Let's Just Get This Out of the Way

I'm a vegetarian.  I don't eat animals.  No, I don't eat fish.  Yes, I eat eggs and dairy.  No, eggs aren't animals because they're not fertilized.  Yes, fish are animals, look it up.  I'm a vegetarian because I don't want to kill animals.  I've been a vegetarian for 13 years.  Yes, I miss meat.  No, I'm not upset if you eat meat in front of me.  Yes, I find plenty to eat at restaurants.  No, I won't eat your fries that are drenched in the drippings of your medium-rare burger.  Yes, I get enough protein.

Are we quite done with the questions?

People tell me over and over again that they don't think they could ever be vegetarian.  While I think they're selling themselves short on their own ability to make decisions and follow through on them, I understand why they think that.  Meat is just ubiquitous.  People just assume you want it all the time.  Why have the muffin with eggs and cheese when you can have it with bacon egg and cheese?  Why have pizza with mushrooms when you can have pizza with sausage and mushrooms?  Meat = flavor, right?

If the need for salt is a lie, the flavorfulness of meat is downright confusing.  In fact, meat often needs seasonings to not be horribly bland.  Imagine fried chicken without the secret blend of 11 herbs and spices.  Trust me, you don't want that.  In fact, what you want is a combination of oregano, chili powder, sage, basil, marjoram, pepper, salt, paprika, onion salt, garlic powder and MSG, but I digress.

You see, most food, in its most basic form, is rather light on flavor.  You have to combine things to get amazing flavor.  Like Remy the rat.

When I make rice and beans, it is so much more than just rice and beans, if you recall the recipe I shared in my post about cumin.  You want to dump in as much as you possibly can to create something greater than the sum of its parts.  This is why proper seasoning is that much more important for vegetarians.  We bear the stigma of eating "rabbit food".

So when cooking for our friends, we have two sets of expectations to exceed.  We can't just make something that's good, we have to BLOW YOUR DAMN MIND!!!  We have to shut you up once and for all and get you to realize that we do, in fact, eat some very yummy things.

Quite a few of my friends, independently of each other, have said to me "if I could eat like this all the time, I would have no problem giving up meat" after trying some of my more impressive recipes.  This is an amazing compliment to hear, but it's my current benchmark test.  I don't want you to like my food, I want you to love my food so much that you want me to cook for you all the time.

This is why spices are so important to me.  They let me elevate my relatively low fat and low salt cooking to new heights.  Am I over-compensating?  Maybe, but I'd like to think the results speak for themselves.  I think most cooking vegetarians can relate to this.  We get a good amount of flavor from mirepoix, garlic, tomatoes and peppers, but when eating savory, those spices on your shelf aren't just helpful, they're quintessential.  They're the crux, the balance, the ur, the alpha, the omega...  He who controls the spice controls the universe.

A Little Something to Clear Your Sinuses

Whenever I'm coming down with a cold (which I seem to be right now) I like to make my food a little spicier.  It helps clear up any congestion and my dad tells me it's got vitamins "and stuff".  My go to for heat these days is cayenne, one of the many cultivars of capsicum annuum.

Coming in at an impressive 30,000 - 50,000 Scoville units, a cayenne is roughly 6 times as hot as a jalapeño.  Scared yet?  Well don't be, because apparently it is also an aphrodisiac.  Some like it hot indeed.

The taste is salty, tangy and a little sweet, making it perfect for just about anything.  It certainly adds "brightness" to the flavor of the food, and by that I don't just mean the flames that will be shooting out of your mouth.  I mean that while most spices bring a bit of "earthy" flavor, cayenne brings more of a light zing.  It's more treble than bass.  It's not quite as bright as, say, lemon zest, but it's not too far removed either.

Cayenne comes in both flakes and in powdered form.  I personally like the powder more since the heat won't be all clumped up in sneaky little hate balls that explode like a dying sun when you bite into them, but to each their own.  If you use it in cooking and cook the dish long enough, it's a moot point.  Like all chilies, the heat comes mostly from the seeds but the flesh is plenty hot on its own.  Don't underestimate the cayenne.

The heat of a cayenne pepper is so intense it can even cauterize wounds.  Well, not really, but it CAN stop bleeding by causing blood to clot.  I'm not sure this is the ideal method since it probably hurts so badly you'll wish you could just bleed to death instead, but if your vegetable chopping ever goes horribly wrong, it's nice to know you've got first aid right there.

Because cayenne is used in almost everything it's hard to find a recipe to showcase it.  It doesn't help that most American recipes are light on spices and heavy on salt.  I picked this one out because it uses considerably more of the spice than I would expect and is also very easy to make, so if the heat intimidates you, you can't use the complexity of the recipe as an excuse!

Spicy oven roasted chick peas

Speaking of heat intimidation, cayenne is actually a great way to build up your heat tolerance.  Ever been hanging out with friends who dump sriracha all over everything but you had to politely decline?  Well, no more!  Just start small.  1/4 tsp in a large recipe (meaning it serves more than one) is a good start.  Slowly add more until you can handle the burn.  Remember, it's not an injurious conflagration, it's a bubbly tapdance of flavor elves.

Just have plenty of milk handy.

Since We Can't Eat the Christmas Tree

In keeping to theme, rosmarinus officinalis, or rosemary to you and I, is my favorite herb.  Its distinct and powerful piney taste is a perfect reminder of the holiday season no matter what you celebrate or don't celebrate.  Then again, it's amazing all year round like any good evergreen.

Rosemary has been one of my favorite seasonings period since long before I learned to cook.  I can't remember when exactly I became aware of it, but I know that I immediately started buying rosemary crostini, crackers and anything else I could find that contained it.  I still regularly use it in my cooking because it holds up well in anything.  It's such a diva that it shoves other flavors out of the way.  It is the Cher of herbs.

