A Week Thinking About What We Eat

The year begins with champagne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (circa 1880-81) and new dietary guidelines. Well, something like that.  Marion Nestle at Food Politics offers a review of the impregnable document: The 2015 Dietary Guidelines, At Long Last, while Mother Jones points out that climate goes missing in the document: There’s A Huge Problem With The New Food Guidelines. FiveThirtyEight peeks under the covers of how nutrition science works: You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition, and CivilEats takes us through the timeline creating the new guidelines: Shaping The 2015 Dietary Guidelines.  Health Or Lobbying? from Democracy Now reminds us who’s been in charge of these guidelines since Sen. McGovern’s ill-fated attempt back in 1977, which I blogged on last year in Not Much Has Changed Since 1977.

So, what to do with all this information?  Plan a week worth of meals. The family has talked about eating less meat, yet when we do making it celebratory.  Our plan is to focus on veg and fish during the week, then welcome the end with a mighty punch of red. here’s what happens.

Sunday we we dig into roasted chicken, broccoli, radishes and potatoes with green beans sautéed in butter with garlic.

Which means Monday I puree the leftovers, along with pork liver stuffing from the Christmas pig, which I’ve kept in the freezer, creating a chicken/pork liver pasta sauce served over linguine.

Next up, we receive Acorn Squash and Sweet Potatoes from Greenling, so I adapt Bryant Terry’s Sweet Potato and Pumpkin Soup from Afro-Vegan equaling yum.

For Wednesday, we turn to Madhur Jaffrey and combine two of her recipes, Mushroom and Potatoes Cooked with Garlic and Ginger and Turnips with Cilantro and Mint from Indian Cooking.

Leftovers on Thursday attain nirvana with a fried egg.

Friday we move to catfish adapting a Trout Amandine recipe from my holy tome, The Professional Chef from the Culinary Institute of America, again with help from Bryant Terry and his Blackened Okra and Red Rice recipe.

What does Saturday bring?  A Salmon fish head.

Which then leads to a noodle soup with red cabbage, mint, cilantro and mushrooms.  I love fish heads, besides the stock they supply enough meat for three.

And this brings us to Sunday and meat.  Two glorious Bone-in Rib-Eyes from Revival Market pan seared than basted with sage butter.

Served with Potato Confit and a Cesar Salad.

So this is our plan for the upcoming weeks of 2016–vegetables, grains and fish during the week, a chosen animal for the weekend.  In the words of Michael Pollan from In Defense of Food, “Eat food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”  And to supply an appropriate epilogue, here is a link to his new documentary aptly titled In Defense of Food. Bon Appétit!