I know. I should have given you a bit more warning. But sometimes you just have to dive in and not worry about how cold the water is.
Or something like that. Maybe I've been watching too much of the Olympics this week. But anyway.
I've been lucky enough to get fairly normal hours at work in recent weeks. Yay! I also got a promotion two weeks ago that I forgot to tell you about, which sort of has something to do with the more normal hours, though the normal hours started before I got the promotion, probably in anticipation of said promotion. So, normal hours mean I have time and energy to cook once in a while. Monday night I made a recipe from the vegan cookbook of all vegan cookbooks to most blogging vegans (as far as I can tell) (though I'm not sure I'm as thrilled with it as the rest of the blogging vegans are!), Veganomicon. I think the recipe is called "Samosa-Stuffed Twice-Baked Potatoes," but I don't actually own the book, and I scribbled down the recipe without scribbling down the title, and now I don't have ithe book in my posession, so I can't go back and look it up. And I'm not going to give you the recipe, since I'm a bit afraid that Isa would come and kick my ass (does she still live right across the river from me, or did she move to Portland already?). But here's a picture!
Pretty, no? And really, really, really good. Bake a few nice, big russets, scoop out the insides, mix them up with some soy milk, peas, shredded carrots, and Indian spices, refill the potato skins, and re-bake 'til hot. Yum. I could eat bowls and bowls of the filling. Next time, I will salt the skin/shells before refilling them, and I will use ground coriander instead of whole seeds. Other than that, yum. Kevin concurs.
Wednesday was Kevin's birthday. I made an old favorite of ours, "Spicy Fu." You can click on the link* for that story. For dessert, we had vegan cupcakes from my place of employment, since A) it's too damn hot in NYC in August to bake, and B) I haven't experimented with any vegan baking since going vegan, believe it or not! It was a nice dinner, store-bought cupcakes or not.
Tonight's dinner was a recipe from "Vegan Express." But you'll have to wait a day or two for that one!
*Incidentally, when I went back to that post to get the 'fu recipe, I noticed that my instructions say to ass the coconut milk, rather than add it. Sounds painful. I didn't have the heart to change it, since it's been there for four years. Funny.
Many years ago -- 6? 10? somewhere in between? -- I started writing a children's story. A very simple, short, picture-book type story. I wrote this story so long ago that I stored it on a floppy disk. Go ahead. Laugh a little. I'll wait.
Better now? Good. Anyway. All those years ago, I got the story pretty well outlined, and wrote a very rough first draft. And stored it on a floppy (insert more laughter here). And thought about it every once in a while, but never did anything more that that with it.
That floppy has very stealthily traveled 400+ miles with me, from Maine to Massachusetts to New York, through four apartments. Yesterday I got it in my head that I needed to find that floppy, but I didn't have time to look for it. I even dreamed about my story last night! I got the chance to look for the disk today, and amazingly enough, found it in the first box I looked through (I knew it was in one of two. there are just some things you never completely lose track of).
I put the disk into the drive on my ancient (in technology years. I wonder how many technology years are in a calender year? are they like dog years? anyone? Rick?) desktop system... and got an error message. I called my brother the computer whiz and he said that he'd only seen that particular message once or twice in all his years of computer geekdom. He told me the disk was toast. I said Noooooo! Do not want! Well, not exactly. But I asked if a really geeky geek could recover the file. He said maybe... but not likely... but he sent me a data recovery program just for the heck of it. I ran the software and got nothing but weirdness. And then decided to try it again just for the heck of it. AND IT WORKED! I got my little story back! It's pretty rough, but I think it can be something someday. And it's probably the only book I'll ever have time to get written. I'm up to two cookbook ideas now, but writing cookbooks requires many, many hours of recipe testing and cooking and reformulating and cookin and writing and rewriting. And unless someone revives that lovely medieval concept of the Patron of the Arts, and someone decided to give me many thousands of dollars so I can quite my job and cook and test and write and rewrite, it's going to take many, many years to get even one cookbook written. I think a 16-page picture is a better place to start.
Ruby Tuesday, Brewer, Maine, Monday afternoon. Kelli (that's me!) is being subjected to a decidedly un-vegan friendly menu. Brenda (my mother), Kyle (my nephew), and Kelli (that's me!) are being subjected to a heinous mix of hits of the 80s, 90s, and today...
Leona Lewis: I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love.
The stomach thing I've had since Saturday is just about gone (can you say 101.5 temperature?), I'm spending tomorrow in Boston (and my round-trip bus ticket was only fifty cents!), and there's a Red Sox game on TV (that doesn't happen very often in NYC!).
