There isn’t usually meat in my fridge mingling with vegetables. But once there was and I threw a giant fit about having bitten into sausage, so me lovely mum has taken to leaving warning labels on things I’m likely to eat that are not meant for me (if it’s in the fridge it’s fair game. Y’all know Owen stay hungry.). I thought this was cute and sweet and am sharing it.
Merry Happy Sunday, y’all. This is the last day of #springbreak2012 #nopants. In house brunch and mimosas for . . . just me. Self-explanatory photo recipes and tweets to navigate my adventure in the kitchen:
Read them from the bottom up.
Step 1: Slice all the veggies into neat piles (I have solved the eggplant.).
Step 2: Admire them from various angles.
Step 3: Choose your spices. I chose these. They're highly recommended.
Step 4: Add veggies to a pan of hot olive oil. Sprinkle each spice over the surface of said veggies till they're covered. That's how you know if you've put in enough. We don't measure round here.
Step 5: Liberally apply Adobo spice blend to a slab of tofu. Both sides. Then dice it. Then fry it very carefully in grapeseed oil. Trust me. Make sure there's no water on your hands or the tofu or the spatula. Otherwise you will be in pain.
Step 6: By now your vegetables look like this. If not, learn to saute and dice/fry tofu simultaneously.
Step 7: Dice a tomato (not shown) and an avocado.
Step 8: Untrap your cheese. Dice it. Put it in the bowl with the tomato and avocado (that's where they went. into a bowl)
Step 9: Add cilantro and the green parts from the scallions (have you been paying attention to the pictures?), and salt & pepper and olive oil to the things in the bowl. That's done.
Step 10: Make a pile of rice, salad, veggies and scrambled egg in a bowl. You have just won at brunch. Almost.
Step 11: Make a Pineapple Mimosa with St. Germain . . .
Step 12: . . . Add a shot to your coffee. Now you've won. Merry Sunday.
I’ve been doing the shoddiest job of writing about food. There’re loads of reasons for that that I’m not gonna list. But I got a new phone the other day and since I’ve been on spring break I’ve been cooking leisurely and eating in the park and snapping pictures as I go along, so I figure I’ll post those. I’ve not, however, been keeping track of ingredients, so I’ll just make an empty promise to get better at that and post recipes in the future. But till then, savor these:
Why yes, that IS a pierogi on top of this birthday quinoa tofu salad.
I've been obsessing over tofu quesadillas. I finally made one with eggplant and bok choy this afternoon and ate it over a waterfall. That's just how I roll when I bother to leave the house.
fried some tofu
sauteed some veggies
wrapped it in a tortilla with some queso
ate it in the sunshine. no biggie.
Post finals stress hit my fictional tapeworm Owen pretty hard. He’s been eating some really obnoxious, extremely shameful things that do not by any means need to be discussed in-depth. Just know that I’m now involved in a group that I’m calling #cheeseeatersanonymous due to pizza-and-beer-related escapades. There have also been several bakery-related incidents involving chocolate covered, cream-filled goodness that one of these days I swear I will have the self-control to not eat. And there has been cake. So. Much. Cake. And some ice cream-induced near anaphylaxis. *hangs head in shame*
So after some serious self-reflection, Owen is in time out. No more waffles, no more fast-food fries. We’re doing a cucumber/oatmeal/pomegranate/rice&beans cleanse, save for the occasional bakery fresh bread. I find it easier to deny myself after I’ve let Owen have his way and I’m feeling guilty and itchy.
Step one of Owen’s Cleanse is to start cooking again since I have so much time on my hands with my sporadic employment. This winter destitution brings with it the return of the intital point of this blog: eating well on the staple foods I’ve already got in the house. Here’s what Owen and I have accomplished thus far. It has not been much.
turnips, pinto beans, & stewed tomatoes
Recentish cooking efforts yielded a surprisingly delicious pot of red rice and beans. I discovered pinto beans in the kitchen and had recently purchased a large bag of Goya rice. I inexplicably started a version of arroz y gandules that featured those ingredients and subbed tarragon for recao and included a random turnip. As I was dumping things in a pot (yeah, that’s what cooking is. Dumping things in a pot.), I stumbled upon a can of stewed tomatoes that gave the finished product a very nice touch.
sunflower seeds & brussels sprouts
I love it when my mom goes grocery shopping. She always buys a ton of produce (usually broccoli, mushrooms and cherry tomatoes – a few of my favorite things) and doesn’t cook it, leaving me ecologically obligated to handle said produce for her.
I’ve had a bag of fancy-pants rice pilaf for a while, and now my rice stash is low enough for me to have found the patience for the cooking time of brown and wild rices. I do not, however, have the foresight for beans, but was down to my last lentils, which just so happen to have the same cooking time as brown and wild rices. #score.
rice pilaf
seeds and sprouts
I work a lot. I also eat a lot (Obviously). And I’m horribly disorganized.
To get around all that, I’ve decided to start stashing food at work. This is going to be sort of tricky since I have two jobs (writing consultant [tutor] and daycare teacher), but only enough money for one of everything. Also, I never wake up early enough to eat breakfast/pack my lunch and get to class on time. There is no helping that particular situation.
