And so it begins

by 52weeksofveggies | Dec 12, 2021 | Food & Thoughts, Is My Name Marie

And so it begins

Rather than writing blogs per-se, I’ve decided to focus on a newsletter approach that readers like you can chose to view much like a blog post or actually subscribe to via email. Although I may still create blog posts just for here, (how many guesses that those will still be food related?), I’ve started a page over on Substack.com instead of focusing on blogs for now. I’ll try to cross-post them here, but you will have to go there to read the full posts (at least for now–that may change). Here’s a snippet of the very first one for you…

Welcome! This year, I decided to follow Elsa and run into the unknown yet again, moving across the world from where I spent 7 years making a home in Washington D.C. to make a new one for an unknown time in Cambodia. So far, I’m loving it.

What I haven’t been particularly good at is chronicling any of it! Until now…

Read the full post on Substack! You can also subscribe below to receive the newsletters, called “Is My Name Marie – And Other Qs” right to your inbox! This subscription option won’t include posts that are just on my website, but like I said, right now they are the ones I will be focusing on, at least. Up to you!

Quarantine Cookventures

by 52weeksofveggies | Sep 14, 2021 | Food & Thoughts

Quarantine Cookventures

It’s been a challenging almost two weeks for me recently as I’ve been confined to my apartment due to the possibility of direct COVID-19 exposure. Since I cannot enjoy adventures outside of my apartment, though, I’ve tried to focus on ones still available to me – like cooking!

I’ve baked and cooked since I was a child – making my first solo family dinner as a seven-year-old (don’t worry, it was baked beans and hot dogs…) and my first entirely solo “real” dinner from scratch for my family of seven when I was 12-years-old. Experimenting in the kitchen has always been a joyful and relaxing experience.

Moving to new countries – and continents – entirely refreshes that experience. My kitchen is nothing like what I’ve been used to. No oven, just two burners to use instead. I’ve picked up my first airfyer as a result, and of course I got a rice cooker, and even a tiny little toaster oven. I went to open a can of tomato paste the other day and realised I still need to aquire a can opener. No amount of inventiveness could open that can without one for me!

This new kitchen has made me realise how much I’ve come to rely on certain easy staples in my life; baking some variation of quiche that lasts for a week at least once a month; oven roasting veggies; oven roasting meat; crock-pot soups and stews and curries… the list goes on. No oven, no crockpot – not to mention a whole new assortment of food to figure out.

When I first started my 52 weeks of veggies three years ago, I thought the hardest part was going to be the actual eating of the veggies. As it turned out, though, the hardest part was learning how to identify and prepare them! I discovered I had major anxiety in the produce section that I’d always ignored since I skimmed past that section anyways. I realised that I didn’t know how to identify what was a “good” veggie vs a rotting one or not ripe-enough-for-when-I-need-it veggie, and that I was still scarred from this one time my sister and I ate moldy peas that had been imported to our island before someone realised that they were, actually, moldy. We didn’t grow them there or see them often, so how were we supposed to know they were bad? (We did point out that they felt fuzzy…)

The point is, I neither grew up seeing nor eating a lot of the fruits and vegetables available in the USA grocery stores and when I did see them, they didn’t necessarily look the same.

Now I’m in the same place again, but I understand it better and I’m not crippled by anxiety over it; I find myself feeling curious and excited instead. What will this turn out to be? What can I do with it? Will I like it? No? What if I try preparing it a different way?

It becomes fun instead of stressful. And the biggest thing I realised in 2018 when I first started the veggie project: it’s also a way of creating art. The very act of experiment and creation focuses and relaxes me, as well as eventually also providing sustenance for me.

So, now that I’ve shared all of that, what have I been trying out? I’m so glad you asked!

A new friend here told me about a farm-to-table company called Toom, where I can have a box of fresh produced delivered straight from an organic farm to my apartment. I’ve started getting a box about once a month delivered to me and while I know some of the items (carrots, cabbage, potatoes, bananas, tomatos), there have been some I had to figure out.

My quarantine box this time around contained not only the carrots I finally learned to like, but also some unidentifiable long green things and dragonfruit, among other items.

I also add fresh duck eggs to the order, and they are so yummy!

With this second box, I tried googling the veggies I didn’t recognise first, but ulitmately ended up messaging Toom’s owner to ask what they were.

I used to feel embarrassed about asking questions like that; ashamed that people would realise I didn’t just know. But the fact is, while it may be humbling to show that, it doesn’t mean I’m ignorant or have reason to feel shame. Rather, it simply means I don’t know yet – and that I want to learn. And do I prepare the food more tastily and end up eating healthier (not choking to death because that part of the veggie shouldn’t have been consumed) as a result of asking? Yes.

As it happens, I’m still not entirely sure what the green things are in the photo and maybe one of you know better.

