cellio | Entries tagged with food: recipes

Here's what I ended up doing for Shabbat lunch, as best I can recall.

Friday mid-day: put following in crock pot on high: two diced sweet potatoes, two diced white onions, one can diced tomatoes (not drained), one can great northern beans (all beans drained), some black pepper. Ran out of time; planned to do more later.

Picked up four more guests for lunch.

Added two more diced sweet potatoes, one can kidney beans, one can black beans, half a bag of fresh spinach, about two cubic inches of chopped ginger, about a cup of peanut butter (wanted more but ran out). Meant to add more onions and some red bell pepper but forgot. Decided against fresh broccoli in a Shabbat stew. Considered coconut milk but there was already a fair bit of liquid so didn't. I have a vague feeling that there was another vegetable involved but I can't recall it so maybe not.

Cooked until Shabbat was imminent (= about another hour), then took out crock, put heating unit on low, and put on timer to come on Shabbat morning. Inserted pot before leaving for services; probably cooked for about three hours or so before we ate. Served over brown rice (cooked before Shabbat and kept kinda warm). Also served fresh papaya (not a hit), carrot sticks (more of a hit), and apples (definitely more of a hit than the papaya). I'd considered making a spinach-based salad with fruit but didn't have time.

The adults mostly seemed to like the stew; I couldn't tell if the kids did. The kids seemed to think the papaya was weird (hence the apple), which doesn't surprise me. I think I was an adult before I ever encountered papaya other than as juice.

I unexpectedly have a vegan coming for Shabbat. (Actually, she'll be arriving tomorrow, but staying through.) Due to funeral arrangements and arrival of said guest, grocery shopping tomorrow isn't likely to happen.

I have in the house: rice (white and brown), beans (assorted), fake meat crumbles, sweet potatoes, acorn squash, assorted frozen veggies, and normal staples. I have no tofu at the moment.

One of the obvious answers is vegetarian chili (using the meat crumbles). I'm also thinking of either a peanut-based or curry-based stew served over rice; I'd use the sweet potatoes, onions, sturdy veggies, northern beans, tomatoes, and appropriate seasoning (peanut butter + ginger or curry). I don't know how well the squash would work; it would turn to mush, but maybe that's ok or maybe I shouldn't try. (If I had yellow squash I know that would work, but I don't.)

I welcome other ideas.

This was tasty (even though it involved neither garlic nor ginger) and easy.

Pull bag of frozen schwarma out of freezer. Conclude that there's not enough to be a main course for two people. Decide to improvise.

Dice some red potatoes and set to boil for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat oil in a skillet and fry schwarma. While that's happening, cut up some summer sausage to supplement.

Remove schwarma; add sausage and cook. Meanwhile, dice a couple of white onions.

Remove sausage; add onions, which pick up a nice flavor from being cooked in the meat fat. Dice half a red bell pepper and add that. Cook until the onions are getting limp.

The potatoes should be softening by now. Add them to the skillet. Dump in some pepper too.

Look at skillet and plate of meat and decide that putting it all in the skillet and then "poaching" eggs in that (the original plan) may make over-cooked meat. (And is it really poaching without significant liquid? So that might not have worked anyway.)

Add meat to skillet; meanwhile, fry eggs in another skillet.

Apply skillet contents to plates and top with eggs.

The recipe I had called for black beans, barbeque sauce, beef, beef broth, taco seasoning, chili powder, cumin, tomatoes, and sour cream (topping). I found barbeque sauce and taco seasoning interesting separately and surprising together, but I was feeling adventurous so I decided I could adapt this.

1 can (15oz) black beans
1 can (ditto) white northern beans (I didn't have enough black)
1 can (ditto) diced tomatoes (recipe called for a 28oz can)
2 diced plum tomatoes (hey, I do what I can :-) )
1 jar (16oz) plain barbeque sauce (no adjectives like "spicy" or "smoky")
1 packet taco seasoning
1t cumin
1t chili powder

Topped with sliced green onions, chopped cilantro, and cheddar and monterey-jack cheeses. (I was out of sour cream.)

This was reasonably tasty. The barbeque sauce did not clash with the taco seasoning, but it did make the chili sweeter than I wanted. Next time I may just use tomato sauce, or go half and half. I may also add diced sauted onions next time.

