grapeleaves

The Turkey Pardon.

Is that supposed to be a nice thing? What exactly is the turkey being "pardoned" from? Do they play a cop and robber game with it first? Do they put the turkey on trial? Have all the other turkeys somehow done us wrong that we've decided to eat them?

Wouldn't "pardoning" a turkey mean that you are inadvertently "condemning" the others? How is this a joyous way to eat? To think about food? Are you punishing what you eat? And does sparing one animal arbitrarily out of millions make you feel better about it somehow? Does it make you benevolent?

What's with this death-game you play? This gladiator ring for "unfortunate" animals. This power play. Might as well start watching snuff films at the Thanksgiving table. What a bizarre way to look at food...

Trial and errors in cooking are difficult. They're expensive. They're painful. It sucks to fail at something that's supposed to bring you pleasure. Cooking, like everything else, isn't a solitary act. It gets combined with all the other aspects of your personality. Are you persistent? Are you patient? Are you adventurous? Passionate? All of these intertwine to determine your successes and failures, but the liberation in it is that it's always on your own terms...

It's hard to feel bad about being addicted to buying plants.

Here are the vegetable plants in my balcony that survived this horrible, neglected summer.

My peppers:


This is my rose. It is my baby. And it is a trooper. It has completely dried out twice and still,  as soon as you water it, it sprouts leaves again.



My herb pot, thyme, and grape:


Pretty much right after I planted the herbs, the cat ate all the chives...

I also have a gardenia and I just potted some daffodil bulbs.

R.I.P. squash, cucumber, strawberries, black krim tomato, and 6 other varieties of tomato that didn't survive the barrage of heat, malnutrition, and the white-fly crusade.

Happy Happy Joy Joy! Cupcakes for the Blasphemous Bake Sale:

Overachiever.


Christmas sugar cookie decorations...

This is the story of the diet that almost was.

During the summer of 2009 I got approached with the challenge of partaking in a purifying diet. And by "got approached" I mean that I completely brought it onto myself because I wanted to show that such a diet would probably not make me feel "better." The diet went as such: For 12 days, I was not to eat any meat, grain, dairy or caffeine (somewhere the food pyramid is screaming). I also could not fry or sautee my food.

Breakfast was:
- Juice of 1 orange
- Juice of 1 lemon
- 2 tablespoons of strictly cold-pressed olive oil
- 2 cloves of garlic

All blended and chugged and immediately followed by a concoction of flax seed and fenugreek tea. 2 cups.

From this point on I could drink as much tea as I liked until lunch. Lunch was either fruit salad or vegetable salad but not both because apparently those don't digest well together. From lunch until dinner I could drink tea again, eat a grapefruit if I was really hungry, and "cheat" with a few almonds. Dinner again consisted of fruit OR vegetable salad. Nothing could be eaten after dinner.

This diet was supposed to make me feel better. This diet was supposed to cleanse my colon and give my liver a break. It was supposed to freshen my system and make me "feel like your eyes are open like pulled shades." I was trying to show that it was all psychological...That your eyes are popping out because they're looking for FOOD! I called my dad, who is a doctor, and asked him if it is true that these diets can cleanse you. He confirmed my notion that if you consider diarrhea a cleanse, then yes, but otherwise, not only are you not helping your liver, your kidneys or your colon, but you're hurting your body by depriving it of so many things it needs. He told me not to do it, but I had a point to prove. So I set off on the diet. I even went to Wholefoods to buy herbal tea, which for me is the equivalent of a Jew at a ham factory. I drank the garlic OJ, I chugged the awful tea, I herbal tea'd myself to oblivion, and I had sliced banana, canteloupe and blueberries for lunch...And then the waiting started...Dinner. Dinner. When is it time for dinner?
 

 Lunch.

I developed a headache. All I could think of was the next thing I could eat. The day that was supposed to liberate me from food had enslaved me to it. When can I have that goddamn grapefruit!? I moped, I paced. I couldn't stand to look at tea anymore. My grandmother asked me if something was wrong.

