In May 2009, I got very sick with Valley Fever. The month of May was a complete loss and the rest of the summer wasn’t much better. The disease can be mild enough you don’t know you have it, except that you’re very tired for about a month, or it can be so severe it kills you. I had a very medium case. I was very sick for almost two months and exhausted and out of breath for another three months, and still have problems related to it more than one year later, but it didn’t kill me. Obviously, or this truly is “ghost written”. Bad pun, but-- whatever .
During the worst of the illness, for the first “sick week”, I slept the entire week. I hadn’t missed a week of work to illness 20 years (and then I was hospitalized with pneumonia.) Once that passed, I only had enough energy to work for short bursts, maybe one or two hours, and then I’d need a nap. Seriously, I’d wake up, read the newspaper, do the crossword puzzles and need a nap. I’d sleep for two hours, go to work for two hours, go home to sleep for two hours, go back to work for two hours, than home to crash. I spent most of two months like that. Once I started getting a little better (around July, August), I wasn’t so exhausted I need to sleep all day, but I didn’t have enough energy to do anything and I was still extremely short of breath. Even into July and August, I’d get out of breath walking from my living room to the kitchen, and I live in a small house! I went from working 36+ hrs a week to working 18. Ouch.
Keep in mind, it was summer in Arizona. It is un-godly hot in the summer and I tend to not spend any time in the sun unless I have to. Our night time lows are higher than most of the country’s daytime highs. (Don’t give me that “but it’s a dry heat”. Come visit in August. I dare you). Your days go down the rabbit hole. Stay in during the day; go out at night or very, very early in the morning. Stay in during the summer; go out during the winter. Arizona is backwards in so, so many ways and our seasons are just one example. But I digress. Not only did I have too much time on my hands, I was at home, alone, unwilling to go outdoors to do anything and too physically weak to do anything even if I’d wanted to.
So, last year when I had all of that time on my hands, I decided to deal with an ongoing problem. Well, what else was I going to do when I was relegated to the sofa, too weak and short of breath to do anything functional? Years ago, I discovered that if I don’t plan out what I’m eating during the week, I don’t buy all the ingredients I need to cook a dish. I would buy food that looked interesting with no real thought about what I’d do with it, thumb through the cookbooks looking for a way to use the ingredients I had and discover I was missing key ingredients to make anything interesting. So I would wing it, make the same things over and over again, or just give up and go to Mac’s for dinner (Shameless Plug: Mac’s Broiler and Tap, Guadalupe and McClintock in Tempe, next door to Changing Hands Bookstore. It is a fabulous neighborhood restaurant in the best plaza in Tempe –maybe all of Phoenix-metro. Good food, good prices, lots of regulars and locals.)
After I’d missed so much work because of the illness, I couldn’t afford to go out to eat. It turns out that being extremely poor in college had its benefits. I mastered the art of cooking cheaply, which means from scratch. So, I got out all of my favorite cookbooks and started making lists. I have several food intolerances so there are categories of foods I skipped (pork, corn, wheat products and gluten grains, dairy) and my personal preferences. But I was making the lists for me, why wouldn’t I choose the foods I would want to eat and omit the foods I don’t?
I put the recipes into an Excel spread sheet by category (chicken & poultry, fish & seafood, soups & stews, etc) and then separated the recipes within the worksheet. It’s all very organized which amazed everyone who knows me.
Once I had all the recipes listed, I realized I had more than 200 soup/stew recipes, 250 fish/seafood recipes, 200 poultry recipes and still more beef, lamb, bean, grain and vegetable/salad recipes. I had enough recipes to make something different every day for about four years. And that wasn’t even getting into the binders of recipes pulled from magazines and on-line.
I decided to see if I could pull it off. I made a table and listed out the meals for a week, printed out two weeks at a time and tried to follow it. I had about six months worth when I first listed tried this.
Then, sadly, I was watching an “Intervention” on A & E and the sister of the addict made a comment that she (the addict) had the weekly menu posted on the fridge, “who does that??” was her comment. Well, I do. It made me feel OCD and sad. Then I asked around and found out that it’s the same for many people. If they don’t know what they’re eating, what the menus are, they do the same thing I do—throw something together, always make the same three or four things or go out. So they plan out the week’s menus, shop daily or two-three times per week and call it good.
When I was still sick, I would make a soup, a chili, and roast a chicken or make a beef roast on the weekend when I could spread the cooking out between naps. Then, I’d eat on that for the entire week because I was too exhausted to come home from work and try to cook. Since August of 2009, I have not repeated a recipe. Now that I’m reasonably well, I’ve been cooking everyday-- almost.
Sadly, I discovered a problem. By making something different every day and making a soup or chili recipe every week, I was making way too much food. I would follow the plan for a week, then eat off the left-overs for the next week and freeze the rest. My freezer is full!
