ROTR

I made it!

Yesterday, in just about 11 hours, I prepared six recipes to completion, started a seventh based on leftover ingredients, and left the kitchen cleaner than it was when I began the project.

Why?

Because my darling wife loves cooking from scratch, but doesn't want to get burnt out on it, and I haven't done a lot of intense food preparation for a spell. So I offered to spend an entire day cooking as many meals as I possibly could, so neither of us would have to think about it for a few days.

How?

The day before, we bought some ingredients, loosely based on some recipes in Dr. Joel Fuhrman's books, and including some other ingredients that we just like to have around.

The morning of, I transcribed the recipes to paper using the "tabular recipe notation" showcased at Cooking for Engineers. For example, the "Veggie 'Meat' Loaf" recipe:

I then created a rough schedule for the day across two sheets of paper, with recipes in columns and each row containing actions to be taken for each recipe. The rule of thumb: nothing within each row should contend with another thing. If two ovens are needed, defer one of the recipes to a later row where the oven is no longer in use by another recipe.

The schedule was key for keeping the flow going with so much resource contention -- there's only three burners that work well on our stove, and we only have one oven, yet three recipes used the stove and three used the oven.

Here's my schedule, complete with markups as I altered it:

What?

Ingredients available when I started: diced tomatoes, pumpkin, tomato paste, barley, quinoa, brown rice, yellow split peas, garbanzo beans, red kidney beans, blackeye peas, great northern beans, oatmeal, oat flour, whole wheat flour, pastry flour, dark rye flour, lemons, tomatoes, garlic, sweet onions, red onion, yellow bell pepper, red bell pepper, raw sunflower nuts, walnuts, raw almonds, dates, raisins, jalapeños, carrots, celery, green onions, romaine lettuce, cabbage, spinach, apples

Ingredients now available: diced tomatoes, pumpkin, barley, quinoa, brown rice, blackeye peas, great northern beans, oatmeal, oat flour, whole wheat flour, dark rye flour, lemons, tomatoes, garlic, jalapeños, romaine lettuce, spinach, apples

Ingredients untouched by this project: diced tomatoes, pumpkin, brown rice, jalapeños, romaine lettuce, spinach

Prepared dishes now available for us to choose from: tons of Cabbage Raisin Soup, 4 servings Quinoa in Color (already gone!), a Veggie "Meat" Loaf, several snackfuls of Apple Walnut Surprise, 12 Whole Wheat/Rye Burger Buns, 25 Bean Burgers (and some salad crumblings from the ones that fell apart).

On the way: Something with the leftover sunflower nuts and almonds (currently soaking) and walnuts; the leftover raisins and dates (currently soaking); and canned pumpkin. My wife wants to turn it into a pudding of sorts. :)

So?

Both parents needn't worry about preparing food for some time.

I want to do this again, with regularity, helpers, more ingredients, even more food in mind, and perhaps with extended family from time to time.

This time around, I did it alone (I didn't even ask for help from my wife until all the kids were in bed!) since I had never synchronized so many food preparation tasks at once, and thought that keeping the kitchen off-limits to everyone but myself for most of the day would help keep the flow smooth (it did).

It was tremendous fun. Next time I'll have even more fun!

Four times, in eight twirls of the Magic Bullet, for four people this morning:

• Add, then blend:
  • 1/4 C rice milk
  • 1 heaping TB fresh ground flaxseed
• Add, then blend:
  • 2" diameter wad of fresh spinach leaves
  • 1 banana
  • 1 heaping TB peanut butter
  • 1 heaping TB cocoa powder
  • drizzle of real maple syrup
  • 1/4 C water

This morning, I made an interesting batch of oatmeal. As is usual in recent times, I left any sort of sweetener out. The dish begged for a little bit of honey though. And of course, we wanted to get the benefits of raw flax and pumpkin seeds since we had some around.

It's usually a chore to get our six-year-old to eat a lot of ground flax or even more than a few pumpkin seeds. Here was my solution for getting around that:

• Put some flax seeds and pumpkin seeds in a blender or Magic Bullet container.
• Soak them for at least 30 minutes; even better if you soak them overnight.
• Drain water off. Quickly rinse if you've soaked overnight.
• Add some honey, to taste. This is the key to getting kids to eat it. The more nuts that they put on their oatmeal, the more honey they get.
• Add a dash of soy or rice milk, to thin it out and promote whipping.
• Blend everything for about a minute, preferably with a blade designed for whipping.

It turned out very fluffy, only lightly sweet, and very delicious.

Instead of "Do I have to eat pumpkin seeds?" or "Only a little bit of flax, please", our son told us instead to put five spoonfuls of the nut butter on his oatmeal!

If you were curious about the oatmeal, here it is:

• Cast-iron skillet to medium high. Don't worry about preheating.
• Add lots of oats, some 7-grain cereal, and a little bit of Basmati rice.
• Add cinnamon, allspice, and pumpkin pie seasoning.
• Toast it for a while.
• Cut some apples into small pieces.
• Add apples to the dry ingredients and continue cooking/toasting.
• Boil some water in a separate pan while toasting.
• As water gets to boiling, pour a little bit at a time into the skillet and stir it in.
• Eventually, add enough water for everything to soak in for a bit.
• Turn skillet down to low and cover to simmer and keep warm while preparing nut butter.
• Serve hot over frozen blueberries. Add generous portions of nut butter.

When preparing homemade maki-zushi for the first time ever, don't be too liberal with eating the slices that don't end up quite the way you wanted them to appear. Otherwise, you'll do what I did tonight, and enjoy so many without thinking about the fact that you might be eating too much, and you'll end up with a mild stomacheache later on. :)

I have to disagree with the defense lawyers quoted in this article.

