Actually Crispy.

OOooooh! Lovelies! Here we have SUCH a yummy dinner!! I got the idea from blah blah blah-ler, she made it sound so easy and good, and it was! Also, now I will always think of Doritos when I eat this dahl...

I made it in the crockpot, 'cuz that's how I roll... Um, actually I made it in the crockpot because it seemed like a good idea to let all that spicy goodness simmer away all day.

I probably should have dragged out the 'ol trusty skillet and really browned/fried those chickpeas up- I will try this sometime (and then of course skip the crockpot). That would definately up the Doritos effect.

2 15oz cans garbanzos, drained and 1 undrained
1/2 can diced tomatoes, drained
2 T oil
1 T freshly grated ginger*
1/4 t chili garlic paste (you know, the kind with the rooster on the front?)
1 t onion powder, cumin, garam masala, salt
1/2 t coriander, turmeric, garlic granules

Put the oil, ginger and salt and spices in the crockpot on high, and mix around until fragrant. Dump in the rest of the stuff, mix well and let it cook on high for a few hours, however long until supper. Make rice and serve. MMMmmmm.


*I've been scraping all the skin off the ginger with a spoon, then freezing it in a little ziplock in the freezer, then taking it out and grating it on my box grater and it works great! Yay, no more shriveled, sad mistakes of ginger left to moulder on the counter!

Here is a fairly uneventful supper. The most exciting thing was that I made crackers and doubled the recipe and they were more like soft crackers, if that makes any sense. Still good, though. I will go back to the original half amount, though, and make actually crispy crackers.

I finished "Smilla's Sense of Snow" and I don't know if I was just distracted toward the end or what, but I just could not stay interested. Isn't that wierd? It was, like, the culmination of all this stuff and ?dare I say it? it was sort of anticlimactic? I am so Western I suppose all with my need for dramatic endings and resolution. That was sort of the point of the author- no resolution, so I guess I'll just have to take my lumps, or however the saying goes... Really cool book, though. Pretty cool heroine! I wonder what the movie's like?

Pasta Water

Well, well, welcome.

Last night I made samosas. Mushy samosas. I cooked the potatoes too long... still good, though. Used up all those potatoes and now we have yummy samosa leftovers!

"Samosas" it's fun to type and if you look at it long enough it starts to look strange. The word, that is. The pic above might look strange, too, I haven't looked at it that long.

You will be seeing these again, wrapped in delicious crescent roll goodness...


And lo! Here is some pasta. I always hesitate to post these 'chick'ny' pics because when I look at them they look so flesh-tastic, but ah well... again, a good dinner. And quick!

I tried this newfangled 'use less water + start from cold' way of making pasta and it was fine. And yes, the pasta water is good! I feel like I should save it for making soup or something!

1/2 box 8 oz pasta
2 T oil
1/2 onion, chopped
1/2 pkt morningstar chick'n
1 t herbes de provence/your fave herb
1/4 t citric acid/some lemon juice
1/2 t salt
few leaves kale/some spinach/broccoli

Boil up your pasta. Stir often to prevent sticking.

Meanwhile, in a large cast iron skillet, saute your onion. Add chick'n and herbes and citric acid and salt and chopped up veg. Saute until chick'n is brown, adding pasta water everytime it starts to stick. When pasta is done, add it to the skillet and mix well. Serve hot!




And finally, my most exciting thing!! Are you excited?!? I made tortillas.

A long time ago I made tortillas, and they were breaky and stiff. Like, not wrappable. What's up with that?

So I was bound and determined to find a good recipe, and I think I have.

Of course, then I read a bunch of scary stuff about Crisco, so now I'm all freaked out about using it.

Next time maybe I will sub in Earth Balance... we'll see.

I did like them enough to use Crisco again. They were soooo good and fun to make. I used my cast iron skillet (suprise) and heated it up real high and then counted 'one, two, three' flip, 'one, two, three' flip and 'one, two, three' off onto a plate. Actually, I had a friend help and that made it even more fun!

