Learning How to Cook

I've taken the leap into making sauces/dressings for my salads and other dishes that a sauce/dressing just seem to go naturally with. And in the process, I cleaned out the rest of the heavily processed, packed with oil and sugar foods from my fridge. It really is amazing to see just how much oil and sugar is used to create salad dressings and other kinds of sauce. When I think about how much dressing I used to put on a salad, even when all I would have for a meal was a salad, all of the calories were coming from the dressing. They weren't nutrient dense calories, either. Just calorie dense calories. Bad calorie dense calories. I cringe now thinking about all the oil and sugar I was consuming. 

So now I'm making my own sauces/dressings. Knowing exactly what is in the sauce and how much of

each ingredient is in the sauce creates peace of mind about what I am putting into my body. The first dressing I made is an avocado/lime/cilantro combination. It pairs wonderfully with mixed green salads. The second dressing was supposed to have a nondairy yogurt base, but since I don't have any yogurt in the fridge, I went with a base of cashews. I threw in garlic powder, onion powder, mustard, salt, pepper, and parsley. That first taste test said yep, it's a keeper. This one will pair nicely with green salads and rice or beans. These two dressings should get me through the week, and when they're gone, I'll make two new sauces/dressings next weekend.

It took me so long
to write this post  
that the cake finished
and I made the fruit
compote. Yummy! 

  At the moment, I have a coconut lemon cornmeal     cake -- recipe courtesy of Thug Kitchen -- in the   oven. I could have just eaten the batter, it's that good.   But I retrained myself and now that tasty batter is doing what batter does when   heat surrounds it: rising and becoming my sweet for the week. I'm thinking a   mixed berry compote will not only look beautiful dripping off the sides of a   slice but also taste so darn good. I can't wait until this lovely cake is fully   baked and ready for me to dig in.

 In a bit, after I finish some work (yeah, I'm procrastinating when I should be     finishing up all my online classes for the coming week), I'm going to get the   soaking garbanzo beans into the instant pot. I already did my rice for the week,   along with a huge pot of steamed veggies, so now I just have the garbanzo   beans and the black beans to do. I absolutely love the instant pot for all of   these. Just set the timer and let it do its thing. 

 I noticed today it seems I've finally moved beyond the all-too-often side effect  of increased gas when eating vegetarian/vegan. The first six or so weeks were bad. It wasn't the abdominal pain gas issue. It was just lots of passing gas as I walked across the room. On our walks, every fifty yards or so the gas found freedom. Ado would look at me like, really? Today, though, the gas seems to be pretty much gone. When I think over the last few days, it was noticeably less. I was really hoping my body would adjust to the increased beans and legumes. Perhaps it has and I won't totally embarrass myself once I return to civilization on a regular basis.

I'm finding I truly enjoy all the cooking I'm doing. There's just something about buying the foods and actually cooking them, creating different dishes each day. Yes, I have cooked for years, but not like I am now. For years it was eggs and bacon for breakfast, some kind of meat with cheese sandwich and chips for lunch, and a meat of some kind, a potato or pasta, and a veggie, maybe a tossed salad for dinner. There wasn't a whole lot of thinking going into what I was eating. Now, I'm actually learning how to cook and work with so many different kinds of veggies, grains, beans, legumes, and fruits. I get excited about what I'm preparing, and I truly enjoy all the flavors. Right now, I'm totally in love with lentils. I've had them before, but recently I learned just how versatile lentils are. Even just by themselves, with a bit of salt sprinkled over, they are simply delicious. 

Now that the weather is getting cooler, I'm dreaming of all the different kinds of hearty soups I can make. And homemade breads. Hmmmm. Maybe making a loaf of bread is in my very near future. 

Note: the spacing around the images is off a bit. When Blogger changed over to the new format I'm now working with, inserting images became a nightmare. I don't know what they did, but the changes for inserting images didn't make things better. In fact, the changes made this process of blogging and using images a lot worse. Sometimes the old saying is very true: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.