Andrew and I sponsor two children: Sofia in Pakistan (through Plan), and a child in Egypt (through Save the Children). Save the Children does things a bit differently. Instead of telling you about "your" specific child, Save the Children chooses an "ambassador child" to serve as the face of the program for all sponsors with a child in that country.

Save the Children just sent us a pretty little brochure with a profile of their newest "ambassador child," a 6-year old girl named Noura. Part of the brochure was a blurb about one of the most popular dishes in Egypt, "foul" (pronounced "fool"), or fava beans.

(EDIT: Wikipedia article on "ful medames," فول مدمس, can be found here!)

After reading about the different ways it's prepared and scanning the sample recipe on the back, I decided to try it myself this week.

So here are my "funky groceries" for the week, as modeled by the hypermuffin. Save the Children's recipe for "foul" is at the end.

The hypermuffin's daycare is putting together a recipe collection as a fundraiser. They want to collect 150 recipes. So far, they have 26.

Five of those are mine -- and unfortunately, although I could easily stock them with 150 recipes all by myself, I'm limited to contributing only five.

I was considering logging on under a few nommes de plume -- Howard Alan Treesong, Natalia Romanova, Hal Jordan -- heck, toss in Alan Scott, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, and Kyle Rayner while I'm at it. Or, for a more female-oriented bunch of names, I was thinking of using the names of high school classmates of mine. Niloufar is a name that should be seen more often!

Anyway, before resorting to massive feats of duplicity in order to stock the daycare's recipe booklet, I thought I would turn to you.

If you have a few minutes to input between 1 and 5 recipes on their little recipe-inputting site, in order to get their recipe total up, I'd appreciate it, and so would my adorably charming 3-year old, one is sure.

Instructions

EDIT: Deadline is July 3, so you have some time... but don't put it off too long or you will forget. Don't ask me how I know this. *blush*

Here's a fascinating, informative, and pretty site: The Perfect Pantry.

I enjoy the recipes, although I haven't tried any yet, and I especially like the series on Other People's Pantries -- how they are configured and what cooking supplies they store therein.

Some coworkers and I walked from the office down to Pike Place Market for lunch today. The weather is glorious, and it felt so good to get out of the office!

Nikki, Dafny and I had fish and chips at Jack's Fish Spot -- greasy and salty and delicious. I ate mine while we were waiting for the others to rejoin us. Jen and Megan went to La Vaca, and tatterdamelion got chicken teriyaki somewhere in the neighborhood. It looked fire-engine red, and Jen (who tried a bite) said that it was not really very spicy (although he had asked for spicy), but it was full of flavor.

After we all regrouped and started walking back, we were ensorceled by the beautiful displays of caramel apples in the window of the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Nikki and I split a plain caramel apple -- a sweet, crispy-yet-not-too-hard green apple, drenched in perfect, sticky-yet-not-too-sticky caramel. They slice it for you there, which makes sharing one much easier.

(A Bacon Maple Bar (really!) would also have been acceptable. But driving to Oregon for dessert seemed a bit ambitious. Also because none of us had a car anywhere nearby.)

Right now my office is treating everyone to impromptu root beer floats! They have orange soda, too, in case you don't like root beer. Orange soda + vanilla ice cream = Creamsicle-y goodness.

And, in case all that was not enough sugar -- tonight is Nikki's "Castle Falkenstein" game, and we are having a brownie-off. tatterdamelion is going to make New Mexico Chile Brownies (having toyed with, but then rejected, the idea of Banana-Rum Brownies), and I have already made Orange-Ginger Brownies -- a little orange oil and some chopped crystallized ginger. Mmmm. I almost made Bacon Brownies, but in the end sanity prevailed.

It occurred to me recently that I really only cook the same few meals again and again right now.

It makes sense. I just don't have the time, energy, budget, and frequency of shopping that I used to have. Gone are the days when I could spend a leisurely hour dicing, chopping, and then sauteing 10 kinds of vegetables for Baked Ratatouille. Say hello to the days where dicing one (1) onion and throwing it in a pan with some ground beef is about as much as I can manage.

In the interests of Science, then, here are the 12 recipes I am currently reusing again (and again and again). I hope to one day return to my recipe adventuresomeness of yore.



That's it. That's pretty much all I ever cook anymore.

--sigh--  When I think of the hundreds of recipes I used to experiment with, from all corners of the world... my boxes of index cards filled with neatly inked recipes and my notes on them... my extensive spice collection, not very often used nowadays... I miss the old days.

But this phase of my life is not compatible with foodiness.

This morning's xkcd comic generated many, many links in the comments to various bits of bacon-y goodness. Here are two that look simply astounding:

• Dark Chocolate Bacon Cupcakes (yes! Chocolate, and bacon, and there's coffee in it, too!!! Triple yes!)
• Bacon Apple Pie. After giving the recipe, the blogger writes:
  

  "So how was it?

  I wouldn’t be posting this if it wasn’t absolutely incredible. It wasn’t greasy like I thought it would be. The flavor was a perfect balance of sweet and salty. I served it up with slices of smoked cheddar cheese for a room full of amused but open-minded skeptics, and the entire pie was gone in 10 minutes."

I also belong to the LJ community bacon_lovers, so I get the inside scoop on all things bacon-related.

Mmmm, bacon.

I want to take classes in Historic Cookery now. Unfortunately it appears that I might have to go to the UK to do it.

Check out the "Catherine basket" partway down the page!

[EDIT] Just stole the Catherine basket for a new icon. Mwahahahaha. *rubs hands together evilly*

-- is a wreath made of meat.

I can't find one on Google, but I'm still convinced it's a good idea. You know -- a ton of different kinds of sausages, made into a wreath? Who wouldn't want that?

Quibble not with me about your pedestrian concerns re "refrigeration."

