preparation

I'm making this apple tart for the dinner party tonight, to have after the batata vadas and dosas and pressure-cooked rice. I just made the dough for the tart, and I am already excited about the eating we will be doing.

avgolemono

I made Greek-style egg lemon soup today. I used vegetable broth instead of chicken, of course, and I added some chopped green onions. I also had a higher egg-to-broth ratio than that recipe calls for, because I like it to be really thick. It was delicious! I think I would have liked it with more orzo, but I am the kind of person who likes it when lentil-barley soup turns into just lentil-barley after a day in the fridge because there is so much barley all the broth gets soaked up. I also had artichokes with lemon-butter-garlic sauce. It was a very lemony dinner.

I'd put up a picture, but my camera is broken. Looks like the camera I want is coming down in price, though, so maybe I will get it before I go to the Mundial. I'm pretty excited about that and I'd love to be able to take pictures.

kids

I'm reading The Namesake. The main character is born in the first chapter, and grows up throughout the book. I have just reached the point in the book where he finishes college, so all my reading today has been about his childhood. What struck me is that, for most of the part of childhood that they can think and remember about later, kids don't seem to really like their parents. In the book he doesn't seem to like his parents past kindergarten or so, and now that he's graduated from college he is only just warming up to them. It made me think of my own parents.

Most people I know have had times when they didn't get along with their parents. Some people had good reasons, but mostly it was because they were annoying and not cool, or because parents tell children what to do and what not to do, and young adults continue to hold it against them. I am kind of ashamed of having been, like all other children, pretty selfish when I was young. I probably could have been nicer.

soup season

I've been making a lot of soup recently. I made potato-leek soup at F's house last week because he had a cold (he ate it all immediately). Then today I made generally vegetabley soup. My camera is kind of borderline broken, but I worked at it and took a picture because the soup looked so colorful:



Also, on Wednesday I went to a middle eastern art demonstration night. They had Turkish music, snacks, painting, calligraphy, and some ladies doing mehendi. I had never had it before and the henna paste smelled really good, so I got them to do one of my hands:


It's been a couple of days now and I didn't leave it on long to begin with, so the stain is already fading a little. But I liked how the henna marks are almost exactly the same color as my pre-existing freckles. I thought it might look weird on me because I'm very pale, but I really like how this turned out and would definitely do it again.

salad update

1 head of cabbage, sliced into shreds
1 jicama, cut into matchsticks
2 carrots, shredded
juice of 2 lemons
1-2 T sesame oil
2-4 T olive oil
salt & pepper
----------------------------

1 delicious salad

that explains it

I can't believe I left the eggs out of the spicy fried rice! I have so many eggs, and I like them in fried rice . . . just wasn't paying attention, I guess.

I called my mom so she could talk me out of buying this coat, but we ended up deciding I should get it. I really just wanted a second opinion. An unbiased expert that could see through coat lust and tell me whether it was a good idea or not. It was a good idea! Yay! It's going to come in the mail in a couple of days.

Now I'm going to try to copy a citrus-sesame "cole slaw" that Strawberry Fields had once. It was delicious! They had the usual shredded cabbage and carrots, and I think there was some jicama in there. No mayonnaise, though; the dressing was lemon-sesame or something. We'll see how close I can get.

these days

There are some new things in my house, including this big brown couch. I'm not sure why the picture turned out the way it did, but I kind of like the uneven lighting. It makes the picture look old, like the couch.

I eat a lot of dumplings, and some people ask me what kind of dumplings they are or how I make them. Here you go - these are the dumplings (they're vegetarian):

I make them by adding about a half inch of water and a couple tablespoons of sesame oil to a frying pan. I put the lid on until they're hot through, then take the lid off and let them get brown and crispy once the water boils off. They stick to the pan until they're crispy, so I wait until they are ready and then I flip them to let them crispify on the other side. Then I eat them with Chinese black vinegar (镇江醋).

I also lost two buttons from my coat and only had one replacement button. So I got a bunch of new red flower-shaped ones. People have been asking me if I got a new coat. They look really pink in this picture, but they are actually maroon and match the coat's lining.
Here's a picture that shows the flower shape better.

I added some links. Some people (hi Mom) will probably really enjoy the cooking blogs that I have been digging recently. 101 Cookbooks and Mahanandi are both vegetarian, but don't let that stop you, omnivores. The recipes are delicious and often inspiring, and the photos are great.

i have a smart blog

What does this even mean? How does it check?

interesting ways to eat thanksgiving leftovers

Those roasted vegetables were really good with hot breads and sweet mangoes. It is ok if you don't get the breads joke. Also I've been eating a lot of pie for breakfast. Mmm, hot pie.

pumpkin story

My family visited my house for Thanksgiving dinner today. Yes, today is Friday. We always do that - it lets them use Thursday for driving. Works just fine. I made some great food: a pumpkin stuffed with roasted veggies, the wild rice stuffing that's become a family favorite, and a simple, delicious asparagus salad. It was complicated, interesting cooking, so I took a lot of pictures.

When my brother arrived at my house on Wednesday, we started preparations by making the vegetable broth that would go into the pumpkins' stew. This (which we later thickened slightly so it was more stew-like) was my favorite thing out of the whole meal. The roasted pumpkin was cool, presentation-wise, but this broth was just ridiculously good.

Thursday we put the stuffing together, and I don't have pictures of that. But there are a lot of pictures of the final stage of preparation from today. We hollowed out the pumpkins (which were actually just pumpkin-like squashes), first...
Then we roasted them empty for a little while - since they're the biggest thing they needed a head start.
They came out looking very pretty.

These vegetables were all roasted, too (on the outside of the pumpkins). I forgot to put the beans in, but I intended to include great northern beans as a substitute for the seitan the recipe called for. Then we put the vegetables and the sauce inside the partially-roasted pumpkins and roasted the whole thing a little longer.


The pumpkins came out beautiful and delicious. It was a little hard to access the deliciousness at first, though.


The last thing I made was this salad: roasted asparagus with lemon juice, blue cheese, and tomatoes. Everyone always likes it. I liked this wine, too - I am generally a fan of vinho verde.

look what I made

One of my favorite food blogs had a recipe for peppers like this a long time ago, except they had them in a sweet peanut-ful sauce. I didn't feel like going to all the trouble, so I'm just going to eat them with yogurt. I really love yogurt.

I decided to try making paneer. It's pretty easy. You boil & curdle the milk, then you strain it and squish it into a cheesy form.



And for lunch I had carrot-ginger-sweet potato soup, which was great.

cold day, spicy food

I have learned how to make some decent black beans to go with the quesadillas I eat all the time. The key seems to be cumin & onions.

special guest star

F. was visiting this weekend, and last night we didn't have much to do so we made a delicious dinner. I made sweet potatoes with creamy sauce, he made spicy fried rice with onions. Here's F's fried rice, mid-fry:


These are the sweet potatoes before I added the cream. I microwaved them first, so they didn't take much cooking in the pan, they just had to pick up the flavors.

Next, here are the sweet potatoes after I added some cream (actually, I put in milk, too) and peas. The spices in there are cumin, cinnamon, coriander, and cloves, so this smells pretty good.


We ate the rice with yogurt on top and had some wine. It was so delicious that I ate way more than I was actually hungry for. After that I wasn't good for much besides sitting on the couch for an hour or so.

perennial dinnertime favorites

An egg taco, fresh from the skillet. The avocado is a little less than pretty, but still delicious.

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.