Ask the Food Fairy!

This week’s boxes and meal plans feature New Year’s recipes from all over the globe. Ghana, Ireland, Japan, the American South…. It was a lot of fun researching what different cultures eat.

The groceries for the premium meal plans run about $40-$50, depending on where you are and what you have on hand, so with the $15 meal planning kit your meals for the week are $55-$65… and with no wheat, and lots of veggies and protein, it’s a super-healthy and delicious way to start off the new year:

Herring in Sour Cream (Germany)

Eating herring at midnight on New Year’s is supposed to be good luck – so save one just for that! The omega-3s and omega-6s packed into these little fish are bound to bring you good health, too.

Photo credit: Wordridden on Flickr

Cotechino con Lenticchie (Italy)

So many of the dishes that different cultures use to celebrate their new year are aimed at bringing in the bucks. In this case, the round green lentils symbolize money, while the delicious sausage symbolizes the abundance and good fortune you must have to be eating sausage whenever you like!

Sanshu-zakana (Japan)

This is just part of the elaborate boxes of New Year’s dishes that people eat at this time: the o-sechi, a ton of food in three or four lacquered boxes that allow people to go for several days without having to cook! (Hey… a lot like using these meal plans!)

According to the Japan Times, the kuromame (a black bean dish) is “for the blessings of health and the ability to work; seasoned dried small anchovies, tazukuri — for fertility in the field; and prepared herring roe, kazunoko — [are] for maternal fertility and abundance of generations.”

Photo credit: _e.t. via Flickr

Yam Fufu with Stew (Western Africa)

As a local restaurant review put it, “the fufu reaches a soft, fluffy consistency between mashed potatoes and whipped cream. You eat it by using your right hand to pluck morsels off the mound in your bowl. Then you dip the fufu into the stew and delicately flick it into your mouth. Don’t chew, just swallow. ‘Once you get used to it, it’s a very sensual food,’ [Ghanaian food expert] Osseo-Asare says.”

In “Things Fall Apart,” Chinua Achebe writes lyrically of the fall Yam Festival, when “old things of the past year are ritually discarded and thrown out in anticipation of a new yam and new year.” Different cultures in Ghana and Nigeria celebrate this in slightly different ways; for example, in Ghana it is also known as the “Homowo” or “To Hoot at Hunger” Festival. Yam fufu is, of course, a highlight of this celebration.

Fatt Goh (China)

Moist, fluffy little cupcakes traditionally made with rice flour. If they puff up while steaming, you will puff up yourself with good luck and prosperity during the coming year! And hey, if not, you still have delicious cake to eat.

The groceries for the basic meal plans run about $20-$30, depending on where you are and what you have on hand, so with the $15 meal planning kit your meals for the week are $35-$45… and damn is it getting yummy in here:

Fatt Goh again (China)

Yep, this meal plan has the same little cupcakes. They’re also called huat kueh, if that helps you at all! But here, you get to eat them every day. Cake for breakfast?! That’s a VERY happy new year! And then:

Photo credit: jetalone on Flickr

Stuffed Cabbage Rolls (Hungary)

So many of the dishes that different cultures use to celebrate their new year are aimed at bringing in the bucks. In this case, the cabbage leaves symbolize money, and the meaty, colorful filling symbolizes all the prosperity and abundance we want on other levels too.

Photo credit: Sheila Miguez

Boxty (Ireland)

“Boxty on the griddle,
Boxty in the pan,
If you can’t make boxty,
You’ll never get a man.”
Whether or not that’s a goal of yours, boxty is a delicious, hearty way to ring in the New Year. Besides, potatoes stave off scurvy. You don’t want scurvy, do you?

Hoppin’ John (American South)

The black-eyed peas symbolize coins, and the dark leafy greens simmered alongside them represent riches and good luck. A little bacon or other pork product tossed in for flavor symbolizes prosperity. Oh yeah – and it all tastes great too! I especially love how creamy the black-eyed peas get; it makes such a good contrast with the slight crunch of those greens.

Happy New Year’s to those who celebrate it this week!

Happy post-U.S.-Thanksgiving, everyone

I just finished creating the meal plans for this week and I am excited! The basic box has a garlic theme: roasted garlic and olive oil plate, pasta with garlic and parsley, lemony-garlicky scrambled eggs, and roast potatoes with garlic aioli. Yeah… it’s plenty of garlic! Great for your immune system, right? And just enough to make you smell deliciously garlicky in a good way.
And the premium box is designed to help people use up leftover turkey!  First you’ll make patties out of it and wrap them with garlic bacon to get the turkey super-moist and flavorful. Then you’ll use some to stock up the Amish Bean Soup, so you don’t get bored of eating bird. And to make turkey sandwiches exciting, we’ll punch them up with gorgonzola, proscuitto, and arugula, much in the way that Food Blogga did last year! Plus for the first time, there is some variety in the breakfasts (and NO TURKEY) some days it’s a fantastic pumpkin soup with bacon-flavored whipped cream, and some days it’s gluten-free coffee cake! (That one’s store-bought – I am sure many of you will be tired of cooking at that point!)