When the time finally came for dinner I cooked some tomatoes in their own juice, tossed in some portobello, and baked half a squash. It tasted good - but I hated it. I hated it! I was angry at my food! I ate until I was stuffed and I was still angry. I like tomatoes. I love portobello. But I hated this...I hated the whole thing. My headache was only worse and my eyes were burning. I threw away the rest of my dinner and just sat on the couch contemplating. I had failed. I didn't have the conviction to enjoy this. Everything about this diet was exactly the opposite of my food philosophy. I didn't feel better, stronger, clearer. I just felt like crap and acted like it too, and that was the point. But I have to keep going. I will be immediately discounted because I only did the diet for one day. Can my experience be worth anything if I don't stick through it? Will I ever be able to show that this is actually a mental exercise that has nothing to do with how good your liver feels, and the sense of accomplishing this self-torture exercise, or the desperate need to pretend you are happy, is the source of elation, and not the restored health of your insides? Should I go on?...I thought...and I thought...and I thought...

And then I made myself a delicious chocolate-banana crepe and basically told my liver to go fuck itself...
 

 Dinner.

No music! No goddamn music!

I was flipping through the channels in bed this morning. My mom's finally gone on vacation and I've hijacked her bed, sleeping right on top of it with an extra blanket. And as I'm going from channel to channel, I end up finding a cooking show with Jacques Pepin and Julia Child. I like them both, and I had no idea they had worked together, so I was pretty excited. For half an hour, Jacques Pepin and Julia Child made salads. Garden, ceasar, nicoise, potato. It ended up being the favorite half hour of cooking I've ever seen on TV.
Let me tell you why. It was so oddly respectful. It was fucking real. It was what being in a kitchen is like. Two people in the kitchen with some goddamn lettuce and eggs and putting it together. Did Jacques Pepin tell you exactly how many tablespoons of vinaigrette he put in the pan to sautee his tuna? No. Did Julia Child tell you how many teaspoons of salt to put in? No. Did she measure her potatoes by the cup? No. She just had some fucking potatoes in a bowl. Did Pepin use a food processor to make his vinaigrette? No. He just put some fucking oil, vinegar and mustard in a jar and shook it. Did they molest their salad with three different kinds of chili peppers? I'm talking to you Bobby Flay! Did they show you how to make a good salad? Yes. And when it comes out, you already know what it tastes like, because it's lettuce, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, maybe some garlic. But maybe you'd never seen that salad before, or maybe you wouldn't have thought of that, or maybe you didn't know how important it is to drain your lettuce. That's it! It's ingredients you know, and when it's on the plate she doesn't have to swear on her mother that it tastes good or lick her spoon and purr a la Giada-de-la-Prosciutto because you know it tastes good...

And then hours later in a fit of boredom I turned on the food network and instantly felt violated like never before. What the hell was wrong with what I was seeing? Sandra Lee is parading on crack like usual. And then I suddenly realized, wait a minute, there are no acoustic guitars in my kitchen! What is this music? This easy-listening, major chord strumming, rainbow-shitting acoustic nightmare. And then right after, Giada De Laurentiis and her Italian elitism. And I listened to her go on and on..."This is nice and smooth, nice and thick, nice and easy, nice and fresh, nice and hot, nice and golden brown, nice and spicy...". Is that what food is?...Nice? And right at the point when she said "chili powder is classic in a chili," I realized that the Food Network would never be the same...

These people treat you as if you didn't have a family of your own. As if you never had a grandma in the kitchen. Like you've never been to Italy. Like you don't have traditions and like you've never set a table or tried a pineapple liquor. Everything is a goddamn surprise. They're appealing to the most culture-less.
Did Pepin swoon over the smell of the basil? No! And neither did your grandma because that wasn't her first time at the rodeo! Did Julia finish the show by arranging a bouquet of tulips on the table? No. Celebrity chefs act like they're talking to robots. Cayenne is spicy, butter is savory, basil smells good, bread has airpockets, go buy some flowers, they're nice.

It's no wonder that as soon as you can tell a spoon from a fork you need more than the Food Network. That's exactly what I appreciated about Jacques Pepin and Julia Child. No goddamn music...

"Beef is definitely the king of meat, but pork....pork is definitely the prostitute..." - Blake

Here's some of the stuff I've been up to lately.

Shrimp noodle soup	Fruit tart with chocolate-layered crust and vanilla pudding
Chicken tikka masala with homemade apple-pear hard cider

The morning of my 21st birthday I found myself sitting over a plate of fries at San Francisco International with my dad, feeling changed. All the accumulated feelings from the events, chaos, and turmoil of the recent past, good and bad, had finally found a moment of calm after months of high-paced life to burst out in a manifestation of a feeling so solemn that I'm sure my face did all the talking my mouth could have never done. All I can say is that it felt like the profoundness of the end of the beginning.
About an hour later I boarded a plane headed to Frankfurt, and then another one that landed about six hours later in Tehran. After eight years, I was back in my city of birth. Plenty of people have been away from their birthplaces for much longer than that, but at 21, eight years is well over a third of your life, and if you take into account the change a person goes through year by year between 13 and 21, to me it felt like going back to Iran after eight lifetimes.

