I haven't said much about my two weeks eating vegan. Except for a few things that drove me crazy, such as soy milk in my coffee and the absence of fish, it wasn't a bad experiment. Oh yes, I also missed parmesan cheese on my pasta. Those seem like little things, but my discontent with them grew larger and larger each day. I never could solve the Coffee Issue and daydreamed about sardines and tuna with increasing frequency as each day passed. I came away from my two weeks of eating vegan with some good experiences. But, my first non-vegan meal of red snapper curry from a local restaurant, (Sophie's Thai Kitchen for all you Davisites), was heaven and underscored what I missed during that period. I think it's best to go vegan gradually.
For some reason, I became obsessed with chickpeas during those two weeks. I cooked huge pots of them, to have on hand for one particular recipe, a Deborah Madison tomato and chickpea pilaf. I craved it. The recipe can be found in an article I wrote about eating vegan in Fit Fare. Yesterday, I decided to make an entirely different type of chickpea recipe. I had a lot of cooked chickpeas in the fridge that I needed to use or they would wind up in the garbage. The resulting meal was spiced with cumin, coriander seed, turmeric, and heaps of garlic. It also called for cinnamon. Now here's some handy advice, mainly for myself. If the recipe calls for a large amount of cinnamon, keep in mind the quality of the cinnamon you use. In my case, it was Penzey's Extra Fancy Vietnamese Cassia Cinnamon, the best and strongest cinnamon you can buy. I should have used much less than the recipe called for. Much less. The dish didn't shout "cinnamon", it bellowed it.
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