Good Food

If you’re like me, you want to feed your body well, you actually enjoy many healthy foods, but you struggle to eat that way consistently.

Years ago I worked with a group of women to run annual plant-based cooking schools at Bend Adventist Church. Although I grew up vegetarian and I loved baking healthy breads with freshly ground whole grain flours, I wasn’t interested in changing my diet by giving up eggs or cheese or sugar or oil or white flour. Ever.

As it turns out, my body feels far better on a minimum of dairy, especially because it minimizes my allergies. Once I found delicious dairy-free foods to fill the places of my previous favorites, I realized I could be content without dairy. It’s not a rigid thing. We bring dairy home from the store occasionally, but I seldom cook with it. If we’re invited to someone’s home, we cheerfully eat what is available, dairy and all. If one of us had true food allergies or celiac, carefulness about intake would be a different story. But none of us do….

Then my daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and that brought yet another set of restrictions. We found that she thrived on a plant-based, high whole-foods carbohydrate diet as long as we used a minimum of refined oils. Cutting way back on refined oils was quite a bit easier than giving up dairy. When I cook for my family, I save oil for the places where it absolutely can’t be left out (in my opinion), such as in sautéing garlic, flavoring sushi rice or stir fry with toasted sesame oil, or in minimal amounts in baked goods. When I don’t tell folks that the oil’s been left out, they still like my cooking and baking.

In recent years, I’ve had to start figuring out how to cook so that I don’t leave out friends and family members who absolutely MUST avoid certain foods. My son-in-law can’t have corn or peppers. One of my sisters can’t have blueberries or green beans. My mom is miserable when she has cane sugar or pecans. My cousin has celiac. A friend from work can’t have tomatoes, eggs, or sesame, and several friends from church can’t have soy, dairy or gluten. If you have proven plant-based recipes that avoid common allergens and you’re willing to share, please email me a copy at grandpaspasturegarden@gmail.com. If we like it, it’ll likely become a blog post and you’ll get credit for sharing.

Back to my initial story — after each cooking school, I’d stay focused for about nine months. And then our family diet would fall apart. The next cooking school usually came at about the right time. I’d have lost my inspiration and desperately needed a fresh infusion of motivation. Somehow the preparation and the class sessions would get me back to where I needed to be for another year. It’s been over a decade since I last helped run a cooking school, so it’s about time I got re-inspired! My hope for this blog is that sharing old favorite recipes from the cooking school cookbook, family favorites that have been added since, along with any new keepers that come along, will do for us all what those cooking classes used to do for me.

—The Midnight Gardener

btw, the photo is of Soft Gruyere, adapted from Miyoko Schinner’s Artisan Vegan Cheese. It is amazing, and here’s a post from flutesandveggies.com that explains how to make a gluten free version since I don’t have photo evidence of my own adaptation yet.