badseed1980 | Thing Forty-Four: Arisia Chow

It's not like I haven't cooked since November. Really. In spite of the fact that we did some traveling and ate out (or at other people's homes) more than we usually do, I've cooked PLENTY. But I haven't made much that really seemed interesting enough to post here. This may be of more or less interest as a dish, but it's mostly the concept I want to discuss here.

For those reading this (if any) who don't already know this: every year, my husband and I go to a fan-run science fiction convention held here in Boston, called Arisia. Even though it's only a few miles from home, we stay at the hotel for the duration of the con, which runs from Friday through Monday of MLK weekend. Now, there's food available there. The hotel has a couple of restaurants. They have food trucks come park outside the hotel each day. There are restaurants not far from the hotel. Still, eating out for every meal does a number on the wallet, and leaves my body feeling icky and logy and bloated. To save some cash (gotta have money to spend in the vendors' room!) and to make sure we get proper nutrition, we bring and eat our own food.

This requires some planning. We always bring a cooler, for one thing. The picnic cooler with dishes and utensils that my brother-in-law and his wife got us for Christmas last year works great. We also bring a crock pot. Breakfasts consist of fruit-flavored Greek yogurt cups with Kashi Go-Lean Crunch, which makes sure we get plenty of protein and fiber in the morning. (There's one day that friends of ours does a Bagel Breakfast in their hotel room, so we have that one day, too.) Lunches consist of sandwiches (sandwich thins with turkey, cheese, and mustard), and baby carrots and sugar snap peas for veggie goodness. We also keep hummus on hand for dipping the veggies, as well as apples, Clif bars, and multigrain tortilla chips that are surprisingly low in fat and high in fiber. This year, I picked up a container of Trader Joe's triple ginger cookies as a treat, and to share with other people.

Dinner is a little more complicated, because I'm the kind of person who, faced with sandwiches for lunch and dinner several days in a row, would say, "screw this, I'm going to the restaurant." Much more appetizing is a nice hot one-dish meal. Our general MO for this is to cook up enough of a one-dish meal to provide us with dinner on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. We freeze it in three quart-size Ziplocs. Each day, we fill up the crock pot with water and put a Ziploc into it to heat up. On high, it doesn't usually take that long. When it's nice and hot, we dish it up and eat it with a salad.

In years past, we've made something my husband and his brothers call "Chicken Slop," a chicken and wild rice casserole with canned cream soup, sour cream, and veggies. We've usually used the low fat and low sodium versions of the creamy stuff, and added extra veggies. This year, I decided I wanted something different. I cooked up a batch of barley in low sodium beef broth to serve as the big carbohydrate. For protein, I used some ground venison/beef mix that I got from an uncle who hunts, supplemented with some leftover turkey kielbasa and a small piece of another smoked sausage I had in the freezer. I browned all of those with some onions, celery, and garlic, and drained off every bit of fat I could, then quickly wilted a bunch of fresh spinach in the pan with it. I also roasted up some diced turnip and carrot.

The smokiness of the kielbasa and the other sausage provided some nice flavor, as did the aromatic veggies. Still, after poring over my spice rack for a while, I decided to supplement those flavors with some rubbed sage, a hint of clove, and some aleppo pepper (which is flavorful, but not very spicy at all). I combined everything together, and filled up the Ziplocs, labeling them "Arisia Chow."

I'm looking forward to our yummy dinners this weekend! Nothing beats sitting down to a hot, home-cooked meal in a hotel room while you're wearing a Star Trek costume.