Chilly Weather Stuff

It's starting to get chilly, and it's times like these that you don't really worry too terribly much about cranking up the oven, and doing some serious roasting and baking, because your apartment could do with a bit of warming up anyway. Last night's dinner was really simple, but rather nice. We sliced up some eggplant, spaghetti squash, and broccoli, blasted them with a bit of nonstick cooking spray, and roasted them in the oven. The broccoli was done in 25 minutes, but the eggplants and the spaghetti squash took about 1 1/2 hours. Again, I wasn't bothered, because the big hard work of it all was slicing everything in half, and laying it on the baking tray, then chucking it in the oven.

The other thing is that since these are not finicky creatures, I didn't bother to preheat the oven. I just let them park in there as the oven heated, and they got done to a turn in that time. I didn't have parchment paper last night, so I also gave the baking sheets a hit of the spray, but if you do have parchment, you can skip the spray stuff completely. While those roasted away in the oven, I did some simple cabbage with a bit of curry powder, garlic, and oregano. Something about that mix just does lovely things to the smell. At the end, I sprinkled on some sea salt, and ground cumin. It tasted incredible. Then, I whipped up a quick white bean & chickpea dip (we used cucumbers for dipping) with white beans and chickpeas, rosemary, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and a bit of water to thin it out as needed.

The reason I'm not mentioning huge gobs of fat in everything is because we were having dinner at a friend's house, and both of them are trying to watch their calorie intake, so that they can keep the pounds under control until Thanksgiving and the other winter holidays show up, with their obscene amounts of food.

Frankly, none of us really missed the fat. The bean dip provided that creamy addition to the meal, and since everything was simply roasted, it was already bursting with caramelly flavour. And the best part is that the actual prep time was nonexistent, because everything kind of sat in the oven until it was done to a turn. For dipping, we used that Oyster Mushroom sauce you get at the Chinese market, and some Tamari with garlic and lime juice. It was quite possibly the most surprisingly filling meals I've eaten in a while. It was all vegetables, but it was filling!

We went through one medium head of cabbage, three broccoli crowns, five cucumbers, four pounds of tinned beans, a head of garlic, five enormous eggplants, and one large spaghetti squash. For all that, we went through about 1 teaspoon or so of oil. It got to where the fat was so low that it added negligible calories to the meal. Score.

Just because it's getting colder doesn't mean it's time to go into hibernation mode!