Edible gifts redux

I wanted to follow up on my post about soup in a jar and show you how it turned out.

My girlfriend decided she wanted to give these as office gifts, too.  We set up an assembly line and ended up making 14 of them.  She tied the labels on with some festive yarn.

A few tips, if you decide to do this:

• If you're making up a big batch of the spice blend in advance, as I did, it will not go as far as you think it will.  We had to stop midway through and make some more.  I think this is probably the result of settling, since I made the spice blend the night before.  
• A canning funnel was a huge help when it came to pouring the lentils and rice into the jars without getting them all over the table.
• Tap the jar firmly on the table after each addition, to keep the layers level and make sure the jars are packed tight.  That will keep them looking nice when you shlep them to wherever they're going.

We packed these in gift bags with tissue paper, and included a can of coconut milk with each jar (another protip:  Trader Joe's coconut milk is only $0.99 a can!  They also had good prices on red lentils and jasmine rice.).  

Everyone really seemed pleased to receive these.  They were also impressed that we had made them ourselves, which made me laugh -- yes, I poured ingredients into a jar all by myself!  Also, I was afraid this was a hackneyed idea, but people acted like it was a great novelty.  Several commented on how creative I am (!).  Of course Glue and Glitter is the creative one, and I did give her credit.  I guess it all depends on what you're used to.

We wanted to know how it tasted, of course, so I made a batch with some ingredients we had left over:

 
I followed the printed directions exactly (except I used a little less olive oil than called for).  I like the combination of the two kinds of lentils.  The red ones disintegrated and the brown ones stayed relatively firm, which was a nice contrast.  I also love the aromatic spices, and the creamy richness of the coconut milk.  If I were going to make it again:

• I would add more liquid.  The rice really drank it all up, and as you can see above I ended up with a porridgelike consistency (in fact, I have been eating this as my breakfast starch and it fills that role nicely).
• I would use brown rice instead of white.  I think I just prefer a little more chewiness.  Wild rice might be nice, too.  I've been eating a fair amount of wild rice lately.
• More spice.  Maybe some garam masala.  Maybe more black pepper.  Maybe a little cayenne.  Also, the recipe calls for "salt to taste" and it definitely needed the salt.  It might not if there were more heat in it.
• Maybe change the proportions of beans to rice.  As written it's about half and half.  I think I would prefer 2/3 beans to 1/3 rice, or maybe even 3/4 to 1/4.  But I'm a huge bean fan and your mileage may vary.
• Maybe throw some more veggies in there.  Cabbage.  Carrots.  Spinach.  Of course then we're really moving away from the "just about everything you need is in the jar" concept.

To sum up -- it's a nice bowl of comfort food and probably a good starter recipe for people who are afraid of Indian cooking, but I don't think I would make it as written again.  I do think it would be a good starting point for my own creation, though, and that's often how I use recipes, especially for soup.

I had to laugh, because unbeknownst to me, my boss had bought me two bags of chili mix from a group called the Women's Bean Project.  I'm soaking the beans from one bag this morning, and will be making chili later today.  I'll give a review of that one when it's done.

Among the normals

Yesterday was my office "Christmas party."  I thought I'd write a little bit about this to give a glimpse of how a vegan with an eating disorder deals with Christmas food and festivities.

The restaurant was lovely -- for an omnivore.  I knew I was going to have to plan ahead, so I looked at the menu on line the day before.  I did see that a vegan could order pasta with red sauce (at least I assume the red sauce was vegan; I wasn't going to eat it so I didn't check), but I don't eat pasta.  But this place had side dishes that could be ordered separately.  Thank the FSM for side dishes.  Lots of restaurants don't seem to have them any more, but they can really help a vegan out.

My typical lunch is starch, protein, vegetable, fruit.  I saw that I would be able to order a plain baked potato and steamed spinach, but no protein.  So I went home and made my favorite baked tofu, from Appetite for Reduction. A three-ounce serving wrapped in plastic wrap fit very nicely in my purse.  Then when it was time to order, I got the baked potato ("no butter, no sour cream") and spinach.  I unwrapped my tofu and put it on my bread plate.  There wasn't any fruit for me to order, so I ate a banana when I got home.