The spicing was very mild.

While the two different kinds of beans were an adaptation out of necessity, I like how that worked out.

There was too much liquid; perhaps that would have cooked down more if I'd let it simmer more than the 30 minutes called for in the recipe. But I'll probably reduce the liquid next time.

Friday night at services one of the people who coordinates the congregation's food program (for congregants) told me that they'll be delivering food to our rabbi's family soon. (He just got out of the hospital a few days ago.) He mentioned this to me specifically because I am one of the few active congregants (and contributors to this program) who keeps kosher, and so does the rabbi. So I said that even absent the kashrut reasoning I would be delighted to cook some food for them, and asked if there are specific types of food that are needed. I'm told that they specifically want soups, so I spent part of the afternoon trying to meet that need.

I made the following two soups. (Apologetic note to

celebrin: both contain tomatoes, but at least in the latter they could easily be omitted. For the former, you could omit them if you add more water/stock, I would think.)

( pumpkin soup )

( vegetable soup )

Both were tasty and have now been packed up for delivery. The pumpkin soup made about 2.5 quarts and the vegetable soup was about 2 quarts.

For dinner we then joined friends at a Japanese restaurant, where everyone else got sukiyaki. :-) It smelled very good. I'd like to figure out how to make it someday.

On a different note, while I didn't make it today I want to mention the nominally-African peanut stew I've made in the past, because someone on my friends list was asking about stews recently.

I don't make soup very often, so I'd welcome links to other good recipes.

This morning's roads were not nearly bad enough to justify the traffic conditions. The CD I was playing in the car looped. My normal commute is about 15 minutes (20 on a bad day). Feh.

I'm currently trying to learn to chant a torah passage that, if I'm successful, will be the longest one I've learned. This is true for most of the readers in this service (the annual local women's service), and they've told us to do as much as we can (so long as it's valid) and we can fill in the rest from a chumash if necessary. But I'm really trying to do it. And I've got good motivation: <geek> near the end of my section is the following trope sequence: pazeir pazeir t'lisha-g'dolah </geek>. That's fun! This is frilly show-off stuff, if I can just get there. :-)

I think the next president of my congregation likes me even though I've been a thorn in his side on some policy things (nothing personal). By law I'll be stepping down as worship chair in May, and I'm not currently on the board, so he wants to make sure that I have a leadership position I'm satisfied with. I told him that completing the Sh'liach K'hilah program and putting that learning to use, especially in worship contexts, is my top priority -- but that in the meantime he should put me on the budget committee so I can do my nit-picking early. :-) (If he was hoping I'd say "so, tell me about the executive track", he'll just have to be disappointed.)

Monday I got mail from Amazon UK saying that my copy of Blake's 7 (season 2) had shipped. It arrived today. I'm impressed! It's not as if I paid for any sort of expedited shipping; I just got lucky. Pity that I have other things I need to do in the next couple days, like work. :-)

Tonight's dinner featured grouper sprinkled with black pepper and cumin and pan-fried (use a non-stick pan and you can skip the fat). The recipe suggested a side of corn with bell peppers (I used red), green onions, a little cumin, lime juice, and honey. (The recipe called for cilantro too, but alas there was none to be found last night.) There was more cumin in the fish than in the corn, but Dani thought the corn was too spicy (and ate the fish without complaint). How odd. I liked both, and they did work well together.

( religious adjustment, food, books, movies, parents )

Friday our congregation had a dinner after (early) services. It's become our tradition to have a dinner for the last Shabbat of the secular year; it started the last time new year's eve fell on a Friday night.

The plan was a catered main dish with people bringing side dishes to share with the people at their tables, but you can't get a caterer for new year's eve. That was fine, though; we had declared that the main dish would be fish (because I'm the committee chair and I feel strongly about the kashrut issues that would arise if we served meat), so I told the person at the synagogue that I would take care of it. She thought that would be too much work; I explained about cooking three-course dinners for 100 people and that took care of it. Yay, SCA experience. :-)

I got huge amounts of undeserved praise for what was a very simple dish. I hadn't really planned on making it generally known that I was cooking, actually, but I failed to clue my rabbi in about that. Oops. People gushed about the fish, beyond the usual bounds of polite thanks. I was pretty surprised. (I also note with amusement that twice now I've said I wanted to serve fish for a big dinner and had people balk because "people don't like fish"; the other time had similar results. And no, I'm not some sort of fish expert.)

