Chinese Food! by Mollie

*Sorry it's really late... I wrote this post a long time ago and then forgot the password :P.*

I picked the month of January for Chinese food month because the Chinese New Year was on January 23^rd this year, so I figured it would be an appropriate time. Well, it turned out to be even more perfect than I had intended. From January 17-23, about twenty students from our sister school in Nanjing, China came to visit, and we had the amazing opportunity to host one of them! Her English name was Alice, she was smart, friendly, loved to read, and her English was very good. And one of the first things she told me when we met? “I can cook for you.”

You don’t get that very often… The first day she was here, we went to the grocery store to get some vegetables for a Chinese dish. She made us something very simple and very tasty – white rice cooked with peas, carrots, corn, and broccoli on the stove, without any oil or seasonings. We had soy sauce to put on at the table, but that was it. And this was delicious. See, I guess you don’t need all those fancy, who-knows-what-they-put-in-them sauces, do you?

A couple of days later, we went to a Chinese restaurant along with a friend of mine and her Chinese guest. I know it sounds odd, but as both my friend and I went to China last summer, we learned that American Chinese food is very different from authentic Chinese food, and we wanted our Chinese guests to experience this. (After all, we ourselves found that even Pizza Hut is different, and better, in China.) After working through some menu item confusions – they couldn’t tell what anything was until they got the Chinese version – they devoured their food, seeming to love every bit of it. Alice said with a satisfied nod that it was “different, but better,” and I believe she was describing a difference in the sauce.

Mainly what I took from this month was that Chinese food is simple. It’s about eating vegetables and rice, and having a balance of it. And another thing I’ve learned, sort of gradually, is that Chinese people eat a lot. I think they have better appetites than Americans do – probably because they don’t feel compelled to always be on a diet since their natural diet is healthy enough.

Low Glycemic Thanksgiving and the Joy of Simplicity, by Mollie

Sounds impossible, doesn't it? With the plethora of high carbohydrate and fatty foods that constitute the classic Thanksgiving meal, it's hard to be low-glycemic. Well, we tried this year. We still had mashed potatoes, but we didn't cook them with any butter. Of course we had stuffing - that's always the best part - but we used millet bread and small amounts of oil. Instead of stuffing a turkey - which we never eat anyway because we're all vegetarians - we stuffed two small pumpkins. Pumpkin pie was, of course, a necessity, but we used a recipe we found a couple of years ago for vegan pumpkin pie, which uses a nutty crust. We used bananas in the pumpkin filling to decrease the fat content, and we had it with a small scoop of coconut ice cream instead of whipped cream.

That was probably the best pumpkin pie I've ever tasted.

As my mother remarked as we sat down for our meal (well, actually, as I took a picture of it before we sat down), it all looked just like a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving. We saw the original painting only a week later at the Dayton Art Institute, and she really was right.

Over the week of November, my mother made a lot of REALLY YUMMY low glycemic dinners. I'll leave the details of those left to be discussed by the Cook herself, but let me just say that I was extremely impressed with the variance that a low glycemic diet presents. Like with a salad bar, there are so many different options for combination, every one of which tastes good alone also, that the possibilities are endless. And they are so SIMPLE. Low-glycemic meals don't require a long amount of frying or baking. Some people mistake the simplicity of a vegetarian or gluten-free diet for repetitiveness. But the truth is that vegetables are vegetables no matter what, and they are so many different kinds that will be good together in almost any combination, as long as they are combined with good seasonings. I was SO GLAD to have those wonderful, feel-good meals when I got home after a long day, and I can never thank my mother enough for cooking them, or for converting us to a largely low-glycemic diet.