Hope I don't fall off the make-my-own-lunch wagon this time around. It just takes 5 minutes, but it's so hard to get up 5 minutes early. Now that the extra hour has factored in, I am hoping to psychologically kid myself by not changing the clocks. Thus, theoretically I would wake up an hour ahead. Heheh, I love this little wicker gate to future insanity.

(e:libertad), you really just need a lunch box with a lid, like this one:


(My lunch last Friday.)

Thanks to (e:jbeatty) in more senses than one...

All hail Lebanese cooking! Since this delightful little dish has an unpronounceable Arabic/Lebanese name, I decided to be more than a little inspired by beatty's book and blog.

... is my own! New and improved, with 75% less fat and 1000% more happiness.




Recipé:
Place a high fibre pita bread (available at wegmans) on a plate.
Layer with thinly sliced tomatoes.
Layer with chunks of cheese curd cheese (from Guercio's)
Layer with sliced red onions
Sprinkle with dried basil and oregano
Layer with a generous dose of red chillie powder
Layer with sliced capsicum/bell peppers.
Sprinkle a generous dose of salt.

Pop into microwave and cook on high for 10 minutes.
File this recipé under the generic classification of "relatively healthier fast food".

A view of the gorgeous skies, from my flat window!

My department had a spate of office moves recently and enough trash was generated to choke a small island off the coast of the Caribbean. On persistent prodding of the maintainence staff, secretaries and other people in power, I finally came to the most appalling conclusion that Roswell does not have a recycling plan!

Yes, all those recycle bins in your offices at Roswell are a psychological device for employees so that we can go on living in bliss and believe that we are recycling all those reams of paper, cardboard, plastic and glass!

For an institute battling cancer, this is most unacceptable behaviour. Worse is the deception of its employees by placing dummy recycle bins whose contents will be dumped into general trash when the employees go home.

I am going to make an official complaint to Dr.Trump. Can other concerned Roswellers please make the effort to make a complaint too? Your voice can be crucial to force the institute to be more environmentally responsible and stop polluting Buffalo's landfills with totally recycle-able trash.

Thanks!

I downloaded a bunch of recipes, packed them all together and uploaded them here:

I know. I know. I should probably have typed out the recipes. But hey, I am lazy. Deal with it. Besides, my recipes change everyday and the results are as varied as the tropical vegetation in the Amazon. I am also chronically challenged when I am asked to use butter/ghee/sugar in a recipe and have a lot of trouble bringing myself to accept the cold plain fact that things taste better with butter. I am against all "replacement" products so I end up not making the dish or taking the non-buttered bumpy highway.

Getting back to the point, the archive is in the .7z format. It opens and extracts with this OUTSTANDING opensource program: Ditch those stupid winzip/winrar programs; they are no good.

If you are having trouble figuring out what the hell the recipé³ are talking about, let me know. I have to admit that I haven't really tried all of them, but I did read through a few and they sounded fine.

Oh, and when they say "oil", it means PEANUT OIL (or in rare cases, Sesame oil). Don't ever use any of the other crazy oils out there for Indian cooking. They just don't make the cut. I can't emphasize this point enough. If you are thinking, "Oh, maybe I could substitute with vegetable/corn/canola/soybean/rape seed/olive, STOP. STRANGLE and KILL that thought right now. In fact, even if the recipé ³ays "vegetable oil", you will get infinitely better results cooking with Peanut oil. FYI, Peanut oil is called Groundnut oil in India.

As a general rule, you may want to tone down the butter and and the ghee and the sugar and the cream and the coconut. None of them are particularly good for you. You could subsitute butter for ghee, but you cannot substitute "I can't believe its not butter" or any non-belief short-changed product for any of the above.

Here is a lentil list for reference:

Happy Cooking! :)

PS: I also like this site: However, some of the recipé³ on there are non-traditional with equally unreliable results. Try with caution and use your discretion about the saturated fat content.

From:

The next time you go to that fancy shoe store and are enamoured with the pair that costs $$$$90 +, remember to also check out the cheaper pair, gathering dust on a neighbouring shelf. According to latest sports medicine research, the cheaper pair has just as many benefits to your running alter-life, if not more, when compared with the expensive pair.

In fact, if you yield to your temptation of buying that costly pair of trainers, then you should also realize that you have been conned into parting with your money simply by some carefully worded meaningless and empty "features".

So, hahaha @ all those vain snobs who make me feel bad at shoe stores! I love research that is pocket-friendly! :)

Nicaragua has a blanket ban on abortions.


I know there was an abortion/pro-life debate on here some days back, but this irks me so much that it's impossible to not post and express my outrage directed at lunatics like this "Dr" Rafael Cabrera, who far from being a "doctor" is not even fit to be called human any more.

My heart cries for all the women in this godforsaken country. I am overwhelmed by sadness and anger, and once again am appalled that a few demons can plunge a country into the misery of the dark ages.

Since I am quite amused by all the confusion going around, I decided to do a concise (albeit biased) clarification about "Curry".

The East India Company (The British masquerading as traders) first docked on the southern shores of India and were immediately struck by:

1. The *awesome* South Indian cuisine.
2. The multiple layers of gold that women wore.
3. Everything else, including how gullible the natives were and how twisty the language was.

They decided to use their devious stratagem to buy enormous quantities of spices for cheap, and rob the gold and diamonds.

However, what they couldn't do was master the language. In particular, they had trouble wrapping their tongues around the word: Karuveppilai, the Tamil word for what is now (and quite inaccurately) known as the "Curry leaf". They also had trouble understanding the locals who called any side vegetable/meat accompaniment as "Kari". It didn't help matters any that every South Indian dish they ever had was either seasoned with Karuveppilai or had some powdered version of the Karuveppilai in it.

Using their tendency to clip short every vowel, and their total bewilderment with the language, they shortened the entire idea of a spiced dish to "Kari". Some Spaniards on the ship to England decided to spell it phonetically as "Curry". So voila, a new word was born.

When they proceeded further north into India, they came across another totally different type of cuisine - dominated not by the revered Karuveppilai, but Coriander ("Dhania" in Hindi, "Cilantro" in Spanish, "Kothamalli" in Tamil).

But by this time, the trade name "Curry" had curried favour up and down the length of the common(stolen)wealth. The seasoned business acumen that the British had acquired, stealing the wealth of natives around the world, warned them about the dangers of changing the name of a popular product in their home and overseas markets.

They decided that, since coriander was also a green leaf, and learning the names of the new spices involved trying to comprehend another wild language (Hindi), they wouldn't bother renaming the new North Indian spices (called "masala" by the natives). The easy solution was to just mix it all up in a bottle and rebrand the whole concoction as "Curry Powder". So essentially, the "Curry Powder" is about as Indian as Guano is a culinary delicacy.

And there you have it. The "History of Curried Confusion: Confounding the Western World, since 1600".

If you ever go to the heart of the subcontinent and ask for "Curry Powder", unless you are in a westernized supermarket, you are bound to get blank stares. Consider yourself warned.

If you want to get Karuveppilai here in the US, the best place to look would be an authentic Indian Store. South-east Asian stores seldom have it. The reason being that they don't cook with Karuveppilai, it is an acquired Indian taste.

Here in Buffalo, the places to go would be:

Super Bazaar
3218 Sheridan Dr
Amherst, NY 14226
(716) 835-4770

Spices of India
438 Evans St
Williamsville, NY 14221
Phone: (716) 633-4800

I really haven't seen it elsewhere. Just to give new meaning to the phrase "green with envy", here's a photograph of my stash. :)