Tag Archives: cooking without dairy

The Dairy Free Cooking Challenge: 9/9/2012

I truly want to report that I’m loving not cooking with dairy.  But I can’t.  The truth is that I love cheese and dairy so much that I am eating it out at every opportunity.  Burritos with sour cream and cheese.  Enchiladas.  Nachos.  Grilled cheese.  During canning season I tend to order out more food than normal because my  kitchen is such a chaos of big cooking projects that I don’t have the space or time to make regular meals.  And I make sure that every meal I eat out is full of dairy.

I resent my challenge sometimes.  I have been tempted to chuck it in and just buy some yogurt and cheese.  I have been eating these huge breakfasts of eggs and tomato and avocado and buckets of ketchup – and I want to have a lighter breakfast routine.  I could have one egg on one piece of toast, obviously, but when making eggs I seem to need to go all the way.  When I eat cereal for breakfast I can just eat a bowl and be done.  Or a bowl of yogurt with fruit – this is a light breakfast I love to eat.  Soy yogurt?  No way.  Soy or almond or coconut or oat or rice milk on my cereal?  No thank you!

When I was a kid we sometimes ate granola with apple juice instead of milk and I might try doing that.

I’ve also been wanting to bake some kind of breakfast bar and even have the ingredients on hand.  The truth is – I don’t love baking.  I have to drag my feet to bake things so relying on home baked breakfast bars for breakfast doesn’t seem like a great plan.

I like oatmeal but I like it with some milk.

The food I’ve been making at home that’s dairy free is good, there’s no question about it.  The point of the challenge was to come up with a strong repertoire of dairy free meals that I could easily make and get excited about.  When cheese and milk and yogurt are in the house I will nearly always turn to those ingredients in some way.  Not having them around forces me to be more creative.  But even when I’m making good dairy free meals I never stop wishing I had dairy around.  I never stop wanting dairy.  Now I understand how meat eaters feel when they give up meat and they can like vegetarian meals but never stop wanting meat.

The best dairy free dishes so far:

The navy bean, green bean, mushroom, zucchini salad with thinly sliced red onion and dressed in balsamic vinegar dressing – the raw onions weren’t good for my mom but Philip and I loved this bean salad.    I made it so it could be eaten by itself or over a bed of lettuce.  The mushrooms and beans and zuchs were caramelized which I believe added depth of flavor and made them prettier.

Navy bean and sundried tomato spread – I didn’t have any of this on bread (I only tasted it with a spoon) but my mom and Philip devoured it and declared it a great success.  I will be posting a recipe for this when I have the time to make it again.  It had in it: navy beans, sun dried tomatoes, lemon juice, thyme, salt, pepper.

But the very best thing I’ve made I made the other evening and my people ate it ALL so fast.  I was lucky I got even one little bowl of it myself.

Mexican style pasta salad – sauteed onions, Hungarian wax peppers, zucchini, green beans, and fresh corn with wheat rotini pasta dressed with a cilantro/lime dressing (olive oil, lime juice, red wine vinegar, salt pepper, garlic, and cilantro – blended until thick).  It was amazing.  I plan to get a recipe for this up as well.  Because I really want you to try it.

I know this challenge is good for me.  In spite of eating cheese out more often than I normally would – there are a few days every week when I eat no dairy.  That hasn’t happened for years.  Not having it in the house means I’m not eating it for every snack.  Though I’ve lost zero weight from eating less cheese, I know it’s good for my body to ease the dairy intake.  I’ve considered ending this challenge because it’s just too hard and I love dairy too much, but I’m going to keep going.  It’s only been a month.  One month.  The fact that I’m finding this so hard is indication that there’s a lot more to learn from continuing to do it.

A few of my friends said that when they stopped eating dairy it eventually didn’t even taste good to them.  A long time ago I gave up all dairy for one month.  I made it the entire month and I have to say that cheese tasted better than ever when I had it again.  I think my DNA is made of cheese.

 

Dairy Free Dinner Challenge: samosas, dill, and hummus

Not cooking with dairy if you’ve been cooking with lots of dairy your whole life is exactly as challenging as I thought it would be.  I’ve had a couple of meals out again this week that had dairy and there was some grated Parmesan left that I put on some ratatouille because I was so desperately craving cheese.  Since my goal isn’t to be 100% dairy free – this is okay.  The goal I set is one I’ve kept to – I haven’t bought any cheese or yogurt (or milk or butter – though I may still buy some for baking as stated in my challenge) since the end of July.

What to cook without any dairy?  I’m finding you simply have to shift your focus.  I don’t want to cook things that normally would have cheese in them because it makes me miss the cheese.  I don’t want to do mock-cheese dishes.  I don’t want to be cooking dairy free but trying to replicate dairy with soy or coconut.  For the most part I want to learn to cook meals that are simply and normally dairy free.

I love Indian food.  It’s true that my all-time favorite Indian dish is palak paneer.  Paneer, as you know, is CHEESE.  I’m so predictable.  One of the other things I love best is samosas.  These are usually fried and I don’t do much (any) frying in my kitchen so I decided to experiment with doing a baked samosa.  For the filling I used a recipe from a book called “India’s Vegetarian Cooking” by Monisha Bharadwaj.  I didn’t have frozen peas (or fresh) so I used broccoli cut small.  The filling turned out really well.

For the wrapping I used a yeasted dough recipe from Deborah Madison’s cookbook “Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone” (my most used cookbook).   I loved the dough – it held up really well when used like a calzone – it didn’t get soggy.  Admittedly, the filling wasn’t very moist.  The dough has egg in it which helps strengthen it – I’d love a similar dough that doesn’t  have eggs in it but has the same strength.  Anyway – Bharadwaj suggests eating samosas with either chutney or ketchup.  We ran out of our chutney so I ate mine with ketchup and loved them.  To serve with them I made a cucumber salad with dill and vinaigrette.  Just cucumbers.  This was nice and cooling next to the spicy samosas.

Hummus.  I think hummus has become our go-to snack and meal food.  I can’t keep up with the demand for it.  It’s fast, nutritious, and satisfying.  I made pita last week too.  I couldn’t find my baking stone which is how I usually make them but my friend Emma reminded me that I could cook them in a cast iron skillet so I tried that.  I’ve never done them stove top before.  I really loved the results.  Since I never make pita to stuff it – it didn’t matter that they didn’t puff in the middle for me.  I rolled the pita thinner than usual (I was worried about them cooking all the way through) and they were fantastic!

One of my favorite lunches (seen in the pic above) was a pita spread with hummus and then topped with sliced avocado and some sun dried tomatoes in oil.  While I was eating it I didn’t think about cheese for a second.  It was so satisfying and the tomatoes and avocado made it feel indulgent.

Another dish I made that was amazing was a cous cous dish using the leftover steamed potatoes and broccoli from the samosa project and caramelizing some onion and mushrooms to add to it.  Then I made a lemon, olive oil, mustard, and dill sauce to dress it with.  It was amazing!  I will be making it again and posting the recipe for it soon.  I love dill and think it’s underused in American kitchens.

Right now I’m making my own red curry paste and I’ll tell you all about that and the Asian market adventure I went on with my friend Chelsea to find some of the ingredients in the next post.  In the mean-time – tell me what dairy free meals you’ve made recently that you loved?