Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

and also because dairy was making me sick. I had a sore throat all the time when I was consuming milk and cheese and other dairy products. I was practically living on the stuff.

I wasn’t able to remain entirely vegan, though. In 2001 I started eating salmon once in a while. I do the cooking in the house, and one day when I was making a piece of salmon for Rachelle, I realized it looked really good to me. I was craving it in a deep, deep way. I thought, “Okay, I’ll try it. Maybe I’ll get sick. It’s been nine years since I’ve had any fish. How has my digestive tract adapted to a totally vegan diet?” I didn’t get sick at all, and I felt very good. So I guess I can blame my lapse from veganism on Rachelle.

At this point I’m 80 to 90 percent vegan, and once in a while I have a piece of salmon. Go figure. But I feel good.

Home Cooking—or Not

I used to cook all the time, but between my Begley’s Best business, our TV show, and my acting career, things have been kind of busy and I rarely find the time. Consequently, we’re eating out quite a bit.

It’s easier for a vegan to find restaurants to eat in now than it was years ago. A restaurant called the Vegan Plate recently opened near me and it’s so good I could eat there twice a day and be happy.

But I do have breakfast and lunch at home. A really quick lunch would be some vegetarian sushi; Whole Foods makes a wonderful avocado roll and a vegetable roll. Occasionally I get Amy’s frozen enchilada plates. They’re very, very good and they’re quick, so if you’re in a rush, you can cook and go.

But there’s a tendency—and I’ll be honest with you, I’m disappointed to see it in myself all too often—to rush our meals. In response to this unfortunate (and unhealthy) trend, a movement that started in Italy and spread throughout Europe has reached the States. The Slow Food Movement is meant to provide an alternative to our fast-food culture, and it encourages folks to savor their food, to enjoy the process of preparing food, and to take their time with their meals. I think that’s a laudable goal that we should all pursue. We can all slow down and not be quite so busy.

When it comes to dinner, we don’t always eat out. I may not cook, but we often buy healthful prepared stuff and serve it at home. (Of course we recycle all the packaging.) But when I get the chance, I still do like to get in the kitchen and cook—even if my “kitchen” is sometimes my own backyard.

Solar Cooking: The Backyard Without a Barbecue

People would probably be surprised to hear that I don’t have a barbecue grill. A barbecue burns charcoal and releases nasty emissions into the atmosphere. Instead, I have a solar oven.

We certainly have heard the bad side of the greenhouse effect, where we might be heating up the planet at a rate that is inconsistent with a long life-span. The very good side to it, for us, is without the greenhouse effect, we’d be very cold. We would perish because we wouldn’t have that warmth that is provided by that greenhouse effect. And a solar oven makes use of the greenhouse effect in the best possible way.

I’ve been using a wonderful solar oven for years. It’s essentially an insulated box with a pane of glass to retain the heat, sealed very nicely. It also has reflectors—from the north, south, east, and west—placed at a 45-degree angle to focus that light into the box even better. That makes it a hot, hot box. I built a rolling stand so I can move the oven around throughout the day to capture the maximum sun, and I even bought a second solar oven so now I can cook more things at the same time.

If you stop and think about it, you need a temperature of only 212 degrees Fahrenheit to boil water, to make soup, to make rice, to make beans. That temperature is easily achievable and sustainable for long periods in a solar oven.

I have found, however, that there are some things I cannot do in my solar ovens. I can’t sauté, and I can’t really bake well because for baking, you need 400-plus degrees. On a really good day, I get 375 degrees in my solar oven, but when I put in a cold mass of flour, water, or whatever to bake, that temperature plummets down to 200 degrees for a time before it eventually comes back up. That results in some pretty leaden baked goods.

But the things a solar oven does do, it does exceptionally well. I find it also keeps foods moister—and it holds in the flavor—far better than a gas or electric oven.

         That solar oven used to be the bane of my existence. I’d come out into the backyard and it was in one position, then I’d come back out and—boom—walk straight into the solar oven. It turns out Ed was always moving it strategically around the backyard so it would be in a position to get the most sun.

For years I considered that solar oven a real eyesore. They say beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, and obviously Ed will always find it beautiful. I would never call it beautiful; functional, I suppose, but unattractive (although if you stand by it, with all those reflectors, you can get a nice tan).

And it does work. In the morning he’ll put some water in it with some potatoes and vegetables, and by the afternoon, it’s soup or stew. He makes all sorts of dishes with it. I think he likes the novelty of it.

I especially like the fact that it’s essentially free food. He mostly uses stuff we’ve grown on-site, and we’re using the free power from the sun to