Ok, for the curious: spray or oil a pan, lay grouper fillets in pan, top with thinly-sliced white onions, pour a little olive oil over that, apply spices (garlic powder, oregano, black pepper), top with diced tomatoes. Seal with foil, bake at 425. Check after 20 minutes. Because we were cooking for 55, I used canned tomatoes; in the past I've used sliced plum tomatoes instead, in which case you want to add a little liquid, either tomato sauce or white wine. Sprinkle with chopped fresh parsley right before serving.

I specifically chose grouper for this because it's a very durable and forgiving fish. I knew that we were going to have to hold this at low temperature for a couple hours (Shabbat started two hours before dinner), and I know that cooking times can get out of whack when dealing with large quantities and fully-loaded ovens. (I had two layers of fish in each pan and had to bake it for 30 minutes before turning the ovens down to 200 to hold.) You can do stuff like that to grouper; don't try this with cod. It'll disintegrate -- or, if you didn't add enough liquid, dry out.

There were a lot of people at the polls this morning, but the folks in charge were running things very efficiently so I was in and out in about 10 minutes. The building where I vote actually serves four voting districts; this was the first time they split them out into multiple rooms, I assume for crowd control. The campaigners outside were reasonably well-behaved too, and down in numbers from the past. Only one person tried to push paper into my hands. There was one person from MoveOn there, but I didn't interact with her so I don't know what she wanted.

Tonight we are going to an election-night party. Not that I think we'll know the results tonight or even tomorrow, but hanging out with friends and eating political food is more fun than staying home. (I'm not sure what constitutes "political food" this year. I failed to look up the recipe for mudslides in time to procure ingredients.)

Sunday lorimelton and ralphmelton fed me a new delicacy. Take Nutter Butter cookies and dip in white chocolate. (They then added two tiny chocolate chips for eyes -- making a ghost.) Yum! I can feel the arteries hardening as I eat them, of course; I guess it's good that they only gave me two to take home, and that I'm probably too lazy to make them myself. But...wow.

A friend sent me this article about Shabbat-compliant kitchen appliances. It's an interesting (quick) read.

This was really good. Summarized from Fish: the Basics (which I've mentioned before).

For 1 - 1.5 pounds of firm fish fillets (I used ocean perch):

Mix 0.5C flour, 1t salt, 1t dried marjoram (they give alternatives), ground white pepper to taste (not black), some paprika. Spread the mixture on a plate.

Rinse fillets, roll in flour mix to coat, shake off excess, set aside.

In a skillet, heat about 1T butter and 1T olive oil. They should be hot but the butter shouldn't brown. Add the fish; turn when the edges look crispy. The book says 2-10 minutes total depending on thickness; I ended up at about 6 minutes over medium-high heat (translation: started high and then turned down to medium when I worried about heating all the way through without overcooking outsides -- I'm not very practiced at pan-frying).

I'm sure this is calorie-laden with all that fat and stuff (just checked -- yeah, FitDay agrees with that assessment), but boy was it tasty! The white pepper gave it a nice little non-hot zing. (Note to self: a second pepper mill, dedicated to white peppercorns, would be a nice and inexpensive improvement on the mortar and pestle. Yeah, blah blah spice grinder blah blah. Someday. How do you clean them so your grains of paradise don't taste like white pepper?) The recipe suggested some cayenne pepper or cumin as an option, but I didn't do that this time.

I have no idea what the culinary and/or chemical effects of using two different fats in the pan are.

The pot-luck invitation calls for dishes based on song lyrics. I wanted to make something parve (neither meat nor dairy), to keep my options open.

Carrot Juice is Murder (also known as "Screams of the Vegetables") by the Arrogant Worms seemed to be just the thing. Excerpt:

I've heard the screams of the vegetables (scream scream scream)
Watching their skins being peeled (having their insides revealed)
Grated and steamed with no mercy (burning off calories)
How do you think that feels (bet it hurts really bad)
Carrot juice constitutes murder (and that's a real crime)
Greenhouses prisons for slaves (let my vegetables grow)
It's time to stop all this gardening (it's dirty as hell)
Let's call a spade a spade (it's a spade it's a spade it's a spade)

( implementation )

This was really good. From Fish, the Basics by Shirley King (typing from memory):

Put 1T butter, 2T olive oil, 1 clove minced garlic, and 1T chopped ginger in a casserole, cover with plastic (leaving a side vent), and microwave for 2 minutes.

