Cooking-for-One Part Five and Other Healthy Endeavors

Exercise (like cooking) is one of those things I’ve always---and I do mean always---hated doing. But I recognize the fact that some of the health issues that my husband and I had/have could have been prevented if we had had the same mindset the younger generation has regarding keeping fit. I begrudgingly do a two and a half mile walk twice a week and I pat myself on the back like that’s comparable to running a marathon. I’m even more proud of myself if I let the dog nag me into additional, shorter walks…proud until I run into one of my peers who does an eight mile hike every single day before I even get out of bed. In the winter I do time---like a prison sentence---on my exercise bike and she’s out in the cold, snow and ice still doing her eight mile hike, 365 days a year. If they find her stiff body along side of the road some dark January morning, the victim of a hit-and-run driver I’ll say, “See, I knew exercise was bad for you!”

Food is another matter. I’m really starting to get into the mindset of cooking and eating healthier. Better late than never, as they say. I’m not aspiring to be a vegetarian but I am down to eating meat or fish every third or forth day and I’ve added fruits and vegetables to my weekly shopping list that until this year I’ve never even tasted. Heck, I’m even making kale chips. Can you believe that, the woman who used to think the kitchen was just a room you walk through to get to the garage is making kale chips! The cooking-for-one series of classes I’ve been taking has done a sneaky good job of selling the eat-for-good-health life style. But the biggest attraction, to me, is the simple fact that if you don’t have to learn to cook things with faces it cuts down on the stuff you have to know how to do in the kitchen.

This week’s cooking-for-one class was all about using herbs. I learned that in order to eat healthier all by myself I have to go down my basement and find some old fruit jars to turn into containers to keep fresh herbs in my refrigerator. Imagine that! I learned I have to buy a mortar and pestle to make herb pestos that I can use two dozen ways including as rubs for grilling vegetables, in scrambled eggs or as a dressing for pasta or to freeze in ice cube trays to add to those pots of beans and soups I’m suppose to make next winter. I also learned that I need to move next door to a sharing master gardener who has a huge herb garden because there’s no way I’m going to be tempted to buy herb plants at the farmer’s market this weekend. Well, maybe one or two to go along with that smelly little basil plant I bought a month ago at the grocery store.

In the year or two before Don died I started watching the Food Network and to amuse him I’d often mimic their stars when I’d fix and plate dinner. I was more Lucy Ball than an Iron Chef but it would make him laugh and maybe make him forget that I was “cooking” from boxes, cans and take-out menus. Now that my cooking classes are at an end and I actually do more cooking from scratch I ordered myself a present: a set of chef’s knives I’ve had on my wish list for almost a year. If I cut myself and bleed to death the first time I use them I hope my nieces will send them back for a refund. They cost a fricking fortune! Who would have guessed a woman my age could have so many new kitchen gadgets on her wish list? Next thing you know I’ll be lusting after a salad spinner to dry off all the fresh herbs my factious new neighbor will share with me across her white picket fence. I wonder if House Hunters on HGTV could actually find me a home with a neighbor like that. Oops, my imaginary, ideal neighbor is distracting me from my cooking classes.

Back on track. Do you want to know what the most important things I learned about cooking-for-one are? It really boils down to four basic concepts: 1) Learn to love your sauté pan; 2) learn to love cooking in foil or parchment packets; 3) rethink how you define a meal, and 4) cook less, eat closer to the earth. ©

Kale Chips

One bunch of kale

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 teaspoon of sea salt or seasoning salt

1. Preheat an oven to 350 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
2. With a knife or kitchen shears carefully remove the leaves from the thick stems and tear into bite size pieces. Wash and thoroughly dry kale with a salad spinner. Drizzle kale with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.
3. Bake until the edges are brown but are not burnt, 10 to 15 minutes.
4.  

Basil and Parsley Pesto

1 cup fresh basil leaves
1/4 cup fresh parsley leaves
1/8 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/4 cup olive oil
1 garlic cloves
1/8 cup pine nuts
Salt

Directions: Using a pestle and mortar, combine the basil and the parsley and crush until a paste starts to form. Add the rest of the ingredients and continue to crush until a creamy paste has formed.

The Widow's Kitchen: Part Three Cooking-For-One

It’s an understand statement to say that the cooking class I signed up for---Cooking-For-One---isn’t what I thought it would be. The dietitian teaching the series announced at the beginning of our third session: “Beans, beans, are not the musical fruit. The more you soak the LESS you’ll toot!” Oh, my gosh! Two hours on identifying, cooking, storing and tasting beans is not something I expected to do on a fine April day in middle America. “Slow soak. Hot soak. Quick soak. Gas-free soak.” Who cares? Mashed pinto beans on pizza? Really? Who makes pizza for one? And don’t pretend a six inch tortilla is as good as pizza crust. I’m not that gullible. In fact, talking about pizza for one made me realize I miss pizza! A gooey, cheesy thick crust pizza supreme, I haven’t had any since Don passes away. Every so often we’d drop the dog off at doggie daycare, and then we’d go into town for a pizza. I’ll bet Levi misses those play dates as much as I miss the pizza.