It turns out that the feeling was largely justified. It was almost like a paranormal experience to see faces that hadn't changed a bit over a backdrop that had become virtually unrecognizable. How did all of this change, and why is no one else shocked but me?... I went there chasing a lot of my memories, and found that most of them were nowhere to be found. Instead I came back with a new understanding of change, for the better and for worse, and a contemplation that perhaps the only way to catch the elusive past is to grasp the present a little bit harder...

There is a lot I could say about Iran, but that will have to wait until the right words slowly come. Until then, there is certainly something to be said about the food...

The first meal I had in Iran was bread and cheese and what not at my grandma's when we got home from the airport at 3 or so in the morning. I went to bed for a short sleep after that and didn't get up til 4 in the afternoon. With that day essentially wasted I had to wait until the next morning before I could really go into the city. I went grocery shopping with my aunt:



It's funny that for all the modernization that you see in Iran you still won't really see people shopping in anything resembling a supermarket. It all still kind of looks like this:



Now, before you let your mind run too far with thoughts of 'culture' and the 'non-corporate' and 'the little man,'  please stop and consider that supermarkers were created for a reason: They are convenient. They are safe. They are clean (I can already hear some people scoffing at this one but if you have the balls to stick to your own standards I'd like to see you go to this market and then call the Safeway deli "horrifying"). Nobody smiles at you, and the little seller man will always try to rip you off. At least at the supermarket you and the guy next to you will buy your apples at the same price. In truth, markets like this are only cute to the people who have the privilege to not have to use them. But hey, I don't have to use them, so it was pretty cute and very touristy. However, all the fat women in black chadors will ram you over like blind people driving bulldozers. The crows, as I like to call them, have no shame, and they dislike you and judge you because you're not a crow like them. They will deliberately be condescending to you by getting into your personal space to show you who's boss. It is the Islamic Republic after all.

Somehow (and I mean, let's not say somehow because the mechanism of word of mouth by which all information indiscriminately shoots across my Iranian family world-wide is quite mathematical), word got into Iran that I was looking forward to having beets and turnips, the way you bought them steamed from the street vendors. As a result, not a day went by on my 18-or-so day trip that I wasn't offered beets and turnips, or wasn't asked why I wasn't eating beets or turnips. By the end I had both, and it was good. But I think people are still waiting for me to write a novel about it.

I knew going to Iran meant I was going to eat kabob. A lot. Probably 3 times. I couldn't have imagined that I'd have kabob something like 10 times! But man, it was mad delicious. One of the places we had kabob was at a roadside restaurant on the way to Kashan, where we sat on wooden beds covered by carpet to eat. Again, cute, but cramped. For the experience and laughs I wouldn't have changed a thing:



 A roadside stand with dried fruit on the way to Kashan. We each bought about five pounds, then wondered why.

Another fantastic experience I got to have in Kashan was to visit these hundreds-of-years-old houses - mansions more like - and experience not only the ridiculous beauty but also a couple of things quite interesting:

 One of the houses in Kashan. This is just one quarter of it, because it goes all the way around and this open space is the courtyard in the middle.



I must have been the only person in the group who was perfectly in love with this dungeon, because as it turns out, it's the refrigerator!

Also:

The water well

The kitchen

 Back in Tehran I had the chance to go around town with my grandma, and one of the places we stopped by was this very classy little coffee shop in a mall. I'm always impressed by the level of style and effort that some people put into their businesses. I got a cappuccino there and it was delicious, plus it came with a complementary piece of chocolate. The owners of this cafe were two young brothers, and I was very impressed with them. Very quiet, cozy, stylish place, and it was obvious people enjoyed being there and being themselves.

My cappuccino

This painting of a bazaar on the wall along with the wooden frame and the wooden tables really made the place.

I told one of the owners that I have a food blog and promised to feature his cafe, and I gave the address to my site. Of course this post didn't go up until months later, so who knows if he'll ever see this.



I was in Tehran on December 21st, the night of the winter equinox, which is a sort of unofficial holiday in Iran called Yalda. By tradition certain things are eaten on and I got plenty made fun of for taking pictures of everything on the table.

Watermelon in the winer?...

Nuts and seeds and dried fruit

My grandma also cooked some Kookoo that night, which is a pan-cooked mixture of herbs and eggs, kind of like a quiche but with no crust. Then again, a lamer culinary comparison was never made...

