Oldie but goodie: chickpea soondal and kale with radishes

Well, not so old - I made the chickpeas and the kale during and right after Thanksgiving - but a replay nonetheless.

Now that The Clock-Racing Gourmet has a couple of drawer' worth of fresh produce and is back to racing the clock, I figured that, for tonight's dinner, the sauteed kale with radishes would be an easy way to use up half a bag of kale and half a bunch of sliced radishes.  The chickpea soondal and brown rice didn't dispense wtih any additional produce but were simple and made the meal nutritionally complete.  I threw it together while Steve watched the second half of Basic Instinct II.  Not my kind of movie, so it's just as well that I had raw materials and a need to cook.

Eight days.  I'm starting to weird myself out by how long I've consciously gone without meat.  There are only other two times in my life that I've done this.  One was during my junior year in college, which I spent in Geneva and had to cook for myself in the Cité Universitaire.  It turned out that there, like here, you can save a bundle by not eating meat.  Plus, back then I was so new to cooking that I was afraid to try my hand at chicken or seafood, undercook it and make myself sick. 

The other time I went for months at a time without eating meat was the summer of 2006, when I started training in earnest for my first half-marathon and my first full marathon.  Coincidentally, I had visited the United Nations on a visit to New York City in June of that year and left their bookshop with an Indian (and a couple other) cookbooks.  Since my then boyfriend had MS and wasn't able to eat much of anything while it was hot, let alone find himself tempted to try new things, I ended up doing a lot of cooking for one.  And since I'm not a big meat eater to start with, I pretty much dined on homemade Indian food, based on the recipes from Healthy South Indian Cooking, all summer.  (Then the boyfriend and I broke up, Steve and I got together and I started going out to restaurants again and ordering chicken and seafood.)  Between the nearly vegan diet and the unprecedented weekly mileage, I ended up losing more weight than any other time in my adult life and was also as strong as I've ever been.  Not a bad way to live at all.

Anyway...one nice thing about going vegetarian is that my love of chocolate and beer doesn't interfere.  Which is a good thing, because I could go for a little of both right now.  Good night!