Sunday Chef

You might be surprised to learn, since one of the recurring topics on my blog is Adventures in Cooking, that I'm really not a fan of cooking. It's time-consuming, and the results are never as good as what I'd get from even a box of something frozen, so why bother?

Theoretically, there are financial benefits to cooking for yourself, but only if you diligently and consistently use up all your ingredients and cooked meals before they spoil, which is apparently really hard for people to do. Some folks find a creative outlet in cooking, but while I consider myself creative in many ways, gastronomically is not one of them. I do not enjoy the process of cooking—food is for eating, not for laboring over. And lastly, there's the simple problem of time management. By the time I'm ready to think about a meal, I'm already too hungry to endure the long effort of converting raw ingredients into something fit to eat. I want to eat now, and cooking first is not a viable option.

So for many years I've been content to live off restaurant food, leftovers, packaged dinners, and zero-prep foods like nuts, cheese, and fresh vegetables...but a lot of things have changed over the past few months. 1) I decided to reduce the amount of cheese in my life and replace it with low-fat protein. 2) I decided to stop eating protein bars for breakfast every day, and mix it up sometimes with vegan whole foods. 3) I haven't been eating in restaurants as much.

These things have necessitated a change in the way I provide for my nutritional needs: I have been cooking a lot more.

Well, "cooking" is not entirely accurate—most of what I've been doing is not so much cooking (which has to involve the application of heat), as just mixing a couple of ingredients together and calling it a day. But I am making my own food, and it hasn't been that terrible. Still, terrible or no, food prep is something that I'd rather not spend my time on, and as such, I have found ways to make it as quick and efficient as possible.

Like many other people on the internet, I have come to embrace Sunday as the optimal day for food prep for the week. In this way, I can assemble all the foods I will need for the foreseeable future in one fell swoop, and I can do it first thing in the morning, before I'm too ravenous to think straight.

The fruits of my labor

This past Sunday was a real marathon of food prep.

I whipped together a batch of chia pudding (mix chia seeds with coconut milk, shake and put in fridge!) — a batch of quinoa (dump quinoa in water, boil for ten minutes, put in fridge!) — a batch of no-bake cheesecake (blend cream cheese and condensed milk in mixer, put in fridge!) — and even a very ambitious (though small) serving of mushroom taco filling (which I put in the fridge).

Of course I have bloggable thoughts about all of the foods I made on Sunday (if there's one thing that makes cooking for yourself worthwhile, it's being able to brag about it in a blog!):

• I am becoming a real chia pudding connoisseur. Since sharing my recipe for pista-chia pudding, I've made the dish with all sorts of different liquid bases and mix-ins, but my favorite variation yet is a coconut milk base. It gives the pudding a thicker consistency that makes it more fun to eat, and look less slimy too!
• My mission to find appetizing ways to prepare quinoa continues apace. Since my first adventures with the ingredient, I tried mixing it with fruits and beet powder as a breakfast food, but that was also a no-go. Finally I threw in the towel. The one and only way to make quinoa enjoyable is ... to mix it with cheese powder. Yes, this totally defeats the purpose of quinoa as a low-fat, non-cheese protein source, but at least it will help me get through my remaining supply of uncooked quinoa (how does one quart of quinoa last so long!?) without cursing its very existence.
  

  

  This is as good as I've ever seen quinoa look.

• No-bake cheesecake is hardly the kind of healthy food that one should be meal-prepping on Sunday, but I still have a sweet tooth that will not be denied. Since I learned how to make this very simple mixture, I have been unable to eat real cheesecake (unless it's from the Cheesecake Factory and has a ton of mix-ins), because this version is so much better! So creamy, and not dry at all, and versatile! You can toss any kind of candy or fruit into it to enhance its flavor and texture profile! It is one of my favorite treats to have waiting for me at the end of a long day!
• Ah, now we get to the mushroom taco filling! Can I condense this all into one bullet point? No! Should I make it into an Adventure in Cooking all its own? Sure! Stay tuned, readers! My next post should be lots of fun(gus)!