Wash/dry 8oz fresh spinach, mix into casserole to coat, re-apply plastic, and microwave for 2 minutes.

Sprinkle with salt, then lay 2 pieces orange roughy on the spinach and cover with some raw spinach. Re-apply plastic and microwave for 3 minutes.

Sprinkle with 2 sliced scallions, re-cover, microwave 4 minutes. Check for doneness; cook another 30 seconds if needed.

I would like to figure out how to adapt this for oven use, because the largest casserole I have that fits in the microwave could maybe accommodate three pieces of fish. I want to be able to make this for guests.

This is the pineapple kugel recipe I mentioned yesterday. My adaptations: low-fat cheeses, 2 16-ounce cans of pineapple, and omitted the brown sugar. (I correctly judged that it would be sweet enough without. Next time I'll reduce the sugar and keep the brown sugar.) This made two 8x8 pans with three layers of noodles and two layers of the cheese and pineapple.

The chicken recipe is from The Book of Jewish Food by Claudia Roden and is described as traditional Moroccan:

Poulet aux Dattes

6 chicken quarters [I used boneless skinless breasts]
4 T peanut or sunflower oil [used olive]
1 pound onions, coarsely chopped
2 t cinnamon [used cassia]
0.75 t mace
0.25 t nutmeg
1 T honey
salt and lots of black pepper
0.5 pound dates, pitted [used some chopped & some whole pitted]
juice of 1 lemon
pinch of saffron [I mashed the saffron in the lemon juice to draw out the color]
0.5 C blanched almonds, toasted or fried [I fried them]

Saute chicken in oil for a few minutes to brown. Remove chicken, add onions, cook until soft. Add cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, honey, ~1.75C water; stir well. Add chicken, bring to boil, add salt and pepper, simmer for 25 minutes [I covered the pan]. Add dates, lemon juice, saffron and cook for 5-10 minutes until chicken is tender. Sprinkle almonds on top before serving.

The recipe advises tasting to get the right balance of spices, and suggests that lots of pepper will be needed to offset the sweetness. I wasn't yet ready to eat meat, so I did it by smell and probably under-peppered it.

This was published in the local newspaper recently and was attributed to Nava Atlas. I made it tonight and it was really tasty. I'm paraphrasing the recipe 'cause I'm lazy. ( recipe and notes )

Friday night the sisterhood led Shabbat services. (They do this once a year. Brotherhood did theirs last month.) While they mostly did a good job with the individual parts, the whole was extremely disappointing. ( rant )

Friday's email brought a short reading list for the sh'liach k'hilah program. I am pleased that the list consists entirely of books I do not already own. This makes me even more optimistic about the program teaching me lots of things I don't already know. I expected that to be the case, but now I have some evidence to support that belief. (They haven't yet sent a detailed curriculum description.)

Saturday evening we went to an SCA dinner on the theme of "travelling food". There were more desserts than non-desserts, which in retrospect makes sense. Cookies are an obvious thing to make. I should have made something main-dish-y instead of individual strawberry tarts. It was a fun dinner, and I got to meet some new cats. :-) From there we went to an impromptu party that lefkowitzga threw together around some last-minute guests from out of town. She's a great party host, and I had fun talking with some people I don't see as often as I'd like.

Sunday dinner was especially tasty this week. ralphmelton grilled steaks that were very good; we concluded that the spice rub called "Chicago style" that he got at Penzey's was especially good. (I don't know what's in it. Eventually I will send agents to Penzey's to do some shopping for me, as the local instance has no hours that are compatable with working normal hours and keeping Shabbat.)

Random food note: sponge cake grilled for about 30 seconds per side and then topped with fruit is really good.

Eric Bogle, meet Gary Trudeau and Darby Conley (link via

browngirl and several others).

On a lighter note, someone has finally given Jack Chick's "Dark Dungeons" MST3K treatment (link via autographedcat).

A guide to those bizarre glyphs that have replaced actual words on the lanudering instructions on some clothes (link via bhakti). Most bizarre entry, presumably included only for the sake of completeness: "do not dry".

