I swear it tasted like bacon. No, really. It did.
Back story: I have decided to start eating better whenever I can. For one thing, it’s de rigeur to eat local and natural and healthy vegetables these days, and I’m all about staying current. Eating better is also good for your digestion, and I’m all about good digestion.
Perhaps most compellingly, I’ve gone up two pants sizes in two years. This trend must stop. I can’t afford to keep buying new jeans.
Call it a side effect of my job. I’m out to dinner four or five nights a week and often don’t get to make healthy choices. I probably ingest more hidden butter than anyone else I know.
Woe is me, right?
So I put in my time at the gym and run around the park at night and stumble across the tennis court whenever I can, just to stay recognizable to my friends and family.
But it’s never been so clear that I’m working twice as hard to be half as fit.
So recently I decided to up the ante. And that means keeping a lid on fat and calories when I’m not eating for work.
This weekend, I put on the blinders and hit the grocery store. I picked up a couple of scoops of bulk pearl barley, a small yellow onion, a nice big carrot, a shallot, a handful of fava beans, a few dried mushrooms and a bunch of spinach. I took it home, all proud of myself and ready to unleash my inner health nut and, oops, I bought the wrong kind of barley. I had hulled barley, which takes at least a couple of hours to cook, and works even better if you soak it overnight.
Darn. So I dumped the barley in a bowl, covered it with water for an overnight soak, and went out for Mexican food.
Cheesy, fatty, meaty, margarita-fueled Mexican food.
Next day, there were no excuses. I strained the barley, simmered it for an hour or so, then strained it again. I put the mushrooms over medium heat to steep, then chopped up the onion, carrot and shallot and sauteed them in olive oil in my big old once-red Dutch oven.
I added the drained barley to the pot and stirred in half-cup or so of an inexpensive Italian Pinot Grigio until it cooked away. Over the next 20 minutes, I stirred in about a cup and a half of the warm mushroom liquid, adding a little at a time and letting it cook off, just like you would risotto.
Toward the end, in went the shucked fava beans, chopped spinach, mushrooms and a nice (but not massive) grating of parmesan cheese. A little pepper and salt. Done.
I ate it hot right out of the pan, standing at the stove, mashing each nutty, chewy, soulful grain between my teeth, wishing from the first bite that I’d made more.
And maybe it’s just because I’ve cooked plenty of pork in that Dutch oven over the last, like, 20 years, or maybe it was the nutty, earthy barley, but I swear it tasted like bacon.
Later, I got online to try to piece together the nutritional values of that meal, and while I gather barley is high in carbs, it’s mostly fiber (good carbs) and everything else in there is pretty much good for you.
Except maybe the cheese, but well, to respectfully paraphrase the recently deceased, you can have my cheese only when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Likewise my jeans.
