Episode 347: White Bean Soup, Seitan, and Home Cooking Changes

In food news, should older people eat like millennials? According to AARP, yes but with reservations. 

  1. Avocado toast
  2. Cauliflower
  3. Kale
  4. Kombucha
  5. Matcha
  6. Oat milk
  7. Overnight oats
  8. Poke bowls
  9. Quinoa

In What’s for Dinner this week, It’s Greek White Bean Soup from Milk Street.

In our How’d You Make That segment, Joy’s talking seitan.

In the Wildcard segment, we discuss how the pandemic may have permanently changed our home cooking habits.

And in What We’re Loving, its Layla Bars.

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11 thoughts on “Episode 347: White Bean Soup, Seitan, and Home Cooking Changes”

  1. Millennial here! The only items from this list I consume regularly are kale, avocado toast, and quinoa. Avocado toast is definitely a millennial food after the 2018 internet conversation about millennials being unable to afford real estate due to their taste for it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/05/15/dont-mess-with-millennials-avocado-toast-the-internet-fires-back-at-a-millionaire/

    Joy, I remember on a recent episode, you asked Marisa about wild blueberries. I know you’ve said you don’t always get to Trader Joe’s, but wild blueberries are always there in the frozen fruit section.

  2. Joy – it’s so fun to played “Chopped!” We always shop for what looks good/what we feel like, and then every lunch/dinner is a creative outlet. We don’t waste food (which I believe is one of your reasons for meal planning); we create things with what will go bad fastest and toward the end of the week it’s just a little more of a challenge. But still fun. Love you ladies! Happy Inauguration!

    1. Thank you, Rachel! Sometimes it is fun to play chopped but other times it stresses me out. Avoiding food waste is a big priority here for sure.

  3. My brothers were born in 1978 and 1980; it seems the name most people have settled on for that micro-generation is “Xennial”, but I know others who call it the Oregon Trail Generation. Either way, rest assured that it is indeed a thing and there are lots of people who feel the way you do about not being GenX or Millennial. 🙂

    The house I grew up in California had four(!) avocado trees, so I relate to always having to figure out something to do with them. Unfortunately I didn’t have a taste for them back then so I was missing out on that bounty!

    My husband and I also do a weekly bean soup (fellow bean club member here with a stash to use up!), but we do it on Mondays (though, we often make the soup on Sunday so that it’s even better by the time we eat it on Monday, plus then we don’t have to do any cooking when we’re worn out from the first day back at the work grind). It’s such a comforting way to start the week. We’ve been doing this for over a year now, and I’d say my most versatile go-to soup recipe is the Tuscan bean soup from Salt Fat Acid Heat. She makes it easy to transform the base soup into a paste e fagioli or ribollita depending on what direction you want to take it. Another favorite is the bean, herb & noodle soup from The New Persian Kitchen.

    Something I think we’ll keep to: we’ve definitely gotten more into a regular meal plan during the pandemic, but I think what we’ve evolved it into is a really flexible but reliable template that reduces decision stress. Like, we know we will always do soup on Monday, pasta on Tuesday, fish on Wednesday, etc., though the specific recipes for each will vary each week, so there is still room to either pick out new recipes or fall back on old reliables depending on our energy level. We leave ourselves one night for takeout and one night for a recipe wild card (on Saturdays, when we have more time to do something elaborate if we feel like it, or not). One thing that we have been doing during the pandemic that unfortunately I don’t think we’ll be able to sustain once we need to go back to the office is having homemade lunches; much as it’s not good for us, we’ll probably go back to food trucks and fast casual places for lunch :(. I am genuinely curious if we will get back into our Saturday Rittenhouse Farmers Market routine; we’ve been doing Philly Food Works delivery this whole time. Maybe in the future it will evolve into a mix of both.

    1. I think you are on to something with a flexible planning strategy based on themed nights. I need to get into something like that myself, and I’m trying to with the idea of bean soup sunday! I will have to keep adding other days. I like “pizza and a movie” Saturday but this Saturday I’m making pasta!

  4. Another millennial here! I hate to admit that I love almost everything (7/9) on the AARP list. I live in California and have an avocado tree, so I somewhat smugly must proclaim that I made avocado toasts before it became a trend ;P

    1. I think that list has a lot of tasty stuff on it! You and Marisa are founding members of the avo toast club!

  5. Joy, I’m curious why you said you didn’t think seitan was part of a healthy vegan diet? It doesn’t strike me as unhealthy, but what am I missing?

    1. I think seitan can be part of a healthy vegan diet for sure! I just also see some vegans eating a lot of seitan, which can elbow out foods with more nutrients like vegetables, beans, tofu and tempeh. Seitan is packed with protein, but it’s also a super refined (read: processed) food that I wouldn’t want to be eating more often that say once a week. I also like to mix it in with other ingredients so I’m eating just a slab of wheat gluten! Does that make sense?

  6. I was born in 96 and I don’t feel like a Milennial or Gen Z either. That list of foods I wouldn’t categorize as Milennial but I do think influencers in the Milennial generation were responsible for making most of those items trendy or “insta worthy” in the 21st century. But I mean come on, we’ve been eating cauliflower, kale, avocados etc. since the beginning of agriculture!

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