Recipe Reduction 97-96

Thai Red Curry Noodles With Vegetables
by Melissa Clark

Before I relate how I totally failed to make this dish correctly, can I just talk to the recipe author for a minute?  Here's what you said in the head note:
Once you have all the ingredients at the ready, the dish comes together quickly. And you’ll have enough leftover curry paste to make this again, even faster the next time.
What if I didn't like it? What if I didn't want to save half of the doctored up curry paste for a second, even faster time?  Furthermore, what was the point of taking two tablespoons of pre-made curry paste and adding into it all the of ingredients that made up the curry paste in the first place?

It's not the first time I've seen a recipe take a manufactured product and add into to it the same ingredients that were already there. I've even seen cooks take enchilada sauce and add cumin, garlic, chili and tomatillo. But for me, this is the end: never again will I make curry paste and add curry paste to it.

It came out very good despite my many accidental substitutions.  It's basically the same recipe I should be able to make with my eyes closed by now: fry some onion, garlic and hot pepper; add the curry paste and a little extra spice; add coconut milk and vegetables; simmer until smelly. Apologize for the odor in the kitchen to a husband who doesn't care for Indian food.

The one unusual touch was the shitake mushrooms. I adore the little morels, but I don't recall ever seeing them in Thai cooking before. Probably my stupid.

Strawberry Avocado Spinach Salad with Poppyseed Dressing
from Gimme Some Oven

Finding this sort of recipe in the backlog is really teaching me a lesson. Here's the breakdown of what it requested vs. what I used:

   fresh baby spinach - okay, got that; but I'm going to use some lettuce too
   strawberries - couldn't get at the farmer's market so I'll just skip them
   1 avocado, diced - I'll just throw in a slice when I'm ready to eat it
   gorgonzola or blue cheese - not for me
   sliced almonds, toasted - too much work; skipped them
   red onion - didn't have; used a couple scallions instead
    1 batch poppyseed dressing (recipe below) - made a half batch and threw half of it away.

The poppyseed dressing was okay, but only because I have really good olive oil from the Texas Olive Ranch near Carrizo Springs. The oil tastes great but the dressing just tastes like oil.  I don't get the point of poppy seeds. Vered Guttman at The Washington Post says,
    Poppy seeds taste nutty, or, when ground to the consistency of moist soil, they offer a pleasant fruitiness I find irresistible.

He finds irresistible; I find tasteless. Should I have ground them up?

A Young Lady's Experience of War

Not So Quiet
by Helen Zenna Smith

I am told, by a possibly unreliable source, that the author set out to write a parody of All's Quiet on the Western Front but instead wrote a serious work based on the war diaries of a female ambulance driver. I could believe that if a writer were confronted with source material like that that portrayed here, he would feel compelled to tell the story--straight up.  This is some grueling (and gruesome) stuff.

I don't doubt it's 99% true, simply because I don't think anyone could make this up. I'd forgotten the cruelty of this first big war--poison gas, bombs, tanks and trench warfare. She describes dropping off stretchers of men with the most inoperable of injuries, and thankfully, doesn't have the knowledge of just how badly they would end up being treated at the makeshift hospitals of her time.  But I do--or at least can imagine it.

Every time you hear a person attempt to glorify war, you should slap them across the face with this book. Or if it's a politician, with a tire iron.

it's over and I'm heartbroken

Heartless
by Marissa Meyer

I do so truly love Marissa Meyer.  But be warned: don't pick this up if you're not prepared to let her steal your heart and--and---and-----

Did you hear me slapping my hand across my mouth right then?

I can't say another word.  Except that she's a comic genius at fracturing folklore, twisting tales, pulverizing poetry, and meddling about morals. She's the nemesis of nursery rhymes. This time she started with Through the Looking Glass and went absolutely mad with it--mad as a hatter.

I live in fear and trembling she might take up The Hobbit as her inspiration some day.

