Meatless Meal - Chilean Dal

In an ongoing effort to decrease my environmental footprint, I've been experimenting with meatless meals. Meat uses up a lot more resources than vegetables/grains, so by decreasing my meat consumption I become more environmentally friendly!


The latest experiment is a Chilean Dal recipe that I found at The Simple Dollar. I give it maybe 2 stars out of 5. I made a few substitutions (I don't like cooked carrots, so I threw in some tofu and broccoli) and I just didn't have any cilantro. I found that the recipe made A LOT of food, even though Trent's version was already cut down from the version he first found. We had three adults for dinner, and I have enough for at least 3-4 more meals for myself (I doubt my husband will eat this). I have to admit I found the recipe to be disappointingly bland. The salt and pepper to taste help, but it needs something more. Hot sauce also helped. Maybe the addition of some curry paste, or a lot more onion and garlic. If I try this recipe again I'll try spicing it up a bit. I doubt I'll be cooking it anytime soon, I'm sure I can find other recipes that are more to my family's taste.

Trent’s Chilean Dal

1 cup of lentils
1 large red potato, chopped but unskinned
1 chopped carrot
2 chopped tomatoes
1/2 hot pepper, chopped
1/2 small onion chopped
1 clove garlic chopped
8 ounces tomato sauce (small can)
1/2 tsp cumin
1 tbsp beer or sherry
olive oil
1/8 cup chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

Night before:
1. Chop potato, carrot, tomatoes, pepper, onion, garlic, and cilantro.
2. Soak and cook lentils till soft. Drain and rinse, set aside.

Next day:
1. Sautee onions, garlic, hot pepper, and cumin in olive oil. Add beer or sherry.
2. Add vinegar, potatoes, and carrots, cover with water, bring to boil.
3. Add tomatoes and cook till potatoes are soft.
4. Add lentils and tomato sauce.
5. Salt and pepper to taste. Add more water or beer if it’s too dry, or add hot sauce if you like it spicier.
6. Throw in the cilantro, take if off the heat. Serve after a few minutes.

Meatless Meal - 'Spaghetti'

Time for another meatless meal (so long as you use meat-free sauce)! This one is probably the easiest no-meat main dish you could make. I got the idea for The Biggest Loser cookbook which had a similar recipe (though they probably didn't put as much parmesan on their plate as I did on mine).

'Spaghetti'
Ingredients:
1 Spaghetti Squash
1 Jar pasta sauce, or homemade

First you need to cut the squash in half, lengthwise and hollow out the seeds. At this point the squash looks nothing like spaghetti, which made me worry I'd bought the wrong kind the first time. No worries! It'll look like spaghetti later.


Next, place each half cut side down on a cookie sheet. Cook in the oven for 30-45 minutes at 350 degrees, or until the squash is soft when you poke it with a fork. Make sure you're poking the inside of the squash, not the skin or you'll end up overcooking (I speak from experience here).

Take the squash out of the oven, use a fork to scrape the squash into a bowl. This is where it looks like spaghetti. It's also a bit watery so you may want to drain after scooping.

Place squash on plate, spoon some sauce over the squash and you have an acceptable substitute for spaghetti.


I served this with some fresh green beans and garlic bread, which were great complements to the squash. I enjoyed the meal, and so did my guests. In fact, one of them even asked me how I got the pasta to be so translucent! I can see this being made at my house again, though probably not very often since my husband believes squash were not meant to be eaten. I felt the same way, but this doesn't taste too much like squash, more like whatever sauce you use.

Is It Green?

I was heading to a party this past weekend and wanted to bring a gift that would be cool and green at the same time. After a bit of thought, I decided on a cut fruit basket...what could be greener than fruit, even if it does have to travel a little bit? I thought this way I'd avoid adding clutter and stuff to someone else's house. But was it really a green gift? When I picked it up, this is what I was given.



I was a bit disappointed in the amount of wrapping and packaging, but the cardboard is recyclable, and I understand that as a business, if you're sending someone home with cut fruit you'd like it to be covered in plastic.

Here's the basket ready to eat...looks pretty green, right?


