When we brought Lee home from the hospital, my first task (aside from making sure he had clean pajamas, the TV remote, the portable phone, a bell to ring to get my attention, a stack of magazines, his laptop, lots of big fluffy pillows, and a vase of sunflowers by the bed—no joke; he’s not the world’s easiest patient) was to figure out how we were going to eat in this scary new reality. In the hospital, he had eaten pretty much anything brought to his room on a tray, including eggnog. It was August. I’m not sure who decided eggnog was a good choice for a heart patient, but even so, in August? It was just bizarre.
Anyway, we got home, and now I had to feed him. Okay, first I need to confess to something: the first thing I did was get some help. We looked through the classifieds in our local independent weekly, and found an ad for a service called The Food Fairy. I had used a personal chef before, for catering small events, and when I was pregnant, to get my freezer stocked up, but Terri was different—she billed herself as healthy and vegetarian. We figured that would be a good way to get through the first few weeks, until I could get a handle on how to rework our eating habits.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you have to go out and hire a personal chef in order to get your heart disease under control. Remember, I had two small children (both of whom were home with me full-time). And we wanted to make dramatic changes very quickly—not everyone is quite as aggressive as we were. But Terri was incredibly helpful—she took a lot of pressure off me, and more importantly, she taught me a lot. I hung out and watched and picked her brain while she cooked as much as I could, and I learned a tremendous amount about how she balanced nutrients in a meal, how she layered flavor in a dish, and how she built varied menus around a few central ingredients.
Here’s what I learned from The Food Fairy, in three easy steps:
1) Think about a meal as vegetables, with a little bit of protein and a carbohydrate (preferably complex, but not always) thrown in. And if dessert happens to be the perfect vehicle for one of those components, so be it.
2) Never miss an opportunity to add more flavor—start with some sauteed onions and garlic, use stock or wine or liquid from another dish instead of water, add spices and herbs and heat (chiles, red pepper flakes) wherever possible, always toast nuts and seeds, finely grated cheese goes much further than coarse, and finally, if you’re going to use a garnish, make sure it tastes good.
3) Start with a basic item, like a bag of dried beans, cook them up, and use the beans in several different items in the course of a week. Make a stew or chili, toss some over a salad the next night, puree a few to thicken a soup the third night, and the last night mash the last few with seasonings to spread on crostini or fold into an omelet or mix into a pasta sauce. A big pot of rice is a side dish on Monday, the basis for a stir-fry on Tuesday, and a homey rice pudding on Wednesday. That’s how I get through the week, and I never have to toss out leftovers.