Seriously, I am drooling here. I’ll try to get the meal planning kits with these recipes up by Monday too, so that everyone with turkey has some interesting and easy options for using it up! And I’ll be sharing my own experience with that pumpkin soup soon, because it is AWESOME.

I admit it, I’ve been procrastinating on finishing up and posting the menus for October. The first two weeks were up, but what of the future?

I noticed that the fall fruits and veggies have hit our farmer’s market. Persimmons, both the firm honeyed kind and the juicy jelly-like glowing orange suckers; pomegranates in incredible jeweled colors even on the outside; eggplants, not just regular purple ones but green ones, white ones, pale jade ones, long and tiny and round and eggy ones, eggplants galore. And okra, which I freaking love (it’s shaped like stars when I cut it! the seeds are tiny and round and pop in my mouth!) but which I realize is even more controversial than eggplant.

Autumn really serves up the argumentative foods. Even pomegranates are hard to peel and pick apart. And the squishy persimmons are tannic, sucking the moisture out of my mouth, if they’re even a tiny bit unripe. What is that about? Does the veggie kingdom get pissy about the coming winter? It doesn’t even get that cold here, guys. Chill out. (Chill! Get it! Ha ha ha ha!)

So anyway. OH, and APPLES and GRAPES! I am extremely excited about these. I didn’t realize grapes were a fall fruit, but they’re swarming us here. Apples deserve their own entry; we’ve turned them into a difficult, pissy food by offering just a few mealy, flavorless, waxed varieties in the stores and abandoning so many of the wild and delightful “heirloom” apples.

I suspect that the same is true of grapes; it’s easy to find fantastic grapes and apples at the farmer’s market or Berkeley Bowl, but at a big chain grocery store (I am looking at you, Safeway and Whole Foods) it took ages to find a grape that wasn’t pale in flavor and attitude. And why else would we use apple and grape juices as the base for all those commercial juices if they weren’t being bred to be pallid and unnoticeable? I used a Minute Maid drink box, “wild berry” flavor, this morning to rescue a smoothie gone bad; the ingredients informed me that it was apple and grape juice with less than 2% of the ingredients from raspberries and blackberries and I think water.

So, what to serve?

The Basic box is easier to put together because I don’t need to pay attention to how much protein is in anything. Full creative freedom! I already have Mushroom Barley Risotto down for that one; how about a Piña Colada Cooler for breakfast, and something with eggplant for another meal… and something with squash?

My favorite thing to do with eggplant is to roast it with feta and garlic. I always thought I loathed eggplant until I was over at my girlfriend’s house one day and she offered me a bite of what she was having. I saw the brown pieces of eggplant in there, but I thought they were mushrooms! So I dug in and demanded to know what this amazing recipe was, and oops: eggplant. Which is nice, actually, because food that pretty shouldn’t taste bad. (As pretty as a whole eggplant, I mean, all shiny and purple: it sure doesn’t cook up pretty.)

So how about some of that? We can use a kind that doesn’t start out bitter, to make it even easier and tastier for you.

(If you’re a PeaceMeals customer, by the way, you can always tell the recipes that I just make all the time and wrote down for you, because they have ingredients like “A whole pile of eggplant” or “Feta to taste” and instructions like “Roast it till it’s brown and then eat it.” Food just doesn’t need to be all that complicated!)

The squash is a riskier matter because I haven’t paid much attention to what is available besides 10,000 kinds of pumpkins.  Or… why not use pumpkins? I was thinking of a pumpkin-bacon soup… I think the bacon would survive a trip out to you folks in New York and such. It’s cured, and everything, after all. I’ll check it out.

In fact, why not go really crazy and try a variation on this French pumpkin soup with bacon whipped cream? Honestly, the thought makes me feel a little urpy, but that could also be the not-very-good smoothie I drank. Who doesn’t like pumpkin, and bacon, and cream? You can always just put the bacon straight into the soup if you’d rather! (And the cream too, come to think of it.)

All right, that takes care of you people. Now what about the premium boxes?

I know what I want for breakfast there: Fudge-Banana Protein Shakes. Yum! (Somehow in playing with that recipe I accidentally recreated the protein shake I had once at Starbucks. Huh. Well, it was good!) And for four of the meals: Balsamic Braised Chicken Legs. Ohhh, maybe it is time to bring in the Butternut Squash Mac ‘n’ Cheese!! Yeah it is! And one more… something else with veggies. Oh, hey: MINESTRONE! The food of my peoples. The FALL food of my peoples (and winter) and it’ll use up the rest of the canned tomatoes from the chicken recipe! Perfection. Thanks for hanging out and experiencing my process here! Bon appetit!