"Suffering"

Just for the record, here are some delicious things I have cooked in the last week. "Suffering." Bah. Kelsey exaggerates.

Chocolate chip cookies
Cheese and potato and egg and vegetable thing x 2
Tuscan Cannellini Bean Soup with Cavolo Nero
Lentils and rice

I think today I will make Ugly Homemade Bread. And possibly some more cookies.

Madeline is going to win

Even though I bought an ancient grain for 2 units of demerit forgiveness if I cook it and blog about it.  She will win because I have been unwilling to suffer for the contest and keep buying food.  I made my own refried beans two days ago and they were delicious!  So Mads, you can start thinking about what you'll buy at TJ's... :)

Back to the Basics!

Hi, I eat loser of contest for snack. Also I'm copyright Madeline. I live in Kurama, Japan

...my cooking basics, that would be. I more or less learned to cook when I moved to Japan after college (thank you, dining hall and parents, for feeding me till I turned 22...). Japan is full of food in a box. It's like extra points are given out for every layer of packaging involved in the food-boxing process. Sometimes fresh fruit even comes in a box. Food in a box, however, loses its charm when you can't read the box. There was that time I thought I was buying little pink sweets, and they were actually shrimp chips...

So when I moved to Japan, I not only learned to cook. I learned to cook without food in a box. Even after I started to be able to read the boxes (and after a Japanese-speaking friend told me to just put Cook-Do eggplant sauce in everything), I wasn't sure what to do with the contents of the boxes. Eventually, I did discover the foreign food store, where I began buying things like $12 boxes of garden burgers. I also ate a lot of mochi, ice cream, and roll cakes because I knew what they were. However, I also made stuff. From scratch. Gaijin food that I would normally have just bought in a box in the US. I even tried making peanut butter once, with limited success (I made peanut powder somehow).

For example, the only kind of recognizable breakfast food I could find at my grocery store was All-Bran. All-Bran is weird. Japanese breakfast traditionally consists of fish and rice and pickles and miso soup. I miss it now, but I missed Western breakfast then. So, I learned to make very basic mueslix: mashed up banana, plain yogurt, oats. Other fruits optional. I made myself some mueslix tonight for the first time in ages...now I have a big jar full in the fridge to eat for breakfast for the next several days. And I am happy.

Pumpkin-Herb Pasta Salad

Pumpkin-Herb Pasta Salad

Sometimes I think it's pointless for me to own recipe books because I never use them.  This  dish was modeled after something I ate while on vacation recently at an absolutely delightful neo-hippie/Middle-Eastern restaurant in Queenstown, New Zealand.  Yes, I know.  But the food was delicious.

Total cost, probably about $6 and I only had to buy the zucchini today.

Ingredients
~5C cubed pumpkin/squash
1 small zucchini, quartered lengthwise and then sliced
3 green onions, chopped
4-5 cloves garlic
Small pasta of some sort, about 1C uncooked
Fresh herbs - I used rosemary, thyme, and oregano (left over from last weekend's soup)
Olive oil & white-wine vinegar
Salt and fresh-ground pepper

• Preheat the oven to 350F
• Toss the chopped pumpkin in olive oil then put in large baking pan with peeled garlic cloves (pan large enough so that squash is in a single layer)
• Bake until soft, about 45 mins but check frequently with whatever gourd you're using
• While that is baking, cook your pasta al dente, rinse with cold water, and set aside
• Lightly saute the zucchini - you're purposefully undercooking it so that it will still have some substance when it's in the finished pasta salad
• Chop the green onion and herbs
• Once your pumpkin is done and cooled, take out the garlic cloves (all carmelized/roasted - delicious), chop finely, and add to a large bowl
• Combine pumpkin, pasta, zucchini, herbs, and green onions with the garlic.  Add more olive oil and the white-wine vinegar to taste.  Also add salt and pepper to taste - don't be afraid to add more salt!  :)
• Serves 3 hungry people or 4 as a lunch side dish

This is really tasty - I had a hard time not eating it tonight (it is for lunches for the next few days).  The photo does not do it justice.  The only really labor-intensive part is chopping the pumpkin, especially if it has a harder shell.

The Prize (& Some More Rules)

We've decided that the prize for the winner of this challenge will be a $40 gift card to Trader Joes...$40 of food in a box! I am motivated now.

We have decided that violations (such as grocery store hummus) will incur a demerit of $5. We might want to recruit an impartial judge as well, for tricky items like chocolate and cheese and flour.

We have also added widgets with our running totals, and a list of demerits.

Grocery Shopping - 2/1

Today I (Madeline) went to the grocery store and I bought:

Celery: 1.69
Organic Green Onion: .89
Organic Rainbow Chard: 1.69
Anaheim Peppers: .46

So my running total is: 4.73

I will use these things to make black-eyed peas with Trinidadian seasonings. Already got the peas and some rice. Short post because I sliced off a big piece of my fingernail while cutting up the chard...consequently typing is somewhat annoying at the moment.