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.

April Foods!

Man, I haven't posted in a while. I guess I've been too busy catching up on Kings, the biblically-themed monarchy drama that is, as my sister so often says, "awesome sauce." And not just because it stars Ian McShane, the voice of the killer leopard in Kung Fu Panda.

Anyway, the Sherbs and I have been making plenty of tasty food. This Saturday we went back to the Book of a Million Zillion Curries (comic book reference explained here) for dinner, and made both the tasty tea and chickpea curry and a curry of French green lentils and too much spinach. Turns out the recipe makes something like eight cups of food, so I'm glad we broke out the big pot; it's not easy to wilt two pounds of spinach in boiling water already full of lentils. Also: it made the water turn really green.

What was kind of interesting about the spinach/lentil curry is that it basically was boiled spinach and lentils with what I'd call a "sauteed pico de gallo" tossed in during the last fifteen minutes. If tomatoes were in season, there would probably be a bit more flavor (also, we ran short of cumin - who keeps track of how much cumin they have?), but the spinach was otherwise tasty and a good counterpoint to the chickpeas, which were spicy.

The chickpea spiciness could be in part due to the serious chopping of the serrano chiles in that recipe; we have an off-brand Slap Chop® (for immature but hilarious parody, click here; for incident involving the Slap Chop® pitchman and a prostitute, click here) that does in fact make short work of garlic, ginger, and serrano peppers, rendering them into tiny bits in a matter of moments. With more pepper surface area exposed to the oil in the pan, we got more spiciness.

Tomorrow's dinner will involve another salad from the Benedictine monks. This one will require me to make carrot matchsticks tonight. Wish me luck; I can never get them small enough.

Pumpkin Failures

Last night the Sherbs and I were at Aroma in Shirlington again, sort of with regards to my birthday (my parents were there and gifted us with a cordless variable-speed drill). I strongly recommend the crispy okra and the malai kofta for vegetarians, and the vindaloo is amazing for the non-vegetarians.

In food failure news, blog The Bacon Show provides a recipe claiming to be "silverbeet with bacon, pumpkin, and feta." You will have to convince me that bacon, pumpkin, and feta are complementary flavors. Bacon/feta sounds like failure. Pumpkin/feta sounds like failure. Just serve beet salad with feta as one dish, and then have a separate bacon/pumpkin dish like bacon pumpkin pie or a bacon-riffic pumpkin soup.

Holy Cows!

It is known that I like Indian food. So this Saturday instead of drinking beer and eating bland Irish food, I had an Indian food extravaganza!

The night started with a loooong line to see a fantastic movie based on a fantastic book. It was very good, and although my supervisor at work didn't love it, I enjoyed it thoroughly. So good! In preparation for the night, C-Berts , Her Wife and I decided that we'd want to enjoy a feast of Indian food post a movie about Indian cultural identity. Boy, were we right. There was a part during the movie where they were frying samosas and my mouth watered. So C-Berts recommended a tasty spot, and we dined on delicious food. We did have samosas and other goodies. I ate roasted eggplant with onions and peas and it was quite tasty. Mmm....

I don't know why I adore Indian food food as the "ethnic" food of choice. (Granted, we ate Italian as well, until of course the Atkins fad hit my dad.) But I think because I am a so much. I grew up (like so many Jews) eating Chinesevegetarian I enjoy Indian food so much now--so many options! Not just a "pasta and cream sauce [probably made from chicken stock] and a few frozen veggies" but REAL OPTIONS. Hooray! And it's spicy. Mmmmm...

And now for something completely different...

A few months ago I bought white corduroy pants. I am not trendy, don't purport to be trendy, or care about trends even remotely. However, they were on super sale and fit well, so I bought them. I'm wearing said pants, and now feel like a sailor.

Feelin' Hot Hot Hot

On Friday night, I was at The Pedant's ancestral home for dinner. (Well, I was there all weekend.) His mother made a spicy Chinese-themed ritual dinner, with hot and sour soup, ma-po tofu, beef and broccoli (fake beef for me!), etc., wit the requisite ritual foods as well. During the course of the meal, the members of the dinner party got to talking about spicy foods. Fast forward to last night, while "stranded" (over-dramatization) in a train station in The Headquarters of the Arsenal of Democracy, I enjoyed a fast-food dinner of Indian food. It was good and spicy, just the way I like it. Which got me thinking again about the value of spicy food.

Now, I LOVE spicy food. Mexican, Guatemalan, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, etc. (I can't say I love Cajun or Creole spicy foods since I tend to not like okra and I don't eat seafood and haven't eaten much of it.) At the ritual dinner on Friday, we had talked about spicy food being acculturated--kids egging each other on "ooo...I bet you can't eat [food x] with this much hot sauce...," or how in warmer climates people tend to have spicier cuisine because it helps them sweat (which cools them down). Spicy food also helps with digestion. And just plain tastes good.

Now, I come from a very good pale people (Eastern Europe ain't so warm!) and although my cultural food is relatively bland (salt and pepper kuggel anyone?) or sweet (mmm...rugulach and babka...); it may be very tasty (and salty!) but not spicy.

I attribute my love for spicy to my parents who LOVE spicy food too. In fact, I didn't always love stuff so hot; as a kid my mother had to buy me mild salsa for taco night. Now, I buy medium salsa (over hot) mostly because I like a lot of it, and hot will become overwhelming. And I am not a hot sauce lover. My uncle from Guatemala and his children (who are half-Latin American, half-Shtetl) and my aunt (full shtetl, but married to a Guatemalan and actually looks Guatemalan) LOVE hot sauce and try lots of them, from the moderately mild to the OHMYGODMYMOUTHISBURNING hot. I like when food is spicy, but still has a taste.

Many of my friends, however, don't like spicy foods. The Pedant and I have found a restaurant tray, I ate it all that we both enjoy that has very good and very spicy Indian food. I went there with my friends for my birthday last spring and when they brought out the medium-spicy appetizerloveingly, while they all ordered more mango lassies to cool their burning mouths. Wimps.

So although my pale, pale people don't generally eat spicy foods, I do. And love it. Mmm...