There is still fear of Sunday nights in my house because of the dinner I made back on September 26 (see: http://www.ayuh.com/2010/09/26/sunday-dinner/).  But even Fiona has said that I now have redeemed myself.

Last Sunday was Couscous Shepherd’s Pie–mixed, cooked “tofu chicken,” beans, and other veggies topped with a layer of couscous and then baked–which followed up nicely on my Baked Red Beans and Rice the previous Thursday.  Last night I made Vegetable Pot Pie, which was delicious.  (Hmmm.  I’m only now realizing that I’ve made “pie” two weeks in a row.  I need to branch out.)  It basically consisted of a lot of mushrooms, onions, garlic, vegetable broth, peas, corn, sweet potatoes, russet potatoes, and parsnips, all cooked until tender.  Then I dissolved corn starch in water and added it to the vegetables to thicken it.  Put all that in a casserole dish, top it with buttermilk biscuit dough (which was really easy to make) sprinkled with a little fresh dill, and bake it at 400 degrees for 25 minutes.  Really very good.

Oh, and I started everything off with herbed goat cheese stuffed into puff pastry immediately after removing the puffed pastry from the oven.  The hot puffed pastry warmed up the goat cheese nicely.  (I actually had intended to use phyllo dough, but picked up the wrong box from the freezer at the store.  Still, it was yummy.)

So, I’m feeling much better about my Sunday dinners … as is my family.

Well, as I’m sure you all can imagine, most of my cards, letters, and emails this week have been asking the same question: “What did you do about dinner in Boston on Saturday?”  Before some of you start getting impatient and sending me yet another note, I’ll tell you.

We went to a small highly recommended, highly expensive, and excessively mediocre French restaurant called Pigalle.  The most economical thing on the menu was a three-course dinner for $40, but there was no vegetarian option.  But I chose it anyway, and had a mango salad, followed by a shrimp and pasta dish, followed by a creme brullee.

The mango salad was interesting, but the grapefruit was too much for it.  The shrimps were batter-fried, and I have never understood why they don’t take the tails off before serving them, especially when the tails are hidden in some kind of batter thing.  The creme brulee was served warm.  The brulee part, of course, has just been blow-torched, but the creme part is supposed to be cold.

So, shrimp.

Wicked, on the other hand, was nothing short of phenomenal.  I love a good musical with a blow-you-away number at the end of the first act.  Dream Girls had it (I’m not goin’), as did Les Mis (1 Day More).  Wicked’s Defying Gravity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g4ekwTd6Ig) is the same kind of thing.  Sensational.

I found the cookbook. It was in the dining room under a stack of mail.

The recipe I made on Thursday was called “Baked Red Beans and Rice.” Never would have guessed that.

I’m happy to say my vegetarian cooking is getting better.  Thursday night I made something called … well, I can’t remember what it was called, and I can’t find the cookbook right now.  I thought it would be here in the kitchen, but it’s not.  I’ve also checked the living room and the dining room.  It seems to have disappeared.  It’s the one with the big tomato on it.

Still, I do recall what was in it.

1 1/4 cups vegetable broth
1 cup long-grain rice
1 can dark red kidney beans
2 cups tomato salsa
1 tsp chili powder
salt and pepper

Basically, you mix everything together in a casserole dish, cover it tightly (I used aluminum foil), and bake it at 350 degrees for an hour.  Serve with guacamole and a salad.  Really easy and very good.  Much better than those whole wheat pastas with the soy ricotta cheese.

I just checked the downstairs bathroom, but the cookbook isn’t there either.

We’re going out for dinner in Boston tonight before seeing Wicked.  Another opportunity to order the least expensive thing on the menu–the token vegetarian option.

So a funny thing happened last night.  Fiona and I went out for dinner to one of our favorite neighborhood restaurants, Caiola’s.  (The only problem with Caiola’s is that it’s not actually in our neighborhood.  Well, not yet anyway.  Once the kids leave for college, we may move to that neighborhood, downsizing to a charming 2 or 3 bedroom house with a nice kitchen.  Of course, we’ll need to re-roof and paint our house first, and probably redo the upstairs bathroom, and do one heck of a lot of cleaning out–particularly in the attic and basement, both of which are stuffed to the gills with all matter of stuff and things (it’s funny that you can have something stuffed with stuff, but you can’t have something thinged with things)–but I do seem to have digressed into a different story.  That does happen sometimes when you’re a stream-of-conscious thinker.)

Huh.  Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  Caiola’s.