I also tried a new way of making tofu! Pretty exciting, huh? Scrambled Tofu.

I liked it becuase it did make softer, golden tofu. I could definately see this in a regular tofu scrambler. I just mixed it in with some spiced up black beans and it made a good burrito filling.

And topped it all off with cheeze sauce*.

1/3 C nutritional yeast
1/4 C flour
2 T oil
1 C water
1 T cornstarch
pinch citric acid
2 garlic cloves
1/2 t onion powder

Blend, heat and serve.

*This is a variation of Vegan Explosion's queso, which is gone for now... aww! So yummy!

Finished Brisingr. It got better at the end. Must. get. more. books!

Snarky Humour

What We Had For Dinner Last Night

Chili Topped Sweet Potatoes
with Mole sauce

This time I just sauteed up a small onion and quite a few cloves of garlic and then added a couple of tablespoons of prepared Mole sauce. And a can of black beans. It was good, and now I know what to do with that jar of Mole sauce in my refrigerator.

Oh, and I also washed and didn't dry the sweet potatoes and placed them in the bottom of my rather large slow cooker and cooked them on low all day. So good. I highly recommend.

This was Cabbage Dal. I used my Fail Proof Dal recipe, plus a little curry powder. Now, it's not real pretty, but it did the trick and somehow, miraculously, the cabbage made it oh so much better without leaving any cabbage taste. Bizarre.

Here we have the lovely Blueberry Muffin. Started making this before I realized I was out of all purpose flour... so I used 1 C whole wheat and 1/2 C some fancy flour I got at the coop like pastry flour or something that I'm never going to use properly. Used the frozen blueberries we picked so late in the season at Cain's Orchard. Very yummy. Ate way too many.

And another repeat, Garbanzo Paprikash with Dumplings. Love. It. Decided to not make the dumplings green by using celery seed powder this time.

So, I started reading "Twilight of the Superheroes" because the author was recommended by Francine Prose who wrote "Reading like a Writer", actually I just took the back section where she has her list of books to read right now and opened it up and just walked the stacks at the library looking for the authors. So I found some books.

BUT THEN when I was at Goodwill yesterday morning I found "Good Omens" which I've been trying to get at the library forever and there it was- it was like a light streamed down from the heavens, yea and I arose from my shopping cart and procured it. Hooray!

And what with my newfound Terry Pratchett love, I find it so fitting to be reading this now.

Lots of snarky humour.

I think the reason I like Gaiman is because he writes the stories that I fantasized that the goth boys I had crushes on in high school lived. And how's that for escapism, huh?

So, Good Omens, very good.

"Twilight of the Superheroes" was about 9/11 and so, there's that. Maybe I will get back to it.

Serve 'em up!

Heyo!
Here is a yummy spaghetti with beanballs type of thing with HOMEMADE SAUCE!!
You take a bunch of tomatoes, blanch them, skin them, dump out the seeds into a fine mesh strainer propped over a bowl, mash the seeds and pulp against the mesh until it's mostly pressed through, toss a few chunks of tomato flesh in there, then boil it in a pot with fresh basil and oregano and some oil and salt and onions and garlic and BOOM! sauce.
The beanballs were kidney beans, tvp, 1/4 c vital wheat gluten, some HP sauce, some soy sauce, some onion soup mix, maybe some cumin? all mixed up and then fried in the aebleskiver and then dumped in the sauce. Sorry no real recipes folks, but geez, it was the weekend. A girl's gotta live a little, you know? It was real good.
Here are the wunnerful jelly doughnut cupcakes from Veganomicon. Do make these. I made the rest of the sumac juice/extract into jam- hooray! and used that in the 'cakes. Deelightful!
Here is a Fail Proof Dahl which I believe I found in a thread on the ppk forums (couldn't find that exact thread, though I did note the author of said recipe!)- thank you chickpea fleet! It was good! I served it with veganyumyum's roti which was recommended and again, v. good.