Defense lawyers said the first-time parents did the best they could while adhering to the lifestyle of vegans, who typically use no animal products.

The defendants were found guilty of murder and cruelty to children for malnourishing their 6-week-old baby to death with a diet that was mostly soy milk and apple juice.

Um, excuse me, Ms. Sanders and Mr. Thomas... but an infant simply cannot be totally vegan. A baby at six weeks of age should have a diet that predominantly consists of an animal product: his or her mother's milk!

I also think the headline is a little yellow, talking about a “vegan couple found guilty”. More accurately, they could have described them as an “ignorant couple”, but perhaps they could have just left it at “couple”.

It doesn't matter what the parents feed themselves if the child isn't feeding on breastmilk. They could have just as well had a diet consisting entirely of cheeseburgers and soft drinks, and have killed their infant by feeding it cow's milk and apple juice.

This kind of story is one reason why I am so adament about, and dedicated to, feeding my children as healthy as I possibly can, and avoiding as much as possible foods that work against the benefits of a healthy diet.

Feeding children (and equally as important, the parents who care for the children!) correctly is incredibly easy, and works remarkably.

I was incredulous to discover that through the entire article linked to above made absolutely no mention of the diet and nutritional intake of the deceased child or the neglectful parents. Consider this snippet:

Williams told police that the night before she died, Rebecca was pale and seemed "out of it." At one point, the little girl knocked weakly on her parents' bedroom door and softly called for her mommy, but Michael Riley opened the door a crack and yelled at her to go back to her room, Williams said.

Poor Rebecca. Poor Michael Riley, who I can only assume was probably severely malnourished himself and probably still is.

When will our society wake up to this? When will malnourishment and addictions to large food companies' disease-promoting products be given the same treatment in the media as tobacco smoking and abuse of prescription drugs?

Wickwire sent me an interesting site with pictures of 200 calories worth of several foods.

It mentions that the USDA says an average adult needs to consume 2000-2500 calories of food per day to maintain their weight. I personally don't buy into that too much. I prefer to just eat a variety of healthy food until I'm full, and let my body sort out the rest. :)

Mood: agitated but humored.

Why:

Hi, my name is Catherine Adams. I am Corporate Vice President for Worldwide Quality, Food Safety and Nutrition for McDonald's. You are probably wondering, what does that really mean? I'm an expert in food quality and food safety for McDonald's restaurants worldwide.

The above claptrap is a direct quotation from Catherine Adams' bio on the McDonald's Corporate Responsibility Blog (accessed 2007-03-13). I'll spare you the boredom of her résumé that followed. (Summary: she blissfully worked for several animal destruction firms, both commercial and governmental.)

This is a trainwreck! I had to read more. A post on 2007-03-06 spoke of "KPIs" (key performance indicators) such as greenhouse gas emissions, but I assume that most "KPIs" are based on how much money, how much marketshare, how much profit.

How about another KPI: how many people ignore the still-disease-promoting-but-slightly-less-so-and-only-in-select-countries options and go straight for the quicker death instead.

After that, I've had enough. I've chosen to avoid the McDonald's train wreck today and as long as possible into the future. The last time I stopped at McDonald's was to get a salad, which was basically overpriced fruits and vegetables.

That was a lame experience. It made me sad that I used to be one of those people that I now saw from an anthropological point of view, mindlessly wandering in with a wad of cash (oh wait, now you can use a credit card and carve yourself out a helping of debt while you destroy your body) and then shoving, not just like, but as a true addict, all of the filth that predominates the menu.

It's not just McDonald's. It's other places that used to frequent, or used to only visit on occasion. Innocent people, feeding themselves rubbish and purchasing it to eat when they get home, or to satisfy their addictions on the way home, all the while finding some sort of pseudo-science in the complex and confusing web of nutrition facts that they've learned over the years to justify what they just did. And then feeding their kids that rubbish. And I used to be one of those innocent people; and I used to feed my son that rubbish. (Thankfully I changed my ways early on, and had been raised to at least eat semi-healthfully.)

The trend "feels" to me like it's shifting in favor of true health. I can only hope that this is the case on a global scale, and I can only do whatever I can to help people I know and love discover truths about nutrition themselves. They're truths that many Americans don't want to reckon at first, but that modern science is getting good at pinning down.

Happy eating!

Black Japonica rice, cooked with just water; Finely chopped onion and garlic, briefly sautéed in olive oil; Shredded carrot and beet, and diced butternut squash mixed in and heated; Everything mixed together. Served with homemade whole-wheat bread (thanks A!) and lettuce salad. Followed by a banana, strawberry, blueberry, and soy milk smoothie.

Fantastic! Made lots of leftovers. M tried a bite, but it was a tiny bit too spicy so he stuck to the salad. A enjoyed it, although it was a casualty and came back up in an unrelated incident. A's mom came over for dinner and also liked it. S ate a little bit of it, but he was porking out on carrots, butternut squash, and onion slices as I was preparing it so I don't blame him for being full.

Swiss chard and kale with chopped onions and halved garlic cloves, prepared separately, roughly like this and this. I thought it was awesome. R didn't touch the greens, although he ate some garlic and I believe a piece of onion. M tried a bite of each green, making slightly exaggerated (but seemingly genuine) wretching noises. A ate a bit of it but didn't like how much she had to chew.

Sweet potatoes, over-baked then mashed. Everyone liked these, except R who normally likes them but didn't feel like eating any.

Minnesota wild rice, cooked about 70 minutes. M took a bite because he hadn't tried it before, and because "all we ask is that you try one bite". A thought it tasted a bit like graham crackers.

Everyone else either was full or was given something else to eat to satisfy their appeties; I ate whatever was left on their plates!