In My Kitchen is another place I spend much of my time. So from time to time I will be writing about our Vegan journey. We still enjoy festively with traditional recipes so our life is not strictly Vegan.
Dinner time generates deep emotional memories for me. My mothers kitchen has always been a very happy place for me. My dad worked evenings and as a little child I recall being woken up by the smell of mom cooking him dinner, usually based in sautéed garlic.
As a teen we always ate dinner as a family, Mom & dad and 6 children, plus any friends who stayed for supper. We had a long table with picnic style benches and lots of chairs to add around the corners when necessary. My favorite memory was coming home from school and seeing a pot of spaghetti sauce starting on the stove, and the aroma deepening throughout the afternoon as the meatballs and sausages were cooked and added into the pot. And snitching a taste of a meatball or the sauce on a slice of white bread.
I loved Home Economics in school, both the sewing and the cooking. I still use the pie crust recipe from my High School class. I later tutored for a family who were Shaklee representatives and learned an amazing amount about nutrition for special health needs and saw first hand the positive results of attention to wholistic nutrition.
As a wife I have always focused on heart healthy diets, in the early years focusing on low salt, which equaled cooking from scratch. This was a no brainer for me as my mom was my best example. My mom gave me a Fannie Farmer Cookbook as a wedding shower gift which has been my cornerstone for 37 years. And her example later after my father had a heart attack and lived vegetarian – which my mother took on whole heartedly and deliciously!
Currently my husband and I are eating a mostly vegan diet. My husband for health reasons and me because I really want to keep him around for another 37 (or more) years! The issue became how to maintain a good nutritional balance.
The protein connections became apparent to me when I noticed that the weight my husband was loosing was muscle mass in his shoulders. For his height/weight my husband’s diet should include @82grams of protein per day. Sounds straightforward, but that equals 5 cups of lentils, 5 cups of chickpeas, 10 cups of green peas, 7 cups of barley or 4 cups of tofu!
So now everything I cook needs to be though about in terms of protein, flavor and variety in our meals. It is good we love Indian, Mexican, Italian and Chinese food these cultures have been doing plant based protein brilliantly forever. To that end I bought my husband two cookbooks pictured above, as well as using lots of great sources on the internet. Ultimate Veg by Jamie Oliver has the nutritional information done for me, Forks Over Knives by Del Sroufe does not. So far Mike and I have liked the recipes from both books.
So stayed tuned for our adventures In My Kitchen.
On My Desk and In My Heart 