Cheesy Quinoa Stuffed Mushrooms

I can't blame people for assuming that I like to cook. No doubt it's true of most food bloggers. But me? I like to eat, not cook. Cooking is just a means to an end.

I needed some inspiration for my wearying daily march into the kitchen to make dinner, so last week I went to hear a speaker, Vanessa Young of Thirsty Radish, talk about plant-based eating. She was very engaging, and urged us to let our cooking engage all our five senses. Coupled with tantalizing photos of fresh, summery produce, these words gave me some needed energy to remember that there is joy to be found in cooking, if you look for it.

Vanessa spoke at a meeting of the Maplewood Garden Club

Since then, I've been reminding myself to appreciate the taste, smell, sight, feel, and sound of food as I prepare it. That does help to make cooking less tedious, but to truly enjoy the exercise, I find that there's another required ingredient: a co-chef to make silly conversation and share the labor. My young backup dancer is an able novice chef, so I enlisted her help in making "Cheesy Quinoa Stuffed Mushrooms" (The Monday Campaigns). 

This is a very easy meatless, gluten-free recipe that we all gave a thumbs-up. Happily, you don't need to be precise about the measurements of the ingredients. A slapdash combination of some veggies, some cheese, and some quinoa will do the trick just fine. 

An advantage of making a kid your co-chef is that she will draw your attention to the sensory delights of cooking that you might otherwise overlook. My backup dancer said she had "always wanted" to use the rubber brush that she used to spread the vinaigrette on the mushrooms, for example, because of its satisfying feel in her hand. Then her enjoyment of the sensation of chopping the spinach was so great that the pieces were like damp green confetti when she was done (but again: This recipe is forgiving!). And when I grabbed my phone to get a picture of her stuffing the mushrooms with the filling, she instructed me to make sure I captured the tantalizing, gooey strings of meled cheese.

So cook with a kid, if you can. And make it meatless, to help slow the climate change that's increasingly battering the world the kids will inherit from us. 

Among other problems, climate change contributes to droughts that create the conditions for wildfires, and as it warms our oceans, hurricanes pick up and spit out more water. The frequency with which the United States has experienced weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion has increased dramatically since 1980, according to NOAA (see https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/). 

Minimizing our meat intake is a way to slow down climate change, because a conventional meat-based diet is responsible for significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than a vegetarian diet (almost twice the emissions, according to one researcher: https://ideas.ted.com/which-diet-is-better-for-climate-change-vegan-vegetarian-climatarian-flexitarian). Avoiding meat is an action we can take even--or especially--when our government officials do not have the foresight to pursue policies that curb climate change.

If you still want to eat meat sometimes, that's fine by me; I do it too. It's helpful to think of meat as a choice, not a default, and to remember that every time we choose vegetarian alternatives, we build a brighter future for my backup dancer's generation and those that will follow.