BLUF, aka TL;DR -- Mixing and matching cuisines within a single meal. Thoughts?
I forgot I had this site out here. This might work better than the wall o' text messages. So anyway, here's where my head's at this morning:
I've recently started following a couple of YouTubers. Tokyo Kitchen and Joshua Weissman. If you don't know Joshua's story, I recommend you look it up. I think he'd be a GREAT asset to team up with NerdFitness, if possible. He's just as extra as the rest of us and has a great weight loss story. But it was actually a Tokyo Kitchen video that got me thinking.
In her recent post about Torijaga (a fairly simple chicken/potato stew from what I could tell), she ended it with a suggested meal plan that includes the main dish (stew) two sides, a soup, and rice. Her suggestion checks out with what we know about meal planning and plate composition -- she's just doing it with multiple plates. She is actually where I got the idea of including a soup with every dinner, by the way. Bagged salads have gotten us to include one of those with each meal. I think keeping a simple "soup of the week" in the fridge might go a good way towards creating another filling, low-calorie side with each meal.
ANYWAY -- it's the pickles she mentioned that really got the ol' gears spinning. She was counting them as a side dish when I normally would have thought of them as a garnish. How very American of me, right? I like Asian-style pickles, don't get me wrong, I like all styles of pickles if I'm being perfectly honest; pickles are freaking delicious, but as a side dish? This sent me down the rabbit hole of "If I make a big batch of daikon pickles, would I be able to include them as a side dish in multiple meals throughout the week? I don't have a lot of room in the fridge to store them long term. Would I need to do a whole week of Asian food just to make sure they get used? What would happen if I started mixing up cuisines? How much cognitive dissonance is there if I make a vegetable fritata with salsa, with roasted broccoli and Asian pickles as the veggie sides, a small dish of leftover pesto pasta for my starch, and a cup of tomato bisque? Does that fit together? That's not a meal -- it a leftovers night. Is there anything wrong with that?"
I get that dietarily, for weight loss specifically, I really only need to be looking at the caloric loads and portionings. But meals are about flavors, textures, smells, sounds, and experiences. Is there a way to take these kinds of hodge-podge meals and create something culinarily cohesive out of them? I have a chef buddy that works for Publix Aprons, maybe I'll ask him.
In the meantime, I'll go have my snack of kimchi (1/4 cup), followed by cottage cheese (1 cup), followed by beef jerky (1 oz).