Soup and stuff

I love to cook.  I love to cook.  If I keep telling myself this, maybe one day I will believe it.  I don’t hate cooking, that much is true.  I love to eat, that is also true.  I like to be the person choosing what we will eat, and I enjoy smelling ingredients, tasting and watching as a meal is cooked, but somehow I don’t enjoy the act of cooking.  I want it to be fast, efficient, and while it should smell and sound good while cooking, I don’t want the preparation of the meal to be a huge production.  Just cook, eat, clean.  And repeat, again and again.  

 

I’ve been on my own, providing my own meals for 35 or more years.  If we eat only twice a day, and we don’t eat out very often, then people who love math can see I have cooked a lot of meals.  I made a lot of bad meals, lots of sticky rice, overcooked chicken,  undercooked beans and according to my husband plenty of semi raw biscuits.  Just for the record I love raw biscuit dough, and have been known to prepare them just so I can eat the raw dough.  

 

But, a well-cooked meal, smelling good and tasting good and looking good, makes for a wonderful complete and satisfying feeling.  So, maybe, in a way I do enjoy cooking.

 

Last night we ate lentils, cooked as dal.  Today we had butternut squash soup.  Both were good, and fun to fix.  Both were full of garlic.  I learned something a while ago about the nutrition of garlic. Apparently garlic provides our bodies with allicin, “which is equivalent to 15 international units of penicillin.”  Pg. 49 of Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson. 

According to the book I was reading three cloves of garlic have the same antibacterial activity as a standard dose of penicillin.  It isn’t the same as taking the drug of course, but eating garlic can help fend off bacteria and the flu virus as well as possibly warding off some cancers. But the interesting thing to me was it only works if we prepare it correctly. Once the garlic is minced or chopped or mashed, it has to rest for at least 10 minutes.  Researchers in Israel discovered this by testing the garlic, cooking it right after mincing, and then cooking it after letting it rest.  What happens is the chemical in garlic that fights off these germs, allicin, is created when two other chemicals in the garlic are mixed together.  These chemicals mix when we mince, chew or in some way smashing the bulb. Cooking stops the enzyme from doing its job, so cooking too soon stops the action, so to have the best health benefits from garlic, mince then rest before cooking.