A Transition

 I am a vegetarian and have been since around 2012. Back then it was not quite as popular as it is today which made food get-togethers sometimes a bit uncomfortable. Holiday invitations were awkward at times. When you don’t eat someone’s special recipe, they tend to take it personally. But I persevered, tried to explain that it was not the food but only my preference, and hopefully remained friends with perplexed relatives and others.

Since I have eaten meat almost all my life, my recipe box was filled with little cards demanding meat as an ingredient so when I suddenly became a non-meat eater, I had some weeding-out to do. Not even all the vegetable recipes one would assume appropriate were acceptable since many called for things like chicken bouillon or bacon or other meat-based ingredients. I was left with meager pickings!

At first I loaded up with frozen vegetarian dinners especially those made by an outfit known only as Amy. Did I mention I continue to eat cheese, eggs and seafood? Amy has the best macaroni, broccoli and cheese, salty and creamed to perfection. And her Pad Thai remains my special treat when I go grocery shopping. I continue to eat Amy’s comfort food but not as heavily as at the beginning of my vegetarian path. Shortages at the grocery store have narrowed my selections and rising costs have made me think twice about the relatively cheap ingredients in vegetarian pre-made food.

Over time I have found my own “special” recipes by searching the Web and specifically YouTube. There are entire YouTube channels devoted to vegetarian and vegan fare. My favorite is the Whole Food Plant Based Cooking Show. I almost want to sing that as their theme song trickles through my brain! Jill Dalton is the host and also calls herself  the Chief Flavor Officer. She hooked me and often I follow along as she makes some very mouth-watering recipes. Some I make, some I keep, and some I discard. It is a trial and error process for me.

As a youngster, I was never big on vegetables so the transition has been difficult and a little astounding as I think about it. If your mom was anything like mine, potatoes, peas, green beans and carrots were standard vegetable fare. I could even throw applesauce in there and get away with it. Fancy cooking and “unusual” vegetables were strangers to our table. Tomatoes should be included but everyone now says they are fruits, right?

If someone had told me back then that when I was in my seventies, I would be eating avocado toast or spicy Thai eggplant, I would have said, “No way!”

https://feelgoodfoodie.net/recipe/avocado-toast-with-egg-3-ways/

And hummus? I am positive I would have turned up my nose at that! It has been amazing to me to find the many many things that now taste good, things that the taste of meat, in my opinion, obliterated. When your taste buds are “addicted” to bacon and ham and grilled steak, the lowly lentil does not seem very appealing. Meat to me is like sugar and salt, the more you eat, the more of it you crave.

I have to admit that my shunning of meat slowly came about after reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. If it has never been on your book list, Mr. Sinclair gives a very vivid account of the meat processing industry in the early 1900s. The author uses the life of a poor immigrant family to highlight the social and economic inequalities of work in the food system. The descriptions are graphic and intense. The scenes in slaughterhouses and animal pens and the conditions in packing houses of diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat truly shocked me.Those images began to pop into my brain every time I picked up my meat-laden fork, and eventually I could not make myself eat meat anymore. And these big businesses treated their workers as harshly as the animals. Meat was no longer for me.

I now have hundreds of new recipes and of course I kept some of my old ones that did not require meat as an ingredient. I am contemplating giving up the cheese, eggs, and seafood and I do not anticipate it being that difficult. I enjoy the taste of so many things now and hardly ever hesitate to try something new, which I never did before. Avocado mousse, zucchini zoodles alfredo, Thai spicy eggplant, and African peanut curry are standard go-to recipes. You may find all of them on YouTube by putting the recipe name into the search bracket. There are even some variations so be adventurous and try them all. You may be surprised at how good they taste with no meat whatsoever.

Blueberries

I don’t know about you, but I love blueberries. I eat them every morning on cereal no matter the kind or brand. Blueberries make it better. I eat them in pancakes with a quick blueberry syrup made in the microwave. I eat them in smoothies with blueberry yogurt and almond milk. I eat them in quick breads with pecans or walnuts. I toss them on salads no matter what else is in it, and pie? Well, yummy, but not so much anymore. Too many calories.

When we first moved to Florida in 1978, I was introduced to blueberry bushes at Hainesworth Farms by Jim’s brother and sister-in-law. They had been picking a few times before and raved about how delicious they were. Sometime in May blueberries ripened, and we got a phone call to join them on a Saturday morning. As we drove the back roads northeast of Gainesville, we caught up on family news and looked forward to picking several pounds of the luscious fruit. The farm handed out family recipe cards for all kinds of blueberry concoctions and even sold young blueberry plants. We stored bags of them in our freezer. Then, Jim’s and our relatives’ interest waned. After all, it is a hot sweaty job. But my love of blueberries never diminished. So I found a new partner.

Picking blueberries with Aunt Fanny was a real adventure I never wanted to miss. Toward the end of May or the first of June I could expect to get a phone call letting me know local blueberries at a certain farm were ripe and abundant, and would I want to be picked up around 8 tomorrow morning? Absolutely! We traveled to Monteocha Farms, to Lake Santa Fe, to Earlton, and many others that I have forgotten the names of.

Aunt Fanny usually had a couple of other ladies with her, but she always kept the front passenger seat reserved for me. Containers were stowed in her car trunk as well as ropes or belts to loop through the handles of the farm’s supplied buckets and then tied or buckled around our waists, leaving our hands free for picking. Once we arrived at our destination, the owner directed us to the next in line picking spot, always in the hot sun and getting hotter by the minute.

Fanny with her straw hat and long sleeves was a fast picker, outpacing me two to one, but I didn’t pay much attention, just enjoying the company and munching a few berries as I picked, making sure they were good and sweet, which they always were. Like the others I started picking at chest level, but if I didn’t want to be admonished, I eventually had to bend and reach for the berries, picking the bush clean of ripe berries before advancing on to the next bush up the row. Sometimes the bushes might be next to a pine forest and depending on the sun, some shade might come my way, but this was unusual, and within a short period of time, I and the others were hot and sweaty. We dare not take a break because the sun was advancing in the sky, and soon, remaining in the field would be unbearable. At some point, upon agreement, we would have to be satisfied with what we had picked, grab up our filled buckets, and return to weigh and pay.

I never picked blueberries with a group that Aunt Fanny was not part of. When she passed away, I bought bags of berries already picked from a farm near Newberry named Maid Marian’s. Of course, they had been cooled, and I never got that warm juicy flavor of the ones fresh from the bush. Not picking with others was just a sentimental thing. Aunt Fanny was a good friend, and I always think of her when the blueberries are ripe.

I am thinking about blueberries today because this year’s stash is dwindling. The berries I am eating this morning were shipped from New Jersey. I buy most of my blueberries at Publix now, and bags stored in my freezer barely last until year’s end. Then I must go to the frozen bags of fruit at the end of the ice cream isle. But blueberries are blueberries and I love them any old way! Here are a few of those old recipes.