cooking with intention

Carolyn over at curlypurl had a nice idea that I was sort of coming to privately, a cook-along. The idea is to increase the amount of real cooking one does for ones family (I'm taking this to mean lacking in prepared foods -those prepared by someone else that is). Now I try to do this already but last month I really got going on this idea particularly trying to incorporate more creative vegetarian meals into our dinner cycle. So for now I will be trying to increase the nights that I don't just make an omelet or a pizza for dinner and I will be inflicting the story of those meals on you all.

Neither of us are vegetarian but I was at a bookstore and found Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian while looking for a good pumpkin curry recipe. This is a fabulous book. I have now made five meals out of it and we have LOVED four of them. The fifth was a chili recipe that is fine but nothing special or worth noticing even. I haven't even made it out of the legume section but even Marius has liked everything and he used to expect meat every night of the week.

So far my favorite recipes have been the ones using black-eyed peas. Maybe it's a southern thing (how many of you knew that I was originally from the south?) but I think these are the most under-rated legume on the market. They aren't trendy. You can't even find organic ones at Whole Foods. But they are awfully tasty. Tonight I made the black-eyed peas with swiss chard and sauteed some chicken with garlic, lemon zest, tomatoes, and parsley. This is officially the first time I have cooked swiss chard so of course I used the red stuff which resulted in pink black-eyed peas. It's such a pretty vegetable, how could I not? After cooking the beans you add the chard and cook it for another half an hour with a bit of salt. Once everything is nice and soft (and the water has cooked down which takes about 3x as long as Jaffrey says unless you raise the heat), you add lemon juice and olive oil and then heat more olive oil in a separate pan with a dried red chili and finely chopped garlic and onions. This then is added to the bean-chard mix and tossed.

I don't have photos of the meal since Marius ate it all but I'll try and keep evidence of these meals in the future. We still have left-over chili but it's in the fridge in single serving containers and isn't very photogenic at this point. Next week I'll experiment with mung beans since you can find organic ones at Whole Foods in the bulk section so I now have two pounds in my kitchen.