Happy Un-Veguary!

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Happy March...and happy end to Veguary! Heh. Tonight for dinner there was a juicy, crisp, roast chicken with all the drippings to dribble over our baked potatoes. I am not a vegetarian. I don't like legumes enough. I enjoy meat too much and I know too much about how to responsibly obtain good meat. Hard to sell me on the lifestyle. That said, it was an enlightening experiment and I think I'd do it again if I was faced with the choice all over again.

For those who wondered...we didn't really save anything on food bills this past month. Turns out buying meat isn't breaking the bank. We tried beans four million different ways, ate a lot of quinoa, had tofu and seitan and tried not to miss eating bacon with our pancakes on Saturday mornings. And we ate a lot of cheese for fun because we like cheese and cheese has protein and cheese, cheese is not meat.  (unless you're doing Veganuary....I totally just made that up)

I thought I'd pass on the two recipes I liked most from this month of meat-free living. These will join our canon because they were so good that they made A stop mid-chew and say, "Um. Wow. This is good." Ironically, they are both soups. Soup used to be my deep nemesis. We're friends now.

Soup #1 is a Tuscan White Bean that one of my painting mentors recommended to me. It's filling and wholesome and cheap and simple and feels so happy satisfying. I will turn to it for cold weather pleasure food in the future for sure. I kinda want a bowl now, just writing about it and remembering its fabulousness.

Soup#2 is a fabulous rendition of Vegetarian Chili. I made this dish with great skepticism. I'm really not big on dishes that are faux versions of something. I like chili. Real, regular chili with meat in it that you can serve to men who have just come in from splitting wood in the bitter cold. (Not that men around here split wood....) Even though I like real chili. I like this chili too. No tofu crumbles to resemble meat, no substitutionary  tricks of the eye...just a multi-bean mix with a good broth and a little chocolate for a spoon licking depth of flavor. And anything with chocolate in it is good. Why didn't I think I was going to like this?

So, yes, all you real vegetarians are made of sterner stuff than I am. I confess I am a wimp...but boy, that roast chicken sure made me happy.

Related articles

• Springtime Ayurvedic Shopping List (realyoganyc.wordpress.com)
• Protein Foods List (mademan.com)
• Top 5 Healthy Meat Substitutes for Vegetarian Diets (brighthub.com)
• The Art (And Science) of Being Meatless (friendseat.com)
• Eat less meat in Veguary (healthzone.ca)
• Try It: Eat Less Meat (shutupandtryit.wordpress.com)
• Martha Stewart Living: Roast Chicken Tips & Recipes (huffingtonpost.com)

Coffee: Homegrown, Home-dipped.

Remember, back when I talked about the coffee tree blooming?

So, it bloomed beautifully...and survived the wild botanical mistreatment of our move and then it started making coffee cherries! Really! I couldn't believe it. I was so proud. This  stalwart little tree, valiantly blossoming and fruiting here in the chaos of an urban home in Connecticut. That's guts, right?

As soon as Planty (he has a name) started to fruit out A and I began plotting what we'd do with the coffee. We're not big coffee drinkers and it was sure to be an infinitesimal amount of beans anyway. We considered just eating the cherries by themselves to see what coffee in-the-raw was like and decided we felt badly about not going further with our hard-won produce. And then a brilliant idea hit me! Chocolate covered coffee beans. Genius. A small amount was ideal, it highlighted the little nuggets beautifully and it would be a genuine experience to take it from tree to table. The other hidden bonus was of course that chocolate covered coffee beans can easily be packed up and fly across the ocean to be shared with Miq and Penny, the tree's rightful owners.

And that is how I found myself finishing the process, this afternoon and looking proudly at the first homegrown coffee beans, hand-dipped in quality dark chocolate....that I have ever known. There is something cool about making a thing yourself, however silly the quest may be.

Here's how it worked:

First we picked the ripe, red cherries.

Then we peeled off the skin (which we found were sweet when we couldn't resist tasting them), and put the beans themselves to soak and ferment in a little water.

They soaked for about 3 days. Every day or so I poured off the water and added fresh and rubbed the beans to encourage the pulp to drift off and leave the seeds bare. Somewhere in there, the seeds began to separate and I found that each cherry contains two seeds, their flat bellies sweetly pressed together. You learn new things, every time the sun comes up. Once the seeds were feeling pretty clean, I rubbed them smooth and free of all fleshy bits and gave them one more good rinse under the faucet.

Next I stoked a fire in the fireplace and got out the vintage popcorn popper that I found at an estate sale this summer.

Once the fire had created some nice coals I put all the beans into the cage and rattled them over the coals for a good long time, checking periodically to see how they were coming. Eventually, they started to smell nicely: a great toasting, roasting aroma that I can still smell hanging in the house. Not too long after, they were finished. I think we might have taken some of them a bit farther than we wanted but hey....a dark roast is more European, right?

I let the beans cool and melted some dark chocolate. Once the chocolate was a shining, wet puddle of sweet I was ready to do the final dip. Each bean took a swim in the cocoa bowl and then was dripped out onto a wax paper sheet where they cooled and became...our very first crop of homegrown chocolate covered coffee beans. So, so cool.

Miq and Penny, watch your mailbox!