Cooking with Dr. Monkey

Today's episode: Actually today's installment of simian cooking is a vegetarian meal, more about why I'm cooking vegetarian more often than not these days at the end of this post.

I've been craving some mashed potatoes and gravy lately so I decided to fix some, along with some other stuff, for dinner tonight. I started by peeling and then cutting up a big sweet potato and a couple of regular white potatoes.
After I put them on to boil I got out my gravy base.
I picked these up at our new mostly organic grocery store, which is called Earth Fare, the other day. Both taste exactly like chicken and beef broth when cooked up. I'm not kidding. They taste just like what they say they're supposed to taste like but they are made out of vegetables. We had the Not Chick-n last night in the squash soup that Sparky made and tonight I used the Not Beef as my gravy base. I melted the bullion into a couple cups of hot water and I added one finely chopped shallot, a couple of finely chopped cloves of garlic, some cracked black pepper, and a dash of dried red chili pepper. I let it cook up and then I made a spinach salad that included cherry tomatoes, celery, raisins, and shredded carrot.

After I set aside my salad and as my bouillon and potatoes cooked I chopped up some one half of a Portabella mushroom, some organic button mushrooms, some yellow and red pepper, a little piece of zucchini, and one half of a medium white onion. I then sauteed all those vegetables in some yogurt based butter substitute and some spices and herbs.

When my gravy base had cooked up enough, that is to say when the shallot and garlic flavors had been infused in it, I added about a quarter cup of flour to thicken it. I then poured all that in the food processor and I pulsed it until everything was blended together. By this time my potatoes were done so I mashed them with some butter substitute, a dash of milk, and some shredded and then chopped Parmesan cheese. I then cut some of the bread Sparky baked on Saturday and I plated our meal. This is what it looked like:
Let me tell you kids, this meal was off the hook good. The gravy was savory and flavorful and it had a little spicy kick to it. The mushroom and peppers kicked ass and the salad was delicious too. We both cleaned our plates and then went back for a little more, Sparky went for more potatoes and gravy while I had a a couple pieces of bread with gravy on them. As you can see, we both liked our meals:

I'm cooking vegetarian meals more often because we've decided to try giving up meat all together after the first of the year. We eaten far less meat than we used to since my heart attack but we still haven't given it up entirely. We decided to give it a go after seeing The Witness, a film about how a New York city tough guy who used to fear and loathe cats and dogs came to love animals so much that he started adopting them, stopped eating other animals, and became an anti fur crusader. We saw the film at this year's film festival that we just had here in Johnson City. I booked the film for the festival and as we watched it we were sickened by how food animals are treated. Also knowing what I know about feed lots and pig and chicken farms, I have been queasy about eating meat for a few months now.

I believe that the next crisis in this country is going to be in our food supply. We've become too reliant on factory farms for our food and those factory farms use too many pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics on their animals. Couple that with the decided lack of oversight on the federal level at the USDA and it's just too big a gamble eating factory farmed meat anymore. Also we been wanting to reduce our energy footprint and when you consider how much gas and oil is used in modern farming it's almost a crime to eat food raised on huge factory farms.

So were going to honor our holiday commitments which include some turkey dinners and we're going to have some meat items at our holiday party in December but after that we're going to try to be meat free for the long haul. We're not going to go vegan because we'll still use eggs and dairy products and because I don't want to be associated with most vegans, most of them are a sanctimonious pain in the ass. I also won't be eating things like Tofurky (although we will have tofu based dishes from time to time), Morningstar Farms brand fake bacon and sausage, or things like 'wheatballs.' There's enough variety of fruits, grains, vegetables that can make up our diet now.

Will we succeed? Can we shake the meat monkey off our backs? I'm not sure yet but we're going to try and that's why I'm cooking more vegetarian meals these days.