Shopping Cart Porn Redux -- Cooking

Yesterday I posted Shopping Cart Porn. I spent the afternoon cooking, and here are the results.

The first thing I made was breakfast sausage. My typical breakfast is some sort of sausage and an egg, but I've been having trouble finding sausage that I like. I decided to make my own, and used Alton Brown's recipe more or less as-is. I started with coarsely ground pork rather than grinding it myself, and I used bacon instead of back fat. I put everything through a meat grinder anyway to get a smaller grind, then cooked up a whole bunch of carefully-weighed sausage patties and refrigerated/froze them. I'll be able to pull out one patty and microwave it for breakfast each day.

Next, I made saag paneer-- an Indian spinach and cheese dish. This recipe was more or less what I used, but I always treat recipes as suggestions rather than prescriptions. I used a mandoline to grate the onion, which worked quite well. Plus, I always feel smug and successful when I use the mandoline and don't lose any blood.

Finally, I made soup. I used my Roasted Tomato Basil Soup as a starting point, but I used ghee instead of olive oil, and left the basil out. Instead, I flavored it with garam masala, curry powder, cayenne, and turmeric, so that it would go well with the saag paneer.

End result: My lunches for this week will be saag paneer and tomato soup. I have a few weeks worth of breakfast sausage. Because I've planned ahead, following my diet will be the path of least resistance-- it will be easier to eat good food than bad. I've carefully controlled my portion sizes.

More importantly, I feel connected to my food and I have confidence that it's healthy and nutritious-- I know every single ingredient that went into each dish, because it all passed through my hands. I know that I'm not eating noxious preservatives and chemicals, and there are no artificial foodlike substances in my meals. Michael Pollan would be proud.


Here's the big bowl of saag paneer.

This would have been a great post to go in the thread I made a couple months ago What You're Eating Now so we could all post pictures like this in one place, but no one wanted to do that, so now we have dozens of threads with a single picture...

Oh no, LOL.

Everything sounds great. Thanks for sharing. I may want to try that saag paneer dish myself. It looks really good.

YUM,

I feel the same way! Perfectly put.

It does make it so much easier when you plan. I'm a planner by nature - my sister tells me I was making "To Do" Lists at age 8!

I cook on the weekends and freeze individual servings. That way I don't have much to think about when I get home. I usually have several things to choose from in addition to a salad. It helps that I batch cook and I have a foodsaver. Sometimes the stuff stays in the freezer for 3 months before I get around to it. I just need a larger freezer or an extra one for the basement.

By the way, homemade sausage patties are quite easy to make if you start with pre-ground meats. All you really need to do is to season the meat, mix it well, then make it into patties and cook it. It's basically like making hamburgers.

The "laws and sausages" maxim doesn't apply when you're making it yourself.

The real question is, when you do cut yourself with the mandolin, how many calories does blood have?

lol, okay, I know I'm disgusting.

Well, suremeansyes, if you really want to know, some people have done some math on how many calories are in your blood. They're doing whole-body calculations, though.

And now, I'll whip out my envelope back...

Let's assume that blood is the equivalent to pork in terms of calories. It's probably lower than that, but we'll use it anyway. 100g of pork has 271 calories. A drop is about a fifth of a gram. Therefore, a drop of blood would have about half a calorie.

Ask a geek a question, and...

I'll jump in on this, too...Once upon a time, a nurse told me that when you give blood, you lose between 500-600 calories...

<edit> of course, this is for one unit of blood. :- ) Joyce

Nice! I didn't expect calculations.

My husband is a geek too, so I can appreciate that.

I'm sssooo going to donate blood just to get a larger deficit for that day!

...aaand now I'm craving saag paneer!

And also laughing about the mandoline - I too feel so triumphant when I conclude our biznezz with all digits intact. To me, that means washed, dried, and put away. I've fallen victim to the false sense of post-slicing confidence more than once.