Most women’s magazines advise the reader to use accessories to refresh a winter wardrobe or to update last year’s clothes. Given budgetary restraints, it is obviously much cheaper to buy a belt or necklace to liven up an old dress or boring sweater than to buy an entire set of work and leisure clothes every season (assuming that there are still readers out there who are even considering doing this).
Perhaps we should take the same approach to perking up our meals since they can become monotonous even if we are not dieting. Although most of us have moved away from the “if it is Thursday, it must be meatloaf” approach to menu planning, many would likely admit that they rarely go beyond a limited culinary repertory. Week after week I stare at certain items in the produce section that I rarely buy, such as kale, and resolve that one of these days I will try to incorporate them into my meals. But then I go back to buying the same vegetables and fruits that I bought the previous week. Like many people I enjoy reading recipes in the newspaper and often cut them out. Then I stuff them in my recipe drawer and notice them only when the drawer becomes hard to close. I also go online to look up a recipe but sometimes the number of choices is so great that simply reading all the options takes longer than making the dish.
A few days ago I was in a clothing store that also sells household items including cookbooks. A visiting relative was busy trying on clothes and, trying to mentally block out the loud music, I picked up a cookbook by a familiar author, Mollie Katzen. Years ago she made healthy vegetarian meals accessible and delicious in her Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. This book, Get Cooking, includes recipes for vegetarians and omnivores with pictures that make you want to run into your kitchen and start chopping and stirring. What was so appealing about the recipes is that the methods were simple. They used familiar ingredients and included suggestions for slightly altering the recipes for the second time you made the dish.
Like adding a belt to a sweater or a great necklace to a dress to make them seem new and interesting, using these recipes allows us to still eat our weekly pasta or fish or chicken but in novel and easy-to-prepare ways. Moreover, many of the recipes fit comfortably into the dinner guidelines of The Serotonin Power Diet as they feature soups with salads as the main course or main course vegetables such Greek-style stuffed eggplant, chickpea and mango curry, or Portobello faux burgers.
Just as we may be leery of some new fashion accessories and unwilling to try them out unless approved by friends or family, so too some of us may be leery of trying our recipes that seem a little too novel for our family’s tastes. One way of testing the approval and acceptability of some of the recipes is to eat them as a first course (soups are an obvious example) or as side dishes. For example, you can “accessorize” a plain piece of broiled chicken with a side dish of panko (Japanese bread crumb)-coated eggplant cutlets or skillet potatoes with fried onions. And if spicy, different foods are not your family’s eating style, the cookbook will tell you how to make simple vegetables, such as winter squash, that you may think is too much trouble to prepare. And to my great delight, Katzen has two pages devoted to dark leafy greens, including how to prevent them from taking over all the space in the refrigerator. Tomorrow it is kale for dinner!
