I'm back

I have abandoned this blog recently because I was pretty busy doing this:


But let me tell you what's been going on! We also bought a house....

...which has a beautiful kitchen...

...in which we've been cooking some delicious inventions to put in our awesome new Mr. Bento lunchboxes.

All it takes to make packing lunch fun is to have an exciting lunchbox.

I suppose it also helps to have exciting ingredients. This week I invented a very tasty thai-ish flavored chickpea salad. It had tomatoes, cilantro, green onions, young coconut (the soft kind), chickpeas, and a chili-garlic-lime-ginger dressing. I am really into bean salads because they're so satisfying, easy, and healthy for ladies who are going to big jiujitsu tournaments in a month like I am.

I've also got this dining room set, which used to be kind of grungy-looking white (it's ok to be grungy-looking if you were painted white several decades ago).

I'm going to lacquer it black, with cream and limey/grassy green accents, to go with our kitchen's black lacquer. I think it won't be too dark because the top of the table is glass, the seats of the chairs are upholstered, and the cabinet doors have panels where I can paint or stencil a cream & green image to lighten it up.

NOM

I invented a delicious meal-in-a-bowl yesterday. Just pile these things in this order:

cooked wild sticky rice (also called wild sweet rice, though it's not very sweet, or black glutinous rice, or other permutations)
cheese
arugula
a somewhat runny fried egg
sliced avocado
pico de gallo style salsa

The heat from the rice & egg should wilt the arugula and soften the cheese somewhat. With other salad-y greens I might not recommend the wilting, but arugula is as good wilted as it is cold and crunchy.

That's all there is to it!

fruit and vegetables failure

My office is having a "fruit and vegetables challenge" where you track how many servings of fruit and vegetables you eat and get points for them, and the points enter you in a drawing. I really love fruit and vegetables, so I thought about just tracking the ones I already eat, but then I looked at the prizes: a diet cookbook, a diet book, a book about controlling high blood pressure (mine is on the low side), a salad spinner & other kitchen knick-knacks (I've got 'em all), and an organic fruit basket. Hmm. 4 things I don't want, and one thing I already get once a week. Not worth the effort.

But I wonder how many people would actually want those things. If you don't like "health food", a diet cookbook is not going to help. A fruit basket is tasty but not really "grand prize" worthy. The stair-climbing challenge they did a few months ago had a big-screen TV as a prize. This one should offer a year's subscription to a farm share or something equally worthwhile.

Breakfast of Champions

I don't think I could make it to Sound Bites for brunch today if I didn't have a little bit to eat. So I'm snacking on sev mamra and pineapple juice (separately, not mixed). It's so spicy and energizing! I wish I could share this delicious breakfast with the world.

Note to self

I think this outfit is adorable and I would totally wear it (or something with a similar cute over-shirt and patch work) to the wedding garba of certain hypothetical in-laws. From Anshu's Designer Studio in Ahmedabad.

Shaak-umentary

Yesterday F. and I set out to document the process of making potato-cauliflower shaak so that we can send the recipe to the wedding catering folks. It turns out that we are not as certain about the method as we thought we were, and we learned some stuff about the recipe while we were making it.

Start with 4ish medium potatoes and a head of cauliflower. The sizes of vegetables can vary, but just try to have an equal volume of each.


It is a good idea to microwave, bake, pressure-cook, or boil the potatoes beforehand because then they don't have to be stir-fried as long. You want a pretty soft texture so they're easy to pick up. We didn't do it that way this time, just to see how long it would take to stir-fry them. Normally we pre-cook them though, and I think it works better that way. F's mom also pre-cooks the cauliflower, but I like the cauliflower less squishy than F. likes it.

Next, peel and cut up the potatoes into 1/2 inch to 3/4 inch cubes.


Cut the cauliflower into comparably-sized pieces.


Now for the cooking! Heat a few tablespoons of oil in a large frying pan, then add 1/2 tsp whole cumin seeds, 1/2 tsp whole mustard seeds, a few chopped fresh chilies, and about 3 big pinches of asafoetida (hing). I have never met anyone who knew what hing is called in English who did not also know what it was called in hindi or some other Indian language. It's like jaggery that way. Only Indian people know that it's called that in English, I think.


Fry those spices in the oil until they start to smell good. Then throw in the potatoes and cauliflower (if they're both pre-cooked -- if not, put the potatoes in a bit earlier than the cauliflower). If you didn't pre-cook your vegetables, you may find that periodically adding a splash of water helps them get soft. They need to be pretty soft so they're easy to pick up with bits of bread.

Stir-fry the vegetables in the oil for a little bit, then add 1/4 tsp turmeric and some ground chile powder (we used about 1/2 tsp, I think, but you may want more or less, as you like it). Different varieties of chiles have different flavors and different levels of spiciness, so be careful with that. Indian ground chiles are labeled "lal mirch" at the Indian grocery, and they are pretty hot but not very "warm" tasting. I think the closest American thing is ground cayenne pepper. Add some salt. There are a lot of vegetables in here, so I put in up to 1 tsp.

Finally, garnish it with some chopped cilantro. We forgot to take a picture at the end because we were too hungry. But this blogger added soy beans, too, which could be pretty tasty. Their final dish looked like this:

Simpleicious

Yesterday F. and I made a delicious pasta dish. The farm share has been giving us a lot of sweet potatoes, so we cut some up and roasted them, then served the chunks over pasta with wilted arugula (also from the farm share) and a sauce made from white wine, olive oil, brown sugar, salt, pepper, and tarragon. The sauce was intended as a salad dressing (does it count as "sauce" if you don't cook it?), but the ingredients of the salad were too sweet for such a sweet dressing and it actually went better with the pasta.

I imagine we could also serve those sweet potatoes with polenta, risotto, or just by themselves.

The earth is spherical, implying that it has no edge. Therefore I cannot possibly have fallen off it.

What's up is that F's computer broke, so we're "sharing" mine. Maybe after I buy him a new computer I will have time to put up photos from our awesome vacation.