Ok, Enterprise gets points for not using the time-travel reset button I feared they might use after "Azati Prime", but... ugh. I don't like the direction some of our characters are moving in. Archer should not get off easy even if he does save the world.

Last Sunday on the way to the bunny melt we were held up by a large number of police cars that seemed to be in an awful hurry. I counted eleven, and I didn't start counting until I noticed that this was not your run-of-the-mill car or two. As they came through the intersection we were stopped at they peeled off in different directions, so we were guessing it was a containment effort, but we had no further information. It wasn't until I caught up on newspapers last week that I realized that we were right in the path of a chase involving kidnapping and ultimately murder. Ouch. (They chased the guy from somewhere in the west end, onto the parkway, off into my neighborhood, through another neighborhood or two, back onto the parkway, and then onto the turnpike, where he later made an illegal U-turn and finally crashed at an exit.)

Yesterday I cooked red snapper for the first time. I was unsure what other fish might be an adequate substitute if they didn't have any at the store, but I got lucky. (Having now worked with it, if I had to make a substitution I think I'd go for haddock or monkfish -- similar consistency and not strongly flavored. Other opinions welcome.) Here's what I did, which turned out well: brown onions and lots [1] of garlic in olive oil, then add chopped parsley, salt & pepper to taste, and some white wine. Cook down (reduce by half), then add diced tomatoes (I didn't drain the liquid from the can but probably should have). Simmer a few minutes. Then spread half of this in a greased casserole, put the fish on top (in a single layer), spread the rest of the sauce on top, and bake for about 40 minutes at 350. Yummy! (I was working from a recipe, but I tend to be pretty casual about measuring so you're not getting quantities unless you ask.) ([1] "Lots" refers to the conventional understanding of garlic quantity, not to this writer's personal preferences.)

Happy birthday

tangerinpenguin!

How not to manage a software project #173: (overheard and taken out of context) "...and if we assume that the tooth fairy knows Java...".)

I have this pasta salad that I wanted to use up, but in dinner-sized portions rather than side-dish-sized portions. The salad has assorted vegetables in it and an oil-based dressing, but no mayo. This worked: mix with grated cheese and sour cream, put in casserole, sprinkle top with more cheese, and bake. I guess it's sort of like lasagna and sort of like a kugel, but with (in this case) tri-color springs instead of conventional noodles. But hey, it worked!

From a local newspaper: An interview with the rat lady (a local SCA person who is well-known at Pennsic as a purveyor of plague rats). She's a neat person. It's a pity the article didn't quote her shpiel -- it changes over time, but tends to include things like "they work on your friends, they work on your enemies, they even work on the Board of Directors -- I'll bet you didn't know anything worked on the Board of Directors...".

Using discomfort as a social yardstick, from dmnsqrl.

Okaaay... "thingamabob" is sort of in the dictionary. But I don't think the first entry (from American Heritage) counts. :-)

(This arose from a bit of linguistic anthropology. The words I use for this are "thingamajig" (spoken only, except in meta-conversations like this) or (more common) "doohickey" or "thingy"; Dani uses "thingamabob".)

I persuaded a developer today to implement the correct, general solution to a problem, rather than the expedient solution that would have been good enough for his current needs (only) but would be hard to maintain. Yay. As an extra bonus, I anticipated one area where he might have been tempted to hard-code a value and persuaded him not to. I love it when these things work. :-)

Speaking of developer interactions, it's nice when "how do I do such-and-such with this interface?" generates the response "you're right, that should be supported; I'll take care of it". :-) (I thought the problem was my lack of knowledge, not his lack of support.)

I tried a new-to-me recipe for fish stew tonight (thanks src). It had a mix of spices that struck me as unusual, but it works well. Definitely a keeper. I couldn't find cellophane noodles (would that be dry, frozen, or refrigerated?), so I served it over rice and that worked.

(For anyone who's wondering, src is her initials, not a Unix reference. I didn't get that right away either. :-) )

Seasonal food question: What goes well with latkes? I don't mean the sour-cream-vs-applesauce question; I mean: what (dinner) main courses work well with potato pancakes? Suggestions for dairy (or parve) options are especially welcome, but meat is fine too.