1. Herbs, dill, stuff...	2. Enter eggs.
3. Mix.	4. In the pan with some oil, lid on, cook.

 My attempt at chronicling my grandma's cooking was hilarious because at the end of the night I forgot to take a picture of the finished product...Ha...


Child's play and Kookoo aside, one of the coolest experiences I got to have in Tehran (twice!) was to go to this traditional-style restaurant in a basement in an administrative side of town. This kabob and dizi restaurant was just a few steps away from my uncles office, and interestingly enough next door to the electronics store that used to be owned by my grandfather, which has now been turned into a bank. In all my years in Tehran I'd never seen my grandfather's store, so it was definitely a scentimental experience to be in that part of town. I imagined going back to my Iran after the death of my grandpa would be a harder experience than it actually turned out to be. I thought stepping into my grandparents' house would immediately trigger a rush of memories of him...The streets where he used to take me...The books he used to read me...His chair, the garden, the trees...But everything was so different that the memories didn't really come. When they did, it wasn't that emotional. I still don't know why.

Anyway, back to the dizi! Lamb, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, plenty of oil and fat, cooked in a stone pot. This stuff will have you feeling so dense you'll cancel your plans. Happily.

 
My dizi, yogurt, pickled vegetables, fresh herbs.

By far the best part of dizi is the technique employed in eating it. If you're a traditionalist, here's how you do it:

1. Break up your bread (sangak I think. look it up.) into bite-sized chunks and put them in the clean bowl they bring.
2. Pour some of the oil/broth from the stone pot on the bread and let it soak.
3. Eat soaked bread strategically: leave room for the meat.
4. There will be a chunk of fat in the pot called the 'donbeh'. Find it and put it in the bowl, and use the stone mallot/pestle thing they bring you to mash it into a paste.
5. Put the meat in the bowl along with however much potato, beans, tomato and broth you'd like, and mash it.
6. Eat with bread, yogurt, herbs, pickled vegetables, and doogh (yogurt drink).

In my excitement I bought a stone dizi pot in Esfahan. I've yet to use it...

Speaking of Esfahan:


Gelato! This cost me $1.50 in Esfahan

And if you thought the Kookoo story was over (you thought you could escape it), many nights later we reheated in Esfahan and I finally got a picture of it finished!


Fin!


Alright, so this next part was inevitable. If you're "one of us" (because we don't waste this stuff on people who are going to question it), you're not only probably going to eat this stuff on your trip to Iran, it will practically be pre-ordained. So true to code, one night at my aunt Azi's house my uncle got us some Sirab-Shirdoon (tripe).



I hadn't had this in a while, and to be honest, all my hours of watching Bizarre Foods wasn't making this any easier. Channeling Andrew Zimmern! Channeling Andrew Zimmern! Come on...1...2...3......ughhhhxvjbnsdk!!!!.........................................................That was good!

This was a great demonstration of truly how psychological a thing eating is. Even though I genuinely enjoyed the taste, every spoonful was a struggle to the end.

About the last thing I got to take pictures of in Iran was Ladan bakery in Tehran, where we always went to get our pastries. This place is trendy as hell and crowded as shit and it will ruin your stupid little diet so give it up.

Assortment of nuts, seeds and dried fruit	Assortment of pastries and cakes. They taste better than they look
Assortment of cakes

Now here's my question to American bakeries: What the hell are you doing? Cookies my ass. Grow up and bake something real...

According to my uncle the price of Saffron in Iran has gone up to about $5600 per pound. That's about $350 an ounce.

Either that or I can't do math.

A couple of weeks before I left for Iran my boyfriend Blake and I went to a restaurant in Berkeley that I had found in some food magazine or another. The place was called Zabu Zabu, and their specialty was that they had tables with gas stoves in the middle where they would put a pot of boiling broth, into which you could dump and cook whatever it was you ordered (shabu shabu, I know). The idea was good enough, and having seen something like it on No Reservations in Schezuan made me even more itchy to try it out in hopes that the more I do what Anthony Bourdain does the more likely it is that I will slowly morph into him.
I don't understand why asian restaurants consistently have shittier service than other places but that has been my experience so far and Zabu Zabu didn't make itself an exception. But at least by nature of it being Japanese there was a lot of style in the place to distract you from the fact that you've been sitting in the lobby for...40 minutes now?
However much that Blake loved the food, the taste never matched the concept for me. The chicken broth never gave either the meat or the vegetables the right balance of flavor or a good texture, turning the thin-cut meat into something wet and tasteless, and making the vegetables, especially the great assortment of mushrooms that I was at first very excited about elastic and chewy. But I'll ascribe all this to my inexperience in knowing how to order. It was a good experience overall and maybe I'm just making it sound bad because it didn't end up being what I needed that night. Maybe some other night it would have been great. Maybe my taste is too unsophisticated for food that subtle...I don't know...Blake loved it....