The baked potato was good, with a nice crisp skin.  The spinach was meh.  It was baby spinach, which was nice, and it wasn't overcooked, but they didn't do a good job draining it.  I also found a rogue piece of spaghetti in the bottom of the bowl (with the cooking water that should have been drained away).  Ew.  Also, the portion was tiny ("The food was terrible!  And such small portions!").  I really should have ordered two vegetables, but at those prices I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Fortunately, my coworkers are used to me.  I got a few questions about the tofu (one person seemed unaware that tofu can be purchased in a grocery store), but none of the interrogation or mocking I've read about on  vegan message boards.  I'm amazed by the crap some vegans have to deal with.

The lunchtime conversation reminded me how fortunate I am, to have a way to deal with food.  This is the time of year that amateurs who don't normally overeat start acting like people with binge eating disorder.  There has been a steady stream of junk food gifts to my office -- cookies, cupcakes, popcorn, chocolate -- and apparently everyone but me has been snacking all day (most of the stuff isn't vegan, but when I was deep in the throes of my eating disorder that would not have stopped me).  People were complaining about stomach aches and weight gain.  In January they'll all be heading to Weight Watchers and the gym.  Meanwhile I'm all "starch, protein, vegetable, fruit, repeat."  I've been getting more exercise lately, wearing a pedometer and taking 10,000 steps  a day.  My knee isn't thrilled, but otherwise my body feels great.  I don't know how much I weigh (a topic for another post), but I'd guess my weight has stayed the same or even gone down a little bit.

It seems like normal people overeat around the holidays, and then when the holidays are over they go back to normal eating or do a diet or a cleanse for a while.  The last time I did any holiday overeating, it took me about six months to stop.  People say "My disease doesn't take a holiday, so I can't either."   I have to eat the same way all the time.  No highs and no lows.  It's like what I wrote a month ago about living on a plateau.

One of the weird things about being in recovery is that people say things like "you have so much self control."  Someone said that at the holiday lunch yesterday when I didn't order dessert.  I said, "I really don't."  What is hard for normal people to understand is that if I had any self control, I wouldn't have to eat this way.   But that's okay.  For today I'm feeling really peaceful, and I don't mind.

Edible Gifts

I don't give a lot of holiday gifts.  I'm Jewish, and when I was growing up Chanukah was never a gift-giving extravaganza the way Christmas seems to be.  These days I buy Chanukah gifts for three people -- my mom and my two little cousins -- and those were all shipped out a week ago or more.  But I do believe in playing well with others, so I try to give a little edible gift to my coworkers every year.

Last year I made the candy cane variation of this fudge, and it was a huge hit.  But I don't eat stuff like that any more, and I didn't want the ingredients in my house.  I also read an article about food gifts that spoke to me -- it said everyone is already inundated with junk food at Christmas, and would appreciate something healthy.  So I hit on soup mix in a jar.

It's not so easy to find a soup-in-a-jar recipe that is both vegan and delicious-sounding, but I finally hit on this one, courtesy of Glue and Glitter.  It sounds yummy, and I had a lot of the supplies in the house, including some leftover pint canning jars. And  G and G even provides cute little recipe tags to print out! My girlfriend and I decided we would both give these to our coworkers.  We are going to include a can of coconut milk with the jar of soup mix, since that's an ingredient a lot of people don't have lying around in their pantries (if people don't have olive oil, onions, and garlic lying around, they are never going to cook anything and I give up).  Yesterday we replenished our supply of canning jars and lids, and got some cute little gift bags that are NOT Christmas themed.  We also made the spice mix, which included removing a huge pile of cardamom seeds from their pods and grinding them, because that's how we roll around here.  That was probably the most time consuming aspect of the whole project.

This morning I made up a prototype, with stuff I happened to have in the house:

Cute, right?  The layers of lentils and rice didn't come out as even as I would like.  I'll have to work on that.  Maybe I'll go ahead and cook this one for us -- we talked about doing a taste test.