Back on topic: The class instructor seem to think whatever we make we can add protein packed beans to it---tuna melts, banana or zucchini bread, brownies, salads, waffles, etc. I’m surprised she didn’t give us a recipe for a bean facial scrub. But I must say, the bun-less black bean burgers we had in class topped with a mixed bean salsa, avocado and sour cream was tasty. And the white bean pancakes with strawberries the dietitian also served I would order in a restaurant. But would I make them? No. Making a big batch of something like pancakes, then freezing part of them to pop into a toaster later on is not the kind of cooking-for-one I envisioned learning how to do. Duh, I can split recipes to freeze without a class and it's rubbing salt in the widow's wound when you have to cook like that---or is it just me?. Besides, I’ll bet the Iron Chefs on the Food Network never freeze a batch of pancakes or a half a can of beans to use later on. I don’t want to be an old widow with a freezer full of split recipes. Hey, that might make a good episode of Chopped, though. Open up a widow’s freezer and empty it out for the mystery baskets full of ingredients for their cook-offs contests.

I may poke fun of taking an entire cooking class about beans or say that splitting recipes makes me sad. I may say I didn’t learn anything useful for a woman living alone but being in the class, sampling and laughing was a fun way to spend an afternoon. Plus I got a cute little booklet of 50 ways to add beans to your diet with the advice that we each need to eat a half to a full cup of beans a day. Who does that? Certainly not me but the class did bring back a funny memory of Don. He once asked me to buy him a half a dozen cans of beans for an upcoming hunting trip. It was a guy thing and something to do with a yearly farting contest. “Beans, beans, the musical fruit. They drive your tent mates outside while you toot.” ©

Spicy Roasted Cinnamon Chickpeas  (I liked these!)

Ingredients

1 15oz. can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

½ t cumin

½ t paprika

½ t cinnamon

¼ t coriander

¼ t cloves

¼ t kosher salt

⅛ t cayenne pepper

⅛ t smoked paprika

1 tablespoon parsley, finely chopped

Instructions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees and spray a baking sheet with cooking spray.

Combine all ingredients except parsley in a small bowl and toss to fully coat.

Spread chickpeas out on baking sheet and roast for 30 minutes, tossing 2-3 times.

Add the parsley before serving. Experiment with various combinations of spices and try adding nuts for variation.

Cooking- for-One Posts

The posts linked below where written about a series of cooking-for-one classes I've been taking. If anyone has a good cooking-for-one tip or easy recipe to share please feel free to do so in the comment box below.

Cooking-for-One: Part One

The Widow's Kitchen : Part Two

The Widow's Kitchen: Part Three

Cooking-for-One Part Five and other Healthy Endeavors

The Culinary Class - Thai


Other food and diet related posts found in this blog:

Doctors, Dentists and Widows on Diets

The Widow and the Culinary School

Widows on Diets and Lost Horizons

Circus Acts and Widows Who Bake Bread

Guilt and Grief on the Pantry Shelves, Dust Bunnies Under the Bed

The Widow's Ktichen: Cooking-For-One Part Two

We used to know a carrot farmer and he told us to never to buy carrots without smelling them. Back in those days---15-16 years ago---3^rd world countries used Kerosene for herbicides and if you have a good nose you could detect the toxic stuff with the sniff test. I was reminded of this in my cooking-for-one class this past week and of another story he told about how orange carrots became the color of choice. Carrots used to grow naturally in a rainbow of colors, but in the 17^th century a Dutch grower started cultivated the orange carrots as a tribute to William of Orange who, as the story goes, led the struggle for Dutch independence. Over a generation the purple, white and yellow carrots fell out of favor and the rest is food growers’ history. It’s funny how things in life come full circle. Recently our local supermarket started selling the heritage colored carrots and the skinny dietitian teaching my class is singing their praises. She says they are more nutritious than the orange, especially the ones that get machine shaped and polished---those cute little “baby carrots” I’ve been buying for years.