 Zabu Zabu

The past few months have really made it evident to me where food fits into my current life -- both in terms of cooking and in terms of eating. When I came back from Iran I basically hit the ground running. Actually, I hit the ground stumbling, but I managed mostly not to fall, and since that moment I have felt busy until now. 

And the truth is that I don't love what I do. I have an interest I hope to grow to love one day, but sometimes I can't help but to wonder if that's wishful thinking. If I am to base my life and career around what I love, how am I so sure I belong at UC Davis and not at culinary school?

I think I know the answer to that question...But sometimes the question teaches you more than the answer...



 Lunch.
 

By special request I will post about this here piroshki before moving on to the story of my recent not-so-culinary journey in Iran!



So I woke up this morning and thought, "Oh no...not again. I'm craving piroshki...". After hours of sitting in bed and one Alton Brown video in which he coincidentally ate a Caribbean stuffed pastry I realized I had to take this to the kitchen. Now, I haven't been to the store in almost 6 weeks. I had to work with what I found, and ended up making this piroshki out of flour, milk, salt, butter, a turkey patty, and red sauce that I made from mixing ketchup with water, herbs, spices, and lemon juice. With no idea for what I was doing, I made the dough and rolled it out. Cooked the meat and added the sauce, and then stuffed the meat into the dough. In the oven at 325 for about 20-25 minutes and man, this piroshki was the bomb. The stuffing was delicious and the pastry was perfectly delicate and flaky. I definitely gave kudos to myself for this one...


(Quick note: Whenever I make something up it only turns out good the first time. I guarantee the next time I try to make this the pastry will end up wet and soggy and the meat will taste like crap.)

An oldie:



4th of July pudding. Hah.

So, where was I? It's been a while since I've written and in the meantime a lot of culinary excursions have occured--unfortunately I can't remember them all...Here's a few:

I made that pomegranate cheesecake, and good god, a masterpiece. This cheesecake ended up being a real testament to my cooking style. A story of ambition, rebellion, suffering, doubt, terror, triumph! I took a very crappy picture of the last piece that I may or may not post.

I made a marbled chocolate cake for my friend Chris' birthday. Another example of me making food meant for other people to eat, and then almost losing my guts for fear of it being disappointing. It went well, though. It was moist, but the texture was a bit crumbly.

I'm also in the process of making a home-brew out of sparkling pear juice. It'll be ready right around finals time. A blessing and a curse. 

That being said...one might think that I'm a "foodie" and spend my days scouring farmers markets, sauteeing truffles and making gourmet dishes. And frankly I'd hate for someone to think I'm that person. I may as well buy myself a cashmere scarf and start listening to acoustic alternative. Makes me nauseous thinking about it...

Most of my meals end up being a very starchy imitation of something better, and I tend to have the same type of thing over and over again. Which does get miserably boring sometimes, but I'd rather be bored than broke.

Here a couple of things that I eat rather frequently:

A  variation on noodles, chicken broth, potstickers, and then whatever.

Spasagna?

The second picture is my attempt at fooling my brain into thinking I'm eating something much nicer than I actually am. It's my poor-man's-lasagna. I can actually make a mean lasagna from scratch -- and from scratch I mean I make my own noodles from flour and eggs. But when I don't have time, this is a great alternative. It's angel hair pasta layered in a dish with ground beef, tomato sauce, and white sauce (flour, butter, milk), some spices like pepper and oregano, and then cheese. Tastes pretty nice and it's a little more exciting than just pasta and sauce.

By the way, remember that blueberry coffee cake I posted about early on? Here's a less weird picture of it out of the oven:

 (One of my pomegranates)

On Saturday I spent 4 hours of my life making pomegranate syrup 'from scratch,' so-to-speak, for the first and probably last time in my life. I want to make a cheesecake to bring to the potluck in my physics class next Thursday, and I wanted to use the pomegranate syrup swirled on top of it. It's honestly just a novelty thing, because pomegranate is one of those fruits I highly prefer unfooled-around-with. For a syrup it's kind of tart, though, so it should cut through the creamy sweetness of the cheesecake pretty nicely.

