Climbing the Third Stair

My alarm went off at 5 am this morning and somehow I slept in until 6 am. I suspect I shut off my alarm and went back to sleep, something I sometimes do on weekends but practically never on work days.

After a rushed breakfast I got dressed and hurried off to catch a bus. I had a paycheck to deposit and groceries to buy! So far my food budget experiment has been going well. At midmonth I was running $27 dollars under budget, so I decided to 'invest' that in a new pressure cooker pan. I had discovered last winter that pressure cookers were the Best Thing Ever for cooking dried beans, and since I have a lot of bean dishes in my recipe files this seemed like a good idea. The idea of having access to practically-instant mujadarah makes my mouth water.

The grocery store near my credit union had a sale on red and green bell peppers, so I bought LOTS of them--8 of each color. Some I plan on cooking with this week but most will be chopped up and tucked into the freezer for the coming months in which they retail for roughly the same cost as gold. (OK, not quite that much. But they do get really expensive.) I think I will be making some stuffed peppers, either from my mom's recipe or one of the ones in my Middle Eastern cookbook. Given the numbers of peppers I have, I could do both. It seems lavish, but when peppers are in season it seems right to take advantage of them.

Yesterday when I came home from work I noticed that my mustard greens had grown enough to allow a second harvest, so I decided to make the greens with cornmeal recipe that yhlee had introduced me to some time ago. I bought some cornmeal at work (mmmmmmm...polenta grind cornmeal), came home, and realized that with as much bread as I had in the house, making a grain-heavy dish for dinner was not the brightest thing in the world. So I put the cornmeal aside and started thinking.

What popped into my mind first was that Bittman's greens cookbook has a recipe for curried greens of some sort that had always sounded good, and I had onions and a new kind of curry powder I'm making friends with, and this was starting to sound like a plan. I could have gotten the relevant cookbook out at this point, but I'm not really that kind of a person. I've made curries, I've cooked greens; having given me the idea the cookbook had done its job and could put its feet up and relax.

I put one of my big Visions pots on the stove (some days you just need a pot you can see through), added 2 tablespoons of oil and started it heating over a low flame. Then I chopped a really big onion into chunks (I think it must have been 2 or 3 cups), added them to the pot, put the lit on, and let them sweat/braise until they were soft and almost starting to brown. Meanwhile I chopped the mustard I had picked (it was already washed; I'd done that as soon as I had brought it in from picking) and when I was done I had about 12 cups. This was slightly depressing, because I knew from experience that this would end up as an absurdly small amount of greens once it was cooked.

Anyway. My new brand of curry powder was one I picked up in a Middle Eastern grocery I had visited for the first time last week. It comes in a green metal tin with a ship on the front and it proudly proclaims itself as being "Arabia's best selling curry powder". Really, how could I resist it? And truthfully I am liking it so far; it seems to be better balanced than the kind we sell at the store. The onions being soft and almost-brown I added a quarter-teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of the curry powder, stirred it up, and let it cook a bit in onion mess before adding the greens. Then I put the lid on and waited for the steam to start cooking them. After about 10 minutes they had begun to shrink, so I stirred them up a bit, distributing well the leaf-clumps that hadn't started to wilt yet, and then put the lid back on. In another 10 minutes they and all cooked down nicely, so snagged a bit with a clean fork and tasted. It was a little too sweet (hello, onions!) and not quite spicy enough, so I added another quarter-teaspoon of salt and another teaspoon of curry powder. Then I let it all cook a bit longer until it looked "enough".

I dished some out for my dinner and it was wonderful. It was just how I like my veggie curries, with the spice zinging up the flavor without masking the taste of the greens--odd as it sounds, I like the flavor of mustard greens and I want to be able to taste them. I could have eaten the whole pot, but I restrained myself--while cooking I had this great idea of, when reheating the leftovers, poaching a few eggs in the brothy greens and having an almost-instant dinner. I can't deal with poached eggs straight up, but a few years ago I discovered I liked cooking (and eating) them in something saucy.

In conclusion, I will be making this again.

Today I treated myself to a new lunchbox. Not the kind I had in childhood: a big metal thing that held a sandwich, a small bag of potato chips and a Hostess cup-cake. This one is metal--stainless steel, in fact--and it holds only three cups worth of stuff. It's like a very basic version of a bento lunch container, and this is not an accident because I have been reading up on bento recently.

