adrian_turtle

Once upon a time, I saw a recipe here, on this very computer screen! Probably on dreamwidth. Whose Dreamwidth? No clue. I don't read hundreds of them. I didn't make it when I saw it, and it is impossible to search for because it was a recipe for tahini biscuits. Biscuits in the sense of the American biscuits you make with flour and baking powder, cut in butter to make crumbs, add milk to make dough you can roll out, then cut and bake. This recipe used tahini to replace (some of?) the butter and milk, but I have no idea what the proportions are. I am not a sufficiently experienced biscuit-maker to rely on "the dough feels right."

And of course, any search for "tahini biscuit" returns acres of cookies. Some of them may be delicious, but they are not what I'm looking for. Any suggestions?

Somebody sent me a chain letter! Not spam, not advertising, not political advocacy. Not even a joke that had been forwarded a dozen times. An actual chain letter that says to add your name to the bottom of the list, send something (in this case, a recipe) to the person at the top of the list, and pass it on. With various encouragements to play along and not break the chain. Won't it be fun to have strangers email you recipes when people are feeling isolated? (Well, maybe. I'm kind of oversupplied with lasagna recipes, especially since I stopped eating dairy.) Sending a recipe to somebody without even checking if they're vegetarian feels oddly old-fashioned.

Some of my friends will cheerfully send recipes until you beg them to stop. That doesn't feel quite the same as being comfortable with this kind of chain letter. I looked at it and worried that I might send it to somebody who would not just roll their eyes and delete it, but also think less of me for sending it to them. I'll ask right out if any of you want to play this game?

Yesterday, I had pigeon peas for the first time. Perhaps I should say I ate pigeon peas for the first time. They had been sitting in the cupboard for months, since the time I asked the grocery delivery people to bring me 3 cans of black beans and they brought 2 cans of black beans and 1 of pigeon peas. (Along with a great many other things.) When I called to tell them about it, they didn't charge me for the pigeon peas, but they didn't make an extra trip to exchange cans, either.

So, yesterday. There I was, not really on speaking terms with my hand or shoulder, so it was not a viable option to go to the store. Fortunately, I had the can of pigeon peas, rice, canned tomatoes, half an onion, lazy garlic, soyrizo, cumin, oregano, and green olives. (And a few things not appearing in this production, but really not very many.*)

I found a recipe for arroz con gandules, substituting soyrizo for chorizo, and leaving out the pork and bay leaves. I'm not sure if the back of my mouth was trying to warn me, as it sometimes does: Danger! You've never eaten this before, but it feels like a migraine trigger! Or maybe I just didn't like it much. I ate it anyhow, because I was hungry and didn't want to throw away the resources** that had just gone into making it. And then I ended up with a migraine.

Does anybody know of pigeon peas being a migraine trigger? Everything else in that recipe was something I had eaten before, with no problems. Many migraines do not have food triggers, and this one could have been set up by muscle spasms in the shoulder. It's just that taste (that feeling in my mouth, equal parts taste and smell and fear) that made me think the pigeon peas were problematic.



*Pickled herring, prunes, oatmeal, maple syrup, pickled carrots, eggs, soymilk, frozen squash, and soba. I can make a few more meals out of this before going out of town on Thursday, but it's a bit of a challenge. I may end up going to the store, but with significantly less than my usual 5-pound limit. Meal-planning suggestions are welcome.

**In this case, the scarce resources are "food in the apartment this week" more than "food, generally," or "food I can afford." I can get groceries delivered when I come back from Virginia, but they only deliver large orders so I can't get a little now and a little next week (which would be really useful.)

I made something with chard last week that almost worked perfectly. It worked well enough to be worth trying again, but I'm trying to figure out how to get it exactly right. (I mean, other than having all the chard cut up beforehand, rather than trying to chop the leaves while the stems are cooking.)

I started with a bunch of rainbow chard and 5 eggs. I started cooking some lazy garlic in olive oil, like you do, then added the chopped stems of the chard until they softened a bit. Then added handfuls of chopped chard leaves and let them wilt down until they all fit and I could cover the pot. Then more garlic, because I had a LOT of chard. And then I mixed the chard with a handful of raisins and put it in a baking dish, beat the eggs with a little salt, and baked it at 400F.

I liked it, but it needed something. More raisins? Lemon? There was just a little more egg than strictly necessary to hold the chard together, and I think that was right. There weren't any of the hot spices, and I don't think they would have fit...but maybe something like sumac/zatar or ginger?

It will cook everything but potatoes. I can't understand it.

I rarely buy parsnips, because I don't know what to do with them. If I'm making carrot soup (the savory kind, with black pepper and herbs, as opposed to the kind with orange juice and ginger), I might add 1 or 2 parsnips...but otherwise? Here's what happened to a bag of these admirable root vegetables. They all turned out very well.

( cottage ppie for a silly cottage )

( vegetable soup )

( lamb stew )

(LJ asks about adult content these days, but they don't have a setting for juice boxes and chocolate milk.)

I'm having a little trouble packing lunches for work. With a 30 minute lunch break, nobody goes out for lunch. I am always terribly cold in this workplace, and hot food in the middle of the day seems to help a little. There is a lunchroom, with a sink, microwave ovens, coffee makers, tables and chairs, a tv. I started out just putting some tangerines and a little rubbermaid container of beans and rice in my backpack. Then I realized I needed to carry eating utensils, as well as food. Having a fork and an apple both tossing around loose in my backpack can be hard on the fruit. And I found it awkward to take my flatware, food, and cup out of my pack and carry them across the plant to the lunchroom (yet taking my whole pack to lunch is completely inappropriate.)

