I forgot to mention

I have a dog now. She loves to chew stuff up.

lucky me

My iPod is covered by the warranty even though the reason for the crack in the screen is a little iffy: my dog chewed it up. They didn't seem to care, though, and the replacement will arrive tomorrow. Hooray for Apple.

Why not? Certainly you wil get.

I'd had these ancho chiles sitting around in my fridge, waiting for me to get around to stuffing them. But I kept thinking it'd take a long time, so I never actually did it. Turns out it's easy! I fried some rice with onions, cumin seeds, and canned crushed tomatoes, and then put that in the peppers with some cheese and baked them (450 degrees, 15ish minutes). They could have been roasted beforehand - I think that would have made the peppers softer & milder - but they were delicious just the way they were.



Next time I won't take the seeds out of the peppers with my bare hands, though. I often have a lot of little cuts on my fingers, and it really burned for a while. The skin is only just starting to feel normal again.

cleaning out the fridge

A while ago, Meijer had salad greens on sale, buy one box get one free. So I had a whole lot of arugula. But I never got around to eating it, and it was wilting in my fridge, until I did this with it:

Arugula is a little bitter, so I added some sugar, and it's a delicious late lunch (with plenty of leftovers, of course).

minty milk

I bought some fresh mint the other day to cook with some fennel and onions I was making. But what do you do with the extra mint? That's always my problem with fresh herbs - unless I'm making a lot, I can never use it up before it gets dried out. This time, though, I have a delicious solution to the extra mint problem.

First, I shred up 6ish mint leaves and put them in a short glass with a teaspoon or two of sugar.

Then I put in a tablespoon or so of milk and muddle them around as if I'm making a mojito.

Then I fill it up the rest of the way with milk. It's very refreshing, and it reminds me of some "fresh mint" gelato the co-op sells. But it doesn't cost $5 for a pint, even if I use Oberweis milk.

beverages

I have a stuffy ear (I didn't know ears could do that), so I've been drinking a lot of Mom Tea.

meals: greatest hits

These are some of the food pictures I emailed to my envious friends before I thought to put them up here (most recent first).

I made this cake for my family when I visited them over Labor Day weekend:
For a week or so, I was making avocado and roasted pepper spring rolls for lunch:

You can't see much of the food, but for this birthday party I made veggie subs, vegan chocolate mousse, chocolate cake, and margarita chiffon cake.

I ate this mango, too.

This was my entry for Iron Chef Urbana. Nobody really dug my "rustic home cooking" theme, so I lost to the fancy seafood dishes. But actually the twice-baked sweet potato with grapefruit on top was really good. Next time I might make it with some kind of grapefruit glaze, so it's easier to eat.


I ate this for breakfast a couple of times:

dinner

I've been taking pictures of my meals and sending them to people. They are invariably envious of whatever I'm eating. So I thought I'd start blogging about food instead of sending email - that way the envy could be less exclusive.
Today I made a version of this zucchini kurma, from one of my new favorite food websites. I used patty pan squash, though, because it's always been my favorite and I brought some back with me from Michigan.

I chopped all the vegetables...


Then I had to fry some onions and spices...


Here it is bubbling away with all the vegetables added...


I finally ate it with rice and some leftover potatoes. Don't you wish you were also eating my favorite squash?