Umami for Weight Control

As I careen towards my 40's, spinster-style, I've had to shed many childish eating habits. Gone are the days I could poo-poo salad as not being real food. Gone are the days I could do meat heavy meals. I remember when I was in my 20's, I could eat a pound of pasta with olive oil and cheese in a sitting. I cannot fathom how that's possible now.
At work I'm bombarded by cheap, unhealthy food. When you're stressed out and on your feet for 12 hours a day, no matter how good your intentions going in, you're going to succumb to your cravings, your deep and cellular need for ordering everything with sausage gravy on it, for ice cream every day with all the toppings, for whatever deep fried thing will make everything okay for ten minutes, for the cookies, the endless baked goods the messmen make out of the kind of deranged affection that's usually the territory of grandmothers who urge you to eat! eat! and then wonder aloud if you've gained weight. I digress.
So home has become my bastion of sensible eating. Most days my meals revolve around a bag of frozen veggies, gussied up with some kind of lentil stew or sludge. Or a salad, gussied up to its neck with chickpeas or avocado, boiled eggs, nuts and dried fruits. A treat is cheesy toast.
A super key component to eating like a cud-chewer and feeling satisfied, feeling satiated, even, is UMAMI. That sixth or seventh taste that's been in vogue for a minute now, not the delightful cover band that plays at the Cafe Hon on the regular in Baltimore, you should totally go see them. Melissa Sharlat is a sweetheart I met in Istanbul but that's a long story and I'll save it for another day.
Umami the taste sensation is MSG as found in nature all around us. Foods high in naturally occurring glutamate have a more satisfying taste to them. Something you can't put your finger on but feels better in your mouth.
It's ridiculously easy to pump up the MSG volume on your food. A good trick I picked up years ago is to throw a parmesan rind into any soup or stew you make. Parmesan rinds can be used or abused until they disintegrate. Simply wash off after using and store in the freezer. Whole Foods used to sell them cheap by the bag, but it's been many years since I lived in the real world so I can't confirm or deny if this is still a thing.
Other sources are soy sauce and its ilk- worcestershire, oystersauce, etc. Mushrooms. Preserved meats. Seaweed.
I've gotten into the habit of sprinkling a little parm, and/or some nutritional yeast, and/or some soy sauce or whathaveyou, on everything I eat. The savoriness tricks my brain and stomach into believing I'm fuller than I am, that I have, in fact, just had two bacon double cheeseburgers, and thus even my 20 year old self, who could put down quarts of orange juice (which I now know to be pure sugar water, with or without pulp) on top of bags of doritoes and taco bell for dessert, that 20 year old self who still resides in the hidden corners of my cells, is satisfied with a dinner of cabbage slaw and and avocado, or a bag of frozen veggies.

My go-to healthy meal:
Take a bag of frozen veggies. Any kind you like, or any that's on sale at the moment. Not, like, a bag of peas, but something with an exotic name like San Francisco Blend. I pay exorbitant grocery prices up here in Seward's Folly, but it never comes to more than 2.50, and unless it's a super carrot-heavy blend, seldom more than 200 calories for the whole pound.
Put the veggies in a pyrex pie dish (thrift stores always carry these) with a quick squirt of Pam or a scant 1/2 tsp fat, rubbed even to save you cleaning later. sprinkle with salt and, if you're feeling daring, a bit of cumin.
Bake at 350 for 20-35 minutes, to desired level of doneness. (Baked veggies beats boiled or steamed veggies in every conceivable Vegetable Desiredness category. Trust and believe.)
Sprinkle with soy sauce, or fancy soy sauce, or that lemon stuff, or mushroom catsup, or some other preserved fish sauce/garum type thing.
Sprinkle again with nutritional yeast, parmesan cheese, or ground seaweed.
If you're really feeling cray, sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds, of flax seeds, or chia, and if you want the best poop of your entire life, sprinkle psyllium husk powder on top of that.
It's a satisfying dinner. Lots of chewing and a full feeling belly, and no feeling of sacrifice.

I Don't Know How To Cook

I think you DO know how to cook. Cooking is applying heat to food. Have you burnt bread? Have you eaten crunchy pasta because you already mixed in the cheese sauce so it's too late? That's a good start.

