Eating Seasonally
As any good foodie worth their salt knows, it’s always important to eat food that is in season. Then you’re assured of the freshest, most nutritious, healthiest options in your diet. So when I went shopping in my conventional supermarket over the weekend, I was delighted to discover the arrival of one of my favorite seasonal food products – Mallomars! They’re a decades old treat from Nabisco that I remember eating as a child. When I was older and couldn’t find them in the store, I thought they had been discontinued. Happily I discovered that Mallomars were still produced by Nabisco, but they’re only available during the cold months – a classic seasonal food. I guess it has something to do with the shelf stability of the chocolate coating on the marshmallow.
So if you too are a foodie who works hard to eat seasonally, I urge you to buy yourself a box of these delicious treats before, like Persephone of Greek mythology, Mallomars have to go underground for another six months.
Bye Bye Christmas Cookies
The holidays are winding down and there go my excuses for baking Christmas cookies. After all, Christmas cookies in September just don’t have the same appeal. So bye bye butter, bye bye sugar, bye bye vanilla, bye bye red and green decorations, until we meet again next December.
Hello New Year’s Resolutions…
Happy New Year!
Lunch and Dinner
Christmas preparations and family activities away from home and out of the kitchen over the past several days. I’d be completely done with the kitchen after my morning oatmeal – with maple syrup, my new favorite sweetener – was consumed. Have I told you about this new breakfast habit. I wake up in the morning and just can’t wait to make my bowl of oatmeal, maple syrup and rice milk. Sad, I know. But it makes me feel warm, full, and happy every day and I don’t become hungry until lunchtime. Lunchtime, which brings me back to the original point of this post, lunch and dinner.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that lunch is one of my most problematic meals. Nothing ever seems really good for lunch. I don’t want to take the time to cook since I’m in the middle of my work day, and I usually don’t feel like pj&j. So I’m stuck with some leftovers that no one else has eaten. Unless I’ve planned ahead, taken care of myself and prepared some Lunch and Dinner – one meals that extends to multiple meals. This is my secret strategy to make sure lunch doesn’t leave me feeling hungry, sending me back to the kitchen for snacks. And the perfect meal for making Lunch and Dinner is macaroni and cheese. I love a good macaroni and cheese, don’t you?
The first time I ever prepared it was in my 7th grade cooking/home-ec class, which was probably the only home-ec class our school had. Without giving you all of the off topic details, and losing you to a funny blog, I’ll just tell you that I went to high school in a Manhattan office building and we had our cooking/home-ec class in a classroom using electric cooking equipment. One of my favorite recipes from that class, and the only one I remember, is tomato macaroni and cheese made with canned tomato soup. I guess it stood out because my mother never made homemade macaroni and cheese (probably not Italian enough for our family) and the only kind I ever had was the Stouffer’s frozen variety, which I loved. So learning a new spin on mac ‘n cheese was memorable.
I didn’t really cook mac ‘n cheese again until I was married and then I tried to recreate the high school recipe, more or less successfully. Then, over the years, especially since I had kids, I began to explore every variation of mac ‘n cheese I could lay my hands on. Because, as regular readers know, it runs counter to my life mission to cook any recipe more than once. Have I lost you yet?
About ten years ago I followed Weight Watchers and lost some poundage. Part of my strategy was to buy lots of frozen diet meals and eat them for lunch. But very quickly my palate detected all of the preservatives and artificial ingredients in the meals. Eventually, the only one I could tolerate was – no surprise – macaroni and cheese! Still, I didn’t feel particularly virtuous filling my freezer with these expensive, high sodium meals, and I stopped buying them.
One day a stroke of brilliance cut through my dull stupidity, and I realized I could make my own frozen lunches. Therefore, any time I cook a big tray of macaroni and cheese for dinner, I make sure to save small, single portion sized containers of it in my freezer. And one wonderful macaroni and cheese dinner turns into Lunch and Dinner. Tah Dah!