1 1/2 C moong dal
3 C water
1 t Trader Joe's ginger paste
1 t turmeric
1 clove garlic, minced
2 T olive oil
tidge chili garlic sauce
2 T mustard seeds
1 T cumin seeds
1 T coriander seeds
1 t salt

Rinse dal, add to water with ginger and turmeric, bring to a boil. Skim off foam, lower heat and simmer 'til tender.
In a large soup pot, saute garlic and seeds until seeds start to pop. Add salt and chili garlic sauce.
Lower heat and add lentils.
Blend some in blender, add water if needed.
Serve with fresh coriander leaves and roti.
Makes a lot (maybe 6 C), roughly 6 points a cup.
Roti.
And finally, a soup I made which was very nice- I'll call it potato groundnut soup!

3 large potatoes (I used Viking purple potatoes- woo!)
2 T peanut oil
2 large shallots
1 sweet pepper
1 t cumin
1 t coriander
pinch nutmeg
tidge chili garlic sauce
1 t salt
pepper to taste
1/4 C creamy peanut butter

Scrub 'em, chop 'em and boil up your potatoes.
Process shallots and sweet pepper until coarsely chopped.
Saute in oil in a large soup pot.
Mix in spices, salt, pepper and chili garlic sauce.
Mix in peanut butter.
Dump potatoes, water and all, into pot and mix well.
Blend in blender.
Serve it up, yum!

Reading "Absurdistan", v. weird.

Eating Rajmah

Last night we had... yes, I know I need a new opening line!
Hmm, how about, 'After a rousing bout of Uno...' (we did not play Uno) we ate Rajmah. Kinda sounds like we ate some poor hapless guy, don't it? But no cannibals are we. Rajmah is an Indian dish made with kidney beans. Susan already did it. But I found a recipe that uses canned kidney beans, of which I had many. I doubled everything except the spices, didn't add salt because the canned kidney beans had salt and I added 1 T sugar because it was pretty tangy, I don't know why. It was pretty good and after eating it for a while, I really liked it (?it had to grow on me?).

Rajmah

2 cans kidney beans, drained
1 can tomatoes, drained
2 T oil
1 onion, chopped fine
1 clove garlic, minced
1 t Trader Joe's ginger jarred (was this the tangy culprit?!)
2 t coriander
2 t cumin
1 t tumeric
1/2 t chili powder
1/2 t garam masala
bay leaf
pinch cardamom
pinch cloves
pinch cinnamon
1/4 t pepper
1 C water

Saute onion and garlic, add ginger and spices. Add tomato and beans, cover with water and simmer until thick.

I called one of my favorite yarn shops yesterday to see if they had more of the yarn I'm using and they did, so I asked them to hold it for a week. I wasn't sure if I'd have enough to make this short rows scarf I'm working on. So I told myself that if I knit like the wind for one week, then I'll use up the skein I have and know whether or not to get the second.

Well, I then proceeded to rewind it into a smaller centrepullball than the centrepullball I'd already wound, checking to see if the repeats of color made enough for another length of scarf, which they did. Hey, why are you backing away like that and shaking your head? Hey, where are you going? Come on, now, don't you wind into a centrepullball skeins of yarn that are already made to pull from the center? What? No?

Anyway, it turns out that I have enough yarn for a whole 'nother repeat plus a little more. So I should have enough. But I'll still try to knit like the wind this week and see where I end up. So no reading, probably.

Everytime I make rice lately I end up pondering something while I stir and stir the rice with my fingers under the faucet in the wire strainer- I read somewhere that if you rinse the rice, you rinse off all the vitamins and stuff they spray onto the rice, but if I don't rinse my rice, it makes a terrible mess in my rice cooker*. This conundrum is completely representative of so many things in my life I can't even tell you. Next time I think of one I'll tell you and call it 'the white rice conundrum'.

*Not to mention the fact that I SHOULD be using brown rice anyway!! And the fact that I'm wasting water as I wash the rice under running water!! Agh!

Oh noes! Rice two nights in a row!

Last night I made a successful curry.
If you just happen to have onions, garlic, a few carrots and a few potatoes, you're golden!