I'm not interested in the arty kind of bento; there are people who are entranced by the notion of carving a slice of carrot into a flower and I am not one of them. (On the other hand, I now have several kinds of edible flowers in my garden, so I could come up with a lunch plan that included sprinkling flower petals over everything. Hmm.) But bento-style lunches by their nature are exercises in portion control, and I am interested in that. For a long time my breakfasts have been models of dietary rectitude and if I can start lunching in the same fashion I'll have 2/3s of my eating day corralled. At that point, dinner should start falling into line naturally. I'm really bad at dieting, but given a list of things that I should eat each day I do pretty well.

The lunch box is a bit of an extravagance. I've been doing my bento-inspired lunches for a couple of weeks with plastic containers I picked up at a discount store, and it has worked well. Except that I have to tie them up with a ribbon, because I cannot trust them to stay shut in my backpack. The new metal one has a locking system that pretty much ensures it is going to stay closed until I say otherwise. Also, I am not opposed to the occasional extravagance, especially when it is for something I'll get some use out of.

Now I need to wash some dishes, so that I can cook something to pack in it for tomorrow's lunch!

I'm sitting at an Indian restaurant in the strip mall where Table Top Games is located with Bob Yager. We've just polished off our pakoras appetizers (very good, btw) and are waiting for the entrees. Lamb korma for me, vegetable byriyani for Bob. After we finish we'll go back to the room and build decks and frost cake.

Sometimes life is very, very good.

I flew to New Jersey on Friday to visit my best friend Karin and her husband Ami. I got no sleep the night before because with one thing and another going on this week I didn't have time to pack or clean beforehand and my flight was so early in the morning I decided I might as well give up and stay awake. Also, I can't read on a plane (I have the same problem with cars) so I could always take a few naps en route.

My flights went pretty smoothly, though there was some turbulence as we came into Newark. Karin was waiting for me as I came off the plane and we collected my suitcases after a brief hunt for one of them, which for some reason was piled next to the luggage carousel and not on it. On our way out to her car something in our conversation reminded me of the time Karin was taking me to the airport after a visit and she had forgotten to grab her purse, so she had no way to pay for the parking fees and I had run low on cash and didn't have enough to cover it myself. We finally had figured out a plan were I could pay it with my credit card at one of the parking kiosks inside of the airport and then she could take the receipt and run out to her car before the grace period expired. I reminded her of this and we then laughed really hard because that was the same trip where I had somehow managed to put her car into neutral when we were going down the parkway at 60 mph--and I wasn't driving. Strange, but true. ( More words about food and Kamikaze Girls )

I'm breakfasting on left-over cornmeal blueberry muffins this morning; I'd made a batch for my lunch yesterday.

I'm not normally a muffin person, but yesterday morning while looking for something else I found a container of yogurt that was out-of-date. Now, there are a lot things that I will pitch immediately and without remorse in that situation, but at home yogurt is not one of them. It already has microorganisms in it and it is rather acidic, both of which helps keep down any of the bad spoilage organisms. (It goes without saying that I'm a lot more draconian on this issue at work.) I do prefer using old yogurt as a cooking ingredient, and the company had helpfully printed a cornbread recipe on the container. Sadly, I've made the recipe before and wasn't that impressed--but it would do as a base recipe. I increased the cornmeal slightly, added 1 T more sugar (it was already too sweet to be a proper cornbread imho, so why not?), 1 t of cinnamon, a few rasps of nutmeg and a heaping cup of frozen blueberries.

They were decent but not sublime. I think if I try again I'll decrease the wheat flour and skip the spices--I miss the corn flavor.

In other news I made it to the farmer's market Saturday morning. As is typical for May, everyone else lined up in front of the asparagus vendors while I circled around, trying to decide who had the best-looking radishes. I got some really large red ones, and some of the white icicle-shaped ones.

I was reading my copy of Larousse Gastronomique (a Christmas gift from Karin and Ami a few years back, and fun to browse) this week and learned that in France they eat radishes with butter, so I tried it Saturday night. I wasn't impressed, but the next time I bake bread I think I'll try radish-and-butter sandwiches, another variation on the theme.