in which i pretend to be ethnic

i made a potato/tofu/broccoli curry on sunday. it was sort of weird. i'm going to have to admit i'm not really indian.

some sandwiches for lunch (avocado, cheese, hummus, lettuce).

grilled cheese and (based on this) tomato soup on monday. the soup was actually not bad. i'm thinking tomato paste was key.

falafel on tuesday, courtesy of near east foods. plus a cucumber-yogurt sauce.

made macaroni and cheese on friday, which actually came out very well, as this is the first bechamel/roux(?) i've made successfully.

and, finally, this sunday i made piroshki, which are very good, except there's no way the dough actually needs that much butter. i'll probably have a heart attack in the next few days or so.

i think about buying an oven thermometer, but i haven't had any problems yet...

made this hawaiian sweet bread. it was...ok. not as fluffy and soft as the kind you buy, but it tasted about the same. but the lack of softness was not in its favor.

mapo tofu for sunday's dinner, but i managed to slightly burn it, or maybe it was the new chili sauce i was using. in any case, a disappointment, although edible.

then made very good lasagna, sort of following this and the recipe on the back of the box. but with frozen spinach instead of meat.
this lasted a very long while.

on tuesday i went down to new york, and got a falafel sandwich from grand central station. i forgot how much i love falafel.

then my friend sent me ginger pound cake from kentucky. she is the best. however, i had been thinking about making cookies for a while, so i made those- the oatmeal lace cookies from the joy of cooking.

and finally, made MORE bread because, apparently, i don't know what else to do with myself. i did buy a half-off ciabatta last week, but maybe that's the last bread i'll buy for a while. home baking, again, did not disappoint with "robin's bread" which was a semi-whole wheat bread. of course, the recipe wanted 3 loaves, so i 2/3-rded it, which makes me nervous since it allows for a lot of arthimetic mistakes. but it turned out very nicely, although i'm not sure if i would add sunflower seeds again. (or maybe just not these, roasted and unsalted from trader joes. maybe i want raw ones?)

maybe i should try cooking french food...

i went to trader joe's, so i bought a lot of frozen food (gnocchi, burritos, lasanga) but i realize if i have frozen food, i'll eat it almost immediately.

but i redeemed myself on wednesday and made some sort of eggplant curry. something like that, but with peas, and the spices already mixed.

we'll skip ahead now to the incredible dinner i had friday night. my lab group went out on the company tab to new york to the french restaurant artisanal to treat a visitor from japan and say goodbye to a temp leaving. after some confusion with the french language (gougeres? what?), i broke my lenten vegetarianism to try oysters (and um, a scallop and some tako) assuming that i wouldn't get to have free oysters again. they were actually pretty good. not, of course, that they're spending much time on one's tongue. (and anyway, if i was catholic, it would have been ok since it was st. patrick's day...and shellfish besides...) then, after staring at the lemoned fingerbowls for a while, we moved onto fondue, which was very good. then, perhaps the best creme brulee i've ever had. (granted, i had had at least 5 glasses of extremely good wine by this point. i wish i was rich.)

yeah, so this week wasn't too exciting either

i was uninspired, what can i say?

although i was at a different grocery store (big y) looking for a particular chili-garlic sauce, which of course they were out of. they did have a szechwan sauce, which i tried, and which was...ok, i guess.
but, they had a new annie's macaroni and cheese (and tomato and basil) which was also...really good, or really gross. it's a finer line than you would think. they also had premade indian food, notably kashimi rajma from kohinoor? which was quite good. (fascniatingly, a google search for kohinoor brings up indian porn first. as for me, kohinoor reminds me of the god of small things.)

i also made egg salad, with some tofu mixed in, which added some body but not much else. egg salad is mostly an excuse to eat mayonaise anyway, right? which reminds me i had an artichoke sometime in the past two weeks also.

then i had mixed vegetables in garlic sauce from the chinese take-out place, which was good and very greasy.

i am currently in the process of making bread, but it's a two day process.
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now it's the next day. it came out...decent. very edible for garlic toast with pecorino romano, which i bought at trader joes before realizing it was sheep cheese. it was, again, from the book home baking, under american white bread. perhaps it didn't rise as much as i would have liked in the over.

finally, sunday night, i made this. which meant buying a lot of spices at the indian grocery, and then adding too much, i think. still, now i have a plethora of spices to mess around with.