The China Study Cookbook recipe #5

Baked Vegetables from The China Study Cookbook.  It was supposed to be Scrumptious Baked Vegetables With Fresh Spinach but the bagger at Kroger's failed to give me the bag containing $3.50 worth of spinach, $.25 of ginger root, and $2.00 of broccoli crowns.  When I got home, I noticed the ginger was missing and assumed it had just been left on the counter.  But how did they manage to misplace a huge box of spinach and a big bag of broccoli?  I wonder if the next person got it?

Whatever!  From now on, I'm watching those guys.  It's wasn't the money so much as I wanted my darn spinach.

The vegetables, without the broccoli and spinach, were pretty nasty.  The recipe instructions bugged me, so I messed with it to try to improve it, but I think it was hopeless.  First off, sweet potatoes take longer to cook than green vegetables.  They should have been precooked.  Second, it told you to cook the vegetables with no seasoning and then, when they're done, add dry herbs--thyme, basil and rosemary.  And raw garlic.  Yuck.

So I made the sauce and poured it over the vegetables before cooking them.  That made sense for the herbs but not for the orange juice and balsamic vinegar.  It came out sweet and bitter.

I wonder if it was a misprint?  In any event, not telling the reader how big to cut up everything, so that it would all cook at the same rate, was not doing us a kindness.

I also cooked Bourbon Barbeque Prawns With Greens, for the meat eaters. 

The prawns (I subbed shrimp) were okay, just a little overcooked.  The sauce didn't stick to the shrimp, but it tasted good spooned over.  I substituted gold rum for bourbon so I may never know how the dish was supposed to taste.  I noticed that no one came back for seconds.

(This is a picture of the leftovers.)

Food of the week

and The China Study Cookbook recipe #4
Lentils

 I've eaten lentils before but I don't recall cooking any.  The recipe called for brown lentils--the store had red, yellow, green and black.  Thank heavens they didn't have golden.

I chose the green ones.  I'm not a Dwarf--I eat green food.  Agriculturally, lentils are a "pulse", which appears to be a legume crop grown and harvested only for its dry seed.  They're a good food for the heart and the heavy; lots of fiber and they taste good, too.  Just not as good as a chocolate bar.

As to the recipe, I think I'll try a different one next time.  I ate it with some rice and, not to put to fine a point upon it...it was bland.  I wonder if my curry powder is old?   What I really need to do is mark the purchase date on every container of spice that I buy.  I'm not a chef who can sniff a spice and declare it "fresh" or "old."  Some of the spices in my pantry could be ten years old...or more.  Scary.

Hey, look what I found!  Wraps that use olive oil instead of "intesterified" soybean oil.  Taste and texture seem fine to me.  And I can eat them without feeling my arteries harden.

Time for a quick mystery

And Then There Were None
by Agatha Christie.  Didn't they "Lady" her or "Dame" her at some point?

I'd call this a perfect engagement for the mind, with no emotion involved unless you consider curiosity an emotion.  A delightful contrast to the last book I read.  And no, I didn't figure out the killer, although I suspect brainy readers did.  The best I could theorize was that the killer set up the last couple of deaths and then killed himself.  I shouldn't have said that.

But never mind.  It's "the most popular mystery of all time."  You've already read it, haven't you?

Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel

For the first time since I started doing audiobooks, I've found one that would have been better read on paper.  With a paper copy, I could have skimmed all the teenage angst--what am I doing here?  Where am I going?  Does she like me?  How could she like me?  Why am I kissing the girl with hair that smells like sandalwood?
 
Sheez--it's like Twilight with airships!

And that's a shame, because the action is superb and the imaginary world is mind-blowing.  I really liked this book--I just wished the main character would quit making the same stupid mistakes over and over again.  He reminded me of young Luke Skywalker--impetuous, stubborn, and incapable of following orders.  Barely lucky enough to survive.

But oh, what a magical world it weaves!   Airships, ornithopters and aerozoans; a skybreaker called Sagramata and the legendary wreck Hyperion; the rich girl, the gypsy girl, the Han Solo-style captain, and the mysterious "B" who seeks the same treasure.
Very cool.

Gripe and complain...what's why I blog, isn't it?

Stupid eight o'clock meetings have resumed.  That's eight P.M., not a.m.  Which means dialing in from home.  Could be worse....

No, it couldn't.

