Monday, April 2, 2012

Seitan, dinosaurs and never finding the right cookbook

I'm a girl who likes a good recipe book. Because I'm no natural cook (there, I said it), I like to have a few rules to back up my grub aspirations. With the number I've been gathering over the past couple of years, I could start my own bloody bookstore, but I've yet to find one that I can recommend or get more than a little warm about.

The vegetarian ones always have cheese as a main ingredient. The paleo ones, being dinosaur-friendly, focus on meat. And the vegan ones assume you want fake meat. Don't get me started on all the "eat right for your type" shite that fills up the diet section of the bookstore. Crap, all of it. Yeah, I said it. Calorie counting is for the 1980 you and has no place in 2012.

I got excited recently reading reviews for the Candle 79 cookbook, based on an NY vegan eatery popular with the snoberific veg-heads. I made the mexican chocolate cake in it, which was truly tasty. It also has some pretty decent looking pure veg ideas, but "Try the seitan piccata!!" is what I've been reading on every bathroom wall. So tonight we dined on said seitan, which is basically cooked wheat balls sliced into cutlets. It was as disgusto as it sounds. Who are these vegan liars? I want to meet them and shake them violently.


So I fall back to the clean eating philosophy, with my own modifications. You'll never see me reintroduce breakfast in my life on a regular basis after almost two years of being juicy. I feel heavy and unmotivated when I down food in the morning now and am fairly addicted to the green high I get at 10 am. But the rest of the philosophy - about eating whole, natural, unprocessed foods and eating smart and low-glycemic throughout the day - follows as closely to what I'm trying to achieve as anything else.

And the best thing is, I have zero clean-based cookbooks right now, so shove over wheat-meat recipes. If you have any good books you love that don't end in "and sprinkle cheese/scheeze over it before serving", please share, share, share.