Recipes and diet, discussed

This looks and sounds nice to me:

It's a recipe from the Washington Post.  I don't subscribe to the much more famous recipe section of the New York Times, so it's WAPO for me.

The recipe is:  Orange-Sichuan Pepper Chicken.   I want to cook it because I don't think I have ever used Sichuan pepper in a recipe before, and I only learnt recently that the type of heat it brings is (apparently) distinctive.  (I also quite like savoury dishes that include fruit - a matter of some contention in my household, as half line up on the "meat and fruit don't really belong together" side.)

Which reminds me:  on Saturday I cooked lamb saag, successfully, following this recipe.  It called for three green chillis, and as they seemed hot to me, I de-seeded them with my hands.   (I know - most of the heat is supposed to be in the white fibres that the seeds are attached to.  I pulled them off with my hands too.)   The result was an interesting "chilli hand" effect that lasted for hours, and when I was having a shower it was particularly noticeable that the hot water made the affected hand parts tingle very strongly.   It wasn't exactly painful, just very noticeable and very long lasting.  I have never had the same sensation from other chillies, perhaps because I usually am only using small ones which affect the fingertips at most; and truth be told, I do find myself 95% of the time using dried chilli flakes when I want chilli heat in a recipe. 

I also watched a video recently that spent about 40 minutes explaining why vegan diets are not (long term) healthy, due to the great difficulty in getting all nutrients needed from a purely plant based diet.  It was citing a lot of studies, and cases of internet vegans who had to give up because of digestive and other issues they just couldn't solve on a vegan diet, and it all sounded very convincing.  But then I discovered that the guy's Youtube channel also contained Jordan Peterson content, in an unironic way.  This gives me a trust issue.

A second video I watched on another channel cited a lot of health benefits of plant diets, but it was obvious when watching it that the studies referred to "vegetarian/vegan diets", which is a bit of a cheat, given that (unfortunately, in my view) veganism has replaced vegetarianism as the "go to" alternative to the normal omnivore diet, and studies that lump both types of diet together are not going to reliably say much about veganism alone.    

Obviously, I am still eating a lot of meat, even though I am just curious enough about some vegan recipes to occasionally (very occasionally!) try them.   

But I still say, if ever I choose to give up meat for animal cruelty reasons, I would never worry about eating animals low on the intelligence/emotional capacity scale, such as most seafood, with the possible exception of octopus.  And I would also be hard pressed to ever give up dairy and eggs, even though both routinely mean the early killing of "unnecessary" offspring.  (That may soon change with eggs, though.)   

And if you are going to include eggs, dairy and seafood in your diet, but leave out all other meat, I presume that it's easy to get all nutrients from that diet.   But someone should do a Youtube confirming that.   The "Everything but Meat" diet, and its benefits.

Update:  made the chicken dish last night - it's good!   Just used jar crushed garlic - mincing 9 fresh ones is a bit of effort and I was in a hurry.   And yeah, Sichuan pepper does have a distinctive smell and flavour.