Rainy days and salad days

There are few things that give me as much joy as a giant bowl of salad on a cold, overcast day. I can mentally put myself away from the cold and blustery city, and pretend to be some kind of happy herbivore, stolidly munching through my day's rations. I can imagine the warmth of the sun, the cool of the shade, the peace and quiet. For someone who dislikes nature as much as I do, I imagine myself in it a surprising amount. I am currently working my way through an enormous bowl of red leaf lettuce, spinach, red cabbage, olives, black beans, red onions, lemon juice, olive oil, cucumber, and sunflower seeds. Munch, munch, munch. Granted, few happy herbivores in the jungle would have access to such delicious fare, but I can certainly pretend for a bit, and escape from the overcast, dark day that's surrounding me. It started off well enough. I bolted out of bed at the crack of dawn (OK, more like 7:30, but I can give myself a little license here), and made kale and urad daal fritters. I added so much kale, garlic, and ginger, that the urad daal wasn't quite holding together, so I threw in a bit of rice flour too. I made a fresh pot of brown rice, and used some leftover kale to make a kale red lentil daal. Y'know. To go with the brown rice. All this took no time at all, because the kale was already chopped, the red lentils already cooked, and it was just a question of grating up some more ginger to make the tarka. 20 minutes later, I'm triumphantly out of the kitchen, with a rather hearty breakfast ready to roll. Since I soaked the brown rice the night before, it only took about 20 minutes to cook. That's the secret to sorting out breakfast quickly: have most of the prep done the night before, so that the morning itself, you can look like a hero. Nobody wants to wait while the delicious smells of garlic and ginger waft through the air, so the sooner you can get food on the table, the better. By the time I finished eating my breakfast, I was exhausted, and managed to conk out for a long nap. This is generally a Very Bad Idea, but I didn't have much of a choice when I found myself nodding off. By 10:00, I conked right out, and slept deeply until noon~ish. By the time I was done with round two of my morning ablutions, I was already running late. I ran into the bedroom, changed, threw the computer and Kindle and phone into the bag, and dashed out the door. By the time I got into the train station, I made it in just enough time to watch the train roll away. D'oh! Fortunately, I get into work, and am immediately inspired to cook, which meant that I managed to get everything done in an hour and small change. Into the oven the roasting dish went. But then, I made the mistake of looking outside, and seeing how gloomy and overcast it all looked. So I'm sitting here, with my enormous pile of greens, working on the next pile of paperwork, and imagining the sunshine and pretty days coming in again.

Saturday Cooking

On Saturday, a friend of mine (Erica) called me over to her house to get together to cook. This is probably going to be the only chance I'll get to go over there before I move next Saturday, so I figured it'd be a great opportunity to show her and her daughter how to get down the basics of cooking for vegans. Their food is mostly centred around a meat main dish, and a couple of sides, so I don't know what they expected when Steve and I came over!

We got in, and I immediately set a pot of lentils to start simmering, so that by the time we got back from the store, they'd be at least mostly done. We went to this place called the Fruit Emporium, where they had so many different kinds of fruits and vegetables, that I was running around like a kid opening presents on the day of his birthday. Kale, collard and beet greens, swiss chard, bok choy, cabbages as big as your head, cocoanut, yams, tiny little baby potatoes, yucca, cassava, pumpkin, butternut squash, eggplant (both Japanese and Italian), and so many others that I can't even remember them all. We piled the trolley full of vegetables, and went to pay.

Everything totalled up to $50.

She was quite shocked at that, because she's used to paying so much more for her weekly grocery bill. We lugged everything to her house, and started cooking. I showed her daughter how to do everything, from start a fresh soup to roasting vegetables in the oven with a spice rub. I kept the steps really simple, so that she could come back and try things out on her own.

All in all, we turned out 14 dishes. 3 of them were soups, there were four varieties of oven roasted vegetables, and the rest were random sides we composed on the stove top. Our friends who came over to help us eat all that food were raving about how it was so much fun to try out the different things we came up with, and enjoy everything so much! The star of the programme, however, was the lentil soup. For some reason, no matter how many times I make them, they always get big raves from the people who eat it.

Unfortunately, we lost our camera, so I can't upload pictures of all the food. :( I'm sure it'll turn up at some point when we get everything set up at home to move.

Back to normal, after a breif break.

I was off taking care of business elsewhere, so this place has been a bit neglected. I came home to find the fridge dead empty. No rice, no bread, no nothing. EEK! I arrived back in Florida on Wednesday night, and really needed to get cracking.

This is when I'm so thankful to myself for taking care of things far in advance. For one thing, I always keep at least a few litres of soup in the freezer. This means that regardless of how long I've been out of town, or preoccupied with other things, or just swamped for time, I'll always have a ready meal, waiting for rice and/or bread within 20 minutes (which is about how long it takes to reheat in the microwave, if you keep them in one litre increments). While the soup reheated, it was a simple question of throwing rice into my rice maker, adding water, and hitting the start button.

Additionally, we have a breadmaker, that my mom got for us from Freecycle a while back. Since I always keep a few packages of yeast in the pantry, it was a simple question of dumping in the flour, water, yeast, salt, and a bit of oil, then setting the time and hitting start. Again, I don't have to bother with anything complex after getting off of a flight that took entirely too much more time than it should have.

Finally, as always, I had some dried beans in my kitchen. On Thursday night in they went for a soak, so that when I woke up in the morning, it was a crock pot away from having fully cooked beans by the time I get home tonight. I soaked up two different batches of beans, so that I could have some variety for Saturday night. Tonight, when I'm done cooking the first variety, I'll get the second variety started in the crock pot overnight. By tomorrow when I wake up, I'll have a second variety of bean to keep things interesting.

Tomorrow morning, I'll lay down some moong beans to sprout. Those will take about a day or so to bring together, and will give me a third option to have dinner on the table. After all is said and done, beans bought on sale in the 12 - 16 oz dried packages keep indefinitely, and cost around $0.50 per package at the regular price. Rice is dirt cheap, and bread made at home is just as cheap. Meanwhile, for less than $10 or so, I've got enough of the staples for the week. Now all I have to do is spice them up, and round out our meals with some vegetables. That part's the easy part.