I'm not fibbing or patronizing.

When I left for college I had two cooking skills. I could make hot milk cake, which my boyfriend's mama adored, and (this is my super-power) I never need a timer when I cook pasta. I just know.

YOU, pal, have a superpower too. What is it? Write me or put it in the comments.

So for years I lived off pasta with olive oil and cheese, which was cheap and assembled within 20 minutes. Payday afforded treats like Bertoli's pasta bakes and Stouffer's pizza bread things, and chicken patties on potato rolls with miracle whip. And then one Christmas, when I was living in Bohemian squalor in an art house in a terrible section of town my mom gave me Rachel Ray's 30 Minute Meals. I cooked my way through the book, starting with the pasta section where I felt on firm ground, and skipping anything with olives. I puzzled my way through dilemmas that the book couldn't answer. I remember that her recipes called for putting the onion and garlic in the pan at the same time, and when I did that, the garlic always burned before the onions cooked. I remember putting the question up in a Myspace forum (Google wasn't what it is now) and that horrible, desolate feeling of making yourself vulnerable to the internet and getting no replies. But I worked through it and learned an important lesson: recipes are approximations, and sometimes they lie. Especially about onions. But I digress.

Rachel Ray started, not a chapter, but an epoch of my life. The groundwork had been set, sure. I grew up in a house where good food was valued.  We ate out at fine restaurants with cloth napkins, and I didn't set foot in an Applebees until I was in my 20's. We had home-cooked meals waaaay more often than not. A t.v. dinner was a rare treat, counted on the fingers of a hand in a year. The reason I didn't know how to cook at 23 was because growing up, my grandmother and mother fought for control of the kitchen, they both loved to cook so much, and my sole contribution to feeding the family was occasional cookie baking and sometimes I got to dice the ham for fried rice night, which, I cringe now, but Mama called Flied Lice Night. She also went around calling herself a Strong White Woman for a number of years because she liked the phrase Strong Black Woman so much. Massive cultural shifts leave some people behind. I don't have the time for therapy right now. I digress. There was also, I think, something of an undercurrent of feminism running through my childhood. My mother and grandmother were both determined that I was not going to be a housewife, no sir no way, and so did not teach me any housewifely arts. Everything I know about keeping house I have learned from the internet. Maybe you are like me, in that regard. But Alton Brown's show started the year I got a full time nanny gig, and he and Rachel and later Giada were the nap-time, homework-time backdrop to the end of my teens and my early 20's. And then I got 30 Minute Meals for Christmas and my life veered off in a new direction, of learning and experimenting and trying and failing and trying again.

So if you think you can't cook you should have seen me trying to upgrade to pasta with garlicky olive oil and cheese, and failing, brow furrowed, book in hand.

I'm confitting a bunch of shit this weekend, so I guess you could say I've come far. I have a lot of blind spots, still. I'm not much of a meat eater, so I can't do much with anything that isn't ground beef. But I can make much from little. I can look at the contents of my fridge and make a meal. Because I read a lot of cookbooks and I tried.

So if you think you can't cook, it's because you haven't. I recommend you go to your local library and check out some books. Sally Schneider is a favorite of mine. Mark Bittman is popular. Don't go crazy- your life isn't Julie and Julia or whatever. Pick something solid and easy. Pick a category you know a little about. If you know how to grill a steak start in the beef section and slowly by slowly expand until you get it. Until you know in your bones how to make a roux, a sauce, a reduction. And then you, too, will know how to cook.

Or Blue Apron it for the rest of your life. You do you.

Upcycled Krups Cup Holder

I saw this Krups cup organizer in the thrift store for weeks before I thought of something to do with it. I kept leaving it behind, regretfully, after mentally disqualifying it for tasks- the dividers don't go all the way down so it's no good for make-up or little kitchen items or stationery. But it called to me from the cluttered office/crafts corner. It called to me. And then I figured it out- floss! 

I've needed to organize my floss, but have been a little stuck on how to do that without buying something single purpose from the horrifically depressing crafts aisle at my local Wal-mart, (the only real crafting option in my small town.) I'm pleased with the result. 