So the process went like this:

I had about 24 pomegranates laying around, so picked 4 of the sweetest looking ones and seeded them. Then I put the seeds in a ziploc bag and painstakingly crushed them to get all the juices out. Afterwards, this is what my hands looked like:

 (My fingers were stained black from pomegranate peeling and crushing. Some of it still hasn't gone away)

I drained the ziploc bag into a bowl, at which point I had about 2 cups of pomegranate juice. I added about 1/4 cup of sugar and a teaspoon of lemon juice, and a tiny bit of cornstarch, and boiled it on low for almost two hours until I ended up with about half a cup of syrup! I will post a picture of the syrup soon. It tastes nice, but I'd rather have a real pomegranate.

Speaking of pomegranates...it is possibly my favorite fruit. Unbelievably gorgeous...It's like breaking open a fruit from a tree and it's full of rubies. Rubies you can eat, and they're delicious. It never gets old.

An excerpt from the publication KDVIATIONS -- an interview with William Poundstone:

KD: We told about your analysis of processed meats years ago. I think we turned people vegan. Talk about this.

WP: I guess it's "waste not, want not." [laughs] Good meat is sold to supermarkets or restaurants. They have to figure out what to do with lungs, salivary glands and leftover bits. Some goes into pet food, but they use a lot in luncheon meats. Spam is pork shoulder. It's tough to market otherwise. Some people actually like it, which I've never figured out.

I've a chart in the book showing you where cuts like pork snout, cheeks and livers get used. The product I determined is probably the most disgusting is chorizo, Mexican sausage. They use lymph nodes, hearts, salivary glands, etc. It's pretty much the complete pig!


An open statement from the general world to Mr. Poundstone:

Dear Mr. Poundstone,

We're grateful you take time out of your busy American day to inspect lunch meat in hopes of uncovering the lastest industry ploy to humiliate the general public. However, we are a bit confused about your definition of "good meat." You see, in parts of the world beyond your personal kitchen, we eat things like shoulder, snout, and heart, even when we know we're eating it. I guess it's a waste-not, want-not kind of thing, but it's what we generally consider "good meat."
Don't get us wrong, we have our fair share of chicken breasts and flank steaks, but every now and then, roasted liver really hits the spot. You should try it. (And don't think we're coming to you solely from the depths of south-east Asia or the Kalahari desert -- no -- think Spain, France, Iceland...you know, the progressive ones you love). We eat it all: cheeks, hearts, snouts, livers, ears, stomachs, blood, fat. Have you ever had sheep udders? No? That's too bad.
You may be confused about why we opt to voluntarily consume pet food, especially when it's not even disguised as salami, but rest assured that we're not holding our breath for you to "figure us out." So thanks for your concern, but don't lose any sleep, and in response to your quest to find the "most disgusting" product, we have only one thing to say: Your mother.

Sincerely,

The hungry global community.

 P.S.  Haggis?

Time is so low lately. I have to wait two, sometimes three days before I have time to go to the store. I can't carry my groceries while biking, and I don't have a car, so I have to take the bus to the store and back, which at its very quickest takes one hour. Public transportation being the cosmic joke that it is, if I leave my house later, the bus will be early and I will miss it. If I leave early, the bus will be late and I will be standing in the street for at least 20 minutes, as I regularly do. On the way back there's another 20 minute wait. I figured out a while ago that it takes me 20 minutes to walk home from the store, so my tolerance for boredom being what it is, the last time I went shopping I decided to just walk home with 4 bags of groceries. I would have gotten home at the same time as if I had waited for the bus, so if it means I don't have to sit and stare at asphalt for 20 minutes, I'll take it.

Getting home with the groceries is another story in itself. I bought some mushrooms to make another one of my mom's dishes and didn't have time to do anything with them until over a week later! Sigh...Anyway, here's what happened:



It's Basmati rice, shredded chicken, and sliced white mushrooms. It's seasoned with curry, black pepper and saffron, and it doesn't taste as Indian as "curry" might make you think. It's pretty buttery and savory, and a little bit spicy.

Mine turned out alright. Once again I failed at the rice, but by less of a margin than last time, so we'll call it improvement. I overshredded the chicken, used a bit too much black pepper, and sliced the mushrooms too thin, but that's how you learn. Overall it was pretty not bad. Exactly that.

I've just enabled commenting by everyone, so you don't have to be an LiveJournal user to comment. I think.