it's not easy cooking green

Adventures in vegetarian (or semi-vegetarian, at least until I finish the last of the homemade lentil soup with ham that is currently in the freezer) cooking is what I am calling this next phase in my life. After flirting with the idea of going sans meat for years, and after reaping all the glorious health benefits of growing up in a household where Honey Nut Cheerios was considered a "sugary cereal," I have decided that I will indeed give this vegetarian thing a try. It's just one part of a multi-part effort on my behalf to make 2008 the year I truly start living a more healthy, sustainable, ecologically conscious, non-toxic, and fabulously green life.

Tonight, for my debut meal as a vegetarian, I cooked Polenta with Spicy Tomato Sauce - all homemade! The recipe is from my new vegetarian cookbook, "Vegetarian Planet" by Didi Emmons, which is full of delicious-sounding meals that place cool veggies, hearty grains, and awesome legumes at the heart of every meal. Already I can tell that, if nothing else, I will definitely gain some much-needed cooking skills from this whole endeavor. Even though the polenta came out a little bit runnier than I would have liked, I think it was a decent effort for my first shot at a truly vegetarian meal. All in all, it was a great first day for vegetarian Tammy - going to the co-op, chopping everything up, and then putting it all together into a meal was very satisfying.

My only complaint about the whole experience is that the recipe I chose called for an extraordinary amount of onions of multiple varieties, which is always a problem for me due to my overactive tear-ducts. Anyone walking into a kitchen when I have been chopping onions would think that my heart had just been broken and that I was sobbing disconsolately over a pile of mutilated vegetables. So, about a month ago, sick and tired of wielding a big knife while not being able to see anything through my copious tears, I had a brilliant idea for minimizing the effect of those juicy onions on my poor eyeballs. So far, this new arrangement has worked out great, and I can now chop onions with wild abandon - just the way it should be.