Where’s the snow?

I really don’t understand why it’s raining. Why it’s 61 degrees on December 6th. Why there’s a Christmas tree in my living room when I can wear shorts to run.

Anyways, I’m pretending it’s winter.

I’m squirreling away cookies and cookie dough in my freezer like it’s my job. (Which it’s not, I haven’t forgotten about this real job and the very real committee meeting coming up in January).

I’m attending holiday parties (in horrifyingly festive sweatshirts).

I’m curling up on the couch reading my kindle (instead of reading the stack of papers currently in my excellent wicker basket).

Lucy is playing dreidel, flights to go home are booked, presents are purchased…WHY IS IT RAINING!?

Anyway…

Real Simple’s pot roast was really too easy to be so good. Have I mentioned how much I love my slow cooker?

This magazine, 99% of the time stands by its name and produces recipes that are easy to create and excellent to eat. Flavorful and hearty.

The lime and soy-glazed chicken from October’s issue was also awesomely simple and a seriously modified slaw made for a balanced dinner.

And David Lebovitz’s recipe turned leftover dulce de leche into a fudgey, need to go running immediately kind of brownie.

Mindy Kaling’s book was really funny and then, on an opposite note, I started Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale yesterday. Very weird and intense but I am loving it.

And as a parting note, here’s hoping that tomorrow’s sports massage takes care of this, the third month of the unstretchable knot in my hamstring. It is really ruining my ability to run hills and wear flats.

Pseudovegetarian

All I can say about my vegetarian journey is that it’s a process. I am cooking a lot less meat, and when I cook it, I’ve found that there are plenty of places to get grass fed beef! Chicken is harder, turkey is nearly impossible (besides Applegate Farms lunchmeat) and pork, being something that is absolutely the worst for the environment and possibly the cruelest to the animal, pork is out. The hardest part of that has been bacon and pepperoni! Anyways, these are my latest vegetarian adventures.

Quality Ingredients

+ a cute apron

=spectacular eggplant parmesan

I am so glad that I didn’t let the 2 hour preparation scare me out of making this delectable dish. Some of the best things, like Mama’s brisket recipe, take 2+ hours.

On the other hand, there’s this.

Fall is here.

The absolute best part about this is that that super unnatural looking cheesy color is nothing unnatural at all! It’s butternut squash! Thank you to Kathleen and Rachael Ray for bringing this into my life. And even with the world’s least helpful sous chef (who insists on watching if there’s anything boiling at all)

This is for me, right?

this recipe is a piece of cake.

In less vegetarian news, well, there was the brisket, and then chipotle lime grilled chicken thighs from Gourmet. And I’m sorry to sound like a snob, but organic chicken just tastes better. You’ll have to trust me because my food blogger photographs have been outweighed by my half marathon training appetite.

Generally life is excellent. Science is working, Cutting for Stone is a great book so far, running is going well, 2 fall half marathon’s coming up, and I always get excited when school starts again, even though I’m not in class :). I’m a dork like that. The chill in the air means one thing to my tomorrow morning…pumpkin spice lattes, it’s been too long :).

Animal as food

If you’ve read Jonathan Safran Foer’s, Eating Animals, you might think that the last think I’d go for for dinner is sirloin over corn cakes. I hate to disappoint you but, you’d be wrong.

I understood factory farming was bad in a vague, general way. Now, just 18% in on my Kindle, I feel that I  have more insight as to why. Did you know that “free range” just means that the animals have to have outdoor access, which can literally be an open window in an overcrowded barn? Or that the average poultry chicken has 67 square inches of space? And that when “layer” chickens (the kind we get eggs from) breed and give birth to male offspring, they kill them? The book is eye opening but so far I haven’t gotten to the point where he’s said what we can do about, besides becoming vegetarian, or I guess considering the conditions, vegan.

Just to open up doors of communication (as I said, I have no intention of giving up meat), what do we think of this? Animals do suffer, they are kept in horrible conditions, and contribute significantly (I have to look up the stats but in the US I believe he said that it’s more than all of our kinds of transportation but together) to global warming. At the same time, man has been eating animals since the beginning of time. In some sense, it’s the natural order of things. I have a lot of questions running through my head while I eat my chicken tonight. Two small pieces with a whole bowl full of quinoa and pasta and veggies, better right?

If we don’t eat any animals, do they overrun the world? How expensive would meat be without factory farming? How much spinach do you have to eat to get enough iron to avoid anemia without red meat? Is it enough to switch to Kosher meat knowing that conditions are less deplorable? To give up shrimp because for every pound of usable shrimp they harvest, 6 pounds of other marine life is destroyed? To stop eating tuna because of the bycatch? Can we ever go back from this animals for profit method of raising our food?

It’d be lovely to go back to a time where a farm was a place where an individual farmer, in overalls and a straw hat, came out and took care of his cows each day. Knew their names, raised them in the best way he knew how, and killed them as humanely as possible, potentially holding its little hoof. A time where our fish came from a fisherman who spent his days out with a rod, or even an individual net, bringing in his haul to support his family. When did the food we eat become so detached from its source? And what can we do about it?