We had a simple pasta dinner for Valentine’s Day with a tomato sauce enriched by mushroom duxelles and creme fraiche over farfalle with a cloud of parmesan on top and some creamed spinach on the side.

The absence of a nice red wine to accompany our dinner necessitated another turn to dessert, which obviously had to be something chocolatey. After the previous success of the chocolate-avocado mousse, I decided to try my hand at the old molecular gastronomic trick of making a mousse out of chocolate and water.

The idea is simple – you melt some chocolate in water and then whisk it into a mousse while cooling the mixture in an ice bath.

Unfortunately (much like the layout of this post), there were a couple of problems with the dessert. I was so intrigued with how the watery chocolate whisked up into a mousse that I overwhipped the mixture, and it set up with too firm a texture. So I whisked in some more water, which seemed to work fine, but once we tasted the desserts, it was clear that I had added too much water and the balance was off. I still have a couple of ramekins of the mousse left so I’m going to add their contents to some melted chocolate and see if I can improve matters. Whatever happens, at some point I’ll try this idea again using a more cautious touch in just bringing the mixture up to the right texture.

We don’t usually eat much in the way of dessert as our general preference typically runs to another glass of wine and maybe a bit of cheese. But since we’re on the superfoods Frugal February diet, when I came across a recipe for dark chocolate-avocado mousse, I had to try it. I’ve made dark chocolate-silken tofu “pudding” before (which is quite good especially for anyone with dairy issues) so I had a decent inkling that the chocolate-avocado pairing would turn out well. A bit of coconut cream mellows out the vegetal notes of the avocado, and vanilla extract and agave nectar add some a rich sweet touch as well. Highly recommended!

Similar to the dried limes used in the lentil salad shown earlier, Chinese salted or fermented black beans are a great way to add complex funky flavors to your food. A roughly chopped tablespoon added to a stir fry will make you an instant convert. The beans are cheap and easy to find in a decent Asian market (though I have yet to find them in the conventional grocery stores here in DC).

Recently, I came across an ingenious new way to take advantage of these concentrated flavor bombs. Compared to meat stocks, whose flavors develop over the course of hours-long simmering, vegetarian stocks can be disappointing flavor-wise (even though [or because?] they are more quickly made). Though I haven’t made a vegetarian pho yet this month, such a stock – suffused with star anise, cloves, lemongrass and cinnamon – might just be an exception. But until then, this stock for a simple tofu-vegetable soup will certainly do.

Ginger, scallions, cilantro stems and fermented black beans are all it takes. Just simmer for half an hour and let stand for another 30 minutes before straining and you’re all set. The soup itself can be made with just about anything you want. In addition to the tofu, I used some cabbage, scallions and rice noodles along with more fermented black beans and a bit of fish sauce, brown sugar, rice vinegar, ginger, garlic and sesame oil. A handful of cilantro at the end and you’re all set!

Most lentil salads I have had suffer from a certain dullness of flavor which even efforts to amp up the acid or simply bring on the bacon fail to adequately overcome. The culprit is the lentil, which for all its nutritional awesomeness will never have the mouthfeel or flavor of a righteously braised bit of pork belly. But since we are eating vegetarian superfoods, we cannot indulge in such an invidious comparison. What to do to add a bit of spark to these wee legumes?

First, for texture alone, use the French green lentils, which hold their shape and firmness. But the real trick is found in the Middle East, and more particularly Oman. Limu Omani are whole limes that are boiled in salty water and dried in the sun (no idea if that is how it is still done). You just poke a few holes in the tough skin and add the lime to the water that the lentils are simmered in. The dried lime adds a sour, citrusy flavor and a bit of funkiness that enlivens the lentils and elevates the salad out of the doldrums.

The first picture shows the dried lime with the French lentils. We had the salad with some roasted potatoes and a walnut-yogurt sauce that was like savory icing – there is nothing that it would not complement.

Rachael and I joke about Frugal February – abstaining from meat and alcohol – as “Lent for atheists,” but there may be more truth to that than we consciously realize. This year marks the third time we have gone on this dietary regimen – the first was Austerity August a few years back and since then we have chosen February as the month of self-abnegation. While happily for us it is the shortest month, the reason we have decided to stay with February is that it comes at the end of a long festive period stretching from Halloween through to Rachael’s birthday in mid-January. Given our customary celebratory gusto, cutting out meat and alcohol is a good way to dial things back and even begin to lose a little winter weight.

While there is no religious significance to our giving up meat and alcohol, our “doing without” parallels the superficial observance of Lent I recall from my childhood. The decision to forgo such gustatory pleasures, rather than simply making a January-type resolution to eat a more healthy diet and drink less, could be seen as some sort of penance for excess or even a mortification of the flesh. But you’d have to be an ex-Catholic to think in those terms!

Instead, besides the obvious health and economic benefits, the decision to take a month out of our ordinary routines gives us the opportunity to live and eat differently. It is a bit of a shock to the system, but it helps us to see what it is we take for granted. The no drinking is always a bit of a revelation because we usually drink everyday and have a drink just about anywhere we go. The end of that particular privation is always a cause for celebration. The not eating meat, however, begins to seem more and more like a choice we could make for more than one month out of the year.

Similar to a lot of people, especially those with the discretionary income to make it feasible, we have moved away from eating factory farmed “supermarket meat” and turned to buying locally raised meat from small-scale producers. The same set of reasons obtain as to why we do this – the meat tastes better, it’s probably healthier for us, it’s rewarding to develop a relationship with the “ranchers,” etc. – but there is an ethical dimension as well that only partially has to do with animal welfare.

I do not expect that I will ever become a vegetarian – because I don’t find it morally objectionable to kill and eat animals – but it is likely that I will eat less meat in the future. A good part of the reason why is a growing sense of ethical unease at being complicit with the prevailing system of raising and processing animals for human consumption. Where this unease (almost paradigmatically a first-world concern) comes from and what it might entail are topics that I want to continue to explore. But for now, it is enough that this ethical discomfort has led us to experiment more deliberately with not eating meat.

In previous iterations of our dietary mania, we didn’t eat in an unhealthy way, but the focus was simply on not eating meat. The idea for a superfoods diet grew out Lester Brown’s latest book, Full Planet, Empty Plates, where, in a few short chapters, he lays out an argument that the combined effects of population growth, increased meat consumption, changes in crop yields, increased water and soil depletion, continued reliance on corn for fuel and the effects of climate change on agriculture are propelling our species toward a scenario in which “Food is the new oil.”

His argument is provocative and compelling, and I will be considering its implications in greater depth in future posts. But if you grant his premises and conclusions, and you regard the amelioration of climate change as a collective responsibility we have to future generations, then decisions about what you eat acquire a moral valence similar to one’s energy conservation choices. In both cases, private actions are more a matter of conscience than causally effective responses to the situation in question. Whether that is what they remain – an affirmation of oneself as a responsible moral agent – depends upon the degree to which one becomes involved with these issues in a public way. Again, fodder for future posts.

The upshot of all this, for now, is that we have decided to eat this month as if we were transitioning to a low (or no) animal protein diet. I don’t think animal welfare concerns and global food scarcity considerations taken together mean one should become a vegetarian or a vegan. But I do think there is a good case to be made for relying on vegetable and dairy sources for the majority of one’s protein intake. Electing to follow a superfoods diet seems like a simple way to organize food choices to meet this goal.

So for the rest of this month, we will not be strict vegetarians – I have already made miso soup with bonito flakes and used fish sauce in certain dishes – but we will eat only plants, eggs and dairy to meet our protein needs. My hope is that we discover a richly varied diet that forever makes Frugal February a thing of the past!