Super-Quick White Bean & Tomato Veggie Soup

Have to share this recipe from last night's dinner. Astrid and I had a long day at Fort Funston with the dog and were too exhausted to cook something elaborate, but are also too broke to treat ourselves out right now. We stopped by Arizmendi to get some yummy bread for sandwiches, but ended up with a crunchy, crusty sourdough loaf instead. Astrid said it'd be good with soup, and thought of the combination of white beans and tomato. This was the inspiration for the following totally ad-hoc recipe, full of shortcuts (canned beans, canned tomato, bouillon cubes). We had delicious soup in about an hour.

Ingredients:

1-2 T oil (olive, canola, whatever)
1 yellow onion, chopped
2-3 stalks of celery, chopped
1/2 a red bell pepper, chopped
2 garlic cloves, smashed and minced
8-10 mushrooms, coarsely sliced
1 turnip, diced
2 veggie bouillon cubes dissolved into about 6-7 cups hot/boiling water
small handful of fresh marjoram or other herbs (about a tablespoon dried)
2 cans butter beans or cannellini beans, drained
1 large can of whole peeled tomatoes, coarsely chopped, with juice
fresh parsley for garnish*
fresh-milled black pepper to taste

* (This is a totally Throw-All-the-Old-Veggies-You've-Got-Into-the-Soup situation. I think the onions, garlic, and celery are essential, but otherwise anything goes. Zucchini or dark leafy greens would be fantastic.)

Method:

In a large pot, heat a glug of oil on medium flame. Throw in the onions and move them around while they cook to milky/translucent. Add the garlic, celery, red bell, mushrooms, turnips or other veggies. Sautée all.

While veggies are sautéeing, boil water separately for the bouillon. I used the kettle - it's a quicker boil than a pot. Place the bouillon cubes in a large glass bowl or measuring cup that won't crack from the hot water. Add the water to the cubes and mix around to dissolve, then pour the broth over the veggies in the pot.*

Add the herbs, drained beans, and tomatoes with juice. Turn the heat up to high and boil. Then turn down to simmer for as long as you want. At least a half hour.

Garnish with some fresh parsley and dunk some crusty bread! I didn't add any additional salt besides the bouillon cubes. Salt to your liking - it'll depend on how much water you add. The flavor of this soup is very similar to minestrone. If you wanna go that extra mile, add some cooked pasta and some grated Parmesan, then mangiare!

*If I'm not making a veggie stock from scratch, I prefer to use a good bouillon cube or paste than one of those ready-made liquid stocks in the aseptic-pack cartons. Three reasons: 1. cheaper; 2. less packaging waste; 3. I find that a bouillon imparts a clearer, more pure stock flavor than those thicker liquid stocks. Most of the vegetarian ones are high in carrot flavor, which provides more sweetness than I like.

Thanksgiving

It's 5:00 AM and I've got nervous energy. I think it's 'cause I volunteered Astrid and I to make the stuffing for the holiday feast, which will commence in about 11 hours. I'm sure it will turn out okay, but as a friend called it yesterday, "You're making THE side dish!" The pressure is on!

Before looking at any recipes, I decided that these ingredients would be essential, and I went and bought them in mass quantities:

whole chestnuts
celery
onions and shallots
mushrooms
fresh parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (which I failed to write in that order on the grocery list.)
veggie broth

Then, on scoping a few recipes for making stuffing from scratch, we went and got three huge loaves of sourdough which we'll toast in the oven to begin the process. We'll roast the chestnuts, sautée the veggies, combine everything, then bake the stuffing. It seems pretty straightforward and easy.

Another friend yesterday assured me that only three things could possibly go wrong:

1. The stuffing is too bland.
2. The stuffing is too dry.
3. The stuffing is too soggy.

The first two will be remedied automatically by dousing the stuff in gravy, so really aren't problems at all. The third means we're shit outta luck. I think I can handle this.