I experimentally sliced them up and stir fried them with coconut oil, garlic, some sweet paprika, and salt, then dipped them in a GF soy-sauce/sweet chili sauce mixture. They were delightful – very light to the palate and almost buttery. I kept the skin on them and that part stayed a bit tougher (it’s surprisingly thick) and had a hint of a grassy taste to it. If I never ate something that tasted like the colour green before, I have now! I did save one to try air frying as an alternative experiment, because I imagine that will bring out a whole other flavour profile and I’m quite curious.

Besides that, I sauteed some fresh spinach (I think; it looks slightly different) from the box with olive oil, garlic, and paprika, then made a duck egg omelet with it – adding in balsamic vinegar and parmesan cheese. That was a treat to the taste buds, for sure!

I’ll share some more culinary experiments and experiences again soon (and a cocktail I concocted!) – but hopefully I’ll be getting back outside again by the weekend. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

I carrot get over it…

by 52weeksofveggies | Sep 8, 2021 | Food & Thoughts

I carrot get over it…

Some of you may remember how a few years ago, I started a blog called “52 Weeks of Vegetables–and Other Horror Stories from a Preferred Carnivore.” In a whole year, I posted 8 times, so not really a well populated blog, but it did the trick for me. It helped hold me accountable to an absolutely wild concept – the idea of eating at least one single vegetable each week. Until then, I abhorred veggies. An absolutely passionate dislike with vehemence that I really couldn’t articulate; just felt all the way in my marrow. So I made a new year’s resolution to eat at least one veggie a week, and blogging about it was a bit of extra fun and accountability.

Although I only posted 8 times, I actually did eat at least one veggie a week… and I have roughly kept that up, at a minimum, in the years since. It was a year of veggies that changed my life forever.

But one veggie (among others) has consistently remained in the same status of “dislike” – carrots. Raw, and the taste and texture bother me. Cooked, and the taste or texture may still bother me. Too sweet, too carroty, too mushy, too crunchy, too something and my body asks me why I hate it so. Even when I read as an image-conscious teenager that just eating carrots was a great way to lose weight (nothing was said about also turning orange), I couldn’t stand the things–especially raw.

But now here I am, 3 years of veggies later and in another country, and I ordered a box of vegetables fresh from a farm outside Phnom Penh. Guess what came in this week’s share? That’s right: carrots. Three absolutely MASSIVE carrots.

Now, I hate wasting food, but this was a problem. Not only did I need to find a way to eat the carrots, I also needed to find a way to prepare them. My kitchen in Phnom Penh is a bit different than I’m used to from the past few years: I have two electric burners, but no oven – and no crock pots, either. I did go ahead and purchase a tiny toaster oven, a rice cooker, and my very first air fryer…

It occurred to me that roasting some vegetables made all the difference between not likeing them before and enjoying them now, so maybe, just maybe, carrots could be tasty if I put them in the air fryer… But how to prepare them? I decided to go with a savoury flavour profile, and do you know what? Last night I ate two giant carrots for dinner and I LOVED THEM!!!

If you want to try your hand at the tasty treats they turned out to be, here’s what I did…

Prep: I no longer have one of those super-convenient peelers, so after washing the carrots, I skinned two of them with a knife, then sliced them long-ways and halved them into long chunks.
Flavour: To give them that savoury profile, I tossed them with sweet paprika, olive oil, and garlic salt before dumping them into the airfyer basket
Cook: I cooked them at around 190C for 30 min, interrupting their little suntanning session a few times to shake them up in the basket and get some rotation going
Finalize: When they started looking a bit crispy on the outside, I dumped them back into the original seasoning bowl I’d used and added parmesan cheese to them, tossing them more while the cheese melted on.
Try: Then, I tasted them – and just, wow. I wasn’t even hesitant at that point, because they actually smelled deliciously tempting by then!

They were SO GOOD. I almost went back and did the 3rd carrot but I’m holding it out for later. I only got three carrots, after all! How did I not know for my whole life that carrots actually *could* be delicious??

Around 3/4 of the way into demolishing the bowl, I had the idea that it would be nice to add a little liquid somewhere. I thought balsamic vinegar would draw out too much of that original carroty flavour I detest; GF soy sauce wouldn’t be ideal with the paprika, but GF Worcestershire sauce could be perfect – and friend, it was. 10/10 recommend.

It may seem like a very small thing, but an entire lifetime of despising carrots has been demolished; a kingdom of hate toppled last night. Sometimes the big wins are in the smallest and most surprising of things, like determinedly finding a way to avoid food waste AND enjoy consuming the food itself. And after last night, I’ll be willingly buying carrots again in the future and hoping they show up again in my next farm share box. And meanwhile, I now debate preparing the one remaining carrot exactly the same, trying a variation on the theme, or tossing it into some fried rice. Only time will tell…