Last night I had a test run of a pre-Cleanse farewell dinner. With old friends at Local Mission Eatery, I savored pumpkin soup with bacon and cream, roasted cauliflower with Gouda, a chocolaty pinot, Four Barrel coffee, and an aged Gouda cheese plate. My real pre-Cleanse meal will likely consist of Thanksgiving leftovers Sunday night, so this incredible indulgence is one I will savor for the coming month.
While at dinner, my friend G. mentioned that his wife is thinking of joining us on the Cleanse. He then suggested a husbands’ support group. I wasn’t sure if he intended this as support for the wives’ efforts (backrubs, herbal tea deliveries, ice packs for migraines), or support for the men who will live with the women who will simultaneously give up caffeine, wine and chocolate while refusing to cook red meat for three weeks. I’m all for support of every kind, so I think it’s a grand idea if the non-Cleansing hubbies head out for an occasional manly slab of red meat on French bread washed down with double lattes—as long as they pick up a Blue Barn salad for me on the way home.
In the case of my family, I suspect the Cleanse will we welcomed by my husband. He grew up in Berkeley in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and his mother whipped up wheat grass smoothies for breakfast long before they were chic. In fact, I think as a college student he was surprised to learn that breakfast was not usually a liquid. Soybean Crowd Pleaser Casserole was his childhood comfort food, much as The Glop was mine.
My husband vividly remembers the day his mother removed the sugar bowl from the kitchen counter and replaced it with a jar of honey. As a result, images of Boy Scout bake sales make him cringe; his white-flour-and-sugar-free cookies were always left on the Scout’s folding table, forlorn, rock hard, unsold. His family bought their honey at a market called Whole Foods--a musty outpost of bulk foods, not the massive, holiday catering, online-order-enabled, how-to-video-enhanced, gift-card-selling mega chain we all now know and love.
So the Cleanse? No big deal for my husband. (BTW, my mother-in-law is today a fabulous cook, who produces delectable roasts and has been known to give my kids cake before dinner. And in case you’re looking for recipes to put in your post-Cleanse file, here’s one for the surprisingly delicious Glop, a one-pot meal created by my gourmet-chef-of-a-mother to serve on board our little sailboat. The Glop: ground beef, cheddar cheese, rotini noodles, tomato sauce, onions, salt, pepper. Cook. Combine. Freeze. Reheat. Ladle into bowls. Apologies, I realize this is not the kind of recipe I’m supposed to post here. )
Of course, Mr. Soy Bean Crowd Pleaser is the same husband who yesterday fed our middle school-aged son a donut, Skittles, and a slice of pizza—all before 11am. Thus, while I certainly don’t expect my children to embrace my new menu, I do hope they’ll try a few dishes and perhaps learn to make do with less sugar and white flour. Secretly, I suspect at least one gluten-sensitivity in the household—so we’ll see if I can slip some rice bread into a few lunches. My one attempt to serve gluten-free pasta in the past was met with disgust. “Soggy garbage,” was the verdict, I believe. But teaching by doing hasn’t really been my motto when it comes to food. I hate eggs, but am proud that I am raising two egg lovers and one who will at least gobble up spinach quiche. “Do as I say, not as I do” may be the antithesis of contemporary parenting advice, but there are times that it’s the best I can muster. For a few upcoming weeks, however, I am going to very publicly enjoy my vegetable stews, kale chips, and oatmeal with flaxseed oil and almond milk—and hope that a healthy behavior or two trickles down the nuclear food chain.
And for the kids, the occasional sweet doesn’t have to disappear as it did for my husband. There is apparently a thriving industry of gluten-free, alternatively-sweetened baking mixes lining the shelves--chocolate cakes, oatmeal cookies, pumpkin bread, brownies, etc. Walk down the baking aisle in Safeway and then do the same in Whole Foods and you’d think you’d time traveled between two countries, two eras, two cuisines. At our house, we recently ran a highly scientific, double blind baking taste test, and my test subjects unanimously praised the first batch of Pamela’s gluten-free chocolate chip cookies.
Who took the white flour out of all the baking mixes, anyway? And when did They do it? And—I’m digressing here—is this the same They who cut off the tops of all the jeans while I wasn’t looking? Not so long ago, I lost a lot of weight by sticking to a strict diet (plenty of protein, even more caffeine) for a period of months. When I finally went shopping for pants that didn’t have a stretchy waist, I discovered that pants no longer had any waist at all. They stopped at the hips, where someone had sewn belt loops and snuck in snaps. But belt loops didn’t hide the fact that these jeans were, in essence, topless. It’s as if the designers said, “Hey, let’s make jeans that end right where that little (or not so little) shelf of Mommy muffin top flesh starts—that’ll look cool!” Was this an economic decision—less fabric, same price, higher profit margin? Did the missing fabric go to those less fortunate? And really, isn’t there a happy medium between jeans that end at the pubic bone and the up-to-the-bra-line “mom jeans” immortalized by Tina Fey on SNL?
Apologies again for the tangent (in an attempt to prepare myself for what's to come, I’m functioning on only two cups of caffeine today), and back to the real topic of this blog. Below is a link to two web pages that list Vegan restaurants in SF. Quite a few offer takeout. Favorites like Dosa are on the list, as are Green’s and Samovar Tea Lounge. In addition, if you don’t already frequent Blue Barn and Plant—know that these spots let you design your own salads and take them to go. And to counterbalance the above-mentioned recipe for The Glop, I include a link to my favorite soup of all time--Ina Garten’s Butternut Squash and Apple Soup. It just happens to fit the parameters of the Cleanse—if you swap out the butter!
-Mary
http://www.happycow.net/north_america/usa/california/san_francisco/
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/butternut-squash-and-apple-soup-recipe/index.html
I grew up with the Glop too, but we called it Train Wreck. Love the blog!
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