Walking with Peety by Eric O'Grey

Author:Eric O'Grey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Bridge

I’d spent six months making all sorts of new discoveries, but then I fell into a rut. When it came to food, I had hit a wall.

I found myself making the same dishes over and over again, just because they were easy. Especially pasta. Not wheat-based pasta, but rice-based pasta. My favorite brand, Tinkyada, tasted exactly like regular pasta, but without gluten and with all the nutrition of brown rice. I made my own tomato sauce so I could be sure of every ingredient that went into it, buying fresh tomatoes in season, or jarred tomatoes to avoid the BPAs in many canned tomatoes. The more I read about our food system, the more awful every prepackaged thing seemed to me. It just astounded me how many foods in this country included chemicals and other ingredients that were suspected carcinogens. Why would I want to consume any of that, even in tiny quantities, after putting in all of this effort to get healthy?

I made a great sauce. I made a variety of different sauces. But it all started to feel a bit too routine.

I also found it difficult to incorporate some vegetables into my diet. When I was a kid, we rarely ate vegetables, and when we did they usually came from cans. They were mushy, metallic tasting, and packed with a shelf life of years. The memory of those smells and tastes were hard to shake. In fact, vegetables were sometimes given to me as a punishment. So certain vegetables, from a very young age, triggered my gag reflex. When I smelled them or when I tried to eat them, I actually felt like vomiting.

Brussels sprouts were a big one. I can’t eat them to this day. I never liked artichokes. I wasn’t a cauliflower fan. I really didn’t get eggplant—it was slimy, and I just didn’t understand why anyone would want to eat it. Those aversions made it difficult to incorporate some of the new and similar vegetables I’d come across into my cooking. So I needed a fresh start. I wanted to learn how to take anything I picked up in my farm-share box or anywhere else and turn it into something wholly nutritious and delicious. I had reached my capacity as a cook, and I needed lessons.

I decided to take Peety along with me on sales calls that Friday. I was heading up to Berkeley, the home of the famously liberal college campus, the hippie capital of the world, and an area that had become a vegan mecca. I figured I could ask around there and come up with somebody who might teach me a thing or two about vegan cooking. There were restaurants and cafés all over that town with multiple vegetarian and vegan options on their menus, and even restaurants that were 100 percent vegan. Peety and I skipped breakfast at home just so we could eat out at one of those cool places.

I stopped into one of my stores before we looked for food, and I brought Peety right in with me.

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