We pretty much completed our holiday shopping (for my relatives) last night. Not only did we go to some actual physical stores, but we even ventured into a mall. Haven't done that in years, but the only local instance of a certain store was in the mall, so off we went. It was surprisingly uncrowded. I wonder if that's because shopping is moving online, because we're between waves of shoppers (the ones who were done in October and the ones who will start on December 23), or because people just aren't shopping as much. As a bonus, yesterday featured the good weather for this week.

We did a chunk of our shopping online, of course (we rarely go that long between instances of giving Amazon our money). But sometimes you've just got to see the item in person.

The release of Blake's 7 on DVD has been delayed yet again. Amazon.uk sends the most polite apologies for things beyond their control, in contrast to most US companies. And it's not like they have my money (only my credit-card info), so I couldn't possibly have any complaint against them. I wonder if the BBC's plan to put all their old stuff online will preclude DVD releases. I don't want to watch TV while sitting at my desk; I want to watch it while sitting in the comfy chair in front of the 32" TV.

I've been doing a lot of D&D catch-up in ralph_dnd. One more major missive to go, and then I'll be caught up to where the characters are. I don't usually write fiction, and this is only semi-fiction because it's reaction to events that have occurred in a shared game -- which is probably why I can write it at all. I've never been very good with fiction, but I seem to do ok when I've got hooks into a set of characters.

I've been meaning to write a proper review of The Kiruv Files for a couple weeks now, but I probably won't get to it this week either. Next week, maybe. If I keep saying that, it'll be true eventually. :-)

Tonight's commute featured ugly traffic snarls. There was an accident on 376 that closed the road in both directions for a while; I don't use that highway, but there was spillover. What surprised me was where the spillover was; after sailing through what I thought would be the worst part, I spent 15 minutes going about two blocks near my house. Unfortunately, those two blocks were right after the point where I could have made a better decision. Oops. :-) (Mind, the accident was around 4:00, and I was doing this after 6:30...)

Tonight for the choir dinner I made broccoli with garlic sauce. I found a recipe that involved the microwave rather than stir-frying, and thought that would be more resilient for a potluck situation. I'm reasonably pleased with how it came out, though I expected a slightly thicker sauce from the description. But it's something I would definitely make again.

Recipe (adapted from something from the Splenda folks, and scaled for about 20 people):

2 "units" fresh broccoli [1]
2 bunches of scallions, chopped
1 bulb garlic, minced [2]
0.5C water [3]
2T soy sauce
2T cornstarch
2t Splenda (I assume sugar would work :-) )
3T chopped cilantro (about 3/4 of a package)
1-2t sesame oil

Chop broccoli and put in casserole.

Combine everything else except the seasme oil and pour over broccoli. Nuke (covered) for 4-5 minutes, stir (making sure to get sauce up from bottom), repeat. (I ended up going a total of 11 minutes, presumably due to the large volume.) Sauce should thicken to coat broccoli.

Stir in oil and serve.

[1] Locally the grocery store sells bunches of broccoli, usually 2-3 stalks held together with a rubber band. Two of those. Didn't think to weigh -- maybe 3 pounds?

[2] Bulb, not clove. I think this was the right amount of garlic, or a bit on the underpowered side. I get the impression that some folks might have thought it a bit much.

[3] The recipe called for beef broth, but the only buillon I had has MSG in it and one of the attendees is allergic, so I just used water this time.

(I need a food icon, but am not feeling inspired. Any takers?)

Update 12/9/03: Does not reheat well.

I'm currently thinking of November 8 for the party.

I'm having fun with the Small Worlds project (that six-degrees-of-separation experiment). Tonight I got a new target, instantly knew whom to send it on to, and decided to try my luck again. And I instantly knew whom to send that one on to, so I tried again. That's when the site told me "no more targets for you". Oops.

None of my chains have reached targets yet; the longest chain so far is four people (not counting me). I have seen no targets living in Europe, though a couple in North Amaerica and some in places much more remote. How peculiar. Only one target has sent me to Mapquest to figure out where the heck that country is.

