Saturday, February 16, 2008

A cooking binge.

Some people go on drinking binges; others on eating binges. I sometimes go on cooking binges. I eat some of the fruits of my labor, but pretty much spend a few hours cooking up a storm.

Last night I cobbled together some vegetable soup and broccoli polenta cakes because I wasn't feeling too well and I had a bunch of vegetables to use up. It turned out rather tasty for something random (well, the polenta was a half batch of a simple recipe from Veganomicon). The soup contained one diced onion, several cloves of minced garlic, two sweet Italian red peppers, a handful of diced baby carrots, dried oregano, half-sharp paprika, short grain brown rice, a can of kidney beans, a bagful of baby spinach, and a bay leaf for good measure. The polenta is just polenta cooked with finely chopped fresh broccoli, spooned into a muffin tin, chilled, then stuck under the broiler to brown a bit. I put it in the middle of my bowl and scooped up bits of the cake with my spoon as I ate my soup.

Today I have been going a tad overboard. I had a giant bag of cremini mushrooms that were meant to go into a variety of recipes that I never bothered to make this week, so I thought I'd saute them up and put them in savory chickpea crepes. Because the crepe batter has to be chilled for at least an hour, I ended up baking two kinds of muffins just to use up a carton of soy yogurt I had (and also, I fucking love muffins)--chocolate macadamia with a gentle dusting of coconut and cornmeal blueberry with meyer lemon zest. These both turned out heavenly.

Still waiting for my batter to chill, I started in on the time-consuming task of slicing my creminis and ended up with about six cups of the damn things. Kevin thought I was insane and wanted to know why it was taking me three hours to make lunch. I told him to eat leftovers.

But we cannot live on mushrooms and crepes alone, of course. Oh, no. So I thought, hey, I can do the mushrooms with kala jeera (black cumin seeds) and red onion, then make some palak tofu (spinach and tofu curry--using tofu instead of panir cheese for the vegan's sake) to round it out! Totally reasonable. So now there's a pan full of bright green and spicy spinach with tofu cubes, a pan full of sauteed creminis, and a bowl of crepe batter just waiting for me to ruin too many and give up and make rice instead.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you like, umm, come up to my house, and like, uhh, cook here? THE GRAYLAURENSHIRE DEMANDS IT!

Anonymous said...

yeah, I second that! yu-um.