Unfortunately, this company skewered all the fruit on plastic rather than wooden skewers. And they're stuck in some kind of florist's foam block to keep them standing upright. However, the fruit tasted great, the basket looked great, and with a few small changes I think this could be a really green gift. To make these baskets at home I think all you'd need would be: fruit, melon baller, funky cookie cutter.

Option 1:
Cut the fruit into cool shapes, stick them on a wooden skewer (renewable resource) and use the same kind of foam block and basket as above. Green savings: plastic wrap, cardboard box, plastic skewers. AND the foam and basket are reusable if you're making them for your own party.

Option 2:
This one came to me as I was writing the article, trying to get rid of the foam and basket. At first I thought of just putting the skewers in a vase, but realized the skewers would probably fall in, especially as their numbers dwindles as people ate the fruit. Then I realized you could stick the skewers in some RICE KRISPIE SQUARES! Since you can shape Rice Krispie squares into about any shape you'd like, you could create any number of funky shapes for your skewers. I'd probably start off with just a big rectangle and make a garden of fruit flowers. Green Savings: plastic wrap, cardboard box, plastic skewers, foam block, basket. The only thing that wouldn't be edible would be the wooden skewers, and they're a renewable resource. I can see myself using this option the next time I have a party! :) Extra bonus: no danger of collecting a lot of different baskets in your basement.

UPDATE: I've been told that what I thought was foam was in fact a head of lettuce holding the skewers upright. I love that!

Cooking for the Freezer

Sometimes it's just easier to order out for pizza than it is to cook a meal when you get home from work. Unfortunately, getting it's hard to be green while you're eating takeout - all the containers and driving to deliver the food really add up. Luckily, there's a greener solution that doesn't take much time or effort at all!

Today when I got home from work I started making Black Beans and Rice for dinner (meatless meal!). The recipe says to use a 9x13 pan, but I decided to use a couple of square pans and have one for dinner and one for a future dinner in the freezer. I also doubled the recipe for two more trays to go in the freezer. Here's my trays as they're about to go into the oven.



It takes hardly any more time to put double the ingredients in the bowl, and helps green my life in a number of ways.
1. Cooking all of them at once means that I'm using one hour worth of oven time once instead of 2 or 4 times.
2. Packaging the other 3 trays for the freezer keeps my freezer closer to full, and a full freezer is a more efficient freezer.
3. Next time I'm tempted to just order out for pizza, I can pull one of these out of the freezer. It'll be ready in about the same amount time as ordering out and no takeout containers! And if it's just DH and I eating, we'll have enough for lunch the next day as well. :)
4. Since I doubled the recipe, I won't have to throw out half a can of tomato juice again!

Make sure you let the extra servings cool before you put them into your freezer - no sense in making your freezer work extra hard by throwing them in right away. Since I was planning on eating one for supper, I let the other three cool while the dinner portion cooked the additional 20 minutes with cheese, and while we ate. By the time we were finished, the other three were cool enough to make their way to the freezer. It's a good idea to label the dishes before you freeze them. I wrapped them in tinfoil, but ideally I'd like to get glass containers that have a nice permanent rubber/plastic lid that would go in the freezer and just get removed for the re-cooking. Someday I might even try the Once a Month Cooking plan, but for now I'll just increase my freezer slowly by doubling recipes as I make them!

Local Cider!

Farmer's markets are great in the summer for helping you to Eat Local, but what about drink? Sure, tap water is local, but sometimes you'd like to drink something other than water. If you like beer or wine there are a multitude of local choices for Ontarians. Unfortunately I don't really like either beer or wine. :( What I do like is a nice cider, like Strongbow (England), Blackthorn (England) or Bulmers (Ireland). As you can see from the brackets, my drinks have come a long way to get to my glass.... which is why I was so excited last time I was at the liquor store to see that the cider section has expanded!

Most of the ciders are still from across the ocean, but I brought home a bottle of County Cider from Picton, Ontario, and a bottle of Clos Saint-Denis Bourg from Quebec. Both were excellent ciders, but the County Cider is a bit more economical. The web page for County Cider also shows an ice cider, which I'm interested in trying out someday. While I was writing this article I discovered that you can also search the LCBO inventory to see if your store has particular products in stock. I thought this was pretty cool. For example, here I found that there's an LCBO not far from my work that has a Quebec cider I'd never even heard of, so I might have to stop by on my way home sometime. I wonder if you can use this product list to ask your local store to order in products they don't have on hand - an easy way to help you drink local!

