what is the what

[mamajoan]

Decent weekend. Some playing with Isaac's preschool friends, some time with grandma, very little melting down on anyone's part (even Ruthie after almost no napping yesterday).

Book update: I can't remember whether I posted that I finished reading Carnival by Elizabeth Bear. It was okay. I'm glad that I read it, anyway, since I kept hearing about it and it was getting a little ridiculous. Now I'm reading The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith, author of the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency series, but this book is part of a different series he wrote. Unless I finish this one by Thursday, my total for January is three books, which is fairly good.

Cooking update: Recipe #7 was the lentil-rice casserole from The Tightwad Gazette book, which I received as a gift courtesy of hopemcg's gift-exchange thingie. The lovely person who sent me the book mentioned that her family, including toddler, love this casserole, so I was excited to try it. I thought it was delicious (just had the rest for lunch), though of course, the kids wouldn't eat it. Sigh. Isaac deigned to taste it, but then declared it "yucky." *roll eyes* Ruthie refused to even try it, though to be fair, it takes an hour and a half to cook and in that time she had eaten two containers of baby food, a bowl of cereal, and a pretty huge pile of shredded cheese. (I've been giving Ruthie baby food -- which she calls "applesauce" indiscriminately -- because it's one thing that she'll pretty consistently eat, she loves feeding herself, it's easy, and at least I know it's fairly nutritious. If you buy the Gerber "natural" ones, they really just contain fruit and/or veggies, with some water and maybe some citric acid added. It feels weird to be giving her baby food but whatever! She eats it!)

Also last night we made pumpkin muffins, which I am going to count as recipe #8 even though we have made them many times before -- because I made several significant modifications. I reduced the sugar by half, and replaced half the oil with applesauce, and added a tablespoon of ground flax seeds. They came out quite well. My sweet tooth is telling me they're not sweet enough, but really, they're just right for muffins. A muffin shouldn't be too sweet IMO, or else you're veering into cupcake territory (didn't tiggrrl just do a post on the fine line between cupcake and muffin?). Anyway, I put a muffin into Isaac's lunchbox -- one of the ones without chocolate chips -- while cautioning him that I'm not sure whether his preschool director will consider it "junk food" and therefore verboten. I hope not, but who knows with her?

One of my cookbooks has a recipe for saag panir, which is my favorite dish to order in an Indian recipe, and I've been working my way up to trying it -- but have not been able to find panir yet. I know you can buy it in some of the stores around here, and I could have sworn that I had seen it at Market Basket (local supermarket) but couldn't find it yesterday. I shall have to look around some more. I was talking to one of my Indian coworkers and she said it's easy enough to make panir yourself, and in fact the aforementioned cookbook explains how to do it too, but I don't think I'm quite up to that yet. ;) It's adventurous enough just for me to be considering making the saag part! lol!

Comments

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

A firm tofu makes a very nice substitute for the panir part of the recipe. And in actuallity, saag is a really easy dish to make; on par with making tomato sauce. You might also try doing the Chole version of saag, which is adding chic peas (chole in indian) rather than panir.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

but...the panir is the best part of saag panir! :)

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

I need to work up the guts to try making tika masala next. I really like indian food and i have some recipe books that include indian recipes. I've been very intimidate by them though because the spices are so out of my normal range that I don't know what to expect. On the other hand, I just bought a cookbook full of Turkish/Armenian/Lebanese recipes to try to convince me to start working further outside my comfort zone!

thanks for posting about the baby food!

[lightningrose.livejournal.com]

Glad to know I'm not the only one. I give my little one pureed veggies as corn, broccoli & cauliflower seem to be the only "intact" veggies he will touch and I want him to get some variety...