Tong.

Hello! And welcome back from the weekend...
Here is some food for you!
Matthew's Delicious Tofu. Served over brown rice.
This was pretty good, pretty simple and very nice. I added some carrot in there...
On Saturday morning I made bagels again!!! The only thing I changed (well, one of two things) was that I added BROWN sugar to the boiling water. I also used a flat flipper/turner to flip the bagels over when they were in the water so as to avoid tong marks on the bagels (if you look at my last set of pictures of the bagels, you can see the tong imprints). Is that how you spell tong? Whoah, weird. Tong it is not. Okay, I totally cannot think of the word I want- pincers? grabby thingy? C'mon brain! Must be monday...

See how brown and deeelicious they are? They turned out more brown, I think because of the brown sugar. Ideally, you're to add malt powder or malt syrup to the water, but I didn't have those things...

And of course I made Paprikash Dumplings for Valentine's Day dinner... not 'cause it's red (although that was pretty serendipitous) but because WE LOVE IT! I have since dropped the celery powder from the dumplings (green dumplings!?!?) and upped the baking powder to 1 T. I also dropped the nutritional yeast to 2 T and added 1 T tomato paste. Oh heck, I'll just write it out again...

Paprikash Dumplings

1 big can garbanzo beans or 2 regular ones, drained
1 T oil
1/2 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
2 T paprika
2 T brown sugar
1 T salt
2 T nutritional yeast
1/4 C ketchup
1 T tomato paste*

dumplings;

2 C flour
1 T baking powder
1 heaping t salt
3 T Earth Balance
1/4-1/2 C water

Get your big 'ol pot of water on to boil.

In a food processor, blend flour, baking powder, salt and Earth Balance until like a coarse meal. With processor running, slowly add water until the dough forms a ball and cleans the sides. Remove, knead a little and set aside.

Saute onion and garlic, stir in the rest of the ingredients and lower heat.

Roll the dumpling dough out into a corncob thick snake and divide it into 16. Roll each of these slices into a ball and coat them in flour. Dump them into the gently boiling water and cover. Gently boil for 10m.

Remove with slotted spoon and put into pot with paprika garbanzo mixture. Gently mix and serve.

Next time I make this I'll probably halve the dumpling recipe and make smaller dumplings.

*do you know what crazy thing I did the other day? I opened a can of tomato paste, measured out Tablespoonfuls of paste onto little pieces of saran wrap, individually wrapped them up and froze them! Now you know how crazy I am.


So, I forgot to mention that I read the ?graphic novels? Persepolis and Persepolis 2 and enjoyed them very much, a good peek into what it might be to live another life. I especially liked Persepolis 2.

I also finished "Little, Big". Man, that book is D.E.N.S.E. I think there are many levels there that I am not cottoning on to. Not to mention that it is 500 or so pages. But, I burned through it because it's that good. Really reminded me of "Winter's Tale" which if I remember correctly I read in the blurb on "Little, Big" that Helprin was influenced by Crowley or somesuch. Heck, I dogeared pages in a !library copy! because they just resonated with me so much!!! Would like to own this one, plus "Winter's Tale". I loved that it was classified as a 'Romance' by the library system. I went to the library and got another of his books, "Lord Byron's somethingorother" so I'll probably start that soon.

Also started reading "The Artist's Way" just because I've heard so much about it over the years. Very interesting. A lot of it is really meshing with other stuff that is going on with me, and I didn't really expect it to, so that was a suprise...

Happy Monday!