How to Eat Well During Tech Week

I am just now commencing on every theatre person's favourite activity: Double-Duty.
I'm ASM on a show that runs until November 8th, and tomorrow (Oct 28) I start rehearsals for my next show. That's two whole weeks of double duty. Luckily, both my SMs are great, and we've worked out a schedule where no one gets shorted, and I even get half an hour for dinner! Even luckier, the theatres are across the street from each other.

Now, I know this isn't tech week, but it's as busy as (or busier!) than tech week, and I want to eat well. The secret, my friends is: PLANNING.

I started preparation for the next two weeks WEEKS ago. I don't want to be running to Starbucks or A&W for dinner every night, nor do I want to buy 14 Lean Cuisine meals and eat those for two weeks straight (well 3 weeks, because the day my show closes is the day the other one starts tech. I love my life), I want good, home-cooked food.

We made a big batch of chili, and froze most of it. Same goes for a stew we made in the slow cooker. Slow cookers are our friends in this business. It's great if you know you'll get home for dinner, just turn it on the morning and have tasty food at dinner. Or, take the extra 20 minutes when you get home at night to throw something together, turn it on, go to bed, and wake up to a week's worth of dinners all cooked.

Something else I enjoy is having the fridge full of good things for sandwiches. Last week, I carmelized a couple onions, marinated and cooked some portobello mushrooms, and made sure to have lots of salad greens in the fridge. Then I had all the ingredients for tasty, healthy sammiches right in my fridge. No more jam sammich just because I can't think of what else to put on the bread.

Speaking of bread, last week I also made bread, from my favourite bread book, The Tassajara Bread Book. It made 4 loaves, 3 of which went directly into the freezer. Keeping the loaves company are two batches of muffins, one sweet and one savory.

There's a company potluck on Sunday (and I still haven't shared the recipes from the last one! shame!) so I'm making my cookies today. They'll get their own post, because they are the best cookies in the world. I'm serious.


So, to summarize:

1. Plan ahead.
   
2. Make big batches of food when you've got the time.
3. The freezer is your friend.
4. So is your slow cooker.
5. Stock the fridge with healthy stuff. If it is there, you'll eat it.
6. Make your own sweets. We all need them (I could live on them!), but it's better when you control what goes in to them.
   

It bugs me so much when I see people stressing out during tech, and complaining about being sick and 'why am I sick now?!' when all I want to do is go up to them and say: 'maybe it's because you've been living on FRIES for a week?' Fruits and vegetables and balanced meals help you not get sick, and keep you more alert and on the ball. I'm a big believer in the fact that eating good homemade things keeps your body happy. Radical, I know.

Recipe: Pumpkin Cheesecakes

You American readers are lucky in that we Canadians have our Thanksgiving a month earlier, thus you get test-driven recipes just in time for you to plan your Thanksgiving spread.

This year, I got pumpkin cheesecake on the brain back in September. One member of the family being diabetic, and on a low-fat diet as well, gave me the perfect excuse to try Fat Free Vegan's Double-Layer Pumpkin Cheesecake recipe. While I am a meat-eater, I love vegan and vegetarian recipes. I really feel like I'm doing something good for my body when I eat them (especially as I seem to be developing some sort of dairy allergy/intolerance).

vegan to the left of me, dairy to the right, stuck in the middle with food

I'm not posting the actual recipes in this post, but you will get the results of the taste-test. After hearing me blather about the tofu-based cheesecake in the grocery store, the boyfriend did suggest I make two cheesecakes, and that one include actual cream cheese. The other recipe I used was from The Joy of Baking (minus the sour cream topping).

Now, our Thanksgiving dinner was on Sunday night. I worked right up until I hopped in the car to go to dinner, and my last day off was the Monday, so these cheesecakes were prepared in steps, in the dark, cold evenings after work. I made the crusts on Friday night, and baked the cakes on Saturday night, so they'd only sit in the fridge for a day.

Saturday night, after coming home from work and eating dinner, I got started. I decided to start with the dairy-containing one first. That all went very well. By the time it was in the oven, it was 9pm or so at night (I do most of my baking late at night). Then I lined everything up to start the vegan cheesecake. I was very excited to find out what Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese tasted like, so I opened that first. What I found was green, and fuzzy.

the rum is called for in the recipe, and I didn't even drink any when I found the green fuzz

By 9pm, my local market was of course closed. I swore. I pulled out the Wii and played a round or two of Mario Kart. While driving recklessly off cliffs, I was doing theoretical math in my head.

"If I work at 11am tomorrow, and the store opens at 10am, but my boyfriend doesn't work until 12pm... is that enough time to buy stuff, make cheesecake and bake it? If so, will it have enough hours in the fridge before dinner..."

The answer to those questions was a resounding YES. Just. The boyfriend had to take it out of the oven and into the fridge so he wouldn't be late, but we did it.

And the results (when asked 'Which do you prefer?' poll of 8 guests):
Vegan Cheesecake: 8
Dairy Cheesecake: 1

the leftovers

Everyone agreed that the vegan was tastier! Even AFTER we told them it had tofu in it! I voted for each, because no pumpkin cheesecake can be bad in my mind. I do think the dairy version could've done with 10 more minutes in the oven, so that may have evened out the scores, as the main selling point for the vegan one was texture.

I've been eating both in the week since (I LOVE leftover desserts) and still like both. The tang the lemon juice gives to the vegan one gives a great refreshing kick.

double-layered vegan tastiness

Recipe: Jewish Apple Cake

In a strange confluence of events, I made Jewish Apple Cake (recipe from Smitten Kitchen) to bring to rehearsal (on German Unification Day, October 3) for a show about Nazis, concentration camps, and Jews.

It's a very powerful show, about the son of a war criminal who finds out what his father actually did during WW II when he was 17. He just thought they were living in Paraguay for fun and sun. It's a tough show to handle for 8 hours a day, so we do a lot of 5 hour days, and crack a lot of jokes. And eat a lot of cake. There's only 3 actors, but this cake was gone by the end of lunch. All in all about 6 people tucked into it in total, and all pronounced it GREAT.

It was super-moist, and sticky, and apple-y, and all in all a great treat for while you're sitting around doing table work.

I managed to use up yet more of those teeny apples. I cut up about 35 of them for this cake. I only really needed to quarter them to get bite-sized pieces.

When I had put the layers together, I was worried there wasn't enough batter, but it came through and rose to make one of my favourite cakes in a while.

Here's a sneak peak pic of how I cook:

Why bother printing when you have a laptop? I've even got a keyboard cover, so I can scroll with sticky fingers using the up and down arrows.