John and I eat a little differently than your average person. So if you're wondering why Dinner From Last Night doesn't include Chinese take-out every two weeks, let me explain why.
First of all, we hardly ever go out to eat. Unless we're meeting up with friends for a beer after work or going to lunch with lab mates, we hardly ever eat out. For one thing, it's cheaper and supporting two people on two graduate student stipends isn't always the easiest thing to do (with a house and dogs and cars and on and on and on). Secondly, we're both pretty good cooks. We figure why pay someone else to cook something that we could make better and tweak it to exactly what we want? It's a win win situation for us. We get to eat healthy inexpensive food that we really like. Everyone wins. Yay!
We joined a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program in June of 2010. For those of your new to the organic/local/green movement, a CSA is a group of people who invest in a local farm where both the farmers and the consumers share the risk and benefits of the farm production for that year. In other words, we gave the farm a big ol' check at the beginning of the year and in return we get a giant box of vegetables from the farmer's market every Saturday. So far, it has been a fantastic experience. The quality of the vegetables is amazing and the diversity of what we get in the box every week keeps things interesting.We've gotten everything from fresh tomatoes to beets to purslane (although I'm still trying to figure out what that is).
One of the main reasons I started this blog was to chronicle how we used the vegetables we got in the CSA and hold myself accountable for not just sauteing everything into one big vegetable mush pile every night of the week. Because I think we would get sick of that after one night, not to mention the entire summer.
You'll also find a lot of vegetarian dishes on this site. John and I are not vegetarians, we're not even strict semi-vegetarians, but in an effort to eat a little less meat we try to be veg-heads from Monday-Friday. But on Saturday and Sunday, anything goes. Since I tend to do a lot of cooking on the weekends, you'll see a lot of meaty dishes here too (so don't run away carnivores!). Through the week, we eat a lot of beans, a lot of pasta and a ton of vegetables. If you're trying to reduce the amount of meat in your diet, hopefully this will inspire you!
I don't want to be a preachy blog standing on my soapbox going on and on about the monstrosities of processed non-organic food and the benefits of eating organic because, frankly we don't always eat like this. There are some days where a frozen pizza and a Coke or Chinese take-out make an awesome dinner. So, I won't go into the reasons that we eat why we do. Mostly, we like good, interesting food. We're not a meat and potatoes couple so we don't want to eat that for dinner every night. We like trying new recipes and flavors from all over the world. Joining a CSA and trying to reduce the amount of meat we eat has made our cooking and our lifestyle a little more diverse. And it's been a fun experiment.
We're scientists... what can I say. We like experiments.
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