Winter

As soon as the new year arrives, January becomes the month all about weight loss, getting fit, eating healthy, etc. We all put on the extra pounds during the holiday months by eating our favorite hearty comfort foods and then try to shed them as fast as we can. Just like everyone else, I too make a new year's resolution I don't quite keep. But this year I hope to follow through with my plan to eat more and more vegetables and a lot less meat. My way of eating during the winter months has always included lots of soups and stews that feature meat. But I'm finding that once I change the foods I eat and the techniques I use to cook them, that I can follow through with my plan. To achieve this, I try to think of the foods of summer, such as salads, grilled chicken and fish, and other recipes that remind me of healthier eating.

This brightly colored black bean salad not only reminds me of summer, but it also has the frugal sensibility of winter. The dried beans, once cooked, are combined with fresh vegetables that are available year round. For this recipe, I prefer using dried beans instead of canned, because they're more economical and I can control the flavoring of the cooking liquid as well as the texture of the beans. Most canned beans tend to be overcooked. This high-fiber salad is great for a quick lunch on its own or alongside a protein for dinner. It also works exceptionally well as a salsa for an appetizer when paired with baked tortilla chips. It's versatile, healthy, and flavorful. It makes for a great healthy start to the new year.

Sounds funny, right? “Winter fruit”. It’s a sorry state of affairs, especially in California where we can get so many splendid things almost all year round AND believe it or not, we DO have winter.

The Farmers Market web sites list what’s in season and during winter the list looks like it’s trying too hard.  With un-enticing things like Gogi and Ground Cherry (what the…?) it looks like a parent making excuses for their untalented child. When I clicked on the Fruit icon at LocalHarvest.com it showed an array of exciting things like apricots and melons, only to find out that they were hocking the seeds to grow them with for ‘sweet goodness grown at home.’  Jesus!

The one fruit that gets to shine during winter is the apple.  I love apples. I’m so glad the growers of Delicious got it together and stopped growing that mush bomb. Red Delicious has returned to the apple of my childhood. Hard as a rock, crisp, juicy and sweet.

Except for an ill-fated attempt to grow mushrooms in a box last winter and the occasional mini-fungi that pop up in the garden mulch, we do not grow mushrooms here on the farm. I guess that’s one of the reasons I’ve neglected writing much about this most meaty of vegetables.

But yesterday I was paging through Fast, Fresh & Green, looking for appropriate recipes for two classes I’ll be teaching at Stonewall Kitchens in Maine in May, and I stumbled upon these Mahogany Mushrooms. Oh, I’d forgotten how much I love cooking mushrooms like this. Chunky, fast, hot, browned, glazed–yum. Wan, undercooked, undercolored mushrooms are not my thing. If you follow this technique, that fate will not befall you.

Just to check, I made a batch this morning and Farmer and I ate them for lunch with some scrambled eggs. He gave the mushrooms ten licks (his rating system—it has to do with how much he licks his chops after sampling a dish).

I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but at some point in the last several years, ginger butternut squash soup became America's #1 vegetarian soup of choice.

Ginger butternut squash soup is everywhere. Google it, and you'll get hundreds of recipes (I stopped counting after the eighth full page load). Every vegetarian cookbook has a recipe for it. It's the go-to soup for Thanksgiving holidays and dinner parties, and 9 times out of 10, it's the only vegetarian soup available at cafeterias and supermarkets food courts. I've seen brawls break out in Trader Joe's as people frantically try to scoop up as many cartons of butternut squash soup as possible.

I understand the love. I made my first pot of ginger butternut squash soup about 15 years ago from a vegetarian cookbook I bought right after we moved to North Carolina. It was a revelation: creamy, refreshing, soothing. I have made that soup so many times, the recipe is etched in my brain along with my telephone number and birth date.