Good adventure but missing a sense of place

A Long Way From Nowhere

A Couple's Journey on the Continental Divide Trail

by Julie Urbanski,Matt Urbanski

I gobbled this up and enjoyed it no end, but I'll only recommend it to people who love traveling and hiking but are stuck in one place for a while.  I enjoyed the people--the man and woman alternating chapters along the way. But I didn't feel like I was really there--I was a spectator watching them be there, but I was somewhere else and that place was far, far away.  It was like the difference between watching a narrated slideshow versus watching a big-screen movie with surround sound.  I wanted the full deal; I got the slideshow.

They're really cool people and had some wonderful times, and I appreciate the chance to read about their journey. I'd gladly read a second volume--how's that for a recommendation?

Gardening In My Roots, apology edition

Gardening is kind of sucking right now. Yes, I'm getting a great crop of purple hull peas which I didn't expect, since I only planted them for the nitrogen they fix. The yellow cherry tomatoes are doing well but some of the plants are starting to die.  The cucumbers are NOT setting fruit (all the wrong gender flowers???) and neither are the lima beans. In fact, the lima beans aren't even flowering.




But my one dear sweet eggplant I bought at Lowes is trying so very hard!













Since I can't show you vegetables in abundance, here's a different sort of gardening.

Recipe Reduction 99-98 (Under 100!!!)

Pumpkin Pie Oats
from The Crunchy Radish

When I measured out the spices, it seemed like a lot: 1/2 teaspoon ginger, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, a whole teaspoon cinnamon, for just two servings of oatmeal. That's as much spice as you'd put in a entire pumpkin pie!  And sure enough, although it smelled good and tasted okay, there was a distinctly bitter aftertaste.

I was also disappointed at the (lack of) quantity of pumpkin. Pumpkin is a lovely thing and I want to get more of it in my body, but this only called for a half cup. So in a serving of about 1-1/4c cooked oats, there is only 1/4 cup pumpkin.

I'll have to put this one in the category "to find a better recipe for."

Vegetable Pita Pockets


One of those no-brainer recipes I can't believe I took the trouble to save. But since I did, I'm glad--it served as a reminder that some of the best lunches can be the easiest.

Recipe: get some pita breads, split into halves and open them up to make pockets. Sometimes they tear and become unusable, but I'll give you this secret hint: it tastes exactly the same if you tear them into pieces and eat with a fork.

Fill the pocket with chopped raw vegetables and dress with something fatty--avocado, salad dressing, hummus.

That's it!  And no cooking required. I may take these on my next airplane trip.

aka "How to pawn your junk off on other people"

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

It's really mean of me to say this, but this book makes me wonder if the author didn't read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and think, "Wait a minute! We've got a tradition in Sweden called dostadning or Death Cleaning. I need to write a book about this so people don't think the Japanese have a copyright on cleaning."

Tacky of me, right? But really, that's how it felt at first. It turned out to be a sweet little book, part memoir and part advice column; it really made me want to get the job done and not leave it to my loved ones.  But it didn't have the eye-opening whack-on-the-head effect I anticipated after having to wait so long for a copy at the library.

Most of her advice is sensible, but this bit could be cruel if carried too far--

Tell your loved ones and friends what you are up to. They might want to help you and even take things you don't need...
Perhaps a grandchild or someone else you know is about to move into their first apartment. Invite them over ...[and] have some bags and boxes at had that you can fill while you are chatting, so they an take stuff with them right away.

I apologize if I distorted her meaning, but I wish she'd included a strict warning against coercive tactics! Imagine visiting your beloved grandmother and going home with a box of china knicknacks that you're going to have to display, store, and move for your next five years of apartment living. You only took them to make her happy and they're going to make you miserable until you finally get old enough to start your own death cleaning.

She's very sensible with her advice about discards, such as this note:

...sometimes you must just give cherished things away with the wish that they end up with someone who will create new memories of their own.

That wish seems like pure self deception. Why not just say goodbye and send them to the landfill? They've lived a good life and made you happy, just let them go. Of course, she's talking furniture or vintage clothing--that sort of stuff may very will end up with someone to cherish them. My cherished things--acorns, children's "art", tattered paperback books--wouldn't be so lucky.