The Daily Grind, Chop and Fry

This blog is not aimed at vegans, but I think there is good reason to try to eat vegan once or twice a week if you are not eating meat at all. Many beginning vegetarians replace meat with eggs and cheese. They are familiar, and easy, but they are also high in calories and cholesterol. Omnivores who are watching their diets, or care about their hearts, eat a lot of skinless chicken breasts, seafood and turkey; the vegetarian equivalent of that is rice and beans.

Toyota Land Rover

Wonder what the jeep is doing in the post?

I accidentally discovered that taking a vegan break once or twice a week could help with weight control when I was travelling. I was spending five weeks in Costa Rica with family, and my sister-in-law, a Tica (Costa Rican) with mixed heritage who also likes to cook French, was killing me with her fabulous food. She made Caribbean food, favorite things of my brother’s like pizza, a lot of “typical” Costa Rican dishes (like fried Plantains with every meal, the local equivalent of bread), plus classic French techniques involving pan-frying fish or meat and finishing with a cream or butter based sauce. I’d beg for rice and beans for dinner, she’d think I was crazy but oblige (and put in coconut milk, ham…..). I somehow managed to avoid meat, cheese, etc. a few times a week anyway (mostly when we were not at “home base”), and came home, got on the scale, and had lost 8 pounds. I was dumbfounded.

You can fiddle with low-fat cheese if you like, to lighten up some of the recipes here. Some low-fat cheeses work perfectly well in some things, other times the results are dreadful. Things like the corn bread are without a doubt not diet-friendly. But I’ve found that it is more enjoyable to have a good really healthy vegan meal that is low in calories and fat one night, and go ahead and have a piece of real corn bread the next.

Vera’s Recipe for Owen’s Birthday Rice

Have Owen drive four hours in his 1977 Toyota Land Rover to their lot on the beach in Limon, to collect coconuts. When you get the coconuts, have Owen sit on a chair on the back porch and use the special coconut shredder he made out of an old board and a modified machete he serrated and nailed to the board; he sits on the board with the machete between his legs and scrapes the coconut meat out. Meanwhile, collect the parts of your food processor you have hidden around your house so the robbers don’t get it. (This is a very reasonable precaution. Some Ticos take Socialism quite literally.)

At this point I’ve lost interest and wandered away to admire bananas or orchids or quality homegrown herb in the back yard. In the end the results seem worth it, although I can’t help but notice days later that the market in the village sells coconuts. Even the trip to the market is unduly complex, an herb-fuelled white-knuckle ride in the Land Rover, which at one point had been stolen from under Owen’s nose, dismantled, miraculously recovered, reassembled, and never the same. For four weeks I thought the roadside warning signs reading  “despacio”, which means “slowly”, meant “bump”. But I digress.