Anyway, Fiona and I went to Caiola’s last night (I said that part already, didn’t I), and normally both of us would have chosen a steak or the pork shanks (which they were out of, so that really would not have been an option) or some similar type of meat-infused item.  But we’re both doing this plant-based diet right now, and after only one week, neither of us found the meat entries appealing.  I started with a simple house salad, and we both had the risotto with shitake (how odd that spell-check doesn’t like that word) mushrooms.  The other benefit to eating this way is that these were the least expensive items on the menu.

In short, we’ve both already reached a critical stage:  animal-based products simply aren’t that appealing.  I don’t find myself hankering for a juicy steak, and I’d prefer a veggie burger (Fiona doesn’t think these should be called “burgers”) over a hamburger.

Any questions?

When freezing bananas to make smoothies, make sure you peel them before you put them in the freezer.  Removing the peel from a frozen banana is like chipping 250-million-year-old dinosaur bones out of stone.

Well, at least I imagine it is.  I’ve never done the latter.

It looks like I need to work on my plant-based cooking.

I’m making a vegetarian dinner for the family every Sunday evening.  Tonight, I made ravioli with no-cook heirloom tomato sauce, which I got from the Whole Foods iPhone app.  The ravioli was Whole Foods’ Organic Spinach & Cheese Whole Wheat Ravioli, a frozen product that takes very little time to make–boiling the water is the most time-consuming part.

Let’s just say it was not a hit.  The no-cook heirloom tomato sauce actually was pretty good–essentially, tomatoes, spinach, basil, and balsamic vinegar.  The whole wheat pasta, on the other hand, was not terrific.  To be honest, I didn’t mind it that much, but there were others who used words such as “disgusting.”  This typically is not a word one likes to have associated with the food one makes.

I purchased a couple of vegetarian cookbooks at the end of the week.  Perhaps I’ll have more luck with those than with Whole Foods’ iPhone app.

So it would seem I need to do a little recipe-book research on how to make a good smoothie.

For breakfast this morning, I put a full banana, about six strawberries, and a cup of soy milk in the blender.  The result did not really taste bad, but it was somewhat thick.  Also, it needed to be colder.  I read somewhere that I should freeze the bananas.  That might help.

By the way, I have officially lost 10 pounds since May 16.  That puts me 20% of the way toward my goal.

Oh, and one more thing.  I just told my mom to look at this blog.  Now I really can’t back down.

Okay, so it’s been about 18 months since I last wrote here, but I’m back.  Why?  Because I need to lose about 50 pounds, and I’m starting a mostly plant-based diet, and I’m going to use this blog to record my progress.

You may wonder why I would write to the world (well, not to the world–perhaps to the three people that might actually read this occasionally) about my weight-loss effort.  My theory on that is that if I tell everyone I’m doing this and then give progress updates, I’ll actually stick to it.  This way, if I trash the diet, I’ll shamefully have to admit it to, well, all three of you.  So, I have added incentive to stick to it.

I have tried a number of approaches.  A couple of years ago I went on a very strict Atkins diet.  I kept it up for two months and lost about 25 pounds.  Losing the weight felt great, but to be honest I felt like crap–all that meat–and three or four months later all the weight was back.  Simply put, the  diet is neither sustainable nor healthy.

This summer I started Weight Watchers, and I bought all kinds of frozen lunches and powdered drinks containing what can only be described as stuff.  Say, that lunch is worth only 5 points!  Just don’t look at what you’re actually eating.  I recently read that you should not eat anything your grandmother would not have made.  Although it’s true that I didn’t want to eat most of what my grandmother did make (how I loathe rhubarb), I get the point.

All of this lead me to the conclusion that we all already know.  The only way to truly lose weight and then keep it off is to change your eating habits … permanently.

And so the mostly plant-based diet.  More than a diet, a change in lifestyle.  My initial goal is to lose 50 pounds by May 16, 2011–my 49th birthday.  (For the record, I’m counting the 8 pounds I’ve already taken off since I turned 48.)  My second goal is to have that weight still off when I turn 50.

But you may rightfully ask, “Hey, Tim, what’s this ‘mostly’ thing all about?”  Ah, good question.  I happen to love a good steak.  Lamb is nothing if it’s not scrummy.  So, when we go to Emilitsa, I’ll have the lamb.  Dinner at friends’, I’ll eat whatever is being served.  Turkey at Thanksgiving; goose at Christmas.  Fish I’ll restrict to once each month, both for health and sustainability reasons.  But my home-cooked meals, my lunches, and my snacks are going to consist entirely of fruits and vegetables and things like soy, tofu, pasta, grains, and other deliciousnesses.

And that’s my story, or the beginning anyway.  I’ll let you know how it goes.