Stir fried vegetables with brown rice; Vegan

A few moments ago, I made this dish of stir fried vegetables and rice.

It’s a simple meal that can be prepared in minutes. Occasionally, you’ll see me preparing meals that do take a while to make, however in this household it’s rare. I love good food, the majority of my daughter and my meals are home cooked.

Color (besides taste and nutrition) is something I look for in a meal. I enjoy seeing a variety of hues displayed within a dish, and so you’ll usually see some type of vegetable (or fruit) playing a starring role in the meals I prepare. Not only does it add a bit of food bling, it  also supplies us with the nutrients that our bodies needs. I’ll write more on the importance of food nutrition in a later post.

I’m a whole foods lady, meaning I eat foods as close to its natural source as possible. If you were to open our freezer you wouldn’t find too many pre-packaged meals. Wait… I take that back!  You would, but they’ve been prepared by myself. Occasionally, I’ll prepare meals in advance and freeze them for the times when I just want to heat something up for us.

Meal Preparation

I’m vegan, but these days my eight-year old daughter isn’t and so you’ll see non-veggie dishes that I’ve prepared for her. While she does eat non-veggie dishes she still prefers vegetarian or vegan cuisine.

If you’d ask me a few years ago, if I’d have let her make such a decision (this early) I would have told you no. Back in the day, I never prepared non-veggie dishes either, but now I do for loved ones. Of course, they get a nice mix of veggie cuisine, and those dishes have been devoured by them. WIth some, they were surprised that they actually liked the dish. To which my response is, it’s all in the preparation.

Bonding with family

In recent years I’ve made several non-vegan meals for family and friends. However, even though they weren’t vegan they all had a few things in common; they were nutritious, delicious, and quite simple to make. Who wants to spend time in the kitchen, when you have loved ones to hang out with?

Although my life is fairly busy, I still think it’s important to share meals together, and so you’ll find me taking my dinner time with my daughter. It’s a great chance to see what happened during her day, and because I listen it’s one way she knows that I care about what’s going on in her world. At times, we all need to be quiet and listen to what others have to say. After I pick her up from school, I usually let her help me prepare something for our evening meal. However since I have a few surprises in store for my little princess today, I decided to prepare our meal early.

The cookbook

Those who’ve followed me from my old site, VeganMomma, might remember me mentioning a cookbook I was writing. Creating a cookbook is challenging  for me. Why you ask?  It forces me to actually measure ingredients. That’s something I don’t (normally) do. I just know what amount works well with a dish. I guess that comes from cooking for a while. I made my first meal when I was four years old, thirty-seven years later I still enjoy cooking.

Anyway, while writing the book I realized there were a lot of stories to tell — some have been tied to various dishes I’ve made over the years, and so I went back and included stories. Crescent Dragonwagon’s Passionate Vegetarian and Yumana Devi’s Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking did an excellent job of applying that technique into their cookbooks.

If you’re a fan of those types of cookbooks, you’ll find plenty of stories mixed in with many of the recipes they share. I read cookbooks like a novel, I enjoy them because the passion that is apparent with the one who’s writing them, but along the way I’ve learned additional cooking tips from some very talented chefs.

Next year, I’m taking a few cooking classes. I’m looking forward to them, and will most likely share bits of what I learn here.