🏷️ eating in

Lunch is served...


Ãœber-tasty cauliflower stew:

• Season olive oil with mustard seeds, urad dal, karuveppelai, coriander seeds, cardamom, dried red chillies and cumin.
• Add finely chopped garlic, ginger, jalapeños and sauté for a bit.
• Add salt and roughly chopped tomatoes and green peppers. Sauté till tomato is mostly cooked and its juices come out.
• Add uniformly chopped cauliflower. Sauté till tender yet crunchy
• Garnish generously with chopped coriander leaves.
• Serve and devour on a rainy day like today!

According to wikipedia, the US was the world's top producer of cheese in 2006, making about 4,275 metric tonnes of cheese every year. However, the US didn't quite make it to the top ten cheese consumers or the top ten cheese exporters.

Where is all the extra cheese going? Cosmetics? Bricks for cheese houses?

I was craving pizza yesterday night so I made my own for lunch today. 10X tastier and awesome and I bet, around 14X cheaper.

A cute breakfast for once...



Cals...............251
Fat................12g (39%)
Cholesterol.....205 mg (143%)
Sodium..........532 mg (38%)
Carbs.............21g (15%)
Fiber..............6g (50%)
Protein...........18g (75%)
Sugars...........1g

A pictorial guide...

I just discovered that I like eating...

Neufchâtel Cheese!

with salt or maybe a little pepper or homemade garam masala or all by itself.

100x more tasty and 10000x more awesome than those ridiculous Greek yogurts.

What is the single most awesome, infinitely more nutritious, 1000x more delicious, 10x cheaper and 10^6 nuttier alternative to Arugula?

Turnip Greens.


They top my all-time-favourite greens-list in mixed salads and fun snacks.

I think if I had to choose the one meal that probably defines me the most, it has to be this:


The colourful and absolutely unexpected bhelpuri.

Come to think of it, it's not unlike @paul's bowl-mania. The base is a spiced up version of crispy rice (like popcorn but made with rice). This is layered with raw onions, chopped coriander (cilantro), chopped sharp ripe tomatoes, boiled and spiced garbanzo beans, spiced fried or boiled potato cubes, freshly-squeezed lime juice, chopped hot green chillies and garlic, fried sev (crispy spiced noodles made of lentil/gram flour) and roughly smashed crisp "puri" (a fried flatbread made of either pastry flour or whole wheat, depending on who's made it...). Finally the whole mix is served with hot green mint and coriander chutney and a sweet/sour tamarind-jaggery sauce. Some high-end restaurant versions also have fried paneer in them. The possibilities are endless.

The result is often unexpected but always interesting and too delicious to put into words. If I were left on an island forever with a choice of one meal type, I would just choose the bhelpuri. You could change the proportion of just one ingredient and arrive at a perfectly unique bhelpuri. If you changed the proportion of more than one ingredient, you could pretty much change the entire dish in a flash and yet have an awesome meal. You could endlessly tweak everything to make it as light as a snack or as heavy as lunch or maybe sweet for a dessert or a breakfast. The possibilities are endless...

I developed a crazy craving for papayas over the past couple weeks and luckily found that they sell fabulous Caribbean Reds from Belize at Pricerite for $1.29/lb.



I couldn't resist and grabbed three big ones off the display and dragged them back to my lair yesterday evening. As a result, I am now sitting here with Bengay for some miserably strained deltoid muscles and a particularly awesome salad of cubed papaya with a lime juice and black pepper garnish.

I say, fair trade.

---

PS: I am SO glad pricerite came to roost downtown. You can't imagine how inconvenient it was to take a bus all the way to Wegmans for things I couldn't get at Guercio's and then wait in the cold for the bus back. I remember walking back with my cart (because there was no bus for nearly 40 minutes) a couple times, Both times, I had 2 gallons of milk spoil on me the next day because of the 80 minute-break in refrigeration. Also, I don't like the price-mark-up at Weggers. It may be fancy looking and all spiffy but I don't think it's good practice to increase prices of produce and keep prices of sugary stuff and baked-goods low because it encourages poor eating habits in the population.

So I had this interesting argument about the functions of a food processor vs. a Blender vs. a Stick/Wand Blender and a knife today afternoon with a couple department-mates.

Do you think a food processor can completely replace a blender, stick/wand blender AND a knife? Really? When I think of food processor, I think of mushed up poorly cut vegetables. How many of you have ALL the above in your kitchen? I have everything except a food processor. I get immense pleasure in chopping stuff down to cookable units with a variety of knives. Should I be lusting after a food processor? Can a food processor knead bread or cookie dough? What can a food processor do that a combination of the other three can't? If you were setting up your minimalist kitchen, would you choose a food processor over the other three?