Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 6

No shopping today.

Cooking and eating, in order:

• bottomless cup of green tea
• leftover roasted veggies from last night
• a navel orange (not the one I bought yesterday but one I bought last Tuesday, or was it Saturday?)
• the last two of the eggs from D.'s chickens, fried sunny-side up in a little olive oil, and two slices of toasted Russian sourdough (I don't really count this as cooking, but yes, I fried the eggs and toasted the toast)
• a tangelo
• one last hamantasch (yes, that really is the singular of hamantaschen, and no, I didn't know that either until yesterday)
  
• a kiwi
• cooked an Indian-style stew (this can be made with any veggies you have around that you think would taste good; I use different things each time, and this was what I had today that seemed right) to eat for lunch tomorrow and over the whole week:
  1. Chop a medium onion.
  2. Heat some olive oil in a smallish soup pot or large saute pan or saucepan over high heat.
  3. Add a few cardamom pods, a couple teaspoons of fenugreek, and a generous tablespoon each of cumin seeds and mustard seeds.
  4. When the seeds start to fry and burst, add the onion. Add salt. Turn the heat down if necessary to keep from scorching.
  5. Chop some garlic (I used four cloves today) and add them to the pot with a generous amount (a tablespoon or two?) of ground cumin and a smaller amount of coriander, and an even smaller amount of turmeric.
  6. Don't burn yourself on the side of the pot, right on your wrist tattoo, while adding the spices. Oops, too late.
  7. Add a bit of water to the pot to keep everything from burning, and turn it down again.
  8. Chop three potatoes and add them to the pot along with more salt.
  9. Separate cauliflower into florets and add to the pot.
  10. Add a big can of garbanzo beans, drained, and then add some water—you can add enough to cover all the veggies, if you want it relatively wet, but I'm not looking for anything super-soupy today so I am going light on the water. If I had veggie broth I would use that instead, but I don't.
  11. Wash a bunch of chard, chop the stems, and add them to the pot.
  12. Simmer for a while, and when potatoes are tender, chop the chard leaves and add them, too.
  13. Simmer a little more and then taste for seasoning. Correct seasoning and simmer some more.
  14. Stick in it the fridge for tomorrow's lunch and beyond. It keeps well and will be even more flavorful after sitting overnight.
  
• cooked some rice in the rice cooker
• (back to eating now) some dried apricots and Ak-mak crackers, oh I love them so
  
• a mandarin from yesterday's market
• a piece of none-too-crisp celery out of the crisper dipped in some peanut sauce I made for a party several weeks ago (that stuff has so much garlic in it, it keeps for months)
  
• some broccoli sauteed with the remaining tofu I marinated on Friday, over some rice from the rice cooker

UPDATE:

• some Mary's Gone Crackers, black pepper flavor
• one of those chocolate truffles I mentioned the other day
• two veeeeery theeeeen slices of Russian sourdough (untoasted), spread with the very last of the Earth Balance
  

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 5

Because my friend M. is coming over to cook dinner tonight, this morning I had to do something I usually avoid: a Saturday farmers market. I went to the Grand Lake one, which is insanely crowded and overwhelming and, in addition to all the farmers and cooked-food stands, features many vendors of items like jewelry, t-shirts, and vibrational healing elixers.

So it's not my favorite place to be, but it was gorgeous out this morning, and I ran into my friends C. and E. (who both said they've been reading, so: Hi C. and E.!) and we gabbed about the great meals we've had lately (me: Suriya; them: the place C.'s stepmother opened recently whose name I can never remember, even though they told me three times this morning and we made plans to eat there next weekend) and it was lovely.

And I bought:

• brussels sprouts
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• a head of garlic
• three onions
• two apples (one pink lady and one fuji)
• three mandarins
• one navel orange
• two white-fleshed sweet potatoes
• a blueberry bran muffin from the best vegan bakery I have ever encountered

The veggies I bought specifically for tonight (except the onions and garlic, which I just needed on general principles), and the fruit because I was enticed by samples.The muffin was breakfast.

