Tonight I tried to find a recipe that was vegan but delicious. I knew from my prior Weight Watchers endeavors that there was a recipe for chicken with broccoli and garlic that I liked and could omit the chicken from. I kind of cheated a bit on that because I had some leftover chicken stock in the fridge that was going to go bad....instead of doing that I would rather use it (I wound up pouring 3/4 of it off about 7 min later). However, I saved the broccoli stems to freeze and use in some veggie stock in the future. I also found a recipe for a side dish called coconut rice that I just happened to have all the ingredients for. The house smells wonderful right now and I'm looking forward to digging in. I also marinated some chicken carcass for the husband and daughter and threw that in the oven to bake.
Just the thought of where the meat comes from now grosses me out, not to mention the cold, dead, post-rigor mortis thought of dead meat which is a novel thing because I was an avid meat eater for years up until a week ago. However, I noticed 2 years ago when I was in Anatomy & Physiology Lab in college that the dissection thing had begun to bother me more than it had in high school. I shrugged it off, but it was a while before I could eat chicken (especially the thigh with the visibly different muscles we studied in the dead cat) again. I always thought I could go back to fish if nothing else, then last summer my husband brought home a beautiful red snapper from a fishing trip with his buddies. As I was slicing up the fillets my husband had cleaned for cooking, I noticed what I always had assumed to be white blood vessels in the meat. I pulled them out and put them down the drain, but my husband saw me pulling one out and said "Oh sorry, I tried to clean out all the worms." WORMS!? Are you KIDDING ME!? GROSS! Omg, I had no fish for dinner.
Now I LOVE to fish. I love it. But I can't eat what I catch. Something about the thought of cleaning the nasty scales off of something and thinking about it being alive and squiggling on the end of my line just turns my stomach. A few years ago my husband caught a huge redfish behind our waterfront business. He cleaned and filleted it, marinated it in Italian dressing, and it was FABULOUS. I wasn't there when he caught it. Another time he caught some sheepshead in about the same place and I saw the fish before he cleaned them. We went home and he made nice fillets out of them and grilled them. Unfortunately they cooled to room temp before I got the sides done, so when we ate them, they were cold. I couldn't even get one down. It was cold and slimy and gag-inducing. Isn't it weird how you think about things like that when you change your life?
Anyway, dinner tonight was good. Not the grand slam that it was last night, but good. I put my rice in a bowl with some of the broccoli and garlic on top. For protein and good measure, I threw half a handful of walnuts on top of all that. Not sure what I'm making tomorrow yet, but I know it will be fabulous or at least an attempt at fabulous. I also know I will be making a dreaded trip to the grocery store with the toddler to find dinner stuff because I'm running out of veggies. Never had that problem before!! Like they say about your clothes being too big or your wallet being too small, it's a good problem to have. :)
Happy eating everyone!
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