurt, as a request of a friend. I typically do not drink anything more creamy than 2% milk, but I like a challenge obviously. Probably one of the healthier things I've had in my life Kefir is technically a fermented milk drink. It's described in all the things I read as "bubbly" but it's not any more bubbly than milk. I drank the vanilla flavor because the idea of plain anything doesn't quite sit well with my mental stomach (just like sour cream and mayo). It has a tang, like yogurt. I can drink a glass and feel fine about it after, but it would probably not be my first choice of drink. In my list of "yogurts" I would probably put it about the level of Greek-style yogurt, below skyr and above the artificial sweet of "regular."

I like to eat yogurt. Typically I'd eat things like Yoplait or Stonyfield. I have great memories of custard-style lemon yogurt from my childhood. So, we decided to try every type of yogurt we could find in the surrounding area. Boring old yogurt Regular yogurt: I like this okay. It's milky and a bit creamy, comes in lots of flavors and has good health benefits, but often has artificial ingredients that I don't really like. Plain yogurt is sour, but the flavors that are usually added cover the sour flavor with sweet. It also comes in containers to make it easier for kids to eat, like gogurt (dressed up almost like an ice pop) or, as they serve it in my school, in containers the kids can crunch up. This is found pretty much anywhere and has been around a long time. I liked the whipped kinds when I was younger, but they have been replaced by "thick and creamy" kinds which are almost more like custard than the honey-thick of typical yogurt. Look, honey in...

I was inspired to write because we are having a new ingredient with our dinner tonight. Unfortunately neither asparagus nor stewed chicken and rice is weird enough for this blog. So, I decided to go with pho (pronounced like "fun" without the 'n'), a food we've eaten for years but is relatively unknown to most of our friends. The Wikipedia image for Pho Pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup. Usually it has a variety of beef cuts (typically you can choose which cuts you want), rice noodles, onions, broth, and comes with condiments of bean sprouts, basil, lime and jalapenos. The broth takes a really long time to make and the taste varies wildly between recipes and places. It's a beef broth with things like charred onion and ginger, star anise, cardamom, coriander, fennel, and clove. I enjoy the ones that are more full-bodied. I've been to one place where it tasted like powdered soup packets. The sheer size of servings are amazing, particularly when (at lea...