2 carrots, sliced into thin rounds
2 potatoes, diced small
1 can peas, undrained
1/2 C red lentils
1 can light coconut milk
1 onion, diced
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
1 T oil (I used peanut!)
1 T curry powder
1 T brown sugar
1 t salt
1 t jarred ginger
1 1/2 cans water

Make rice.
Dump* everything in a pot and bring it to a boil, lower heat a bit and cover for 10m or so to cook carrots and potatoes.
Uncover and simmer for a long time, as long as you have.
There are a million recipes on the web for curries, so go forth and curry!

*Okay, so dump is a generalization here. First, saute onion, then garlic in oil. Then add potatoes and carrots and cook a bit, then add curry powder, mix well, then red lentils, mix well, then salt and sugar, mix well, then ginger, mix well (do you see where I'm going with this?), then the peas undrained and then the coconut milk and then the water. 1 1/2 cans of water is a poor measure, I apologize, but it was what was at hand and really, you need to cover the veggies plus a little.

Knit the mitts in Heilo, an on the thicker side of sport weight sport weight yarn. Found another error- just a wee one!

No reading. Must get to library- stat!
I will give you a retroacted ?grandfathered in? book review (meaning, I read this a while ago).
My local bookstore has this thing where if you're a member, you have access to this one shelf where they put all the books they are sent by publishers ahead of time. So I was in there, looking at Artisan Bread in Five Minutes (props to Minnesotans!) and I checked out the shelf. I'm scanning, scanning... Doctorow! Little Brother. Well, I've read Cory Doctorow's stuff online, and really enjoyed it, so I grabbed it right away. It was a truly fun read and I learned a lot. It's aimed at young adults, but it's such a fascinating (I think the term is 'cyberpunk') world he creates and you get pretty attached to the characters. It made me really paranoid. Like even when the SPOILER love interest is introduced I was all like "She's a plant! She's a spy! She'll kill you in your sleep!" Gah, I must be getting old, I couldn't even watch the latest in the ?what's that trilogy of movies with the dude and he's like, always running from the government?...
anyway! How's that for a review.

I have lapsed in my not double spacing after a period ways.

I made something yesterday.

















Be gentle, it's my first tutorial...

















Here's what you'll need.
A bunch of flowers, I found one with three roses on the stem. And some filler plant like things.

A scissors.

Some florist's tape.

Some pens.

1. Remove cap from pen.

2. Cut one of the flowers off of the main stem (if doing the filler, skip this). 'Cut'; I use the word loosely, what I did was cut the plastic around the wire, then bend and bend and bend while muttering "Fatigue, d**n you!" under my breath.

















3. Start wrapping the florist's tape around the base of the flower, being careful not to get any of the leaves trapped in there. Stretch the tape as you turn the flower- this is how florist's tape adheres to itself! When it stretches, it gets sticky! It's really cool! I had to Google that!

















4. Okay, once you've wrapped the base of the flower a few times, stick the (non-writing) end of the pen next to the flower, with half of the width of the tape over the end of the pen. Stretch the tape around once and then start working your way down the flower (without stretching), on a diagonal, with just the edge overlapping the previous wrap.

















5. When you get to the bottom, cut your stem again if need be, wrap the florist's tape straight around once, then start wrapping back up.
Oh yeah, if you're going to do any little leaves branching off on the side, take the leaf off on the way down and then on the way up, stick it on there and wrap the tape around the base, sort of sticking it onto your pen.

6. When you get back up to the top, carefully streeeetch the tape tightly around the bottom of the flower and rip off. It takes a few tries to get this down so that they tape adheres nicely, I found that if I can sort of wrinkle it in there above the pen and below the base of the flower it works nicely.
7. Tada, you have made a flower pen.

















Now, this may seem cheesy, and it is, but if you have a preschooler, and they need a gift for their teacher, it's nice. I think it's cheesy, but when I was teaching, I got one from a student, and it became my favorite pen because I could a) always find it and b) it was identifiably mine. Plus, writing with a flower!!!!