I’m staring down the barrel of Bon Appetit’s fifth annual Food Lovers Cleanse. I’m a little nervous about it, but then again, I’m always a little nervous about starting the cleanse. Am I really going to be able to get by on zero Christmas cookies for TWO weeks? (Good thing I polished off the last of ’em yesterday.)
The Food Lovers Cleanse is a two-week program in which participants drag themselves back into the kitchen after subsisting on champagne, gougeres, and the aforementioned Christmas cookies to turn wholesome whole grains, dark green leafy vegetables, and good-for-you lean proteins into delicious winter meals. It’s called the Food Lovers Cleanse for a reason: you cook hella good food. This is not one of those cleanses where you can only eat spicy lemonade, nor does it require you to shell out a year’s salary and your first born for bottles of cashew milk and cold kale water. You’re straight up cooking exciting and vibrant food. The team at Bon Appetit gives you a meal calendar, a sheaf of recipes, and a shopping list broken down by week and category, and then you’re off.
After the first year of participating in it, I changed the way I ate as a direct result of the Food Lovers Cleanse. I remember looking at one of the lunches early on and thinking, “This is just not enough food to get through the day.” Little did I know: anything is possible if you’re eating enough protein! This year, I’m hoping to push my tastebuds’ envelopes by:
- Giving kimchi a chance: I am very suspicious of kimchi. It smells gross! It looks gross! It probably tastes gross! I think I’ve eaten kimchi by accident on multiple occasions at Korean BBQ joints, but I’m looking forward to having a chance to face kimchi man to man. I’m eyeing this recipe for Kimchi Miso Dressing askance until I try it on Day 4.
- Determining whether I like mushrooms: I think I like them. At Rivoli, I had a small taste of the cream of the mushroom soup, and I walked away thinking it was delicious. But that could be due to the fact that I’m a big fan of cream. There are shittakes on Day 1 and oyster mushrooms on Day 6.
- Trying new kinds of fish: I’m skittish when it comes to fish. Very fishy-tasting fish does not seem appealing to me, but I’m willing to give it a try. My experience with Blue Apron has made fish seem less weird to me, and now I might even be curious about trying other kinds. Salmon has always been my fallback, but in the last couple of months, I’ve had the ono at Rivoli (very meaty and not fishy tasting) and the trout at The Growlers’ Arms (pink like salmon, but tastes nothing like it). I see that snapper’s for dinner on the first day, so I’ll have one more fish to add to my tiny list.
More: Learn about Blue Apron.
I’m beginning the Cleanse, as always, a day after it officially commences because I like seeing everyone’s comments about the recipes before I cook them myself so I can tweak them to suit my tastes. That, and Berkeley Bowl is closed on January 1 and 2. Ain’t nobody got time to finish that shopping list at Whole Foods.
Want to follow along? I'll make sporadic updates here, but I'll be adding beautiful pictures of the meals I'm cooking and eating over on the Projects section every day.