Item: I just finished Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book, which is full of stories about his "Super Size Me" adventure and the latest antics of Big Food.
Item: I have twenty pounds (eek) of pregnancy weight to lose.
Ergo: the Vegetable Project. For the month of June, I'm going to eat five servings of vegetables a day and cut out refined sugar. And, of course, I'm going to blog about it.
Don't Eat This Book is flawed. It reads like a blog in hardcover; a little more editing would have made it a much better book. There is a "let them eat cake" tone in some places -- too many encomia to organic veggies and not enough focus on the problems of cost and availability, especially in poor neighborhoods. It's not in the same league as Fast Food Nation, which caused me to call all my friends and family saying "Read this book!" and tell my children I would only take them for fast food once a year. I read DETB compulsively, though, sloppy editing notwithstanding.
So this is my super-size-me-in-reverse project. ("Minimize me" doesn't sound quite right.) I had visions of a nifty calendar in the sidebar with links to recipes, but I'm going to have to keep working on that one. Here's a recipe to start:
Peel a head of garlic (do you know the trick where you smash each clove hard with the flat of your knife and the peel slides off easily? also useful when pitting olives) and chop it roughly. Saute in oil, along with red pepper flakes to taste, until tender. Add a 28-oz. can of chopped tomatoes and two 15-oz. cans of garbanzos. Simmer 20 minutes or so. Stir in a thawed 10-oz. package of frozen spinach. (You can substitute other greens here if you like -- I used beet greens. Chop them finely and add them at the beginning along with the garlic.) Serve over pasta with grated Parmesan cheese.
I used whole-wheat pasta for that extra-virtuous feeling, but ended up with a virtue deficit when I waited too long to start cooking and snapped at my children as my blood sugar plummeted. Here's to better planning by month's end.
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