Indian Feast!

For dinner last night, The Pedant and I decided to make some Indian food complete with leftovers for lunches. It's been a while since we've cooked from the best curry book ever, so we decided to rectify the situation. We made a potato with spinach curry and an eggplant-chili stir fry curry. The potato curry was fantastic - it had new potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, garlic and dried chilies and turned out really well. It was spicy, but not overwhelming and flavor full. The eggplant was spectacular. We stir fried french-fry style slices in a VERY spicy mixture with chilies, lime juice, lime zest, salt, garlic and cilantro, added tomatoes and then let get very tender. It was immensely flavorful. I even needed some Greek yogurt (which I found a GIANT tub for cheaps at Costco! SCORE!!! Especially with a $3 pineapple. May not be super organic/local, but very tasty! I figure rejoining a CSA will balance that out, right??) and the wild rice blend we made to make it edible. But it was super good.

For lunch, we met some friends at the Lost Dog Cafe. We all has some really great sandwiches. I got the veggie, which had guacamole (although not enough to satisfy this avocado lover), zucchini and broccoli on a pita with provolone cheese melted on top. TP got some really tasty fries which I had. It was a great lunch. Plus, the restaurant does great things for dogs! Hooray!

Tonight is a vegetarian pot-au-feu from the slow cooker. I will also make a Bittman Wheat Berry salad for some lunches. We had very good wheat berry salad at TP's parents' Friday night and we have some leftovers of it, but both of us really enjoy wheat berries. They have plenty of healthy benefits and make a great addition to salads.

Don't that beet all?

The Sherbs has pretty much covered all of our meal at Founding Farmers, save two things:

1) My salad, which had pretty much everything in it. Mixed greens, slivered almonds, tomatoes, grapes, olives, cheese, and a champagne vinaigrette. Really delicious.

2) My closing cocktail, which was a Hemingway-inspired mix of champagne and absinthe. It was green and thujone-tastic. Seriously, though, it was cool, crisp, and would make a great apertif at parties, although, given its combination of anise flavors and tartness, less is probably more.

Last night we had a salad from one of my new favorite cookbooks, Twelve Months of Monastery Salads Where You Can Totally Halve the Amount of Oil in the Dressing. One of the more attractive Benedictine salad recipes was a "Dutch egg salad," which we had to try.

The salad involves beets, endive, cheese, shallots, and hard-boiled eggs in a dijon/yogurt dressing. Other than painting half the kitchen pink while chopping and boiling the beets, the food prep was uneventful. The end result: tasty, save for one too-sharp shallot. A keeper of a salad.

Coconut Milk Night!

For dinner last night there was a theme - coconut milk. The Pedant saw that at the Teet last week there was a sale on mangoes. Now, I love mangoes. And, while doing a project started over the week off I had of organizing recipes we've amassed over the year (VT, internet sites) in a binder, I printed out a Mark Bittman recipe for Savory Mango Soup (Mangoes, milk, coconut milk, yogurt, ancho chili powder for big, bold flavor). An excellent way to utilize the sale. Plus, a few months ago we made a tofu asparagus stir fry (that uses, you guessed it, coconut milk!) from a weight watchers cook book so we decided to work off of a theme.

The mango soup was good - not perfect, but we used fat free milk and yogurt which made it a bit less creamy. I think it will be even better when mangoes are actually in season. The tofu was good and we made it very spicy. TP suggested adding curry next time to kick it up.

On a different note, I made myself a snack for work yesterday - Greek Yogurt, honey and almonds. It was delish. Not uncommon at all, but really tasty. This will be made again, never fear!

Un-Recommendation

Do not buy Dannon's "Frusion" line of yogurt drinks. Let me enumerate the reasons:

1) They aren't particularly tasty. They aren't as good as the smoothies I make with real fruit and Splenda.

2) They aren't particularly healthy. Check out their nutritional information. Two grams saturated fat, most of the carbs are sugars, and they couldn't even bother to throw in 300% of your day's supply of Vitamin C (also, no selenium. WTF? If you're going to put it on the label, have some in the beverage). Why Dannon couldn't put in more vitamins or fiber is beyond me.

3) They're not very big. Maybe some anorexic woman will be filled by the 7-10 oz. bottles Dannon packs Frusion in, but it's not that filling for me, and I assume, what with the protein and the fat, it's supposed to be a meal replacement.

Eating, Drinking, and Merriment

The Sherbs has already mostly dealt with Sette Bello; my only contribution is to add my meal there, which was a seafood medley on squid ink pasta (pretty good, although basically just stuff in a garlic-butter sauce; not exceptional) and the veal with saffron risotto entree (veal: slightly dry. Risotto: good).

At least as tasty was the pasta dish the Sherbs cooked up last night, which was spinach and garlic on whole wheat rigatoni, topped with parmesan and chopped walnuts. Really tasty.