-- I looked through the archives at Uncle Phaedrus, Finder of Lost Recipes, but with no luck. I do however now have recipes for Birds Milk Cake, Jamaican Beef Patty, Cassava Balls, and German Bee Sting Cake, among others.

From splagxna's LJ (OK, originally from Gourmet magazine), an article on the making of the perfect omelet, titled "Chasing Perfection."

"Three eggs, salt, pepper, and a little butter. That’s all there is in a classic French omelet, but it’s enough to keep reteaching me this vital lesson: Things are only simple when you’ve stopped asking the right questions of them, when you’ve stopped finding new ways to see them. Because what you find, when you learn how to find it, is that even simple things can be wonderfully, frustratingly, world-openingly complex."

I had no idea.

This one tied for first, with three votes.

Three people voted for this, tying it with the "Plaited Breads."

Because I just love the fact that there are people out there who make and eat this -- yes, I would probably try it, intestines and all -- this morning you are getting a recipe for:

The first in a series of transcriptions from my copy of The Best Traditional Recipes of Greek Cooking, Editions Dimitri Haitalis, Copyright Editions D. Haitalis, 30, Chrissalidos Str., 14343 Athens, Tel. 2523.511. There's no copyright date, but I bought it in Greece in 1996.

The actual recipes will appear in later posts. Before we get to those, we should get a feel for the book by taking a look at:



(page 7)

See if you can follow the complex chain of events that occurred yesterday, leading to me posting an amusing poll this morning. :-)

A few weeks ago I took my seat on the 41 headed back up to the Northgate Park 'n' Ride, and found a mysterious piece of folded paper sitting next to me.

OK, it wasn't really all that mysterious. It was -- nay, it is, for it is sitting here to the right of my laptop, next to the congealing remains of my oatmeal with brown sugar and diced apples -- two sheets of paper, stapled together at the upper left. The first sheet lists the ingredients for "Thai Rice Pudding," and the second sheet has the instructions. (They probably should have tried to fit both chunks of text on one page, to save paper. Then again, they shouldn't have gone to all the trouble of printing it out only to abandon it on the bus.)

There's a hand-written phone number at the top of the page, next to "N-gate QFC." So now I know the Northgate QFC's phone number without having to look it up in the phone book. Thanks, mystery bus person!

Anyway,  here is what the paper says. Now we can all make Thai Rice Pudding in the comfort and safety of our own homes. I'm transcribing it word-for-word, down to the missing close-parenthesis in the first paragraph. ;-)

Snippet of an IM conversation with The Devil You Know (Het leven moet worden geleefd) (known here on LJ as tatterdamelion):

Catherine says:
What does your IM tag line mean?

The Devil you know...  says:
Life is to be lived....in Dutch.  

Catherine says:
Life *IS* to be lived in Dutch!

Catherine says:
It's all so clear to me now!


Because, you know -- Holland. (not to be confused with: "Because, you know... Belgium.")

In other vital news, gourmet peanut butter can be purchased here: http://www.pbloco.com/adult_pb.asp

Bacon.

Vodka.

From BrowniePointsBlog: Homemade Bacon Vodka.


I must make this... maybe I'll pick up some vodka tomorrow on my way back from the salon. That's right, boys and girls -- Vanity and Liquor, combined in one dangerous woman, right here. Watch yourselves.

I need some vodka anyway, so I can begin steeping the crystallized ginger in it for a new batch of Ginger Frappé.

Tonight was Andrew's "Harmonium" game. Right before the hypermuffin went to bed, I suddenly got the urge for something sweet. I'd been planning for awhile to make something called "Pumpkin Whip," preferably when I had guests to help me eat it, so I broke out the blender and put it together. It was good; Andrew really liked it. (The hypermuffin didn't.)


The game is still going as I type (9:46 PM). Andrew just told everyone that the "arena" battle currently going on sells four refreshments -- peacorn, popnuts, soda gum and chewing water.

Mmmmmm, chewing water.

I was surfing around a few minutes ago and found a Saturday Night Live skit called "Taco Town." If you haven't seen it, take a look... it's hilarious. I was laughing so hard everyone out in the main room thought I had completely lost it, and I had to take the laptop out and show everyone else what was so funny.

Oh, and speaking of funny... here's Tom Cruise being totally over-the-top "Tom Cruise crazy." http://gawker.com/5002269/the-cruise-indoctrination-video-scientology-tried-to-suppress

And finally, the song "Tom Cruise Crazy," by Jonathan Coulton. (Third one underneath "Funny Ones," the second box down.)

I need to stop now, otherwise I will come up with something else food- or Tom Cruise-related to add to this post. And you may not want that.

Another meat substitute, this one I've never heard of -- jackfruit! (Wikipedia article here.) I found out about this at Where's the Revolution?, a vegan recipe blog.

Intrigued, I consulted Dr. Google and found several links on using young, green, tasteless jackfruit as a meat substitute. Apparently this is done a lot in Asia, and I hear one can buy canned young green jackfruit at Asian markets, plus sometimes frozen jackfruit or even fresh.

Thread from "Post Punk Kitchen Forums" on jackfruit: http://www.postpunkkitchen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=43001
Thai Jackfruit Curry recipe: http://thaifood.about.com/od/vegetarianthairecipes/r/jackfruitcurry.htm
Yelp reviews of "Pure Luck Restaurant" in LA: http://www.yelp.com/biz/pure-luck-restaurant-los-angeles

Check out the pictures of barbecue jackfruit "pulled pork" sandwiches from the Post Punk Kitchen link -- this looks like real meat:

( Read more... )

Amazing!

Due to popular demand... :-)



And another one for good measure -- I made three batches of this, if I remember correctly, to give away to 5 friends for Christmas 2001. (I kept the sixth bottle for myself...)