Recent Food Developments

We'll get to the eel in green sauce in Belgium in a later post, despite it having been two months ago.

First, Cafe Green in Northwest DC is much tastier than a vegan restaurant with a large number of raw food dishes has any right to be.  Their not-quite-bibimbap was pretty tasty, even if not served in a superheated iron bowl.  And the Sherbs loved their raw food assortment. 

For dessert, the cake we got tasted like good pareve cake (better than meh), but the raw cashew "milk" shake I had was pretty fabulous.

Next, the Teet now carries individually packaged servings of freeze-dried fruits.  As they say on Twitter, #winning.  

Finally, I tried to use an online "healthy recipe" guide which advertised that it could give me a healthy meal just by inputting three items currently in my fridge.  I tried that, and these were the failures:

• soy chorizo + endive + mayonnaise
• cheese singles + tuna salad + tomato (despite this being a pretty regular weekend lunch standby; fat free cheese singles on Starkist's "tuna salad in a bag" is more than tolerable on toast).
• ketchup + onion + beans (okay, no baked beans recipes?)
• dehydrated onion + brie + vegetable broth (and I didn't even try to confuse it with the fact that I was using Ile de France's "mini brie" - which, for the record, is superior to Trader Joe's Mini Brie Bites; there's something off about the way the Trader Joe's ones taste)
• mustard + orange + beans

Okay, I do have some esoteric food in my house, but if I was down to just a couple things, I couldn't trust this recipe finder to help me with my "brown rice + whole wheat pastry flour + apple/grape juice mix."  Or my "Fiber One muffin mix + San Marzano crushed tomatoes + anchovies" (two of which, however, will make a perfectly fine pasta sauce - just remember that there's no "apples and cinnamon" buccatini).

Risotto Stories

Last night I broke the faucet. Again.

Or, more accurately, the faucet broke while I was handling it, trying to clean butternut squash risotto out of our large pan. It then sprayed me in the chest with hot water, and when I moved out of the way, shot a jet straight out of the kitchen that left a big puddle in front of the entryway.

The risotto was worth it, though. I would say that it came from the Washington Post's most recent Food section, but I doubled the recipe as there's two of us in the house, except not really, as there was only one shallot at the Teet, I have no idea whether the two butternut squash from the CSA were bigger or smaller than required, and I had just slightly more Wolfgang Puck organic vegetable broth (yes, as my brother says in his Dadaist way, I get the Nazi discount at Spago) and arborio rice than would strictly double the recipe, but I added it anyway. Also a bunch of Smart Balance 50/50 butter blend which may not have been exactly doubled. Or the fact that I couldn't get unsalted shelled pistachios at the Pentagon Row Teet.

But thanks to patience and the indestructable tastiness of butternut squash and toasted coconut, I came away with a tasty risotto, which is now in the fridge waiting for future risotto meals.

The only thing I would absolutely change in the future is to mash up the butternut squash instead of merely scooping it out and throwing it in; it was a little clumpy. Still tasty, though.

Lunch Lessons Learned Today

As I'm home and searching for jobs, I am now making lunch out of what we have in the pantry at the moment, and trying not to subsist entirely on Fiber One™ bars (or their Special K equivalent which have extra warnings for fibrousness) and fifty-cent ramen. This would be easy except that I am lazy and occasionally suffer from what I call "food aphasia," which is where I look into a fridge at raw ingredients and say, "how does this become food"?

Today, I made food in two steps. I cooked up some Uncle Ben's "Country Inn Mexican Fiesta" rice, adding a can of Goya red kidney beans for complete protein-icity. I then heated up a Quorn cutlet with some of Mark Bittman's tomato chutney.

Lessons learned:

• Quorn is good with tomato chutney.
• Uncle Ben's "Mexican Fiesta" is about as Mexican as the taco stand at McFadden's on Cinco de Mayo (the Hawk & Dove in Southeast also has a similar stand on offer, but McFadden's manages to keep its ground floor from smelling like urine, thus making it a classier establishment despite the Georgetown frat boys). The rice is also pretty tasteless.
  
• The "Mexican Fiesta" rice does not go that well with tomato chutney.
• However, it tastes great mixed with the extra-spicy version of Bittman's onion chutney that the Sherbs cooked up for our Sunday hot dog party.

That's lunch. Now back to the job hunt.

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!

Test Prep and Food for the Hungry!

I have just been informed about www.freerice.com, a website set up by the new NGO of Poverty.com that has a GRE-style, progressively harder vocabulary test. For each question you get right, the miniscule ad revenue for looking at that page pays for ten grains of rice for the UN World Food Program.

I found this on the Epicurious.com blog. I always like to check if these things are legit, and the World Food Program has a link, so I'm convinced it's not just a chain e-mail scam dressed up as a word game.

Even if it was, though, it's a darned good game. I'm up to level 47 (of 50), have donated four 100-grain bowls of rice and I am really challenged by it; I haven't been this stumped by a word game since National Review stopped doing "William F. Buckley's Word of the Day," (note: JavaScript super-broken) with quotes from the God and Man at Yale author himself. It's also super-addictive.

More on Beef n' Broc

Since I spent some time talking to Sherbs about the proper way to make beef and broccoli, even with soy "steak strips" (it includes cornstarch), I thought I should interject here that Chinese food is always better with just enough starch. Also, chili pepper.

Back before we were eating healthy, my mother used to make something called "double-fried noodles," where she'd make noodles, then fry the noodles in a pan so they had crispy outsides and a soft, noodly center. This would be served as an accent to another Chinese dish, like kung pao chicken. Man, I'd like to have some of those noodles again.

Although, on second thought, my trips in the East have taught me the value of a good white rice. Goes with anything.