We also made sangria yesterday to get rid of the half-bottles of cranberry wine and cheap red wine we had lying around (especially since they had a sale on fruit wines at the Teet, and we stocked up). The fruit part was contributed by a frozen fruit medley we were initially going to use in smoothies, but then we used the yogurt for something else...I can't remember what.

Tonight I am going to try to rock the wok with a paella. Wish me luck!

Land of the Wine Beverages!

So the Sherbs and I bit off more than we could chew with a Mark Bittman recipe involving roasted vegetables and yogurt - possibly because A) our broiler sucks and B) we don't have a broiler-safe casserole dish even if it didn't.

Also: it takes freaking forever to char tomatoes. Should I just put them over an open flame or what?

To counterbalance our not-quite success with the roasted eggplant, peppers, and yogurt, we made sangria - and stumbled upon a not too bad recipe. I don't think we'd use Weinstock kosher red wine again (it is so tannic), but a mix of red wine and cranberry wine, with chunks of granny smith apples, was tart and refreshing and did not taste as if we were trying to make Bartles & Jaymes (speaking of which - now that we have Mike's Hard Lemonade and such, does anyone drink Bartles & Jaymes anymore?).

We had a goodly amount of the sangria watching the Joan Collins film Land of the Pharoahs, which is sort of a telling of how the Pyramid of Giza was built, if you can allow for glaring failures in plausibility such as Joan Collins playing a deceptive and murderous Cypriot. There are some supporting characters who are interesting, but they take up only about a half hour of the hundred-minute plot, about as much time is taken for long pans across Egypt watching extras pretend to haul or build things.

Successful Meals and OK Yogurt

I love both the piña colada and coconut cream flavors of the Teet's store brand of light yogurt, but the banana cream flavor is just not as good. A ranking of the current Teet yogurt flavors, from best to "meh," I've tasted would be:

1. Coconut Cream
2. Piña Colada
3. Vanilla
4. Key Lime
5. Peach
6. Strawberry Cheesecake
7. Banana Cream

Anyway, the jicama salad and the other things we prepared for the dinner party last Friday (a mushroom risotto which was all the Sherbs' doing and she carried off masterfully, and stuffed zucchini) all were quite tasty. We had a lot of leftover jicama salad, so I cooked it into fritattas the next day, with mixed results. The Sherbs was a fan; I, not so much - cooking jicama seems to cook out the sweetness, leaving it a little too much like eating warm radish.

Be my Netflix buddy!

I'm trying to get everyone I know with Netflix to become my Netflix buddy, in part so I can engage in a voyeuristic look at other people's media consumption, and also to see if there are any movies on my queue that I should skip.

Speaking of which, I saw the first three episodes of All Creatures Great and Small with the Sherbs last night thanks to Netflix. It was adorable and we will watch more of it, but I won't give you the heartfelt review here. Instead, I will satirically summarize it as follows:

The Fifth Doctor infiltrates a rural veterinary clinic as a drunken layabout in order to keep in check the mercy-killing impulses of recent veterinary-school grad James "The Angel of Death" Herriot, a man who finds fatal ailments requiring euthanasia in every third animal he treats. Meanwhile a blond version of John Steed from The Avengers pretends to be a veterinarian but in fact treats as few animals as he possibly can.

In other news, my new favorite flavor of Harris Teeter brand light yogurt is Piña Colada. The Sherbs and I have been visiting "the Teet" regularly as there's one that keeps giving us $5 coupons, plus their fat-free, low-sugar yogurt was 33¢ with my "frequent Teeters" card (not in fact what it's called). The yogurt has little bits of coconut and pineapple in it, which make the aspartame in the mix a lot less cloying.

Things that should be mixed, and things that should not.

Some people, desperate for something sweet despite the calorie-counting that they are doing, will make a "float" out of Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper and frozen yogurt. I am not sure that this works as well as root beer and ice cream; I suspect that the chemical differences of the two frozen confections would affect their relative bouyancies and speeds of dissolving, not to mention how the synthetic nature of Dr. Pepper with three extra adjectives might interact with any other synthetic food (in my hope to become the next Stephen Colbert, I'm going to encourage all you "Mixed Drinks" readers to go change the Wikipedia entry for Dr. Pepper so that it says that Diet Dr. Pepper and non-fat American cheese make a powerful plastic explosive).

Speaking of mixing things with yogurt, on Saturday night the Sherbs and I went to a Greek kebab restaurant which had a fabulous dip for the toasted bread and pita chips. According to what I remember from the waiter, the dip was:

• yogurt
• garlic
• crushed red pepper
• maybe lemon juice

It was super-tasty, anyway. When I have more time I'll look it up on the internet.

Another Breakfast Concept

Today's breakfast: sliced strawberries, fat-free Greek yogurt, and honey. I was looking for a light meal.

Strongly recommend.