the goal is to make indian food that tastes better than the packaged, but that's not going to happen anytime soon

the indian grocery store means pre-made foil pouch food- the paneer makhati was very good, and i made mashed potatoes to go along with it.

monday i made the mexican chirozo dish thing, which lasted 2 dinner and 2 lunches. the leftover "chourice" (had to substitute portugese sausage) i ate with broccoli and these potatoes. i didn't follow the recipe exactly, but i'll venture that it could have used more garlic, herbs, salt and chicken flavor.

made THE neiman marcus cookies, which came out well.

Made this curry, although i think next time i'll make it with buttermilk instead of yogurt. it involves mincing a hot pepper. i knew enough to scrape out the seeds and wash my hands thoroughly after touching it, but this apparently was not enough. i touched my eye about an hour later, and after a few rubs, started to go blind with sheer pain. being a good chemistry student, i went to the sink and tried to rinse my eye, although without using my obviously contaminated fingers. i was fine after a few minutes, but then the middle three fingers on my right hand (which is odd, since i was chopping my right) started to have a sort of mild yet very unpleasant burning pain for the rest of the evening and part of the next morning.

As regards to the semolina cake, I stopped eating it about a day after i made it. got too dry and weird.

see, i do things besides baking sometimes

made some excellent 40 cloves of garlic chicken but with beer instead of cognac and wine and thyme, although i do want to try it that way some time.

also, semolina 1-2-3 cake from home baking, a lebanese cake named namoura or mammoura. it was based on semolina (which i had to track down at an expensive grocery with a large italian section) and yougurt, with a sugar-butter sauce moistening it after baking. not bad, although i would have cooked it a little longer, and used all of the sauce on it, since it really does soak it all up, but could have cut down on the butter content too.

went to the indian grocery and found some "masala puri" crackers, which are excellent, although i think their flakiness is at the expense of several pounds of butter/palm oil per cracker. i was hoping they would be like the indian spicy pretzel-shaped crackers my grad student in chicago had, and they were.

finally went back to 'helen's special raisin bread' recipe since i wanted a bread i knew i liked. (i just bought some toasting bread from pepperidge farm, and it tastes very artificial, although toasting it does help.) i made one loaf with a cinnamon swirl (1/4 cup sugar, 5 teaspoons cinnamon after brushing the dough with milk, as suggested by baking illustrated gives a very cinnamon-y filling) which came out well, although the swirl itself is sort of squished into the upper half of the loaf.

also, went for 6 exorbiant sea scallops (about a dollar a scallop), which came out so-so. the first 3 i tried to make a gravy similar to chicken i mentioned earlier. although i forgot that lemon+cream=nasty curdling. the latter 3 i sauted then put in the oven with garlic and breadcrumbs and basil, as suggested by the supermarket's suggestions on the scallop container sticker.

even i fail at baking, sometimes

tried to make potato bread from home baking. i took so many shortcuts and didn't know what i was doing that the end product was sort of sad. i think the problem(s) came from being short a potato, using too much liquid, running out of white flour and subbing whole wheat flour, rushing the second rising, adding more flour to half of the dough (made into rolls) and rushing the baking of the watery) loaf. for all that though, the result was very edible for my purposes. i just wouldn't let any one else eat it. *update. not really so edible. the first three slices from each end were fine, but it just wasn't cooked in the middle. i think it started to ferment a couple of days in, too. the rolls lasted longer, but the last two of nine started growing mold.
also made lomi lomi, as tomatoes are edging back in season. and brownies, as the leftover chocolate bunny was begging to be melted down.
went to nyc looking for L+L, but it seemed to have replaced with "Osaka Sushi and BBQ" and as they still had lau lau, was fine with me.