Day 34

Last day! My post title numbering went awry at some point.  I had vaca frita and kale sauteed with a squeeze of lemon, a dollop of tahini, and plenty of salt.  If I had thought of it, these two things would have been beyond delicious wrapped in corn tortillas.

Day 30

I made these meatballs with squash and quinoa from the Guardian.  Subbed beef for lamb, potato starch for corn starch.  We had them with these sweet and spicy carrots.  I also tried these granola bars from Half Baked Harvest.  They're very tasty but very crumbly, I think I used too much oil.

Day 29

We were visiting my mom this weekend so I don't have all her recipes but the dishes were pretty simple.  She made carrot ginger soup by sauteing onion and garlic (maybe?), ginger, salt, pepper, and carrots, simmering in water, and whizzing with the stick blender.  Nice bright innards-warming lunch with some rice cakes.  For dinner we had pan seared ribeye with potatoes and asparagus that had been roasted in olive oil, salt, and pepper.  Note about long drives while on LID: eat as heartily as you can before you set off.  By the time we got home the thought of eating another raw almond was very depressing.

Back home we had the Crispy Lamb with Cumin, Scallions, and Red Chilis from the NY Times.  I misread the recipe and used rice wine vinegar instead of rice wine and I was out of cornstarch so I used potato starch instead.  My guess is the latter substitution was the reason why it didn't come out all that crispy but it was still good.  We ate it with brown rice and string beans that had been blistered in the wok.

Day 25

I love the stir fried beef and celery dish in Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice (recipe posted here), it's so quick and satisfying. I was out of pretty much everything except ground beef and celery but filling out the basic template with chopped scallions, chilis, and garlic still yielded tasty results.  I didn't realize until I started eating it at work that it could have used a dash more salt which of course I couldn't do with the office salt shaker, so in the future I'm going to try to remember to have some non-iodized salt stashed in my desk for office flavor emergencies.

Under normal circumstances I sub balsamic vinegar for Chinkiang vinegar.  If you could give a source for gluten-free Sichuan chili bean paste it would be life altering for me; in the mean time I use a combination of gluten free gochujang and doenjang from Crazy Korean Shopping.

I also made the peanut butter cookies from the Thyca cookbook.  Very tasty (especially good spread with jam) and did not, as I feared they would, get too crumbly from being knocked around in my bag.

Day 24

For dinner we had the Oven-Roasted Chicken Shawarma from the NY Times.  Pretty delish, I'm looking forward to making it again when I can have it with feta and hot sauce.  I also made the Broiled Eggplant Salad from Good and Cheap.  Since the chicken takes a few hours I wanted to consolidate oven use so instead of broiling the eggplant I brushed the slices with olive oil and put them in the oven for the last 20 minutes or so while the chicken was cooking.

Day 23

Leftover watercress, duck, and brown rice for lunch.  For dinner I made the Mangalorean Pork Curry in the Holiday issue of Lucky Peach.  If you don't have the mag, this recipe from The Tiffin Box looks similar.  The supermarket near our place didn't have tamarind and in this weather an ingredient safari was not happening so I subbed the juice of three Key limes and about a teaspoon of sugar.  Since I didn't follow the recipe exactly I'm not going to pass judgment on it but if I make it again I'll make sure to use the tamarind; I think it would have given it a little extra depth of flavor.

To accompany we had brown rice and cauliflower "pilaf".  I whizzed up some chopped cauliflower in the food processor until the pieces were roughly couscous sized, then sauteed it with caramelized onions, a few dashes of curry powder, and a handful of golden raisins.  Forgot salt which would have improved the results.

I was startled when I started to open a package of brown rice we had sitting around and noticed it was enriched.  It didn't list iodine as one of the added vitamins but I got a pack of non-enriched rice anyway.  Possibly overkill but it's not like we'll be sorry we have some extra rice on hand when the LID is over.

Day 22

For a snack I made the granola bars on page 25 of the Good and Cheap cookbook by Leanne Brown (available here).

For dinner we had watercress sauteed with garlic and a fresh chili.  I attempted to roast a duck which I don't think came out that great; somehow I managed to overcook the meat but the skin wasn't very crispy.  I used the steaming and flavoring instructions from this NY Times recipe (I made a nest out of foil in the wok) and then roasted it whole according to the instructions in this Canadian Living recipe.  Both recommend seasoning the duck 24 hours before cooking which I didn't do and I'm sure there were a few other missteps (for one, the water level was so high that it bubbled up over the nest which probably made the bird soggy).  But it wasn't inedible and we'll get some nice stock and duck fat out of it.