One of my favorite indulgences of winter is always the heartier fare. There is nothing better than curling up
in a pile of blankets, with a book and a bowl of stew that has simmered all day. Except lately my appetite is
all over the place or non-existent.
With a little one in school a few days a week, he unfortunately gets sick often and subsequently so are we. I attribute
this largely to my lack of hunger lately and I haven't been very consistent or committed to exercise (shhhh).
I really need to fit this in during the work day, but it is hard to get motivated and I am often working on other
projects over my lunch hour.
As a result, most of our meals have been lighter lately; it's certainly not a bad thing, just maybe uncharacteristic given the time of year.
I have been able to use this to my advantage though. I am still experimenting with sous vide and in the beginning, it seemed
like this cooking method was best suited for proteins and not so much veggies. Produce like carrots and corn on the cob had potential, but I couldn't
find a compelling reason to cook all vegetables this way.
That is until I wanted to make a few soups and for convenience, decided to try preparing them via sous vide.
I accidentally stumbled upon a huge advantage of doing this, which is time savings. You can cook several recipes
at once because they all generally use the 185F cooking temp (even grains, but more on that another time).
As a result, I made three soups at once and did not have to use/clean three separate pots or supervise - I just sealed
all the vegetables, herbs and spices - dropped them in the water bath and went on to something else.
Not only that, but the flavors were amazing - I thought better than stove top. This difference was most evident
in the flavor of the carrots, which sometimes have a bitter/soap aftertaste due to terpenoids. Cooking is supposed to
break this down and expose more of their sweeter flavor, but I haven't always had consistent luck with this. It could
have been the batch I brought home too, but maybe this method of cooking is hot and long enough to do the job (food scientists???).
I now have a lot of new ideas for veggies and bulk meal prep, so I will be sharing those with you as they are completed.
(You can also try one of the other recipes I made with this one: Parsnip and Chickpea).