At the Writing Center we’ve got a drawer full of tape and Clorox Wipes. There is also one packet of oatmeal. The one packet of oatmeal has changed the designation of that particular drawer from tape, etc. to The Oatmeal Drawer. A few weeks ago I bought a box of Raisins and Spice flavored instant oatmeal packets, but it didn’t take me very long to go through it since I can manage to eat 5 packets in one day.
oatmeal accessories
So I went Oatmeal Shopping. As in an entire trip to the health food store devoted to oatmeal and its accessories (yes, accessories. I’m very serious about oatmeal). So now instead of a drawer at the front desk full of miscellaneous junk that just happens to include packets of oatmeal, I’ve got a bona fide Oatmeal Bag that lives in the lounge (closer to the electric kettle and spoons, anyway), full of quick oats, golden flax, chocolate chips, pumpkin pie spice, craisins, dates and crystallized ginger, and honey.
my current favorite breakfast
The problem is that I’m already almost out of oatmeal despite buying an entire canister because it’s been a week since Oatmeal Shopping and apparently the only thing I’ve been eating this whole time is oatmeal. But I swear there have been several instances of crispy potatoes, falafel and fried eggs in there somewhere.
. . . .
At the daycare, I’m partial to 90 second bags of rice. Initially it was fancy-
pants all natural ginger lentil rice, but then I discovered that I am not, in fact, allergic to Uncle Ben’s Spanish Style Ready Rice. So I’ve been eating those with avocados and lots of black pepper. The children are always very, very interested in what I’ve got in my bowl and ask me if it’s my food that I’m eating. Two-year-olds don’t seem to have much to concern themselves with besides ownership and snack time.
Oh yeah, avocados are the other thing I keep stashed (in the staff fridge, not the front desk). You never know when one will come in handy, and they usually do come in handy given my (hopefully) fictional tapeworm, Owen, who is always hungry.
So an avocado, rice, and oatmeal shopping trip is in order. I’m also a big fan of granola with coconut milk. Jam and millet & flax bread wouldn’t hurt, either. And I guess I’ll have to start cooking enough enough for leftovers and stash those in the freezer at the Writing Center in addition to the brownies I keep in my mailbox. There’s no place for squirreling food away at the daycare so I suppose I can use my car for a pantry. It’s not like it didn’t spend the entire growing season full of vegetables, anyway. And I’d absolutely love the opportunity to live off of potato chips and cookies.
BTW, I tweet now, in case you didn’t notice. And am on Facebook.
My biggest recent culinary accomplishment is the arroz y gandules (rice and pigeon peas) I made last week that got my brother’s seal of approval, porklessness and all.
It tasted Puerto Rican. I got mad skillz.
I stole the recipe from my Puerto Ricans.
Sometimes I steal things[1].
I may or may not be involved in human trafficking[2].
But I digress.
Since it’s a secret family recipe I’m piecing together from spending May and June in my friends’ kitchens spying on them, I won’t tell you much more about the ingredients than that you’ll need to venture over to the lovely East Side to find them. The things I’ll divulge include:
Everything else is classified. Or else I might have to kill you or something.
I’ve been obsessed with fried potatoes and greasy vegetables, eggs, coconut milk mochas, and pumpkin-ginger flavoured brown rice pasta. The Oatmeal Drawer at my writing center job is my favorite thing of the week and has been amended to include Spanish rice and avocados. Shameful eating has been battling academic anorexia. I’m avoiding all the CSA vegetables that have been “wilting all over the kitchen” for the last couple weeks. I’m too lazy to take pictures and upload them and narrate and compose recipes.
WordPress was really mean to my pictures yesterday. Today I just sort of forgot about documentation entirely. So we’ll see how this formatting goes.
potatoes shabazz with bok choy scrambled eggs. also tomato slices.
I like feeding people. One of my favorite places to feed people is Amber’s kitchen. Mostly cause her kitchen is, like, the most adorable in the world, and then also cause Jared or someone random ends up loving whatever I throw together.
Today I made breakfast for a band of hungry house guests. None of us had ever had bok choy for breakfast. We all plan to do it again.
toast and fava eggplant dip. cake with custard sauce.
Lunch.
winter squash stew with millet & flax bagels and olive oil.
Amber likes to “inadvertently” make obnoxious quantities of stew and have me over to finish it off since I shovel away unbelievable amounts of food. Last time we had soup (not the soup in the following paragraph), her son told me I ate 12 of stew. Which is probably accurate of how many bowls I had.
Last time made soup she forgot about the chicken broth base. I had literally four bowls before she remembered that part. I had a really hard time dealing with this breach of diet, so one of my vegetarian friends suggested I figure out a way to appreciate the chicken so that all that trauma wouldn’t be for naught. This is what I came up with:
Sacred Ecology
sharing a meal is a manifestation of love
a display of solidarity
an invitation to intimacyso i ate
and was inadvertently fed chicken against my principles
even though an omelet on my plate does not
hurl me out of my elementand i worried until
i was told to appreciate the chickenthe very chicken that had defiled my palate
in the same blow put me in the kitchen of someone
who loves me enough
to make sure i had food in my bellythat chicken reminds me
to offer up my bowl of rice and vegetablesthat chicken did not die in vain
Anyway, Amber made stew again tonight. This time it was proper reeseFood, and really, really good. Chili pepper hot tomatoes, potatoes and squash with a hint of cinnamon. The recipe is from a CSA demo that Aspasia did. I’ll post it. Eventually. I mean if Aspasia’s cool with that.