Another anxiety about the day ahead, though this is not what's keeping me up, is the probability that I will eat way too much food. I've been doing pretty well lately with "portion control," as the diet gurus might say, but Thanksgiving is a notorious rule-breaking event, and the entirety of the meal, aside from the turkey, is carbs, glorious carbs. I'm really glad I never went in for the Atkins diet. Not to malign it, because there are some sound scientific grounds for why it works, but I just don't think substantially reducing carbs and sugar over my lifetime is a sustainable strategy for me. I'm not much for sugar, anyway (it's really the easiest thing for me to control) but definitely decreasing highly refined carbs and increasing complex carbs like whole grains and veggies is something I've been focused on and continue to tackle. Anyway, today won't be a whole grain kinda day, but still, eating til I'm done and not keeling over from a gorged gut will be my modest health-conscious goal. That, and Astrid and I are planning to start the day, even before preparing the stuffing, by going to the gym and doing some cardio. She checked, and 24-hour is indeed open for business today. It'll be really interesting to see how many other people will be at the gym on a major eating-oriented holiday.

Gonna try to go back to bed now.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

For the Occasion of Astrid's Birthday...

I am planning the following luxurious meal for this evening:

Salad with arugula and hand-chosen lettuce mix with lemon vinaigrette dressing * Swiss chard and herb tart with two cheeses, fresh thyme and oregano * Greek gigantes white beans in a tomato/garlic/olive oil sauce * Tzatziki made with Greek yogurt, cucumber, garlic, and fresh mint *

My stomach just flipped from thinking about it. Maybe this meal will be a little too rich? And then the drinking will commence. It might be a Tums night. Maybe I'll save the tzatziki for another time.

Comfort Food

Some folks eat mac'n'cheese, others prefer pork chops and apple sauce, and then there's me. When I'm stressed out, I crave Chinese food. The subject deserves several entries, but suffice it for right now, I'm an American Jew, just one generation removed from the Lower East Side, where the Jewish neighborhood rubbed up against Chinatown and Jews began eating Chinese food as early as the late 1800s. It's essentially in the makeup of my cultural genetics. If you're interested in the subject, check out the article Safe Treyf by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine.

It's a fascinating account of the socio-cultural phenomenon of intergenerational Jewish appreciation of Chinese food, and it addresses the history of the phenomenon, as well as the complexities of the race/ethnicity, economic, and religious dynamics at play.

Duck sauce and gefilte fish, like ebony and ivory, they live together on the shelf at Safeway.

So Friday night, Astrid and I ate at Red Jade on Church Street, the only Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. It's decent, inexpensive, and more "American-Chinese" fare than authentic, like many of the restaurants I've frequented in the City. It's not on my list of all-time favorites, but in a pinch, it's fine. The food is fresh, it's not too oily, and the dishes have some flavor. But the key factor this weekend was the stress and the relief of said stress through food. I've gone my two weeks of eating sensibly, and this weekend was the bounce-back binge, starting with Friday night's excursion to the Red Jade. We really enjoyed the spinach tofu soup with button mushrooms, a clear broth soup with a delicate flavor. Their prawns with Jade greens, which ended up being an uninspired glut of conventional broccoli, were just okay. I was hoping for bok choy or gai-lan (Chinese broccoli), which would have made the dish more distinctive and tasty. We also ordered their mango ostrich, which had a really nice, savory brown sauce that contrasted well with the sweet, firm mango slices. The ostrich meat itself was kind of beef-like and a little on the chewy side. Overall, I'd give the meal almost 3 stars, but despite the moderately enjoyable mediocrity, I continued to eat and eat until I was completely gorged.

The other major indulgence of the weekend was a Saturday night wee-hours trip to Mel's Diner for my ultimate indulgence: chicken strips. Many out there may know that chicken strips (embarrassingly enough, the Denny's version of the diner classic) were the first meat I ate after three years of vegetarianism in college. They have become a huge part of what Astrid lovingly calls "the lore of Bree."

So now you know that Chinese food and chicken strips are my total fat-girl kryptonite. What's nice about beginning the week after the weekend's indulgences is this: I'm not tripping out about it.

Back to the regimen!

What It's About

(The first Ambivalent Fat Girl entry.)

By way of introduction, I am a fat dyke in my mid-30s, living a beautiful life in San Francisco. I'm shacked up with a really swell lady and I'm currently a grad student in clinical psychology. My academic and professional interests swim around such issues as death, sitting with the unknown, existential anxiety, body image issues, fatness, fat positivity, health and well-being, sexuality, queer/GLB identity, gender variance, genderqueer and transgender identity issues, spirituality, finding meaning in life, and yadda yadda. For fun, I like listening to music (mostly of the post-punk, folkie, political, artsy, nerdy-emo indie variety) riding my bike, lazing about, blogging, being social, drinking gorgeous cocktails, and more often than not, eating lots of yummy food.



