On Assignment

Hello, and good day. This is your MM cub reporter and today I am on assignment in Fort Myers, Florida. I'm feeling sorry for myself due to a still wonky and swollen foot which was injured in a recent basketball contest back home in frozen Canadia. I feel like Ernest Hemingway laid up with the gout in Key West. But this has fueled my resolve and given me a great excuse to be sitting around on the couch with a computer on my lap.  

I was wondering how I would ever figure out what to do about this week's message and recipe, with a travel day on Saturday and then not having my own computer with me and the sun got in my eyes and... sorry, those were the excuses I planned to use. But then Christina showed me the latest edition of Redbook magazine which she happened to be reading on the plane, which just happened to have a whole section on Meatless Mondays. Oh, sweet inspiration, you even find me here, thirty thousand feet in the air amidst some mild turbulence and heavy infant lung flexing disturbances.

So Redbook includes a month's worth of recipes: four dinners and five lunches, in case you are doubly hungry on the third Monday of the month, I guess. I tried to find links to these recipes online, but they haven't yet posted them, so I searched around their site and came up with another workable option, about which more to follow. In the fashion of fashionable women's magazines, Redbook lists "3 great reasons to join the Meatless Monday campaign." Nothing exists in the world of Cosmo and suchlike that cannot be listed as the "Top 10 ways to know if your man is a-cheatin'" or "18 Health Signs to Never Ignore" (real headline from this issue of Redbook). They love a good list.

You've been wondering about those 3 great reasons mentioned above, I know, and I aim not to disappoint. First, you'll be thinner and healthier, they say. Wicked. Second, you'll bank more than $1,000 a year, they say. Tell me more. Third, you'll help the planet, they say. "If the U.S. population did meatless Mondays for a year, we'd save 12 billion gallons of gas." Hello, Libya? Yeah, you can go ahead and keep your oil. We don't need it after all. Love it. I'm knocked over with a feather. Sign me up. MM is the way to be, can't get enough, how can I take this even further? (I'm looking at you, Tuesday.) My subscription to Redbook starts tomorrow.

The vegetable of the week is butternut squash, which is low in fat and high in fibre, mixed carotenoids and other antioxidants, and before you tell me it's a fruit, sit down and eat some cucumber, tomato and green pepper. And reflect on what it is you're saying, for that road leads to madness. The great thing about the recipe of the week (did you notice that I managed to work in the VOTW with the ROTW? pretty cool, no?) is that it takes only 10 or 20 minutes of prep time, then about 50 minutes in the oven while you sit down with a glass of wine and the latest issue of Redbook. Good times.

Comments