Food Prep Day

I have ten minutes before I put the brown bread in the oven, so I might as well blog.

Today's been food preparation day here; I made scones from my mom's recipe (taken from the Quaker Oats cookbook) this morning (including my family's traditional chocolate chips), along with a bread from Bittman's magnum vegetarian opus that involved white flour, wheat flour, cornmeal, and molasses. It tastes great; so much so that it's already half gone. The Sherbs made our usual amped-up Fiber One muffins - we take Fiber One-branded "apple cinnamon" muffin mix, add apple bits and golden raisins, and enjoy it a lot more.

This evening's bread is a brown bread from Bittman; it smells good already, so I'm optimistic.

I'm also making a gigantic chickpea and mushroom soup from Lydia's Italy; the chickpeas still seem hard after an overnight soak and twenty minutes of boiling, but they're on boil for another two hours, so I will trust in Mme. Bastianich at current.

The soup itself is lunches and dinner later this week; dinner tonight is hot dogs. Hebrew National makes them low-fat.

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.

Chick-a-pea-pea-pea-pea...

Spring is slowly coming, and I recall my youth in Massachusetts, when the merry chickadee would make its appearance.

Also, because the Sherbs and I made a chickpea dish out of Vegetarian Times. It was a "chickpea and butternut squash stew," or more accurately, chickpeas in prefab butternut squash soup, over couscous. It wasn't quite as flavor-riffic as I was hoping, but it was tasty, which is more than could be said for the tahini soup fiasco of last week.

I'm having my tuna casserole from last Saturday for lunches this week; it's Campbell's recipe, but with Teet brand condensed soup, baby lima beans instead of peas, canned green and wax beans instead of pimientos (who eats those, anyway?), and extra mushrooms for greater shroominess (we do this with the slow cooker hot & sour soup, too - we add Teet brand canned straw mushrooms, my favorite mushroom of all time).

Finally, this is an accurate assessment of the Wii game Cooking Mama, which I found frustrating.