All the cold weather is weighing me down, literally. I think I gained a lot of weight in Boston, mostly because I ate a lot of unnecessary meals when I was bored and tired of doing work, and especially because I ate all of these meals at the selection of fastish-food places in the vicinity of campus. But it didn't help that when I made time to cook, I found myself craving wintry comfort foods. But there is nothing like eating rich stews and roasts, and creamy, starchy root vegetables in a warm cosy room while the snow is falling outside. I was hoping to slim down by eating lots of fresh salads and summer fair, but the way it is working out, it looks like I am destined to live two years of my life in constant winter. I'm going to have to find a way to work off the extra calories.
Some of the meals I made in Boston were really spectacular. Unfortunately, the pictures of the two best meals I made the whole time I was there stayed behind withe the camera I forgot there, but I luckily saved most of them on my computer before I came back. So you'll have to take my word for it until manage to get a hold of them. In the meantime here are the rest
1. This was a masaman curry with beef, yukon gold potatoes, and eggplant.
2. Rosemary split pea soup with pancetta and cream. This soup would have been awesome, except we just took so much longer for the peas to totally soften than the package said that I finally gave up and we ate them with slighly more 'texture' than I prefer. It was still really good though.
3. Stir-fried tempeh with kim chee and sesame. This was awesome. I love kimchee in stir fry or with noodles. Because it's a fermented mixture of usually cabage, chilies, and dried shrimp it adds lots of complex flavors with just one ingredient, lending acidity, freshness, meatiness (or 'unami,' if you will), spicyness, and saltiness to any dish.
4. Roast chicken with mashed potatoes
5. Winter vegetable stew. I used this as a filling for a pot pie once, it was awesome. It was a very fast and satisfying with some rice, but is a much more special meal if you throw crust on it.
6. Tofu and green beans with spicy black-bean-ground-pork sauce. I think this will be making a reprise soon, as I got some really excellent tofu and some yard-long beans from the farmers market this week. I guess this is kind of a combination of ma po tofu and szechuan green beans, perhaps not traditional, but it was really good.
7. A closeup.
8. Pizza with spanish chorizo and mushrooms. I made this to make use of a block of mozzarella cheese an earlier tenant had left behind in the fridge in the apartment where I was subletting a room. Unfortunately, it was fat free mozzarella. I really want to know whose idea this was, and how they can possibly continue to sell it. It really was more of a stand-in for cheese, having perhaps some of its visual and physical properties, but absolutely none of its culinary properties. It melted more like plastic than like cheese and didn't taste far off either.
8. Caprese salad. My first meal upon returning to Paraguay and my only taste of summer. Of something like 20 heirloom tomato seedlings we managed to sprout, only one grew to a full plant. That plant only managed to produce two fruits before it succumbed to a particularly virulent case of virticulum wilt. It looks like it might pull through, but I don't know if any of the little green tomatoes will grow and ripen before it gets too cold.
2 comments:
Yeah! back in the blogosphere, if just to return to the eternal winter. But at least mom and dad will be there to take you guys out to delicious bar san roque and lido!
Oh, Gustavo. Meat is so expensive out here relative to vegetables, but you make it look so delicious that I want to cook it all the time. QUANDARY! Anyway, glad you're in Paraguay at such a historic time. I totally miss seeing you in choir all the time too. Let me know if you ever make it out to SF in your travels, and I'll do the same if I get back to Boston.
Post a Comment