🏷️ eating in

Good way to find out if your chocolate is filled with the phony filler substitute for cocoa butter (otherwise known as soy lecithin): Hold it in your hands for around 30 seconds.

If the chocolate starts to melt and smear your hands a bit, it has at least some amount of real cocoa butter (or if you were careful you bought one completely made of cocoa and cocoa butter).

Else, you just bought a chocolate with fake soy lecithin. I wish they had never found this stupid filler. It somehow makes the sugar in the chocolate more prominent than the cocoa. And that is a sign of a bad chocolate.

and carrots.
and tomatoes.
and squash.
and kidney beans.

Dedicated to @fing. ;-)

Sometimes you can only pamper it with so much olive oil.



It's delicious sans mucilage or not.

With mascarpone, blueberry and lingonberry preserves, a huge fresh ginger root, cloves, nutmeg, almonds, whole wheat flour, flax seed, applesauce, milk and baking soda for the leavening.



Even though I added a good sized ginger root chunk, it's not spicy. Next time, I will probably add even more. I purposefully mixed the doughly roughly so that I would get the hard crusty exterior and the bread would be slightly crispy. I don't particularly like moist bread. They don't toast too well. Unfortunately, it wasn't dry enough because in spite of all these precautions it's rather moist. Maybe I should have waited for it to cool down instead of slicing through it like the hungry, impatient and greedy person that I totally am.

I am very close to a complete Fridge wipeout.
I currently have
- A wonderful big Cauliflower {needs to be used this weekend}
- 2 frozen bananas
- 1 ripe tomato {priority use this weekend}
- 1 orange
- 1/4th lb okra {super priority use maybe tomorrow}
- Ginger
- Garlic
- Some hot chillies

Well.. maybe not that close but still this is a reflection of workload. I think I might reach the wipout this weekend and give the fridge a scrubdown before I go grocery shopping.

I read this article with interest:


To me, it represents a global dilemma. Would you rather live in the past and insist that change is disturbing because you don't quite understand it (or want to take the pains to understand it) or would you just accept that the future is here and evolve with it?

The way I have phrased it above makes it sound as if the right answer is choosing the future and evolving. That is because I want to choose that answer. I want everyone to choose that answer. But sometimes, there is no right answer to a question like this. The article about Moroccan cuisine cookbooks illustrates this point so well.

On an aside, I really want to make this bread someday:


Maybe I can this weekend.

The Acorn Squash is hands-down my most favourite squash among all the other squashes.


I just made a roasted acorn squash soup with shredded coconut, tomatoes, red onions, moong dal, ginger, dried red chilles, cumin, asafoetida powder and dried curry leaves in 17 minutes.

A new record. Take that, rice cooker!

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I always have a timed (and rather unhealthy) competition with my rice cooker. While it steams the beans or lentils or some other staple, I chop and hustle to finish before it can. 80% of the time, its a tie between us, it wins 15% of the time. Today was my croaky and gloaty 5% win!

And victory was tasty! :-)

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Acorn Squash shot from Mango&Tomato: I don't own that kind of photo equipment!

I have eaten like crap this entire past week. I think the only highlight of the week that went by was a cup of chocolate ice cream topped with mascarpone that I ate with Paul and Casey. I am determined to make bread this weekend. Specifically, I want to make the easy little bread from 101 cookbooks dot com:

I love that website. It's easily my most favourite recipe website ever. I like the pictures and the commentary on Pioneer Woman Cooks better, but more often than not, her recipes are too soaked in butter, too full of animal products and a trifle too rich for me to handle. I often wonder how many arteries she is clogging with her gorgeous looking blog. I am constantly tempted to go the whole nine atherosclerotic yards but I never make it through even two before I change course and convert her recipes to their ghastly poor versions. Unfortunately, they seldom take kindly to changes.

101 cookbooks, on the other hand, is all about light, airy dishes that don't take too long to cook and are infinitely "tweak-able" with equally good results down each tweaked path.

@paul challenged me to a pear war with the warrior ants and the swarm of bees in @PMT's garden. It was not a pretty sight.

There were fallen pears all over the place being viciously attacked by HUGE crazy ants, bees that possibly had a nasty sting and quite horrendous-looking fat blackish worms that looked as if they had crept slowly out of the scarier zombie movie scene. I think I accidentally brushed my hand on one. UGH. Maybe I should consider amputating it now.

For a while I debated kicking the bee-infested pears around to dislodge and rescue the pears but I was really worried about painful repercussions. Wisdom prevailed and I left them alone. But I did blow the ants off many a fallen fruit and got quite a haul of awesome pears.


@matthew walked in on my grand-bug-war-for-pear-rescue halfway through and threw in some tomatoes into the mix. I know I am totally overdosing on tomatoes today but these mini ones were TOO delicious not to eat as soon as I got back! Thanks so much, @matthew!


And now the quintessential dilemma. What does one do with 20kg of pears?


I am thinking slow roasted red pepper/tomato-pear-basil-soup spiked with red chillies and garlic...