The dietitian should have called the course, How-Not-to-Cook-So-Much-for-One. By the time we get through all six sessions she’ll have us grazing in the fields and orchards in her campaign to get us away from processed foods, time-consuming cooking and ingredients that come with long labels filled with unpronounceable words. She’s a vegan but claims she’s not trying to turn us into one. Ya, sure. Is that why this week’s class was about all about using nutrient rich whole grains without a bite of meat in sight? She’s got me wondering, though, if I haven’t been feeding the birds and rabbits better/healthier than I feed myself. Karma is laughing at me through this class, I just know it. I never took an interest in cooking in my younger years and the very first cooking course I sign up in for in my entire life seems to be all about cooking less and eating closer to the earth.

The grains and pseudo-grains we sampled in class were all new to me---bulgur, farro, wheatberries, quinoa, spelt, triticate and amaranth---but they were surprisingly good mixed with varying combinations of things like fresh spinach, tomatoes, feta cheese, olive oil, garlic, mustard, balsamic or raspberry vinegar, cranberries, apples, oranges, agave, and pecans. She says these grains are easy to slip into any salads and soups, have a long shelf life for single living and freeze well in small batches after cooking. So turn your ice cube trays into grain trays if you want to be healthy in your widowhood---that’s my big take-away from the class. You never know when you’ll get the burning urge to plop a cube of grain on your dinner salad or in a mini-crockpot of soup.

My second cooking-for-one tip I offer with apologies to the swine population and while wearing ear muffs so I don’t have to listen to the vegetarians and vegans yelling at me. It’s something I learned from a Food Network magazine and have been doing for a year now: roll your bacon before freezing it (see the photo above). And the next time I’m waiting the 6-7 minutes for a slice or two of bacon to defrost I will take a moment to thank the organic food industry for making ancient and Old World grains new again. According to the class dietitian they are easy grains for small farmers to grow without using pesticides---and presumably without Kerosene---than the better known grains we’re used to see coming from the big, chemical dependent factory farms. Who knew I’d have to get old and widowed before appreciating the value of making grain porridge. ©

The Widow's Kitchen - Cooking for One

I have bit of a reputation in the cooking department and it’s not a good one. Long story, short all of my opportunities to learn to cook came mostly for family parties where everyone would bring a dish to pass. Let’s just say that after you bring bright pink potatoes salad to a fourth-of-July picnic no one asks you to bring it again. (I was trying out a recipe that combined beets and potatoes but I made a fatal mistake of combining the ingredients too soon.) Early on in our relationship my husband’s family took pity on me and whenever there was a family get-together I’d be asked to bring chips or something that didn’t require a trip into the dark, unused recesses of my kitchen. With my family, I could make a good three bean, marinated salad and they were okay with me bringing that to any and all events. They knew my talents ran in different directions so my lack of culinary skills was never a running joke with them like it was/still is with Don’s family.

Anyway, I have a limited range of things I can make and most of what I can do successfully---like a pot roast dinner or chili---you can’t make for one person living alone. So here I am, a widow with time on her hands and a new plan. I’m going to teach myself how to do things in the kitchen and at least once a week I’m actually going to make a meal using an ingredient or method I’ve never tried before. As my mother used to say, you’re never too old to learn something new. I’m not sure if she was talking about me or the dog but, what the heck, this is my story so I can tell it any way I want. Jeez, now that I think about it what she actually said was, “You can’t learn any younger. Just do it!” I was a stubborn child.

As I mentioned in my 2/15/13 post I went to my first ‘cooking for one’ class at the senior center. But one thing the dietitian teaching the class said won’t leave my thoughts. She said when cooking for one you have to rethink what your conception of what a meal is. A meal, she said, can be something as simple as guacamole on whole wheat crackers with a baked pear for dessert. This was a startling concept for me to wrap my head around, having grown up in an era when a home-cooked dinner always had to have meat, potatoes, vegetables, bread and dessert and later on having hung around Don’s family full of gourmet cooks. But her comment got me wondering if I can actually come up with a month’s worth of recipes to serve one that are easy-to-make dinners.

After class I stopped by the store and bought my second ever avocado to test the dietitian’s premise. When I cut the avocado open the way the she did in class it dawned on me why I had so much trouble opening a mango I tried doing a while back. I was trying to use the same method of cutting all the way around it then twisting the two halves to free it from the pit. But mangoes don’t have a nice round ball-like pit like an avocado and all I did was create a mess. Color me embarrassed. I haven’t tried opening a mango since. Someone should tell the gods of fruit to start growing them all with peels like bananas. I'm sure we'd all eat more fruit if they did.

