Challenge #1: Eat a Pot of Rice

Last night I tried the Sweet And Sour Eggplant (see last post) and it was pretty good! As I was putting it in my dish, I realized I really should have served it over rice.  Which made me think, I really should be eating more rice.  This comes, in part, from reading The Kind Life by Alicia Silverstone.  I skipped all the first chapters and jumped right to the middle part that talks about how to eat a more vegan diet.  I've always thought I'd like to be a vegan, but lacked the motivation and will power to do it.  Now that Olivia is starting to stop eating purees, I've been faced with the question of how to feed her.  I know that a vegan diet is best, but
I don't eat a vegan diet and therefore don't have everything on hand that I should in order to make sure she's getting everything she needs without dairy and eggs.  What better motivation than Olivia's health?  So I'm going to start eating a more vegan diet.  Scratch that.  I'm going to eat a more plant-based diet.  Sometimes these terms are used interchangeably, but to me, plant based is what I want to strive toward.  (And I do mean that.  I'm not proclaiming that I'm going totally vegan or plant-based.  Just striving toward that kind of eating style.)  Vegan just means no animal or animal- derived products.  Therefore refined sugar is fair game as are all the processed "fake" meats.  Plant-based is more whole foods.  Many of the recipes in my Forks Over Knives Cookbook don't even call for oil.  For example, my meal last night called to sauté red and green peppers, onions and eggplant in a dry skillet, adding only water to keep the veggies from sticking.
Anyway, in her book Silverstone suggests making the transition from the SAD (standard American diet) by taking baby steps.  I like this method.  I think that's kind of what I've been doing all along with my diet and greening lifestyle.  So her first step is to make a pot of rice and eat it over the course of a week.  Add stuff to it if you need to (I do) but work on just eating a pot of rice.  Pretty basic right?  So when I started working on this blog post I threw a pot of rice in the oven.  It's my preferred method of cooking rice because I always tend to undercook or make the pot boil over if I do it on the stove.  So I preheated the oven to 375 degrees put 1 1/2 C brown rice 1/2 tsp salt, 2 tsp olive oil and 2 1/2 C boiling water in a round casserole dish, covered it and popped it in the oven for about an hour.  It's cooling right now (If you note the time on that one it's taken me over an hour to get this post done.  There have been a few distractions, to say the least.) then I'll pop it in the fridge and start working on eating it up.  Let me also say, I don't really like rice.  I'll eat it, but I'm not a big rice fan.  I really wish that I were, but I'm not.  So I'm going to take my grandfather's advice. "Learn to like it!" I'm going to share it with this crying child that's hanging from me let right now as well.  It's hard for her to pick it up grain by grain so I'm going to try to find a good rice ball recipe online for toddlers so she can pick them up and eat them herself.

 *Side note I'm very pleased with myself on my genius bean idea.  I bought cans of beans for her, (I either undercook or overcook when it do it myself and for this purpose I needed them to be cooked perfectly) rinsed them well, drained them on a paper towel, spread them out on a baking sheet so they don't overlap and froze them.  I then used a spatula to pop the frozen beans off the sheet and put them in freezer bags.  Now I can grab a handful of beans from the freezer, quickly defrost them in the microwave and Olivia has beans with each meal.  I can vary what kind of bean this way so she's not eating one kind of bean for 3 days straight like she would if I just opened an can and kept it in the fridge or froze homemade beans in a lump, like I usually do.