Kathleen's Pasta

The other weekend I made some pasta sauce with canned tomatoes and vegetable stock, and a bit of spices and onion, in order to eliminate sauce-related points from my pasta meals. This was the first meal I had with that sauce.

With tortellini, the sauce is quite good, because the cheesy stuff inside the pasta is enough to mask any undesirable flavors. But with regular pasta, it's not very tasty. I've never liked that tinny taste that comes with tomato sauce. When I make chili, I mask it with lots of chili powder, but I'm not sure how to get rid of it in pasta sauce.

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Kathleen's Pataks Curry

This is one of my main staple dishes, easy to make and lasting for four or five meals, so perfect to cook on a Sunday night and have for lunch all week. Healthy, too! I just use potatoes, chickpeas, cauliflower, onion, and a wee bit of oil and Pataks Madras curry paste.

Kathleen's Lentils with Spinach

This is one of the few new recipes I've tried in the last few months, made in an effort to figure out a healthy but tasty dish for my diet. The main components are lentils and spinach, and apart from this, the biggest flavors were lemon, ginger, and salt. The recipe called for way too much salt.

Unfortunately, it was a flop. It tasted nice enough when it was warm, but called for way too much oil, and there's so much spinach in it that what amounted to a points-acceptable serving was really not enough to fill me up. So I probably won't be eating it again. Still, it was interesting.

Linden's Vegetable Lunch

So I'm slowly eating my way through all the vegetables that need consuming, but they're not nearly finished yet! My shelf in the fridge is extremely green. This also means I'm trying out new recipes for green things, which is always good. Yesterday for lunch, I finally finished off the quiche (today, I am going to kill two birds with one lunch and use the remainders of the quiche crust and zucchini to make a small galette), with a salad of roast asparagus, green beans, and homemade croutons.

So this is my lazy cheater's version of fake Panzanella (I think the only thing it has in common with traditional panzanella is the bread, honestly). I think there was supposed to be some parmesan sprinkled on top, but I figured there was enough cheese in the quiche and I didn't need to dehealthify the salad even more than it already was. I believe this salad is supposed to have peas in it, but I don't like having peas in this sort of thing because they are impossible to eat. You end up spending twenty minutes chasing peas around with your spoon, or if you're using fork they might get accidentally catapulted across the table. It just makes for an overall stressful munching experience. So, no peas! It's also supposed to be made with whole wheat bread, but that is not what I had. I had semi-stale sourdough (which is, you know, more delicious anyways.) But the salad on the whole is a good way to mix it up when you're just eating vegetamables.

Also, for dinner, I was ovening a sweet potato, and I added some brown sugar. (Well, demerara sugar, actually. One time, I sent two non-bakers to the store on a quest for brown sugar, and they came back with demerara. I have had a devil of a time using it up, until I realized it went well with sweet potatoes, and serves as a passable substitute for palm sugar.) The result was slightly caramelized sweet potatoes which was a delicious variation on the regular kind.

Linden's Papa's cilantro garlic shrimp

So I had some coriander to use up. It's been sitting in my fridge for just over a week, getting progressively yellower. And I thought to myself, coriander has never been my favorite herb, and aside from Papa's grilled coriander chicken which I, alas, cannot make as I do not have a grill and am not male (we stick to traditional gender roles in Linden's kitchen), there is only one dish that overloads on coriander that I like, and that dish is his coriander-garlic shrimp.

Now outside of the kitchen I do not adhere to gender roles as strictly, and occasionally refuse to ask for directions. I thought to myself, it cannot be that hard, there aren't that many ways to combine these things. So I took some shrimp, and made a little marinade of a teensy bit of oil, a fair amount of garlic (although not the handfuls that Papa apparently uses), a handful of chopped coriander, and lemon juice, and let it sit for a few hours. Then I put some spaghetti on to boil, dumped the shrimp and marinade (it was pretty dry, mostly just enough to coat the shrimp) in a pan and sauteed it on high heat for a few minutes until the shrimp was hot and the garlic browned. Then I dumped my spaghetti in, stirred it around a bit to coat it with the juices and remaining marinade, and dished up. (It turns out Papa does this very differently, by the way. There is precooking of garlic, cilantro is added right at the very very end, etc etc. Mine was very good, and I think had less of the icky cilantro bite, so I am judging it a success.)

Now you may notice that this is not all I'm eating. Indeed, that would be a very astute observation! I filled my fridge with green things this week (tempted shamefully by the sale on asparagus) and now have to use them all up, which means every meal is required to have greenery. (Terrible!) So here's my delicious asparagus tip: cook them in a pan with just a tiny bit of oil, and throw in some chopped walnuts halfway through. They taste super delicious together (I suspect a little grated parmesan on top wouldn't hurt, but I know some consumers of this blog are not consumers of cheeeese.)  and is still arguably healthy.

I also bought store-made bread in a moment of weakness, but the ingredients seemed innocent. So this was my lunch yesterday! Eaten outside my house in the grassy courtyard in the sun.

Linden's Coconut Bread

So months and months ago, I bought some coconut thinking, "I love coconut! Coconut is wonderful! This will get used up in a jiffy." And it has spent months and months in my cabinet (under the sink. for this is the only cabinet I have in my room, and thus many of my bits and bats get put here.  Why yes, this does include my socks and underwear.

I also have a box, entitled the Box of Shame, wherein get put all of the things I have discovered I cannot eat, like chocolate and biscuits and flavored teas and things of this nature. It lurks under my desk.)

However! The things in the Box of Shame shouldn't really be used up by me, but the things in my sink cupboard should. And this week, I thought to myself, it is time to use up this coconut! It has been here for months, and It Must Go.

So in my recipe dredging this week, I kept my eye out for coconut recipes. This one looked quick and easy, which is what I go for during the week, and thus it got done.

Sadly, because I was in a bit of a rush, and have become lackadaisical in baking, I added 1/4 cup too much milk, and didn't realize until I'd mixed everything together and it was a very watery batter. "Self," I thought to myself, "Something is not right!" (Fortunately, I didn't turn into a French nun.) So I added some more flour to balance it back out, but alas this meant my batter got overmixed and proportions weren't quite right, but it turned out okay anyways, as these things so often do.

Now I currently have a problem when I bake, because all my friends have left and there are fewer people to inflict things on. So sometimes, I wander the halls with baked goods in hand, hoping to find some unsuspecting acquaintance to force cookies and breads onto. Last night I got lucky, for my friend Nicole had lured Griff, who hails from my hometown, to the Annexe for dinner and I came upon them in the hallway! And gave them some bread. Which was a relief because their powers combined with my flatmates got it down to a manageable amount.

And now, I am going to clean my desk and get started on work for the day! For I am virtuous like that.