One thing I’ve already figured out by reading recipes that are supposed to serve just one or two is often times you still have to buy ingredients in larger quantities than you’ll use. What’s a widow living alone supposed to do with a left-over ½ a can of something or seven tortilla shells? Get a deep-freezer the size of Rhode Island? Oh, my God, now I remember one of the reasons why I hate cooking: wastefulness. I need to watch more episodes of the Iron Chef hoping they can brain-wash me into throwing more stuff out. Have you ever noticed how often they discard ingredients that aren’t the perfect size, color or quality? Those people would die of culinary shock at my house where this “cook” has been programmed to eat what I burn because children in China will starve to death if I waste anything. Bottom line: my widow’s kitchen is now open for business so if you have any tips or tricks send them my way. ©

P.S. Here’s my first tip: Don’t order a cooking for one cookbook for your Kindle. Sometimes you actually need real pages to thumb through and an index you can get at easily.

Widows on Diets and Lost Horizons

I have been dieting since I came here by way of the womb. Today I had to take a link out of my watch because it was sliding around too much. Darn it, who cares about my wrists losing weight! I didn’t give up Ben and Jerry’s American Dream ice cream for smaller wrists. How did that happen? Last week I shoveled snow 3-4 times a day for five days in a row and I was as so happy, thinking all that exercise was going to result in my pants feeling too big. Nope, it had to be my wrists that got smaller. I was so hungry last week with all that shoveling and cold air that I told the dog to stay clear or he’d find himself in the microwave.

Today I’m supposed to send my doctor another fatty-fatty-two-by-four Accountability Report and this month’s email can’t be written by my Ms. Sunshine persona. After a few ups and down I’ve plateaued with only a two pound loss for this month. How will he react? Will he let me slide by on my laurels? After all, over the past four months I’ve lost the extra pounds I put on in my first nine months of widowhood which is what he wanted me to do. But will that be enough to make him happy? Will he want to haul my butt down to his office to admire my slimmer wrists if I mention them in my report? I could just “forget” to send the email. He won’t miss it what with all the people coming in to his office for stuffy noses, acid reflect and cancer.

Yesterday I went to the first of six “cooking for one” classes that I signed up for at the senior hall. This month’s class was on making healthier deserts. The instructor, a wee-little dietitian from the health department, wasn’t the least bit intimidated by cooking in front of 15 women who all probably had at least 40 years of cooking experience under their belts----that’s 600 combined years in the kitchen! No matter what questions were asked the young dietitian had an answer and a lot of the questions went right over my head. I didn’t know, for example that good vanilla has alcohol in it let alone where to buy Madagascar bourbon vanilla in town. Nor did I know that vegans don’t use honey.

Apparently we’re going to use a lot of vegan recipes in these classes. After hearing that I decided to swing by the grocery store on the way home and pick up a couple of Black Angus steaks before the classes start making me feel guilty for eating things with faces. Today we got to sample vegan chocolate pudding made with avocados and she made fruit chai chutney that we’re suppose to use every which way except on Sundays. They both tasted great but I can’t picture myself making something that would tempt me to eat it all in one setting. How is that any different than having Ben and Jerry’s in the freezer? Silly question. Thanks to the class I actually know the answer---it’s all about the nutrient values in the calories we eat. If I’m going to live to be 100 I suppose I should start caring about stuff like that.

I started reading a book for the first time since Don passed away. I used to read all the time, belonged to a book club and couldn’t leave the house without a book for fear I’d have a spare moment and be caught without something close at hand to read. I lost my concentration for reading when grief settled in for the long haul but for some reason an old classic caught my attention last week---Lost Horizon which was written in 1933---and since I escaped reading it in the past I figured it was something I needed to do. I’m not enjoying the writing style and the character development was so slow in the first 50 pages I could have baked brownies in between descriptions of the main character’s facial features. I’m three-quarters of the way through the book and the only memorial thing the 200 year old High Lama of Shangri-La has said was, “Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue.” Maybe more enlightening dialogue will come in the next quarter of the book. I hope so. What good is longevity if wisdom doesn’t come with it? If I had picked up this book while Don was still alive I would have quit reading it by page fifty. But I’m afraid if I quit the book I won’t pick up another for years and I don’t want that to happen.

I talked to a woman from my old book club recently and she said it took her five years to find the concentration to read again after her husband passed away. Sad, isn’t it, that widowhood affects us in so many imperceptible ways. Ways that are not like changes in our weight where a doctor notices and becomes a cheerleader to set our bodies back to square one again. No one notices lost concentration and if they did they wouldn't ask us to send an accountability report when we’re trying to get it back. No one notices or expects an accountability report when tingles of sadness come with signing up for classes on cooking for one. We widows move ahead in such tiny steps---like the character development in Lost Horizon---that we can look like we’re standing still. But we’re not and that’s worth celebrating with Ben and Jerry’s. Oops! You didn’t hear that. ©