Chelsea Boes: New vegetarian diet has couple making beautiful dishes together
This fall, my parents brought us a quarter of beef as a surprise. I stacked the white-wrapped packages — soup bones, stew meat, rib roasts, steaks — into my chest freezer with gratitude. A quarter of cow is a costly and sumptuous gift.
Just a couple weeks later, though, my doctor put me on a plant-based diet. She pointed to the Plant-Based Food Pyramid on the exam room wall. A note on the side instructed “Avoid: Mammals (pork, beef, etc.).”
I like plants. I do. When I found out you can get unlimited refills on broccoli sides at Red Robin, my happy eyes almost popped out of my head. But I also grew up in upstate New York in a community of farmers who regarded vegetarianism as a near mania. With such a rearing, could I really eschew mammals and also, as per the chart, “Reduce to 1 serving/day, then 2/week: eggs, dairy, seafood, birds”? All that dietary advice is stick with no carrot at all. Or rather, too many carrots and not enough beef sticks.
But then, I’m happy to say, I found my carrot: Sarah Copeland’s vegetarian cookbook, "Feast."
My husband Jonathan and I have embarked on a cook-through of "Feast" as a major project for the new year. I don’t know if the book will make us slimmer or richer. But it has already made us happier and smarter.
If you cook through "Feast," prepare for adventure. The book turns you into a whole new grocery shopper. The old me got groceries in a massive, front-of-week conquest of frugality. Now I buy ingredients for one meal at a time, taking care like those chefs perusing farmers markets on TV. I choose items with a relish I was made for, my fingers studying the various cheeses and hunting through the bright Ingles salad fridges for never-before-purchased radicchio, curly endive and tomatillos. I nose through the dry goods aisles for something called masa harina, every kind of bean, aged balsamic vinegar in the prettiest squat bottle and olive oil I can eat a spoonful of without recoiling from bitterness.
Best of all, "Feast" nights — which we observe three evenings a week or more — are date nights. Jonathan and I (good cooking partners because he’s precise and I’m brave) pop the kids in front of the tube for about 40 minutes and boil vegetable broth, sauté mushrooms till “just crispy but still juicy,” lace our sweet potatoes with the zest and juice of limes, press homemade tortillas and boil mustard greens. Though we’ve never cooked vegetarian before, we’re doing what we’ve loved to do all nine years of our generative marriage — make beautiful things, together. No rushing. Only curiosity.
I spent most of my formative years attending a Baptist church. This was long before I heard journalist Michael Pollan’s manifesto of “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” In church, I read of how Jesus multiplied bread and fish for a crowd of 5,000, giving them “as much as they wanted.” He who clothed the hillside with grass distributed lunch with equal generosity, and in our little church potlucks we prayed His blessing over hamburger goulash, scalloped potatoes with ham and barbecue chicken legs. In theory, we believed healthy eating, stewardship of the God-given body, important. But alongside our aspiration this other thing loomed — our real life. Our real life, on many occasions, started with bacon for breakfast and ended with chocolate peanut butter cake for dessert.
But you can change your real life, if you pair a hard new habit with something you love. Despite my doctor’s advice, I confess: My quest through "Feast" is more about beauty than truth. It’s about little sleeves of goat cheese, whole wheat DeLallo noodles, purple cabbage, thin-sliced onions, toasted walnuts and lemon zest. It’s about spending time with my favorite person, who got a lime zester for Christmas to celebrate his approaching culinary exploits.
When Jonathan and I have completed each recipe, we summon our kids. They take their seats gamely as we lay the mysteries before them night by night. Colombian arepas with plantains and garlicky green sauce. Angel hair with lentils and oyster mushrooms. Warm winter vegetables with farro. Taco truck vegetable burritos. My daughter Bravery calls "Feast" “the magic cookbook.”
And the cow in the freezer? We’ll defy the pyramid and eat it with joy. Intercut with our "Feast," it will last almost forever.
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Chelsea Boes lives in Old Fort and works as editor of WORLDkids Magazine in Biltmore Village.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Boes: Where’s the beef? Learning to be creative with a vegetarian diet