green chana/chickpeas/garbanzo beans

I can't be much of an Asian. I've never had green chickpeas (garbanzo to the Merkins). But I bought them from Trader Joe's anyway. They've sat in the freezer for the last month. The green peas, broad beans (fava beans to the Merkins) and pre-shelled edamame have all been scoffed, leaving behind these green versions of my favourite pulse/legume. Chana masala, made with the more usual yellow version of chickpeas, is a favourite standby in our kitchen. Whipped up with tinned chickpeas, tinned tomatoes and whatever Asian spices I have in the cupboard, every chana masala is an adventure in itself. Especially when I get the chillies out (poor P... his poorly tummy can't take the heat).

So it was with a certain amount of suspicion that I opened the bag of frozen greenies today. We haven't had much luck with American frozen pulses. The broad beans are already too far gone for our preference of firmness. Which means we've been substituting it with edamame, which retains its bite a little better, for our other standby: beans and bacon. Anyhoo, a interweb search pulls up a rather tasty looking recipe for harbhara chaat. Seeing the chickpeas in a cone of newspaper reminded me of my childhood, buying kacang puteh from the little cart outside the cinema. We'd get to choose one cone each. My mother always went for the chickpeas, my father for the cashews, my brother for the sugar-coated peanuts. I *always* wavered between the fried lentils and the boiled chickpeas. Somehow, even though the chickpeas were the "healthier" option, I usually chose them.

Back to those greenies. They were a little over-cooked. I swear I only allowed them to warm up in boiling water for 2 minutes. Still. Beats soaking dried beans overnight and boiling for an hour. Not having the best stocked kitchen around, I substituted the onions with shallots and the green chilli with red jalapeno. Amazingly, there was a very old and wrinkled mango and lemon in the fruit drawer, so in they went. As for the spices, I'd be mortified if I didn't at least have cumin, coriander and ginger, so it wasn't too difficult to cobble together some chaat masala, after this recipe. Of course, without the powdered dried mango, it won't be the same.

Served with our current pseudo-Asian rice fave, fake biryani, consisting of whatever long-grain rice we have (usually Thai, but sometimes basmati), cardamom, random nuts (pumpkin seeds at the moment) and cranberries. (Yes, cranberries. Not a fan of sultanas, me. So I can't even make fake British-Asian biryani.) Don't knock it till you try it: sweet/sour dried fruit in rice works. Ask the Persians, inventors of polo, which inspired biryani, which inspired this:

I love pretending I can cook. And at times like these, when everything comes together even though nothing is authentic, I really feel like I can tackle anything. (Don't mention the pizza...)

Cross posted on akatsukieats.

Spag-balls and chips

Eh. Remember that post about the four staple meals in Britain? No? Never mind. Suffice to say, I made my annual allowance of spag bol today. Only it wasn't spag bol out of a Dolmio jar (let alone Loyd Grossman's). While looking for inspiration to cook the only mince I dare buy at Ralph's: ground buffalo, I came across this recipe for buffalo meatballs, which sounded far to easy to pass up. Plus, I was getting sick of buffalo burgers, buffalo black bean stir fry, buffalo burgers... And I was making cookies and onigiri at the same time, so something that was quick and could sit on the stove while I baked and shaped and walked the dog (re: the dog; just the walking, thanks. didn't cook her). And as the final nail in the coffin, the string of comments on my crappy pizza photo, which made me crave spaghetti.

The only thing I changed was the concentrated tomato soup, of which I'm not a fan. On the other hand, I love having tinned tommies in the store cupboard for my puttanesca fix. So, a tin of blitzed plum tomatoes went into making the sauce instead. If I wasn't quite so busy with other things, I might have added some 'erbs or accoutrements like capers. Oh there we go with the puttanesca again... Oh, and I added some paprika too. I'm currently having a love affair with my tin of Spanish paprika. Some nearly went into the cookie dough mixing bowl by mistake. Now, that would have been an interesting choc chip cookie indeed.

The cookies were something of an impulse bake. Was decanting a new bag of flour I lugged home on the bus (not a trivial undertaking with laptop in hand and other important groceries like milk to carry too), and drawn in by the "Extraordinary Chocolate Chip Cookies" recipe on the back of the packet. I like back-of-packet recipes. They're usually piss easy for idiots like me. But this particular recipe must have been developed for industry or a very big, multi-child family. It called for 4 cups of flour, 1 1/2 cups of butter, 2 1/2 cups of sugar (half white and half brown), 2 eggs, 2 tsp baking soda and a 24oz bag of choc chips (or 4 cups). FOUR CUPS OF CHOCOLATE CHIPS?!? P would accuse me of trying to induce a clogged artery so he could be replaced by an upgrade. Even when the recipe was halved, we still had difficulty finding enough containers for the surfeit of cookies.

Cross posted on akatsukieats.

We've been wincing in Downtown Los Angeles.

Despair, death and destruction at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. We've been listening to Wagner and spying on friends.