Rosemary's name does not come from flowers or from a woman named Mary.  Its name comes from the Latin words "ros" and "marinus" which mean "dew" and "sea" respectively.  Clearly dew from the sea is much less gross than dew from the mountains.  Maybe this is why it makes such good personal watercrafts...

After becoming vegetarian, I could no longer enjoy rosemary in sausages.  However, I quickly found a home for it in pastas, mushrooms, eggs and mashed potatoes.  I even found a way to use it in cookies I'm so fanatical about it.  Yes, really.  Cookies.  I'm such a nice guy I'll even give you the recipe.

Don't say I never gave you anything.

While coming mostly from the Mediterranean area (the BEST area for cooking of all time ever) Rosemary is so hardy it can adapt itself to any climate and has been a staple in cooking all over the world for centuries.  The Greeks linked the herb to Aphrodite and a rather unappetizing facet of the world creation myth that I'll just leave right here in case you're feeling bold...

I find that dried rosemary is delicious and will work perfectly in any recipe, but some purists insist on using fresh.  Fresh rosemary has a slightly different taste, being a bit sweeter and more tart.  Since it is a sturdy plant it can be easily grown anywhere and doesn't need much care.  You'll want to cut the flowers off, though.  While they are BEAUTIFUL, they don't have much flavor and cutting them off will yield bigger leaves.

No matter how you get it, fresh or dried, rosemary is an absolute staple in any spice rack.  It is delicious and I can't get enough.  Now let's get out there and eat us some pine trees!

...or not

Merry Spicemas!

My family clearly knows me well. 3 kinds of saffron and Ras el Hanout. Later tonight there will be more insanity when we break out the ground ghost pepper.

Did Santa give you any good spices today?

Is it "kyoo-min" or "coo-min"?

Cuminum cyminum, better known as cumin, is easily my favorite spice.  While not a spice in the sense of giving heat, it gives food a wallop of flavor.  It has a distinct taste that is often called "earthy" but to me that just sounds like dirt.  Anyone who says it tastes like dirt is getting smacked upside the head with grandma's cooking spoon.  Cumin is AWESOME.

For the non-initiated, cumin is used just about everywhere in the world, but is most prominent in Mexican and Mediterranean food.  This is why most people associate the smell and taste with tacos and falafel.  Got a jar?  Give it a sniff.  Doesn't it smell delicious?  DON'T YOU JUST WANT TO PUT IT IN YOUR FACE?!?!?!

My first real exposure to the power of cumin was in my very first attempts to cook healthily.  One of my favorite boxes of bachelor chow to get was Goya's rice & beans.  I tried just cooking rice in water and adding beans when it was done.  I was thoroughly stumped as to why this didn't taste too good (hint: it needed spices).  After looking at the list of ingredients I saw which spices were in the baggie of flavor (a terrifying concept).  Cumin was one of the first.  I gave it a smell and right away I knew that was the big one.

Since then I've gone on to really nail rice and beans.  I constantly tweak this recipe but here is how to make the simple version of the rice & beans your life is incomplete without:

ENJOY!

FUN CUMIN FACTS!!!

• Cumin is an ancient spice, having been mentioned in the old testament and seeds dating to 2000 BC have been excavated in India.
• Cumin is used in bird seed.  Even birds can tell how amazing it is!
• Cumin as a plant is in the same family as parsley.  I'm guessing parsley is the middle child...
• Cumin was first known by the Egyptians who used it in temple rituals.  Presumably this is because cumin is so amazing that even the gods are like "don't hold out on me, brah!"
• The moors brought cumin with them to Spain, and the Spaniards took it to the new world.  The Ottoman empire took to to India where it became so popular that it spread to southeast Asia.  Cumin has LITERALLY CONQUERED THE WORLD!!!!!

Why must the spice flow?

About two years ago, my doctor informed me that my weight and blood pressure were too high.  He asked me to lose weight and to start going low sodium.  This is frightening to hear, because most of us associate that with bland, terrible food.

You have been LIED to!!!!!!!

After a few weeks of buying really awful low salt food, I realized that the prepared food I'd been buying was not actually low in salt.  It was just LESS salty than what I was used to.  And since the food was crap to begin with, using less salt did NOT help.  I realized there was only one choice.  I had to do the thing every bachelor fears most: I had to learn to cook.

I had very little luck in cooking good food, so my sister asked what spices I was using.  I said I didn't have many so she dragged me to the store and I dropped about $60 on spices.  This changed EV-ER-Y-THING.

Suddenly I was privy to an enchanting new world.  Like magical flavor elves were doing a happy dance on my taste buds.  With rainbows.  All of these spices which I had previously feared as being too confusing, exotic and esoteric to use in my daily life made sense.  I thought of seasoning as salt with some other mild flavor, like "movie theater butter".  No more.  I saw the light.  I was liberated.

While I am by no means an authority, I now love spices.  I do a little reading from time to time and enjoy trying new ones both on their own and in a recipe.  A trip to the spice shop is exciting.  Even reading the poetic descriptions of common things like ordinary black pepper is fun at times.  I feel like a mad alchemist transmuting brownish powders into flavor spells.

Probably the most important revelation was how little salt I really need in my food.  Salt is cheap and easy and makes food addictive so most companies (and modern chefs, I'm sad to say) prefer over-salting food.  Seasonings give food amazing twists and turns.  They give it subtlety and complexity that, here in good ol' 'murca, we just don't embrace.

THROW OFF YOUR SALTY SHACKLES!!!
EMBRACE THE SPICE!!!
THE SPICE MUST FLOW!!!