The Potpourri: Quesadillas, Grass-Fed Beef, Farm Fresh Eggs

So some more catching up to do, I suppose. I'll start with a pretty straightforward meal we made a few nights ago: a Jack Cheese and Peach Quesadilla. I followed this, for the most part, verbatim (excluding only the cilantro because it's just not my favorite). I also used chicken tenderloins grilled with a salt, pepper, and chili powder seasoning as opposed to the rotisserie chicken suggested in the recipe. I grilled the chicken first, then kept the bit of chicken drippings warm so that it could be used to grill the tortillas and give them a bit of seasoning.

Sides included roasted potatoes (just quartered white new potatoes patted dry and tossed with roughly quartered onions; seasoned with salt, pepper, a touch of cayenne pepper, and chili powder; roasted in the oven at 425 degrees for about 25 minutes, tossing halfway through roasting time) and fresh tomato salad (tomatoes purchased from the produce stand, including Cherokee purple, a pink tomato, and a striped tomato, tossed with some olive oil, white wine vinegar, cumin, salt, and pepper).

See that green stuff? Yeah, picante habanero sauce, baby. Tabasco doesn't cut it for me anymore. Pretty sure the hubby blacked out for a few minutes after consuming one potato doused in the sauce.

Now, onto the more complicated recipes. I've become extremely involved in reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma," a book that has dramatically changed the way I think about food. I don't want to give a book report here, but it's an eye-opening, educational book. It is not a diet book but, instead, a book urging its readers to step away from the Western diet. In essence (at least to me), it is a non-diet book, a guide to quit a diet, in fact, that is obscenely affecting our lives. The Western diet, in a nutshell, is the quintessential American diet, one underlined by fast food and convenience instead of Slow Food (a movement quintessential to Italians who, despite their consumption of wine and what we consider fattier foods, are healthier because of the very way they eat and view food, or their relationship to food). The horrors of what we choose to ingest are positively overwhelming and, as a result, I have not touched any fast food nor any sodas in the weeks I have been reading Michael Pollan's diatribe. (In fact, I've lost more than 6 pounds by taking to heart Pollan's lessons, combined with running.) Overall, I am trying to make a conscious effort to become more, well, conscious of what it is I am eating. I can point to countless paragraphs in "The Omnivore's Dilemma" that just make sense (all of it, actually), but I will spare you: all I can say is, if you want to change your eating habits, go buy or check this book out from the library. For my part, our household grocery shopping habits are changing, and I am starting to lean more on a local produce stand, the farmer's market, and local meats. I want to know what it is I am eating, where it came from, its origins, something that is at the very heart of Pollan's book. You just can't do that at the grocery store. So, starting with baby steps, our meals have evolved (thought not completely as you will see) to have an origin that is local, not one whose only story is a barcode and a distribution origin of god knows where.

To start, I made a homemade lasagna Monday evening. This comprised a spaghetti sauce I made from scratch using tomatoes that were grown by the hubby's great-uncle. The sauce was simple: I just poached about 13-14 whole tomatoes in boiling water for about a minute to loosen the skins, peeled off the skins, squeezed out most of the seeds, and gave them a rough chop. I sauteed some peppers and onions (both of which came from the local produce stand just down from my house) in olive oil (sadly, I have not learned to make olive oil yet), added the tomatoes, seasoned, and tossed in some tomato paste (something, again, that came with a barcode from the grocery store; but I will learn how to make it from scratch one day).

Next up: the all-important meat. This is where I came to respect Pollan's book because he does not make a case for vegetarianism (something I tried for three years and failed at rather miserably). Instead, he makes a case for becoming a better, healthier meat eater: by learning where you get your meat and ensuring that meat came from, well, happy cows, chickens, pigs, etc. Happy cows are not the product of industrialization, a process that feeds corn and grain and, yes, animal byproduct to fatten a cow more quickly than nature ever intended. That, my friends, is a food chain that is full of petrochemicals, of pesticides, of toxins that us humans consume as well. No, happy cows are grass-fed cows because that is what nature intended. (Or, as Alton Brown pointed out in a recent episode of "Good Eats," you never see cows grazing in a cornfield, do you? That's because it's NOT NATURAL!)

So off my soapbox....where was I? The meat. We made a trip about a week ago to a local cafe called Mikie's 7th that serves sandwiches using the grass-fed beef raised on a local farm called Shadowchase Farms. We picked up a few pounds of their pre-packaged, frozen beef after a delicious burger (seriously, grass-fed just tastes better, and is actually leaner in fat; more expensive, yes, but look at it this way: if you spend more, you're more likely to ration out the meat, thus eating less meat in the long run). So, the next part in the lasagna was the use of that beef, which I just seasoned with a bit (and I mean just a dash) of salt and pepper and browned over medium heat. I then added the homemade spaghetti sauce and used some extra tomato paste to thicken up the sauce as needed.

I boiled some lasagna noodles (again, something that came with a barcode, but I'm determined to cut out that middleman and learn to make my own pasta the next go-round), and started layering the meat sauce, noodles, and mozzarella cheese (okay, I don't know how good I would be at making mozzarella, but I tried to use the least-processed cheese I could find at the grocery store). I baked it all off at about 325 degrees until the cheese was a golden brown.

Lasagna, starring grass-fed beef.

Okay, I may turn this into a novel by the end of this, but next up was the classic "Breakfast for Dinner." Last night, after reading a particular passage in "The Omnivore's Dilemma" about the production of eggs that end up on the grocery store shelf, I promptly trashed half a dozen eggs that were purchased from Kroger because I could not possibly put in my mouth something obtained from so hideous a means (and yes, you could argue that those poor chickens lived their squalid lives in vain to give me eggs that I just threw away, and trust me, I had that internal dilemma, but I couldn't bring myself to eat them). I vowed to go get some fresh eggs that had a transparent story (that is, the lady at the produce stand could tell me from where the eggs came [the farm]). I started at the farmer's market, but they were fresh out of eggs. Instead, I came home from the farmer's market with some local cherry tomatoes, garlic bulbs, fresh farm butter, and cheese curds (yeah, I have no idea what to do with those, but they're quite tasty). I relied on the produce stand for my fruit for dinner and the fresh brown eggs.

So, the menu: French toast (using 7-grain sourdough bread purchased at a local bakery; and yes, that is another ingredient I am determined to learn to make from scratch), bacon (sadly, this was the stuff bought in the grocery store, and this time around, I couldn't bring myself to throw it out; next time, no bacon unless it's local), scrambled eggs and fresh fruit.

I started by making the French toast batter: three farm fresh eggs whisked with about 1 tablespoon of milk, cinnamon, a dash of nutmeg, and a dash of salt. I dunked the sliced sourdough into the batter and let it sit for a few minutes to absorb. Meanwhile, I sauteed the bacon until a slight golden brown and removed to drain on a paper towel. I poured out most of the bacon grease, saving just a bit for use in a few minutes. I preheated a grill for the French toast and whisked together another three eggs with a bit of milk, salt and pepper and poured them (over medium-low heat) into the skillet with the touch of bacon grease, stirring occasionally. I then grilled up the French toast and plated it all, serving it with the farm fresh butter, and voila!

There will be much more to come in later days as I get a better grasp on realizing the origins of our food and how to incorporate that into our meals. It's definitely a challenge to make a conscious effort to quit the Western diet, but I have to say: I've never felt better and more conscious of what it is I am eating, something to which we should all pay more attention before our healthcare costs and overall health skyrocket beyond control. Seriously, pay attention to what you eat; care about where it originates. It's worth your time.