So, on Sunday I slipped in a vegan dish that wasn't in TCSC.  Chickpea salad from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. 

A little too much olive oil--depending on who you're talking to--but excellent.  I used dried mint and dried parsley, which may have compromised the flavor a little, but, as I said already, excellent.

My only quibble is that all of the ingredients are different sizes and it's hard to pick up on a fork.  How would it be if you split or quartered the chickpeas and then cut the roasted red pepper into half-inch cubes?  Better, I think.

Long anticipated Call Of The White

Call of the White
by Felicity Aston

If my expectations had been set correctly, I would have enjoyed this book more.  I'd put it on my must-read list last winter when I was following Felicity Aston's solo trip across Antarctica.  Traveling alone, her twitter feeds were all about "me, myself and Antarctica."  But this book is much different--it's the story of an earlier adventure where she led an eight woman skiing expedition to the South Pole.

After a short teaser involving a collapsed tent in a severe storm (note: wind gusts of 40 knots = 46 mph), she backtracks to the genesis of the expedition--the idea, the planning, and the choice of team members.  Half of the book is over before they set foot in Antarctica. It's all about funding, training, passports and personalities. Women from all over the world were interviewed--she ended up with team members from Brunei, Cyprus, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Jamaica, and the United Kingdom.

All of this is interesting stuff, but not what I'd expected.  Although I might have enjoyed a section of before-and-after observations from each member of the team.  Especially if it were told in their own words.
There's a lot of detail here; a lot of minor matters that, if unattended to, could become trip killers.  There's not much margin for error when you're outdoors in -20C. (-4F) Aside from the obvious--exhaustion; getting lost; snow blindness; freezing to death--there is overheating, perhaps the most dangerous of all.  Sweating in your long johns means damp skin and damp clothes.  Frostbite.  Hypothermia.  Death..

When the skis finally hit the ground, I was thrilled by an occasional passage like this:

It blew steadily against our backs, dragging loose snow across the surface in a continuous flow along the ground.  The surface wasn't smooth but had been worn by the wind into sastrugi, wave formations carved into the snow.  The sharp, clean lines of the ripples were as perfect as the petals of a flower.  They caught the sunlight, creating shade and texture so that the ground was flecked with pale pink and purple as well as flashes of pure white.

That's the way it goes on any trip, not to say that this just any trip by any stretch of the imagination.  A few moments of majesty, then back to wrestling with details.  And as leader of the expedition, Felicity Aston wrestled with a lot of details.  The failure of team members to follow orders had to be the worst.  I'm reading another book in which the main character's inability to follow orders should have gotten him killed multiple times already.  But that's a different story.

 Re , as a travel/adventure reader, I liked.  But maybe not loved.

Fungus lesson

 

Food of the week--crimini mushrooms.


Also known as baby bella, mini bella, baby portobello, or portobellini.  I'll just call 'em "brown mushrooms."  They're harvested at an intermediate state of growth, so they're a little tougher and chewier than the white button mushrooms I love so much.  Their big sister, portobello mushrooms, are simply crimini that have been allowed to grow to full maturity.  I'm scared to try portobello--I might like them too much for my pocketbook to accomodate.

The whfoods.com website recommends giving crimini a quick saute to bring out their best flavor.  I'll try that--next time.  (I just chucked them in the salad and gobbled them raw.)

whfoods also speculates on their possible health benefits--protection against cardiovascular disease and hormone-dependent breast cancer.  And they might even be a significant source of vitamin B-12--although the amount varies widely.  I find the whole vitamin B12 issue amusing.  Humans need very little of it and can store it for years, but since it's the only known vitamin not easily obtained from a plant-based diet, sources like whfoods always rush to recommend foods that might contain a trace of it. 

They also say, "The B12 in these mushrooms was apparently produced by healthy bacteria growing on the surface of the fresh mushrooms."  Which is true for any other vegetable.  It appears that we can get all the B12 we need by eating organic vegetables and not washing them too carefully.  Which is certainly true of foods out of my garden, which I frequently don't wash at all.  Sometimes I rub them on my shirt front before popping them in my greedy mouth.
Hmmm...careless gardening == health-promoting.

To change the subject...I seem to observe that people who underline or highlight in a book frequently quit after the first couple of chapters.  My hypothesis, drawn from that observation, is that people who mark up a book are the people who are likely to abandon it.  (the stupid people)
How to test that?