Learning New Tricks

One thing that has seemed to fill a lot of people's time during this pandemic has been cooking. I think that's brilliant as people can only control what they y eat by cooking their own meals. I've often seen a sign on local restaurants 'Don't Cook Just Eat', which infuriates me. Turns out this is a delivery service that restaurants can contract with to do deliveries. I gather it isn't cheap and they collect their money whether or not the restaurant is selling delivered food, though I could be wrong about this. 

In any case, Bill and I have been out of the habit of eating out much for years now. Once I retired, cooking dinner didn't seem particularly onerous, particularly since I had any number of 'recipes' memorised. My favourite involved starting with sauteed onions and then adding whatever vegetables and possibly meats were on hand. Stir fries cook up quickly and you don't have to use a lot of oil. 

However, I must admit it started to get a bit boring and, far worse, I started gaining weight. So I got out my Betty Crocker's Cook Book from 1987, which has calorie counts for each of its recipes. I had at some point circled the calorie count of any recipe under 300 calories and those are the ones I focussed on. Besides calories, I've been trying to cook less and less red meat and more whole grains and vegetables. I frequently substitute yoghurt for sour cream or oil for bacon fat (it is an American cookbook after all). 

Some of Bill's favourite recipes of late have been cream of mushroom soup and Pennsylvania red cabbage (cooked with brown sugar and apples). I've never, in the 30+ years I've owned this book, looked at the vegetable recipes. We've also discovered that bulgar wheat cooks up as easily as rice and tastes something between white and brown rice. 

So, amazingly, some bulgar wheat cooked up with a vegetable stock cube and some red cabbage and some Brussel's sprouts (shredded and stir fried with a diced onion) is a pretty satisfying meal. Who would have thought?