I discovered this video a few weeks ago when someone on either the Fuhrman or McDougall forums mentioned it. I had no time and/or energy to watch it then, so saved it, burned it to a disc, and put it aside for future viewing. I do this with lectures I really want to see because things tend to vanish on-line, and what's there today may not be there tomorrow.
I started watching it in the afternoon and had to pause it to get supper going and take care of a few other things, and didn't get a chance to get back to it until after dinner. By then my husband had collapsed into the bed next to me and was watching along with me.
He was impressed. He said as much as he loves all these new recipes I've been trying out, he wouldn't mind if we went back to the old way of eating we used to do. That was really easy - I made the same foods each day of the week, week after week, with only slight variations. I did as Dr. McDougall says to do - one starch was the centerpiece and the rest of the meal evolved around it. For instance, Monday was usually a casserole with rice or potatoes as the base or a Jeff Novick SNAP meal; Tuesday was rice with veggies and each person chose which sauce between all the soys and terriyaki we have to add to their own bowl; Wednesday was a non-tomato-based pasta dish; Thursday was a potato-based meal; Friday pizza, made with homemade whole wheat crust and either nutritional yeast-based cheese or cheeseless; Saturday was pasta with tomato-based sauce; Sunday was burger or other sandwich day on whole wheat rolls.
Plain and simple. Many potato meals were just baked potatoes with a bowl of veggies on the side and maybe some gravy. Many Wednesday pasta meals were pasta with veggies and either gravy or a nutritional yeast cheese sauce. Saturday pasta was pasta and jarred sauce, nothing else.
When the flu hit, the schedule went out the window, and we had lots of pasta meals, lots of rice and veggie meals, and (big confession here) delivery pizza or Chinese food on days neither of us felt energetic enough to cook.
In-between all this, the elderly relative I mentioned many times before started going downhill fast, and every few days we would get a call from the nursing home, sometimes at 2 am, telling us to meet her in the local hospital's emergency room. After some blood work was done they would admit her with IV fluids running to rehydrate her, and the next day the doctor would send her back to the nursing home. This was repeated a number of times, even after the doctor told the staff at the nursing home her kidney's are failing, there's nothing to be done for her at any hospital. They finally had us sign a DNH - Do Not Hospitalize - form and hospice care was started. Finally the nursing staff at the nursing home realized the end was near, and a week after starting hospice care she died a peaceful death at age 94. So we now had the wake, funeral, and probate details to run around with. During all this my husband and I were still coughing with the flu, and more than once I had to leave the church to go outside with a coughing fit as not to disturb the other mourners.
But now that all this is over with, including the flu (knock wood, cross fingers, say a novena) I started cooking more elaborate meals again, as you saw in the the other posts in this blog. It was nice, getting back in the kitchen, and the meals are definitely tasty. Aside from some of chopping, can opening and bag cutting, they went together pretty easily. But one thing most of these meals have in common is the large number of ingredients. 8 to 12 ingredients in some of these "quick and easy" recipes!
Then we watched this video:
And now we're thinking of going back to our simpler meals. It'll certainly save time in the kitchen and grocery shopping, and may even save us a bit of money, too. Go back to making up pans full of roasted veggies, mashed potatoes/Caulipots and gravy, pasta with some jarred sauce and a handful of kale or spinach tossed in, even a loaf of homemade whole grain bread and roasted red pepper hummus. Good, decent food.
Maybe it's time we returned to eating like the low class vegans that we are.
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