I tried the insulated lunchbox I bought a few years ago for another purpose. It will hold one medium rubbermaid container and one small one (or a fair-sized apple), along with a juice box and flatware. I don't like how much room it takes in my backpack, or how hard it is to pack around it. (It's strange that I have so much trouble working around it, because most of what I'm carrying is small notebooks, small electronic gadgets, and personal insulation. Nothing big and rigid.) I've seen cleverly designed bento boxes, but they seem cleverly designed for carrying cold lunches, and it's important to me to have something hot. More important, they seem cleverly designed for presenting lots of little bits and pieces of things, which would seem to involve more preparation than I can handle. When I have a big apple, I'd rather just take bites of it than fuss with making slices fit in the fruit cup, and worry about what to do with the other 2/3 of the apple. But I would like a way to keep the flatware from cutting up the apple before lunchtime.

Do any of you have suggestions? Either for what to take for lunch, or how to pack it? I want something I can reheat in the microwave and eat quickly. I want it to be reasonably healthy, with some vegetables, and substantial enough to be my main meal. (I often come home too tired to bother with dinner.) I don't eat anything with pork, shellfish, or dairy products. Eggs are fine. I'm dubious about bringing fish or cooked cruciferous vegetables in close quarters, partly because the smell might be impolite to my colleagues, and partly because I might not want to deal with the smell when I have a migraine flare. And of course it needs to be packed compactly, and enough to eat to get me through the afternoon and early evening. Shepherd's pie sort of works. Though with the amount I can bring in the medium rubbermaid container that fits in my lunchbox, and either an apple or some celery, I'm awfully hungry in the late afternoon.

Silk makes things like juiceboxes, only with chocolate soymilk. I would think of them as an expensive snack...but they're a lot cheaper than going to Starbucks for hot chocolate, both in terms of money and time. I started putting one in my lunchbox with the intent of drinking it at lunchtime, but I found I don't want a cold drink at lunch. I end up drinking it on my way home (or on my way to an evening appointment), after I've been in the car for 10-15 minutes and I'm starting to feel thoroughly warm.

I am really tired of my digestive system not working properly. I was horribly sick with what felt like food poisoning all last week (only food poisoning doesn't usually last that long). Not eating anything is not a sensible long-term solution. It did seem like a good idea for a few days when even a glass of cold water would set off fresh spasms.

I resent that so many comfort foods I remember from my childhood are now things I can't eat because they have dairy. I wouldn't have macaroni and cheese, or creamed spinach, or hot chocolate, when I was sick with a stomach virus (I don't think so, anyhow). But part of my memory of being sick as a little kid is my father making me tea and toast with pepperidge farm white bread, and cutting the toast with a cookie cutter. So of course I looked for that kind of bread when I went to the store, and it has milk in it. It probably always did, I just didn't care, before. At least saltines are safe.

After being sick for a week and a half, I finally reached a point where I felt ok eating bananas, or plain rice, or putting soymilk in mint tea. I even ate an egg, successfully! I was thinking in terms of food poisoning, so I boiled it for 25 minutes, and it had a kind of rubbery toughness to it. I don't know what it means anymore to make easily digestible food when I'm not well.
Then yesterday, I felt well enough to walk down to the farmers' market in the sunshine. I bought baby beets, and summer squash, and cucumbers, and a cookie. I ate the cookie and some of the squash, and it was a complete disaster. I'm right back to feeling as bad as I did 4 days ago.

I learned to make a basic white sauce when I was 8 or 9. For many years, it was a very useful thing to know. A second-order effect of not eating dairy products is that I no longer know how to make a white sauce. I tried replacing the butter with non-dairy margarine (which is astonishingly rare--most margarine seems to have some dairy in it. Why do people eat margarine in the first place?) and using soymilk, and wondering why I bothered. With olive oil and mushroom stock, it tastes like something, but it doesn't thicken anything like a white sauce. With olive oil and chicken stock, it thickens gelatinously...which is different.

There is a recipe in _The Enchanted Broccoli Forest_ that has been catching my eye for weeks. It's called "Deviled Egg Pie," and it's based on a mashed potato crust. I like the idea of pies that don't use real piecrust, because I don't actually like real piecrust (that flaky pastry thing with shortening.) So I mashed 2 potatoes with minced onion and oil and pepper, pressed it into a pan and baked it. Then boiled eggs, not hard-boiled, just boiled enough to peel and slice. The recipe called for making a thick white sauce with flour and butter and milk, horseradish and mustard and dill, and pouring it over the sliced eggs in the crust. Then bake again to set. So I wanted my stand-in white sauce to thicken, as well as taste good. As Cattitude suggested, I used V8 instead of soymilk to replace the milk. Because I was uncertain about it thickening, I increased the flour from 3 tablespoons to 4, for what was supposed to be a cup of liquid. It ended up thickening like crazy. I had to add more liquid to get a sauce liquid enough to pour, using almost 2 cups of juice and more horseradish and mustard to taste. I think it's because V8 has so much vegetable pulp (it's mostly tomato juice and carrot juice.) The larger volume of sauce turned out to be the right amount for the 9" pie plate I was using, and the pie set beautifully. It tasted good, and the cold leftovers were good for 3 days.

I think the sauce, and the pie, are worth making again. But as a white sauce, it probably counts as a failure, as it came out bright reddish-orange.

Should I make peanut butter cookies? Or banana bread? Chocolate chips are a possibility in either case, but I have versions of both that are quite good without.