Busy vs. Green

This week I'm going to be a lot busier than I have been for the last little while. I'm leaving the house before 7 a.m. and fighting traffic, then fighting traffic again nine hours later (I hate traffic). So what happens when a busy life collides with green ambitions? Yesterday I noticed that green lost, being busy had a very un-green effect on my lunch. Instead of homemade lunch in reusable containers or on a plate, I packed a microwave meal. You know the kind - a food-like substance sitting on plastic, with plastic film, in a a waxed cardboard container. Even worse, it turns out there was no microwave where I was, so I ended up at Tim Horton's getting lunch served to me in bags :)

As I battled traffic on the way back home, I decided the next lunch would be greener. I'm not a morning person, so getting up even 15 minutes earlier to make a better lunch is not going to happen. For me, the key is going to be finding lunches I can make the night before in a minimal amount of time that will still taste good the next lunch hour. A quick trip to No Frills and I have the makings for some deli sandwiches, fruit, and a treat. The sandwich will be packed in a re-usable container (when you're making lunch the night before, don't put tomatoes on the sandwich, I learned this one the hard way!). The fruit is it's own container. The Ah-Caramels are individually packaged in plastic - too bad but still way better than eating out or microwave meals! If I'd planned better, I would have made a batch of cookies, or another batch of the Chocolate Peanut Squares that would have been ready for this week's lunches. I think I'll try to stock up on some homemade desserts (less packaging), of course then I'll have to store them in the freezer so that they don't get eaten right away!

The Unhealthy Truth Part II

This is Part II of my review of The Unhealthy Truth, written by Robyn O'Brien. You can read the first part of my review here.

After discussing her own story, and the 'allergy epidemic', the rest of the book is devoted to genetic engineering, chemicals in food and how to modify your diet to avoid the worst problem items.

The arguments for and against genetically modified foods are found throughout the rest of the book. O'Brien points out that in many other countries, food containing more than 1% genetically modified ingredients must be labeled as containing GM foods - unlike in the United States (or Canada) where no such labeling exists. She has a point in saying that consumers of GM foods are part of a giant, largely unregulated, science experiment right now, and that they should at least be made aware that they're participating! Though even if consumers decided that they didn't want to be eating corn that contains it's own pesticides, they may not have much choice. According to a USDA figure, 96% of the soy grown worldwide is genetically modified, 80% of the corn, and 86% of the US cotton crop. Throughout the book, interesting stories and tidbits of information can be found. For example, I didn't know that GM crops often have "yield lag" where the yield is actually less than that from traditionally bred seeds.

The Monsanto corporation is also sprinkled liberally throughout the book as one of the leaders in genetically engineered food, and other innovations in food technology. After reading about some of the connections between Monsanto, the FDA and the US government, it's no longer clear who is in charge of ensuring food safety. One of the big items talked about is Bovine Growth Hormone, or rBGH. Given to cows to help increase their milk production, rBGH seems to have a detrimental effect on the cows receiving it; resulting in more antibiotics and shorter life spans. From the book "cows hopped up on rBGH typically live for only about two years after they start receiving the drug. By contrast, cows who aren’t injected with rBGH live on for four to 10 years." Interestingly, milk is NOT something of which there is any shortage in the States, so rBGH increases the supply far beyond what the market can support - hence there are subsidies and some farmers are paid to dispose of their milk. This isn't a concern in Canada, the European Union, Japan, Australia or New Zealand - all of whom have banned the use of rBGH. The use or rBGH may be why milk is on some of the "must have organic" lists coming out of the States, but doesn't often show up on Canadian lists. Other food issues tackled are the use of artifical colouring and the preservative sodium benzoate in soft drinks, and a brief expose of aspartame. You can read about some of the articles she's quoting such as the Southampton Shocker and a three-part investigation of aspartame online.

The information on GM foods and food additives is interesting, but I was most interested in the easy ways to change my diet advertised by the book. Unfortunately, the book falls down in this area. She begins by suggesting that you start small, you don't need to go all organic, chemical free at every meal - which is a good tip. As she mentions, you can't let "the perfect be the enemy of the good". Her list of diet-changing tips includes things like "use half the powder in your package of KD" (eventually moving to real cheese) and "eat fresh vegetables". There are a handful of recipes, but I was hoping for more.

