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Better All Round
Oct. 22nd, 2010 06:21 pmLast two nights in a row I've had about four hours of sleep. Today was the first 'real' day of the new class I'm taking; I've been scared of it. It's not common for me to doubt my ability at something, but this is surveying and it's spatial and detail-oriented, neither of which are my strong suits. It's a mostly-outdoor class with writing in duckbooks and it was supposed to rain today too.
I was not expecting it to be a good day.
I was nearly late to class, didn't do the food stuff I should have, and was put in a group with people I didn't know.
It turned out to be a wonderful day. Class was fun, interesting, challenging-- and everything made sense (I love botany but try to find the rhyme or reason behind latin or common names and you'll see what I mean. The guys I was working with were sharp but not annoying about it, it only rained for a little while and there was even some sun at one point, things went quickly and we got out of class early with our assignments done.
On the way home I was super hungry and stopped at Donald's Market; it's our local produce-plus store. Never shop when you're hungry, right?
It turned from being a besting-new-challenges day into a food porn day. The roma tomatoes were cheap and had that almost-but-not-quite-overripe time-to-make-sauce smell to them. I got tons. To go with them I got hot peppers, green peppers, and red peppers, a japanese eggplant (cause who needs the bitter, and they tend to be more local)(solanaceae for the win, by the way), zucchini, cilantro, watercress, sui choi (aka Napa cabbage), kholrabi, and I topped up my canned pickled things supply. There may have been some plums and maybe even something else in there.
So, eggplant and half the tomatoes are long slow roasting in the oven now for sauce. Some of the hot peppers, the cilantro, the rest of the tomatoes, all the bell peppers, all the cilantro, a little cabbage, and some smoked tofu are all sauced, they cooked for maybe two hours and now a bowl of that sauce on corn pasta is sitting beside me.
I've been thinking about pasta sauces lately. On the one hand there's the touch-of-thin-sauce-on-pasta philosophy, and that works great if you want a lot of grain or if you have fantastic pasta. When you get a sufficiently thick sauce, though, there's a continuum from stew-with-some-noodles-in-it to a-bit-of-stuff-mixed-in-with-pasta. I used to be a very pasta-primary person, but the more I make super chunky stewy sauces the more I figure-- why not top the balance? More veggies than grain isn't a bad thing no matter what the food pyramid says (we could go there, talk about lobbyists and 'necessary dairy' but really...) and it sure can be tasty.
The tomatoes and eggplant in the oven smell incredible. They're intensifying and richening in amazing ways. They too will be sauced for pasta, I think (or for quinoa, or amaranth, or rice, or combined with some lentils).
Watercress potato cabbage soup hasn't even begun prep yet.
It's a good day.
I was not expecting it to be a good day.
I was nearly late to class, didn't do the food stuff I should have, and was put in a group with people I didn't know.
It turned out to be a wonderful day. Class was fun, interesting, challenging-- and everything made sense (I love botany but try to find the rhyme or reason behind latin or common names and you'll see what I mean. The guys I was working with were sharp but not annoying about it, it only rained for a little while and there was even some sun at one point, things went quickly and we got out of class early with our assignments done.
On the way home I was super hungry and stopped at Donald's Market; it's our local produce-plus store. Never shop when you're hungry, right?
It turned from being a besting-new-challenges day into a food porn day. The roma tomatoes were cheap and had that almost-but-not-quite-overripe time-to-make-sauce smell to them. I got tons. To go with them I got hot peppers, green peppers, and red peppers, a japanese eggplant (cause who needs the bitter, and they tend to be more local)(solanaceae for the win, by the way), zucchini, cilantro, watercress, sui choi (aka Napa cabbage), kholrabi, and I topped up my canned pickled things supply. There may have been some plums and maybe even something else in there.
So, eggplant and half the tomatoes are long slow roasting in the oven now for sauce. Some of the hot peppers, the cilantro, the rest of the tomatoes, all the bell peppers, all the cilantro, a little cabbage, and some smoked tofu are all sauced, they cooked for maybe two hours and now a bowl of that sauce on corn pasta is sitting beside me.
I've been thinking about pasta sauces lately. On the one hand there's the touch-of-thin-sauce-on-pasta philosophy, and that works great if you want a lot of grain or if you have fantastic pasta. When you get a sufficiently thick sauce, though, there's a continuum from stew-with-some-noodles-in-it to a-bit-of-stuff-mixed-in-with-pasta. I used to be a very pasta-primary person, but the more I make super chunky stewy sauces the more I figure-- why not top the balance? More veggies than grain isn't a bad thing no matter what the food pyramid says (we could go there, talk about lobbyists and 'necessary dairy' but really...) and it sure can be tasty.
The tomatoes and eggplant in the oven smell incredible. They're intensifying and richening in amazing ways. They too will be sauced for pasta, I think (or for quinoa, or amaranth, or rice, or combined with some lentils).
Watercress potato cabbage soup hasn't even begun prep yet.
It's a good day.
