Cooking Adventures

At Christmas, my mom and I were both staying at my sister's house. One morning, my mom and I woke up before the rest of the fam and were chatting.

When my sister got up, she plopped down on the couch and listened to us talk for a minute.

"You're talking about food again!" she exclaimed.

Yep.

Food. It's sustenance, it's tasty, and it's our key intersection with "living green."

The more I write this blog, the more I'm convinced that our food choices are our most important way of being "green."

A big part of eating green, or course, is reducing meat consumption. I don't know if I'll ever be a "real" vegetarian, but this blog project has only increased my 17-year-commitment (gee, that means I'm old!) to not eating mammals. Currently, I cook fish or poultry once a week, and eat a vegetarian diet the rest of the time. You might wonder why, when my meat consumption is so low, that I don't go strictly veg.

The truth is, I just like to have poultry or fish every now and again. I don't have a moral problem with eating meat. I do, however, think that those of us in the western world need to make deep cutbacks in our consumption of animal products and start farming and producing them in ways that make better sense for the environment and for our spirits.

As I've mentioned before, my friends and I have created a vegan cooking group, inspired by Alicia Silverstone's Kind Diet cookbook, to experiment with more earth-friendly ways of eating. All of us in the group have long-term commitments to diets that are low-meat (one flexitarian - that's me; one pescatarian; and one vegetarian), but none of us are vegans.

We meet up regularly to try out vegan recipes.

One of our biggest successes was Pecan-Crusted Seitan, from Alicia's cookbook.

This is one of those vegan dishes that you would absolutely never guess is vegan. It's delicious, elegant, and did I mention delicious?

We also tried this Red-Lentil Thai Chili from the Post-Punk Kitchen website. It's one of those recipes where you just feel like health is flowing to you from your spoon -- but not in a gross, wheatgrass kinda way. In a delicious, I'm eating a velvety lime-infused sweet potato kinda way.

Have you tried any green cooking adventures lately?