food funk

I confess we’ve been eating a lot of instant soup, frozen burritos, and plain salad lately.

Part of it is that I’ve been busy working, but I’ve also been a bit discouraged since a disastrous cooking experience earlier this month. I got excited about making this vegan saag paneer recipe. I remember thinking there was an awful lot of lemon juice in the recipe, but I followed it exactly (which is rare for me — I’m usually all about improvisation). It ended up taking MUCH longer than I expected and the meal we attempted to consume at around 9:30pm was lemony, salty, and basically pretty gross.

(Sweetie, of course, said it was good, but he’d probably eat grass and carpet fluff if I sauteed it in a little olive oil.)

At some point I’ll get over my bitterness and try the recipe again with a lot less lemon and salt. The texture, at least, was right on.

I did manage an on-the-fly potato soup last week that turned out pretty yummy. It’s so elementary that I’m hesitant to attach the “recipes” tag to this post, but maybe it will be helpful to someone. We had hardly any food in the house except half a bag of almost-gone potatoes. I sauteed an onion, added the chopped potatoes and some veggie bouillon, then boiled the concoction with a couple bay leaves until the potatoes were falling apart. I was too lazy to run the soup through the food processor, so I just mashed the heck out of it in the pot and seasoned with a ton of pepper. I also added some shredded fake monterey jack cheese which melted up nicely. Not exactly the pinnacle of healthy food, but it was satisfying and cheap and the leftovers tasted even better the next day.

4 thoughts on “food funk

  1. I made palak paneer about a month ago. I bought the paneer, but the effort that went into the recipe just wasn’t worth it. I’ll stick to Indian restaurants for paneer dishes in the future.

    Last weekend I made this simple toss-together recipe and it was very yummy:

    saute an onion and some garlic, toss in some salt, pepper and spices (I used cumin and marjoram, strange combo but it worked) add some fresh spinach and saute, add a few cans of garbanzo beans, a can of crushed tomatoes and some vegan sour cream. Viola.

  2. My son, bless him, listened well to the advice I passed to him from his grandfather about never leaving the table without a compliment to the cook. My father did it even when my mom bought take out hamburgers and sat the ketchup and mayo on the table as her contribution. He never left a restaurant without sending his thanks back to the kitchen or mentioning that the cook should get a tip instead of the waitress since they did all the work. Ben absorbed it and made it his own, probably without even realizing any longer where it came from. His grandfather would be so pleased and honored to know that he had passed this lovely trait down to another generation. Potato soup was one of my Dad’s favorite dishes and she made it much like you did, but with milk and butter instead of cheese and bullion. Simple homey comfort food is hard to beat. My own favorite soup is still navy bean, but it is too high in calories for me right now. I leave out the ham mother added and season it with carrots, celery, and soy bacon bits. Yummy.

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