Whats Fa Dinna?

This weekend was a really weird one, food-wise, since I felt that I let food sort of sag as a priority while i tended to other things, such as walking around Prospect Park, going to a rollicking staff xmas party, and other varieties of good clean fun.

Here I’ll sing the praises of potato leek soup. It’s seriously EASY to make and really, really good.

For potato leek soup you will need:

bag of potatoes

a couple of leeks

some veggie boullion

butter or EB

cream or cheese if you are so inclined.

So, all you do is clean and cut the leeks, peeling off outside layer. slice them up and put them in a big pot with the sliced potatoes and sautee in butter for a few minutes. Cover the whole mess with water and let it boil, add boullion, then simmer, til potatoes smash apart. You can then blend it til creamy or just mash up the taters with a fork. Add cream if desired or put shredded cheese (gruyere! jarlsberg!) on the bowls as garnish/cheese bonus prize.

Babs and I made this delightful little soup this evening, as well as brussels sprouts (also fried in butter) and some Tofurky kielbasa.  Polished it off with some Green & Black’s chocolate, food of choice for girls talking about feelings all over the world, throughout time. 

Potato leek is a great soup to serve as a main course, but also works with European cuisines of all sorts and can be dressed up with other veggies, fake meat, fancy dairy products, etc. It also goes well with FEELINGS.

All the while, through shopping, cooking, eating, digesting, and cleaning up our meal, we talked about our feelings, boys, past relationships, future relationships, sex, love, intimacy, honesty, getting our needs met, and related matters. I feel like we went to a sauna and sweated but it was like a sauna for feelings, man.  Totally cathartic and awesome girl time. Plus, the food was good.

If you are experiencing a transition, or just wanna bro down with your pal and validate each other, I highly recommend this recipe.

Babs, you rule a lot.

Last night Yoko and I practiced music and she made a delicious Indian dish called khicheri. Incidentally, it’s a specialty of Mumbai, where a few of the fanciest hotels in the country’s entertainment and cinema capital were recently subject to an itchy outbreak of terrorist attacks. I doubt any of the guests were served humble khicheri, but it interesting that we ate a regional specialty only days after that region made global headlines.

I’d never had it, but had heard of it, mostly because Joanna says she used to date someone named Khicheri, after the dish. He is some kinda Hare Krishna or guru-cult child. You’d be surprised how many people you may know who grew up in guru cults. They don’t all have obviously weird names, either. My mom was a pretty die-hard Ram Dass fan, (aka Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary’s right-hand man and devout prophet of LSD) and a few friends of mine grew up in the Meher Baba community which has centers all over the country. Anyway, Khicheri the man was one such individual, so I’m told.

It’s one of those foods that is unquestionably healthy and wholesome, and is prized in ayurvedic cooking as very easy to digest.

It started with soaking basmati rice and lentils, mung or adzuki beans (we had adzuki) in water for an hour or more. Then you chop up some root veggies and fry them in ghee with spices, add some water, the rice and legumes, and cook til it’s all a big mess. The soaked rice cooks down into a sweet pasty porridge which basically was my favorite part of the whole thing. I ended up sort of picking around the veggies and just going for that. So much for mature eating habits.

I think the ghee is key here. Ghee is this weird semi-opaque clarified butter, which is simmered after clarifying, and which is often made of buffalo milk in India. Other equatorial cuisines use varieties of clarified butter, such as Moroccan “smen” and Iranian “yellow oil.” This makes a lot of sense, since these rendered butters can keep for a long time without refrigeration before turning rancid and can be more easily used for frying and sauteeing than fresh butter. They also have mysterious health properties and taste delicious.

Khicheri is the kind of food one should eat when one is a)ill b)cleansing or c)a spiritual vegan. Evidently it is not the best thing to eat when you are very hungry, have PMS and are in wintertime nesting/fattening mode, since we blew through several bowls each and I was craving pizza by the time I got off the subway in my neighborhood. Unfortunately the pizza joint was closed, so I had to scurry home and make due with some weird-ass pasta salad leftovers from this weekend’s invasion of our apartment by a group of friendly neighborhood folks who needed a space to gather in. I nuked the pasta salad and put parmesan cheese all over it, only to learn that the creamy reddish sauce was not vodka sauce or alfredo, but mayonnaise mixed with juice from the halved cherry tomatoes.

It was actually kind of good. Hot mayonnaise pasta salad seems like something only perverts and elderly Depression survivors would even consider eating, but I was feeling frisky, and more than a little economically depressed. There was a car alarm blowing out in front of the house, I Robot on the TV, and a sense of impending adventure and excitement about whose origins I can only speculate…