stretchy pants & fanny packs

1. cranberry sauce - the sour kind made from oranges and fresh cranberries - is really good with a little bit of white cheese on a cracker.

2. bacon makes this even better.  a good use of leftover roasted pumpkin!

As I (Jena) have probably made clear on multiple occasions, I am an instinctive cook rather than a recipe-follower.  So here we have an example. 

I have recently gotten totally obsessed with oatmeal because it’s one of the few things you can make in single-person portions with relative ease, and have been experimenting with various fruit-and-spice combinations at breakfast time.  (Ginger, peaches, pecans, cranberries, and a drop of cinnamon and brown sugar is the winner so far.)

So why not oatmeal for dinner?  I found Mark Bittman’s Savory Oatmeal recipe and decided, without having tried it, to improve on it.

Ingredients:

* oatmeal (1/2 cup per person)
* water (3/4-1 cup per person)
* garlic (1/2-1 clove per person, to taste)
* ginger (to taste)
* sesame oil (?)
* mushrooms (5-10 per person)
* unripe mango (optional; 1/2-1 per person)
* scallions (to taste)
* soy sauce (to taste)
* Sriracha or something similar (to taste)
* peanut butter (optional; 1 T per person)

1.  Stir-fry oil, garlic, ginger, mushrooms, and mango.  Don’t forget, as I always do, that sesame oil smokes at an even lower temperature than olive oil.
2.  Add water and oatmeal.  Make sure to stir frequently.
3.  Add soy sauce and hot sauce to taste.
4.  Realize that, since the dried shrimp lady had already gone home by the time you went to the market, your dinner has exactly no protein.  Remember that you have walked 4-5 miles *and* attended a long tai chi class today *and* may go out dancing tonight.  Decide that peanut butter is the best available source of protein and mix it in.
5. Serve.  Top with lots of chopped scallions.

Calories per serving, in case you care:
     oatmeal (150)
     peanut butter (90)
     oil (about 100)
     mushrooms, garlic, ginger, scallions (negligible - max 50)
     mango (about 100)
Total: about 500 for a very large bowl of food.  Bonus points: nothing processed, no simple carbohydrates, lots of antioxidants (garlic, ginger, mango).

I was too lazy to go out and buy the right kind of vinegar (red wine) and the right kind of mustard (dijon, or the fancy stuff with seeds) before I made salad dressing today, so I threw together some things that were sitting around.  It turned out surprisingly tasty:

* white vinegar
* deli mustard (NOT yellow mustard)
* olive oil
* a lime
* zaatar

The (leftover) beets in the salad turned the dressing a pretty shade of pink, to boot!

J

… involves sitting on my patio at 2pm in my pajamas, eating a really, really, really good salad.

Make this: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/health/nutrition/06recipehealth.html  However, use limes instead of lemons.

Serve with:
1) hardboiled eggs, one per person
2) avocados: preferably aguacates criollos, the little ones you eat skin and all, but if not, chop up other avocados
3) a mix of diced cucumbers and cilantro
4) sour cream

I like this even better than normal borscht.  However, my entire kitchen and everything in it - including my hands - are a stunning shade of hot pink. 

(Also, peeling and chopping a large number of raw beets is, like, serious exercise and will leave you feeling highly accomplished.)

(Also also, I think it might want some black pepper.)

Egg creams!

It all started with pastrami.

A couple of intellectual foodie types—but grad students, mind you, so cheap intellectual foodie types—decide to meet up for a regular nosh. Decision time: where to start in a sprawling city pocketed with delicious neighborhood enclaves and a serious mainstream food culture bred on ambition and novelty?

Call us difficult, but we decided to start with a test of the City of Angels, rather than go for its strengths. We had our doubts that LA could do pastrami up right (the fabled Dupar’s? Blech. Johnnie’s Pastrami? Don’t get me started), but having heard that Langer’s had pastrami to rival NYC, we decided to see for ourselves one Saturday afternoon.

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I love eating with my hands, and I always have.  Ask my mom and she’ll tell you chicken soup was my favorite childhood finger food.  Add touch to sight, taste, and smell, and you get even more sensual pleasure.  (If my food makes sound, I’m out.  Just saying.)

I’ve been known to eat with my hands in nice restaurants anyway.  A snobby waiter at the Mexico City airport once felt the need to instruct me on how to cut my food with a knife and fork.  (What’s wrong with my tortilla?)  What I’m trying to say is, I have serious hand-eating credentials.

All that said, I think I’m still too full from Monday night to write anything.  And there were no photos.  Which just means we will have to go back.

J

Just two weeks ago, Fu Rai Bo had a facade.  Now it doesn’t.  But don’t let the scaffolding scare you off — they’re open.  And bonus: we got to sit in the tatami room.  Not for the weak of knee, perhaps, but who cares?

Things we ate:

Unanimous love
*spinach with bacon
*something on a skewer
*duck with some sort of fruit sauce

The jury’s out
*tako wasabi: raw octopus with wasabi sauce.  Dan and I vote it up but everyone else finds it slimy.
*fried baby some-kind-of-fish: We eat fish bones like potato chips.  Too bad it just tastes like fried.

Never again
*hanpen cheese: fish cake with American cheese, fried, served with mustard and soy sauce.  It tastes better than it sounds, but that’s not saying much.

Coda: when trying to find the names of some of the things we ate, I discovered something awesome: their website has no English on it.

J

We eat LA. Watch out!