I cut pieces of Amazon boxes to about two inches square, (no need to be perfect. I hit that with my good-enough stick.) and wound up all my floss and put it in roughly ROYGBIV order. I like the idea that if I ever went crazy Hoarders with embroidery supplies, these could stack. 

And I like that I didn't buy some plastic crap. 

Have any of you had any fantastically clever crafting organizational ideas? Share! 

Difficult Female Relationships

I am almost finished with my second Hitofude Cardigan, (available on Ravelry.com for less than $2!) just in the nick of time. My mother's birthday is on Tuesday, and I'll have just time to block it and express mail it to get it to her in time.

I made my first Hitofude for myself a few months ago. It's a great project- mindless enough for long dark evenings in front of the t.v. but interesting enough to keep me somewhat engaged. It's made in one piece, rather like an envelope, so when you cast off, it's done except for the weaving in. It's a great pattern. I made it in a cherry red bamboo that I bought from some Chinese seller on e-bay and it turned out really well. It's very stretchy, and the arms are an odd kind of short, but all in all I like it quite a lot. It doesn't scream "hand-made," which is so important, no?

Well, mama wanted one too.

I grew up with my mom and my grandmom and know a thing or two about difficult female relationships.
I distinctly remember how crabby it made my mom when my grandmother wanted to have the same things she did. Mom would buy, say, a green and tan Dooney & Bourke purse and nana would get the same model in navy and tan and mom would retreat to the basement and grumble about how she could never just have something of her own.

Mom's about the age nana was then, and now gets really excited about having the same stuff as me, which makes me wonder if it's some kind of developmental milestone. It's silly to think we stop developing at adulthood, right? So just as there are developmentally appropriate behaviors to watch out for at certain points when we're growing up- caution around strangers, questions about Santa Claus and where babies come from, puppy-love, etc- I increasingly suspect there are developmentally appropriate behaviors for growing old- voting conservative, caution around stairs, wanting to have the same purse/earrings/sweater as your daughter, etc.

I said, "Sure, ma," happy to not have to make the excruciating decision of "Which Project Next?!!" which involves so many decisions about needles and yarn and I'm tired just writing that. I decided to order the same yarn. I was happy with it, it drapes well and washes well. I asked what color, please? And she responded, "Ecru."

My heart hurt a little. But mama wants ecru, mama gets ecru. It's just that there are so many pretty colors in this world! But mama wants ecru.

It was with great relief that I got her frantic e-mail a day later, changing her mind- she wants periwinkle! Periwinkle is a color I can work with. Periwinkle looks great on her. I approve! I approve!

The next hitch in the giddyup was there wasn't a good periwinkle in the yarn I'd decided on. There was an infantile sky blue, a terrible lavender and nothing in between.

So I just picked a color I thought she would like, a beautiful delft-ish blue that reads "classy," reminds me of the wallpaper in our dining room when I was growing up, and which I know will bring out the blue in her eyes and the white in her skin.

In other words, I picked out the color for her. After telling her she could pick it out herself. Because I decided I knew better.

Which is a behavior that drove me nuts when I was a kid. From both of them. The three baffling years nana decided mom collected antique tea cups. Mom, who knew I didn't need glasses, I just wanted to be more like my friend Angel. The year my vote for a chocolate birthday cake was, without discussion vetoed because eight year olds actually prefer carrot cake. "Oh your mother told me you were a small, but I just KNEW you were an extra large." And on and on.

So here I am, making a matching sweater for my mom at her request, a request which would have infuriated her three decades ago, and I've chosen a wildly different color for her out of a probably misguided notion that I know what she wants better than she does, a behavior which, if reversed, would infuriate me.

One of the things I love about knitting, and fiber crafts in general, is it makes me feel connected to all the women who've come before me. When I make a sock my hands are doing what women's hands have done for centuries, for thousands of years (in some parts of the world) and I feel part of something ancient. This sweater has also made me feel connected to the women in my family, part of the cycle of love, and exasperation that binds us together and tears us apart simultaneously and forever.

Love you mama, and happy birthday.