Tonight we went to an SCA pot-luck dinner. I needed to make something that could be served cold (Shabbat issues), and when browsing a cookbook I came across an allegedly-Turkish recipe for stuffed peppers (vegetarian) that specifically said to serve them cold, so I decided to try it. (Yeah, peppers aren't SCA-period, but the host had already announced he was serving chili. We don't always strive for authenticity.) They came out well and were popular; I'll have to make them again. I used red and orange peppers; I loathe green (bell) peppers. Because there was also an informal "hot food" theme going, I also stuffed a couple jalopenos and some other small hot peppers. (They were mislabelled in the store, so I don't know what they were. But definitely not the advertised banana peppers.) The stuffing is rice with onions, raisins, pine nuts, dill, mint (that surprised me), tomato, oil, and lemon juice (and salt and pepper). I realized after I'd made them that this was not dissimilar in principle from stuffed grape leaves. Mmm, grape leaves. I've never made those.

Shabbat services went well this morning. Today's torah reader did a good job with both the reading and conducting the service. We went longer today (she gave more of a drash and also read haftarah); some people complained that it was too long (violated their expectations), so we'll have to see how this works out over time. I won't be there next week (SCA conflict), alas. I feel bad when I miss this minyan, and especially now when we're doing something new that I'm shepherding. I'll get someone else to collect data and feedback for me next week.

The new season of Enterprise is off to a reasonable start so far. I hope they can actually pull off this story line convincingly; we know (because it's Trek and because this series is a prequel) that the good guys will ultimately succeed in reversing the Xindi attack on Earth. Now from what we know so far, the Xindi are operating from the vantage point of several hundred years in the future. Thus, they ought to already know what happened when they took on the Enterprise. It must be the same timeline, because if tinkering with the past creates a branch and an alternate reality, nothing they do can change the future they come from. I just hope the authors have spent more time thinking about this than I just have. :-)

We're up to "Acts of Sacrifice" in the B5 reruns. When the episode started I found that I remembered it entirely for its silly (non-arc) plot, and not for the serious (arc) plot. I enjoy watching Andreas Katsulas (G'kar); even under all the makeup and prosthetics and stuff, he can convey oodles with just a look sometimes. And everything comes through a lot better on a 32" TV and a DVD than it did on a 25" TV and videotape.

We ended up with a small group for the NetBill dinner last night. (NetBill was a past job, and most of us were/are friends.) One person ended up not being able to come at the last minute, and all the SOs turned out to be unavailable, so it was just four of us. It was a fun gathering, though, and people stayed until sometime after 1am.

Because the dinner started before Shabbat ended, I did a combination of pre-cooking and using the crock pot on a timer. Since Dani was away at a convention, I didn't need to use the crock pot for lunch. (I just ate cold foods instead.) I adapted a recipe I've previously made in the oven for the crock pot and it came out well.

What I did:

Brown chicken breasts in a skillet in hot oil. Put them in the crock pot, and in the same oil cook chopped onions for a couple minutes (cooked but not thoroughly limp). Throw those into the crock pot, along with diced apples, raisins that have been soaked in water, curry powder, a little honey, and white wine. Cook.

(I did all of this Thursday night, including cooking the pot for a couple hours on high to make sure the meat wasn't raw. Friday I set the crock pot on a timer on low and put the pot back in on Saturday around noon for a 7:30 dinner.)

Proportions: 8 chicken breasts, 4 small white onions, 4 small apples, about 0.5C raisins, about 2T honey, about 1T curry, about 2C wine. This was more liquid than was actually necessary, but that's hard to judge with crock pots sometimes, especially when they're full as this one was. I think I would have preferred a little more of both apples and onions, but the pot was full. If I made this with 4-6 pieces of chicken I'd probably keep the amounts of everything else (except wine) the same. I deliberately kept the curry level mild; this was not hot and zippy but was quite tasty. (I also didn't use one of the hotter curries.)

I'm pleased with the way the lunch I improvised for today came out.

I had thawed out the last chunk of that veal roast I bought for "vam" experiments. (We have since abandoned those experiments, at least for now.) Thursday night's D&D game went later than I'd expected, so I didn't do anything with it that night. Friday morning I put it, a can of chicken broth, half a can of water, some (frozen) carrots, spinach, barley, dried onions, one cut-up potato, salt, pepper, and oregano into the crock pot, set it on low, and went to work. (This was more liquid than I thought it would need, but I also wouldn't be home to monitor it.) I figured I'd cut up the meat into smaller bits when I got home; my eventual goal was stew, not a roast in liquid.

