A week of virtuous yet fulfilling cooking and eating

Friends, if you read Em-i-lis even slightly regularly, you are aware that while I use the freshest of ingredients and am fairly veggie-intensive, I do not shy away from olive oil, butter, cheese and so forth. I like carbs, I like to feel sated, and I like wine. However, there are times throughout the year when even I feel like a lardon and suspect that I need to take the all-out eating down a notch for a few days or a week. I could feel this sensation coming on all day yesterday and by bedtime knew for sure. For breakfast today, I enjoyed a fruit/walnut/honey salad, a lowfat latte and a ramekin of cereal and thence committed to a week of lower-fat/calorie cooking.

And so I'm kicking off this week with a Meatless Monday dinner of the mujadarra I cottoned to yesterday: lentils, basmati rice, lots of onions, cinnamon/cumin/coriander-spiked yogurt. Tomorrow we'll be having a warm tuna and bean salad (green and shell beans) with multigrain bread, and the rest of the week is TBD. Although it's cold out, I will be reintroducing myself to lunchtime compost salads, and because of the chill in the morning air, breakfast porridge will become de rigueur. I love to stew prunes and dried apricots in cinnamon-spiked water, add oatmeal and upon serving, stir in some molasses.

After replenishing my canning supplies today, I'll also be making cranberry sauce and will post that recipe soon.