Coping Mechanism One

Always. Be. Ready.

Part of today's American kitchen landscape involves insta-foods, like rice-a-roni, frozen veggie burgers, frozen burritos, etc. Hot Pockets, frozen pizzas, refrigerated dough. Frozen ravioli, jarred pasta sauce. You get the picture.

Next time you pop open a bottle of your favorite barbeque sauce, take a look at the ingredients. I can't pronounce several of the ingredients in Hunt's or Jack Daniels or... yeah. most of them.

given that I was the queen of quick and easy, eliminating these substances seriously cramped my cooking style. There was no more feeling virtuous as I whipped together a meal of steamed veggies, instant mashed potatoes and veggie burgers served on conventional bread.

Other than the steamed veggies, when we eliminated high fructose corn syrup and intensely processed soy, the entire rest of that menu was taken right off the list.

So, we cope. We adapt. We scream at each other when we're ravenous, there's nothing cooked and there's no chance of cheating, because we don't keep the crap in the house any more. (nothing makes us crazy like ravenous. really.)

One of our quickest, easiest tools is a Grain Pot. The recipe is loosely adapted from 101cookbooks, and has become a gem in my clean-cooking sceptor.

basically, we take 2 parts millet, 2 parts quinoa, 1 part wheat kernels, 1 part brown rice and 12 parts water (so, 1/2 cup, 1/4 cup and 3 cups) and microwave the whole thing in a covered casserole dish for 20 minutes. Viola. The base for any number of yummy dishes. And it keeps for the better part of a week.