For this week, since I have been struggling a little with getting over my 30 pound mental hurdle, I have been trying to make more recipes than just one a week. It gives me a project - a couple, actually, since there's the meal planning, the grocery finding, then the actual cooking and eating, followed by blog writing. It's not only healthy for cooking, but for my brain I think - it's a good task to keep myself busy and keep my mind on something that pushes me in a positive direction with my goals.
I have a lot of old cookbooks but I'm always looking for more, especially when I find a good deal on them. I'm part of a Midcentury cooking and food group on Facebook also so when people share some of their Internet, thrift store, or estate sale finds, I like to try and find some of them for myself . Recently I went on eBay just browsing for some of my favorite categories (vintage WW and BH&G hardcover cookbooks), and found a few exciting new additions for my shelf. Most have arrived, I am only waiting on a bit of a crown jewel for my collection: a set of WW recipe cards.
Not gonna lie, I was very excited to dive into this WW cookbook from the late 70s. "International cookbooks" tend to promise big but fall short in their diversity - they rarely stray from Italian, Mexican, and various cuisines they lump together in a vague Asian category. But this one has a lot of different categories, with salads, soups, entrées, desserts, and drinks from each.
There's so, so much to explore. For this week, my son helped me pick out a recipe. We had a few constraints: it needed to use chicken (since we had some in the house), and lots of veggies (because I wanted to eat a lot). We chose Chicken Dynasty, from the China chapter.
The recipe said it made two servings but we increased almost all the vegetable ingredients so it ended up making 3-4. I need to research more about how food was tracked back then - I know Points are a relatively new concept (and they change it up every couple of years anyway) - but it's easy to see why this dish would be a winner for someone dieting. It's a very considerable portion of food, and it's almost all 0 PP ingredients - the only things with Points are the soy sauce and the rice.
We went to a market with lots of Chinese ingredients to locate the bamboo shoots, and luckily they had the other produce available too so it turned into a one-stop shop. There were a lot of interesting other ingredients there too, we will need to go back when we try more recipes from the book.
And - it was another win with the family! I was a little skeptical about this one, with how many veggies were in it - but they cooked up nicely and the flavors were good, not overpowering at all.
This is definitely one we will be making again. One of the best parts of the recipe was how quick it came together - it was a 15 minute meal from start to finish, so it would be very easy to make again even on a weeknight.
(Not including rice, which I tracked separately because I made different rice for the non-WW folks.)
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