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.