In addition to the muffin, I ate a lot of samples, bite-sized tidbits of:

• Brazilian cheese bread (wheat free but clearly refined; it was pleasantly chewy, not particularly cheesy, and a nice bit of thing but not worth buying even if it had fit the rules)
• dried peach
• tomato (decent but watery; clearly, doesn't matter how warm your greenhouse is, out-of-season tomatoes are never going to be worth it)
• navel orange (at two different stands)
• maple-sweetened pecan granola
• lentils from the vegan soul food stand—next time I go to that market I am going to try to be ready for lunch so I can get a whole plate from them
• Argentinian-style beef empanada, with cumin, raisins, and hard-boiled egg, among other things (this was actually not a sample but a bite of what C. bought); yes, I have been quite meat-tastic lately, and in fact I will be writing a whole post about this soon, as I have been craving meat a lot
• a walnut
• a piece of fuji apple and a piece of pink lady apple

Lunch was leftover Thai food over brown rice still warm in the rice cooker form yesterday, and the fuji apple I just bought. There may be some afternoon snacking involving fruit; I'll update tomorrow if necessary.

For dinner M. and I are roasting vegetables and making tempeh from a very simple recipe given to me my my friend D., who was so influential in getting me started on my whole whole-foods thang: Toss cubed tempeh with soy sauce, onion powder, garlic powder, and nutritional yeast; fry in a generous amount of peanut oil until browned and crispy. I have a general distate for garlic and onion powder, but for this recipe their fresh or real forms wouldn't really work, so I go with it. You can also use other spices like cumin instead, but I like it this way.

Soundtrack to this post: my friend Kate Isenberg's CD that I bought at her CD release party last night. It's frackin' fantastic.

UPDATE: I ate a kiwi as an afternoon snack after the original post. Dinner was exactly as expected, but with a glass of red wine out of the fridge (open bottle from a party a couple weeks ago) and some unbelievably good homemade apricot hamantaschen that M. brought with her. I'm pretty sure they had butter in them, and I know they had white flour and sugar. Mmmmmmmm.

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 4

There has been cooking today! Exciting.

I made garlic-ginger tofu with dino kale and brown rice. Here's how:

• put rice in the rice cooker
• press tofu blocks under a weighted plate for about a half-hour (less is okay but the full time is better)
  
• put into a pie plate: one tablespoon grated ginger, one tablespoon minced garlic, three tablespoons sauce, two tablespoons light (untoasted) sesame oil, one tablespoon dark (toasted) sesame oil, some red pepper flakes, and a bit of sugar (optional); mix it all together
• slice tofu into slabs and nestle it into the marinade; let sit for as long as you can (this keeps in the fridge for up to a week; today I left it on the counter for just over an hour)
• wash and chop kale
• heat some of the marinade in a skillet or saute pan on high heat (make sure you get some garlic and ginger in there)
• add kale and saute for a few minutes, until it's about half cooked (you might need to add a tablespoon or so of water to help it steam a bit if it looks like it might burn)
• add some tofu slabs and fry; flip the slabs when they are browned on one side
• when they are browned on the other side, stick some rice in a bowl and put the whole mess of tofu and kale on top

And now I have three small slabs of tofu sitting in marinade for me to eat anytime in the next several days—all I'll have to do is fry 'em up.

Eating:

• bottomless cup of tea (duh)
• two slices of toasted cornbread with Earth Balance (that's it for this loaf of cornbread; these were the heels and it's all gone)
• the aforementioned kale n' tofu
• a kiwi
• a tangelo
• an old apple with some peanut butter; this is the last of my old apples, thankfully—maybe I'll buy some more at the next market, but frankly I have been feeling not so appley lately
• two thin slices of Russian sourdough with Earth Balance (it's almost gone—I have enough for one more slice of toast and then I am free of temptation until someone buys more and leaves it at my house)

Dinner will be Thai food. There will probably also be drinks.

UPDATE: Dinner was something called Gaeng Ho, which I had never seen on a menu before and had more different kinds of vegetables than any one thing I have ever eaten. It was awesome. It had a few cellophane noodles, tofu, broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, spinach, some kind of squash, carrots, baby corn, eggplant, and a chunk or two of zucchini. All with basil and a red curry sauce that was a lot thicker and with way less coconut milk (maybe even none) than your typical red curry. Can I just say this again? It. Was. Awesome. Suriya. Go there. A little more than you're used to spending on dinner, but worth it.

There was no drinking, not even at the bar we went to afterwards for a show. But by the time I got home I was starving, so I had a midnight snack of generic shredded wheat and organic plain yogurt, topped with some dried fruit. And a chocolate truffle from a little package that Boston J. bought for me at the farmers market when she was visiting a few weeks ago. It's one of those truffles that's teeny-tiny but so incredibly good and satisfying that you don't need it to be any bigger (and you can't eat more than one at once).