Also, apparently I keep gluten-free bagels in my car now.
This is me being a terrorist. Also, notice those wicked curls.
There was a little girl, who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead,
And when she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that about me.
but when she was bad she was horrid:
See, what had happened was, there was some cheese pizza left unattended and Owen = id. I had two slices, thought I was dying and had to take a bunch of medicine. On the bright side, I think I might be cured of the whole shameful eating thing.
Secondly, I am a culinary terrorist and ninja.
I went to the 4th Annual Northeast Ohio Writing Centers Association Conference today, so I stayed up late last night making fava bean-roasted eggplant dip and wrapping random things in nori and taunting my friend, Dave, who likes sushi but wasn’t available for sharing, with pictures of the carefully documented process:
mushrooms, peppers, onions. also sushi rice and that pizza
mix rice with vinegar and agave and spices.
-without spilling agave all over the place
cucumber, avocado, sushi mat, sushi
one cannot simultaneously roll sushi and take its picture.
casualties: the entire kitchen, pretty much
And then I sent pictures of my cake to Amber, who isn’t available for sharing rituals, either.
If it makes it any better, I woke up really, really early this morning to make sandwiches (Garden Herb Sunshine Burgers with pickled squash on mayonnaised toast).
sushi story:
Back when I was RAing for the ESL camp, my lovely, lovely friend Gladys taught me how to roll sushi. I’d never had sushi before and was always nervous about nori since I’m allergic to seafood, but figured it wouldn’t kill me to try it, especially since my zucchini in hemp seed pesto-garlic sauce was the write dimensions. I found getting the proportions right and rolling tight, neat little nori burritos almost as relaxing as stuffing grape leaves. Gladys left me with her sushi mat and nori sheets when she went back home to Chicago, so now sushi is a thing that I make when I have the foresight to worry about what I’m going to eat for lunch tomorrow. (Extremely rarely)
when she was good, she was very, very good
I’m trying really hard to go back to strictly eating reeseFood, which is pretty hard with Owen and my schedule and all. But, I started off today really well with a tomato and egg sandwich, coffee, dark chocolate, gingersnaps and a blueberry coconut milk yogurt. This is what I had for lunch/2nd lunch:
veggie burgers, bean&eggplant dip, hard boiled egg, veggies
mocha zucchini cake with blackberry-peach and strawberry jams <3
Whipped cream may or may not have accidentally ended up on top of my caramel spice cider, arranged so lovingly with sprinkles and caramel sauce that I couldn’t bring myself to complain or scrape it off. . . . . 
So this is what I made for dinner last night:
oven-roasted spaghetti squash and eggplant with kale in a tomato jam-coconut milk curry sauce
Oh, hi. Remember me?
I sort of dropped off the face of the earth a little bit.
But I think I might be back.
See, what had happened was, I got super busy all of a sudden and didn’t have time to waste taking pictures of my food and writing words about it and then posting all that bizniz to the internets.
Also, I realized that I’m absolutely addicted to fresh produce, cookies, cereal, potato chips, millet & flax bread, and free range eggs. Like, I do not get on well without these items. But other than that, I haven’t really been grocery shopping.
I technically still haven’t got the time for blogging, but at the moment I’m soaking rice for sushi and trying to figure out what my fava bean and roasted eggplant dip is missing. That reminded me that I’ve been neglecting my food blog.
It’s definitely not like I stopped eating or anything. Except for that brief stretch in July where I only wanted cucumbers and peaches. . .
Shameful eating. I do not want to talk about it.
Also, since I haven’t been telling whoever reads this all about my food adventures, I’ve been eating a whole lot of some pretty horrifying stuff.
Stuff so horrifying that it would be in my best interests to do a detox (and by detox I mean being super strict about my normal restrictions.) Yeah, it was that bad.
Well, actually, it could have been much, much worse. I’m not sure that I really want to talk about it yet. It’s really shameful. My foodie friends have been judging me. What I can tell you is that I sat in a McDonald’s and met someone in a Burger King parking lot. That picture is from Denny’s. Owen, the hungry one in the title, may or may not be a tapeworm living inside of me. It’s rough in Ethiopia. I had to write a poem because there was chicken in my soup. A little botulism never hurt anything. But I’ll explain later. Maybe, perhaps.
Here are some posts from the future:
eats like a foreigner
Princess Ninja Produce Stand
reeseFood I didn't prepare <3
sexy tomatoes and other canning lessons
grocery stores are the worst
coconut milk and honey
dorm food
Love, Lola.
P.S. Mocha zucchini cake with blackberry peach jam. Best. Detox. Ever.