Is the book worth reading? I'd say yes, it's an interesting book, and well-written. I'd borrow from the library rather than buy it though, I don't think it's the kind of book you'll need to re-read or reference often. For those people who are suffering from food allergies or sensitivities, this book could change the way you look at food. In fact, you may not realize you have a food sensitivity until you try cutting out some of the common offenders mentioned. I'm going to make the effort to cut out artificial colouring (good thing I'm almost done the Lucky Charms!) and I'm already working to reduce my pop consumption.

For me, I think the most valuable piece of advice in the book is the list of tips on determining expert/study credibility. According to the novel, 100% of studies that were funded by the food industry found that aspartame was safe or had no detrimental effects on humans. Of the studies not funded by the food industry, 92% found one or more problems with aspartame. Numbers like this make me want to know the details behind the studies we see in the papers every week.

1. Whenever you read or hear an "expert opinion", consider the funding source. Google the name of the doctor, organization, or medical institution and add one or more of the following terms: "disclosure", "speakers bureau", "grant", "consulting fee", or "funding".
2. Insist on full disclosure. If the expert is not forthcoming in disclosing his or her funding, insist upon it. Take it up the chain until you get it from someone at his or her organization. Then share the information: on your Web site, with your friends, in your blog, in e-mails.
3. When considering these experts and their opinions, weigh the influence that patents, royalty fees, speaking arrangements, television appearances, and the like might have on their reputation and financial success. ... Start to picture them like those race car drivers who have their sponsorships and endorsements blazoned across their uniforms.
   

The Unhealthy Truth - Part I

I've been reading a book called The Unhealthy Truth by Robyn O'Brien (foreword by Dr. Kenneth A Bock). There's a lot of information in the book, so I'm going to do a multi-part book review discussing the book and it's information. For this first part, I'll discuss the Foreword up to partway through Chapter 3.

The author, Robyn O'Brien is a mother of four and a Houston native. She started researching childhood allergies when her youngest daughter had a severe allergic reaction to eggs. As she continued researching, she found more and more information that she thought should be shared with everyone, particularly parents of people with allergies. She admits to not being a scientist, but she's certainly shown a passion for research and is the founder of the AllergyKids website.

The book starts out with a very strong message that the world is changing, and environmental changes are causing numerous ailments in today's children - including autism ADHD, asthma, and severe food allergies. They make a compelling argument that improved diagnostics is not the only reason for a dramatic increase in rates of autism, ADHD, asthma and allergies since adults are not showing the same statistical increase, only the children. Throughout the book they mention that since children are more vulnerable to toxic environments, they are acting as our canaries in a coal mine, and that we should be paying attention to what their ailments are telling us.

These first few chapters are focused on telling the author's story, and how she started researching food allergies. A fair amount of time is spent on the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN) as one of the largest not-for-profit organizations. The author's dismay at finding the amount of funding received, but not publicly disclosed, by FAAN from Big Food and Big Pharma companies comes across clearly. Eventually the author decided to start the AllergyKids website to try and share her findings with other parents (and run it as a for-profit business with the proceeds dedicated to funding research into food allergies). Eventually the author starts to discuss food, and what really is the unhealthy truth. This section closes with The Hidden Side of Soy which discusses the fact that soy is a double-edged sword with all of it's isoflavones. Here are a few of her points:
1. Soy is rich in phytic acid, which blocks absorption of essential minerals including calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, copper, iron, and zinc.
2. Eating soy boosts estrogen, for women this could cause estrogen to be too high during pregnancy, resulting in a variety of health risks for both her and the baby.
3. Infants being fed on soy formula had up to ten times higher blood levels of isoflavones than adult women who were taking soy as medicine
4. Monsanto is responsible for producing over 80% of the world’s soy in the form of a widely used genetically engineered soybean

In the next section of the book, she'll be looking at genetically modified foods, and hopefully getting into how she thinks diets should be modified (she guarantees it'll be easy and inexpensive). So far it's an interesting read, and written so that the points are easy to understand. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book. Look for Part II of the review next week!