When I got home the meat was very tender and practically fell apart for me while I was cutting it up. (Result: smaller-than-planned pieces.) I put all of this back into the pot, along with one cut-up leek (I'd forgotten the leeks in the morning), more salt and pepper, and more spinach. This went into the fridge until the timed reheat this morning.

The meat was tender; sometimes my crock-pot stew is too tough, though I've never used veal before. The flavors mingled nicely. And it wasn't too much liquid, as it turned out. Next time I'll leave out the potato, and I might try rice instead of barley.

Embla is two for two with the attic renovations. Today I came home to find that the door to the attic was closed, with her on the other side of the door. And much of the floor freshly painted. I didn't explore for kitty footprints in the paint. (And this is after I told the contractor that the cats like to hide up there...)

Last night's D&D game was fun. It looked like it was going to be a "sideline" story, just a random adventure and excuse to play with some new toys, and it turned out to be part of the overall story. I thought that was nifty. It looked like Ralph meant for it to be a little more threatening than it turned out to be; calibrating adventures has got to be hard.

Someone described to me an easy sauce for salmon: take sour cream and dijon mustard in approximately equal quantities, mix, spread over salmon, bake. (I always bake salmon wrapped up in foil so it doesn't dry out.) We had this tonight and it was tasty.

According to fitday.com, I get more than the RDA of most vitamins (300% of Vitamin A this past month, 240% of Vitamin C, a few other high numbers, and most others in the 100-120% range). There are two exceptions: Vitamin D at 52% and Vitamin K (what the heck is that?) at 33%. They do not, however, provide the next step in useful feedback: what foods would change that.

(While I'm being statistical, over that same month I've averaged (daily) 80g of protein, 57g of fat, 210g carb, 19g fiber, with saturated, poly, and mono fats being pretty much evenly split. I don't know if this is actually good.)

I was a little disappointed by tonight's "West Wing". The topic of parental degeneration (Alzheimer's) is hard to do well in 43 minutes, but I've come to expect the nearly-impossible from this show and this time it didn't quite work. Oh well. (On a related note, we borrowed "Sports Night" tapes recently; I hope to sit down to watch several episodes in the next few days. Right after Shabbat, perhaps.)

I got some much-needed QA resources at work today, and this has done much to increase my confidence in a part of my work for this next release. Yay, QA!

This evening we went to an SCA household dinner. The theme was "old foods"; since I had failed to come up with any ideas around the "green and fuzzy" theme, we opted for what we hoped was entertainingly-faked documentation instead. We knew the host likes devilled eggs (as do I), so we told her we were bringing "devilled dodo eggs", and brought a facsimile of the recipe in the original hiroglyphics to prove it. Ok, maybe Mark Twain's "Diary of Adam and Eve" isn't really a primary source. :-)

I wanted to color the eggs in some way, just to give them an unusual appearance. I thought that I would get a purple hue by simmering them for a few hours in beet juice (with some white wine to help leech out color), but what I actually got was brown, not purple. Which was ok -- just unexpected. (I boiled the eggs, then rolled them around to crack the shells, and then simmered those. I completely peeled one egg to act as a color indicator, so I could check progress easily. On the other eggs I got a nice mottled effect.)

I have seen deep purple hard-boiled eggs. It's a striking effect with devilled eggs -- a nice contrast to the yellow filling. I wonder whether the process involved natural agents or chemicals.

We should take a turn for dinner sometime in the next several months, so I would like to grab a date around Purim and do "disguised foods". As part of this, I need to hit up my friend Yaakov for his "ham" recipe; I visited him for Purim last year and had this, and it was a remarkable imitation of real ham! I'm especially impressed because I'm pretty sure Yaakov has never tasted the real thing. (He called it "vam", so I infer that it's really veal. I don't actually know; Yaakov can say "here, taste this" to me and I'll do it without further questions.)

Monica

vegan stew

vegan Shabbat food

dinner

vegetarian chili

day of soup

short takes

interviewed by celebrin

Shabbat dinner

election-day quickies

pan-fried fish

screaming stew

fish with ginger and spinach

foody bits (kugel, chicken)

nominally-African vegetarian stew

weekend of food, and Shabbat

short takes

short takes

short takes

short takes

broccoli with garlic sauce

weekend short takes

dinner last night

veal "stew"

short takes

food tricks

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