I've been fat my whole life. I'm 5'4" and I currently weigh around 220 pounds. I've weighed as much as 235, but in the last few years, I've stayed pretty consistently between 210 and 220, most often lingering at exactly 215. I weighed 210 at the end of high school, so my weight's been fairly steady over the last 18 years.

My feelings about my weight yo-yo a bit more than that, to be true, thus with the "ambivalence." After growing up with a lot of anxiety and unhappiness about my weight, in an unforgiving fatphobic culture, with a mom (whom I adore, by the way) who constantly dieted and modeled body self-hatred for me, coming into my own sensibility about my weight involved everything from internalizing the self-hatred to rejecting the paradigm and refusing to get on a scale for more than ten years. Back in high school, I ate like absolute shit. Taco Bell, Denny's, everything fried, crispy and golden brown. I still love me some chicken strips. Moving my body as little as possible was a matter of true slacker pride. In college I went vegetarian for three years and lost a bit of weight that way, but I can't say I was eating much healthier, really. It wasn't until about five years ago that I started exercising, and now I totally dig getting myself around by bike. I actually enjoy working up a sweat, even. So since biking entered my life, and a new consciousness around healthy eating has crept slowly into my routine, things have shifted for me a bit. I'm still a chronic overeater, and tend to indulge my cravings too often, so despite an overall healthier lifestyle, I really haven't experienced a significant net weight loss. Sometimes I feel okay about that, and sometimes I don't.

I experience some health problems which I feel to be related to my weight and to overeating. My knees are stressed and weak, and I had a bad case of patello-femoral syndrome for a couple years, which still affects me, but has lessened some since doing physical therapy and getting more exercise. I can't squat or spend too much time kneeling, or else the knees crack and pop in a very unpleasant way. I've had a low-grade but chronic struggle with acid reflux, which I'm quite sure is caused mainly by overeating, and has diminished some since quitting coffee about four years ago or so. My overall and long-term health would be much improved if I were to dramatically cut back on saturated fats (main culprits: red meat and all things fried) and if I were to make a habit out of eating til satisfied and not until utterly stuffed. Though I'm a fan of salty snacks which carry their own kinds of risks (raising blood pressure and water retention) I will say I'm not much of a sweet tooth. A small square of chocolate is a totally doable limit for me, but get me near a bowl of briny green olives, and the lot of 'em will be gone before you can say "bowl of briny green olives."

It's also noteworthy that since getting into biking, I realize that if I weighed less, I would actually have more endurance and be able to bike faster and farther. Climbing the San Francisco hills is a painful and slow undertaking for me, and if I weighed even twenty pounds less, I think my biking efficiency would be vastly improved, not to mention my stamina and energy for lots of other fun stuff like sex and walking and um, sex.

So I'm inaugurating this here blog with an admission that I'm making quite public. I'm interested in losing some weight. Even as a fat-positive feminist anti-establishment dyke, I have come to understand that for my own body, for my own lifestyle, and for my own long-term health goals, this makes sense for me. I don't know if I'll be successful. I don't know if I'll be any "happier" if I weigh less. I don't know whether, even if I lose a significant amount of weight, I will keep it off or not. I just dunno. But I want to blog the progress, the literal ups & downs, and mostly the fleeting thoughts, feelings, fears, and myopic obsessions that run through this noggin when anything related to these topics floats on through. Welcome to the contradictory journey.

Please feel free to leave comments, but if you flame me for being a "fat hater" I will have to lash you roundly. Also, if you leave inane fatphobic comments like, "Oh my god, you'll look so much better when you're skinny!" I'll also have to lash you. My feelings about this subject are ambivalent for very complex personal, political, cultural and healh-related reasons. In this blog, I am attempting to be as honest as I can about my mixed feelings on weight loss, what is at stake for me emotionally, how I've been conditioned to hate myself and other fat people, and how wanting to lose weight is mired in all kinds of problematic socio-cultural ideologies, prejudices, and power relationships. In other words, I know. Don't judge me for being human, please.

Peace, y'all.

Bree