The Winter of Joe
(This was originally going to be a Tweet about the veggie torta, but since I couldn’t fit it easily into a 14o character post, it turned into a much longer blog post.)
Happy New Year!
Meagan is off to Casper, Wyoming for six weeks for her surgery clerkship, making me home alone with the dog. My friends have dubbed the period “The Winter of Joe” (ala the Seinfeld “Summer of George” episode), under the presumption that more snowboarding and debauchery will happen. While perhaps somewhat true, the truth is that I miss my girl already. (Google Video Chat, however, is coming in pretty handy.)
I also have several more holistic goals in mind for the next few weeks. One of them is to cook more vegetarian dishes. I doubt I’ll ever give up meat, as I simply enjoy it to much, but since reading Mark Bittman‘s “Food Matters” book about a year ago, I’ve had the nagging desire to shift towards a more plant-centric diet, for health, environmental, and ethical reasons.
The start of the new year seemed a great time to try it. We just got back from visiting our families over Christmas, and both the Philly and Boston excursions included lots of delicious but overwhelming amounts of food. (We’ve started dubbing these trips as “the eating Olympics”).
So, like seemingly everyone else, eating better and getting back in shape is high on the priority list, and this is my attempt to do something about it. I’ll likely continue to eat as I normally do when I am dining out, but my goal is to cook mostly vegetarian most nights of the week. By mostly vegetarian, I mean using meat predominantly as a flavor or a side instead of as the centerpiece.
Tonight, I started with a vegetarian torta from Food Matters. I added some Guanciale from Salumis for a little flavor but otherwise followed the recipe, using farro (which I love) as the grain. Unfortunately, I made a few mistakes, and the torta didn’t really hold together very well, ending up more like a veggie pilaf than a torta.
At least one of the problems was that I halved the recipe, which wasn’t a good idea for this dish, since less volume gave it less structure (I didn’t really think what a “torta” was when I decided to halve the recipe, and realized it was a bad idea when the recipe called for assembling everything in a cakepan). I likely needed to bake it longer too so it would set up properly. Despite the fall-apart consistency, it still tasted really good.
It’s somewhat ironic that this shift coincides with Meagan being away. She used to be vegetarian and generally prefers to eat less meat than I do. We started dating a little while after she started eating meat again, and I think I might have accelerated that trend!
Time will tell whether this effort will be a short-lived personal fad or not, but at the very least, I am hoping to expand my cooking repertoire and eat a bit more healthily.