Cookstory: January 6, 2013: Serving Satan ... er, seitan.

Morning

Cream Of Wheat. 
I just made it for myself, only because I needed to erase the memory of yesterday's salty disaster. Today: nailed it!


Evening

Balsamic-Roasted Seitan with Cipollini Onions.
Before the start of 2013, Laura pointed out that we needed to get back on the "health horse" (uh ... my horrible, horrible phrase, not hers) and start eating better again. We really had gotten way off track, partly due to laziness, and partly due to stresses in our lives that, quite frankly, made it difficult for me to devote the time to cooking that healthy eating requires. Tonight's dinner was a clear attempt to fall back in step.

The recipe (as well as the mashed vegetables below) comes from Peter Berley's wonderful book, Fresh Food Fast. I love this book because the menus are divided seasonally, which makes it easier for me to know going into a recipe that I'm going to be able to find all the ingredients. (For all the cooking I do, I'm still not very good at knowing instantly what's in season and what isn't. This fact, along with my fear of ever going "off recipe" and ad-libbing in the kitchen, makes it hard for me to feel like I really know jack about cooking.)

I do question Berley's definition of the word "fast" in the title: the recipes don't take that long—if you don't count all the prep. Not counting prep time before any actual cooking starts seems like a total cheat. For instance, the cipollini onions in this recipe needed to be skinned, and Berley suggests blanching them for 30 seconds before removing the skins. But nowhere does it mention how long it takes to get those damn skins off the onions.

Proof that I need to work on my food
photography: It really tasted better than
this picture indicates!

Luckily it was all worth it. And it was worth keeping the actual recipe a bit of a secret from Laura. You see, she's not a huge fan of seitan in general, and had I pitched the recipe to her ahead of time, she probably would have talked me out of doing it. Hey—I knocked out that chicken noodle soup for her yesterday; she owed me one. And if one believes the ends justifies the means, the fact is that she loved the food. The seitan was so wonderfully marinated in a sauce that included some of the best balsamic vinegar in the world from a local oil and vinegar shop), and the onions were unbelievably sweet, almost like fruit. This is definitely a repeat recipe.

Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Parsnips. 
Parsnips are another vegetable that proves to be a hard sell in this family (including me). But here's the thing: we're past Christmas, and we have a few months of yucky winter ahead of us. We gotta find some love in root vegetables one way or another, and there's only so much I can do with potatoes and carrots. I really want to expand the winter menu. So, parsnips get another visit.

I was a little worried about the entire head of garlic in this recipe, but its presence was surprisingly mild in the final dish. I'm figuring this was due to the cooking method: boiling, rather than sautéing, which would have intensified the garlic. I slipped up when I "undermashed" at the end, for fear of overworking the vegetables and making the texture too tough. I ended up with a couple of chunky pieces of parsnips, and the bites that included those chunks brought on a stronger, uneven taste. Other than that, this side was surprisingly yummy, especially when combined with the sauce from the seitan dish.

Well, the kids wouldn't agree. I gave them a small amount of the mashed veggies (I didn't even try them on the seitan dish), and they immediately spotted the "different" taste. "This isn't like the mashed potatoes you usually make," said Zuzu. "These taste like green beans," said Piper. Well, "green beans" made no sense ... but I finally fessed up to the presence of the parsnips, and ended up having to solemnly promise that I wouldn't make THIS kind of mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving.

(But it was still delicious. Really.)