Dinner: an improvement

For me, one of the drawbacks of working in a restaurant is that, just like when I cook at home, I graze and taste and nibble almost the whole time that I'm there. (Don't worry, I use tasting spoons and gloves and wash my hands and all that jazz.) This means that when I come home from work, I have eaten some vast but unknowable amount of calories from raw vegetables, cream cheeses, sauces, breads, and empty sweet things, accompanied by coffee and spread out over an 8- or 9-hour period. Predictably, if I feel hungry again it is not until several hours later, often after I have woken up from a truly epic nap. I am trying to replace these habits with better ones, but for now my body no longer recognizes normal mealtimes, so at 4 pm on my day off I started working on dinner: marinated seared tempeh (method stolen from Ham Pie Sandwiches) stir-fried with frozen broccoli, over brown rice. It's not perfect, but it's an improvement, and I feel good, like I have enough energy to clean the house a bit before settling down with a grapefruit, Hulu and my mom's way-overdue Christmas gift.

I could eat tempeh for every meal, incidentally, and have to make it super-spicy with help from my favorite Chili Garlic Sauce so that I will have leftovers. It is responsible for both my recent spate of at-home vegetarianism and my rapidly-improving relationship with soy, though you will still be hard-pressed to find me replacing cow's dairy with soy in my quotidian cereal-and-coffee life.