Well, I have decided to take this on as a mission for one year. It’s been almost one year already and I’ve worked out some of the kinks. The volume of food will still be an issue for me since I cook for one, but I’ll keep working on that. I adjust the recipe to reduce the number of servings of meat, but I don’t necessarily alter the sauce, so my recipes will be saucier than yours. Just keep that in mind when I comment on the recipe and when you try it. And, I have abandoned having a soup or chili every week. I’m not repeating recipes but I might not cook everyday to manage the refrigerator/freezer/left-over problem.
So, here’s my plan: I’ll list the day, recipe name and cookbook reference. Give you their original ingredient list and my spin on preparation, notes on how it turned out, changes I’d make next time, and notes on special ingredients and where you might find them. Keep in mind; I am spoiled because I live in a very diverse city abutting a huge city. I can find any ingredient I want and, so far, I haven’t had to leave Tempe to do it. I am also within two miles of Whole Foods Market, Sunflower Market and Trader Joe’s. There is an Indian Market three miles from me, several Middle Eastern markets within easy driving distance and Food City for all your Mexican & Central American needs. (That’s where I buy chiles! If there were a Ranch Market closer to home, I’d get my Mexican food-stuffs from them, but I have to drive more than 10 miles for that now. Um… no.)
Since this blog is starting almost a year after I began this particular experiment, there are many recipes I’ve made for which I’ve forgotten the dates and particulars. I made vague notes and I’ll pass on the best of them. As a rule, if I really, really didn’t like something, I won’t share it. It’s just my taste, but it feels unfair to slam a recipe that might be perfectly fine for someone else. My tastes run to the spicy and the savory. Subtle is not my style – or my taste, for the most part.
Note: When I make a lamb recipe, I have to have several recipe options open because you can’t always find the cut that you’re looking for. I’m still looking for a good market for lamb (Fry’s is medium, I might have a lead on a meat market or I could special order from the market by the mosque near ASU and a friend mentioned a meat market in Chandler I need to check out. Choices, choices.) I’m sure, by the end of this year, I’ll know what cuts are interchangeable and how to do better with lamb.
I try to set up my week to have one poultry dish, one red meat (beef or lamb) dish, one salmon dish, one tuna dish and three other fish recipes, one rice dish and one legume recipe. I don’t plan out the vegetable side dishes because I get what’s on sale at Sunflower and then find something that seems like it would go well with the main dish. Longer cooking dishes are on weekends, really quick dishes are for when I work late (that’s why I like fish so much; it’s really fast).
I live where you can grill all year but I don’t take advantage as much as I should. I’m trying to do more in the summer so I don’t heat up the house but I struggle with grilling. It’s true. I am genetically deficient in the BBQ-grill gene. I can never seem to get the heat right or have the right amount of briquettes to make it through the cooking or I have too many and waste the briquettes. I both burn and under-cook meat, it’s a trick, but I do it. I use a Weber kettle grill (the small one) and have just started using a briquette chimney. We’ll see if that helps. I recently acquired an electric grill, but it doesn’t have temperature controls so I think it cooks at hot and super-hot. I haven’t used it yet because it frightens me. I’ll let you know how that goes if I ever dare try it.
Given my grilling deficiencies, I’ve been known to take a grill recipe and do it in a grill pan on the stove or broil it. It changes the flavor but saves time (and I know I won’t ruin it.) Adjust, adapt, eat.
I love wine, but I’m not good at pairing it with food. I prefer reds, any reds really. I’m not going to try to pair the food with the wine. Someone else can do that.
As a note: Because of my food intolerances, I have to make substitutions. They change the flavor and texture of a recipe, but what can you do? I substitute chicken sausage for pork, rice milk for cow’s milk and rice pasta for wheat. Generally, I don’t cook anything with potatoes or pork (but I do use a bit of bacon for flavoring).
I’m starting this on July 4, 2010, but I’m going to post some of the recipes that I’ve already done (some without dates) because I won’t revisit them for at least a year and some of them were really good (some not so much-- live and learn. That’s what it’s all about. (Hokey-Pokey moment.)
I have my time, energy and cooking limitations, so I only list one entrée and maybe provide a side dish or two. I’m not listing lunch because I eat left-overs, or I eat out, and I don’t list breakfast because I don’t eat breakfast foods and it’s not part of this project.
Just so you know: I like spicy, hot, savory foods. I don’t do creamy (dairy) or deep fried. I like interesting, unusual, international stuff. It gets easier once you have the spices and equipment.
Things I have learned: Always have lots of garlic, onions, tomatoes, carrots, celery, bags of lettuce, cilantro, parsley, parmesan cheese, lemons, limes, canned tomatoes, canned chiles, black beans, white beans, chicken broth and vegetable broth (easy to make your own and keep frozen). Buy fragile greens (spinach, leaf lettuce) as you need it.
Important info: chile peppers are the vegetables, chili is the meat/bean dish. Chili powder contains cumin, coriander, garlic, salt and possbily other ingredients; chile powder is just the powder of a dried chile. Cooks Illustrated magazine has a really good write up on the different chiles in the August 2010 issue.
This is all a plan, a guide-line. You need to be willing to change the plan based on budget, availability, time to cook, unexpected events or whim.
So here we go.
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