We've been out and about with the doggy in Santa Monica.

It's not Easter without chocolate

Not a personal subscriber to the Christian concept of Easter. Full of admiration for those who can give up chocolate for Lent. So, have joined them in a day of gorging on chocolate for no other reason than my love for it. Happy Chocolate Sunday!

Hey you guys!

P doesn't remember ever watching The Electric Company, whereas I watched it religiously as a child. It was on par with Sesame Street as far as I was concerned, just sans muppets and not so babyish. I don't know what made me seek it out tonight. I started singing the "C is for Cookie" song by Cookie Monster on Sesame Street, then HAD to show P the original on youtube. From there, it morphed into a search for The Electric Company sketches. And it finally dawned on me that all those years ago, I watched Morgan Freeman deadpan his way through a kids' show and never realised it. Sure I recognised Bill Cosby; he had The Cosby Show which we also watched religiously as a family. But Morgan Freeman never twigged my not-very-alert actor-radar. I want to watch them all again, but somehow, I fear I may be disappointed. What strikes one as a child as the very pinnacle of broadcasting output may seem a little condescending and overly simple now. I might purchase an episode or two from iTunes, or a DVD, or just spend the rest of the night on youtube...

Amendement: After dithering about I finally acquired a YouTube account just so I could bring you this:

Muffin madness

Multiple copies of the LA Times were strewn across our apartment floors for a couple of weeks. Perhaps it's not in good taste to explain why in a food post. At any rate, the food section has provided some inspiration for baking the last few weeks. I've not had an upside-down cake for ages; not since childhood days of being allowed to make pineapple upside-down cake unsupervised. So it was with great glee that I made a lemon upside-down cake a few weekends ago for my BBQ. It allowed me to get all sorts of things going on the grill and make a cake at the same time. Recipes should always be this easy. Unfortunately, no photos were taken. A usual. You must think I fake these posts... I was going to link to the LA Times recipe, but found it's a pay-per-view article. Well, sod that. I'm not going to reproduce it here, because I've no doubt there's some copyright law on that. So, there goes my stupid plan of using this blog as my recipe archive.

To make up for a lazy Sunday of frozen waffles and blueberries, I got up early to make muffins on Wednesday. (If it was a lazy Sunday, does that make this a working Wednesday?) The recipe, again, was courtesy of the LA Times, so no link. It called for Meyer lemons, but we're swimming in mandarins at the moment, so mandarins it was. I like recipes that don't faff about too much during the prep stage. This one required the citrus to be roughly chopped, then food-processed, which wasn't overly complicated for early morning. The rest of the muffin recipe was the usual simple stir-wet-into-dry-but-not-too-much. I don't think I'll use this recipe again. It called for 1/2 cup of butter, which, compared to that epicurious recipe from before, is 1/2 a cup of butter too much. (Maybe the banana in the previous recipe added enough moisture and good fat to hold the whole thing together.) But I like the idea of using my spare citrus in this manner. Perhaps I could bastardise the two recipes and come up with something edible, yet P-heart-friendly. More experimentation beckons.

Cross posted on akatsukieats.

Knicker change

Fooling around with the template. Can't get head around new codes or even where to cut and paste the old link log. Feel stupid. Nothing new then.

One thing the fancy archive links have flagged up is the shocking lack of posts in 2006. Peak blogging occurred in August with a grand total of 8 posts. The decline in posting coincided with a decline in joie de vivre, precipitated by work-related issues. I didn't even have the energy to post about our very lovely vacations in the South-West with our families because I paid very dearly for them. Fortunately, things have changed. A slight change. Like changing your pants. You still wear them, but with the change comes a certain freshness.

Frozen Brekkie

Best not ask what time I woke up today. I don't even know that. Been living without a clock since moving in. And my last functional watch died last summer. And my mobile phone has done a strange disappearing act every weekend ever since I was phoned on the morning of my last birthday (a Sunday that time) about the location of a chemical in my lab.

Sundays have never been good days for me. I feel as if I should be doing a million and one things, but my body refuses to budge out of the nest I've made in my bed. On rare occasions, I get up early enough to have what is commonly known as breakfast. Sometimes I even bake something for brekkie.

Not today. Courtesy of some clever forward planning by P, we had store-bought blueberry waffles with frozen blueberries on the side. They weren't "leggo of my eggo", but close. There's something about plastic, pre-fabricated waffles that appeal to me, along with equally hydrocarbon-chain-polymer-like hash browns. I prefer the "real thing", but on some occasions, when one has woken up far closer to lunchtime than decent folk should, plastic tastes just fine.

Cross posted on akatsukieats.

Griffith Park

The dog watched horses over there.

Crouch scores a hat-trick against Arsenal? Now, that's an April Fools' joke..

Overheard today: "There are far too many socialists in this lab celebrating this César Chavez holiday." Said, I think, in response to half the workplace not turning up for work today. One hopes it was a bit tongue-in-cheek...

What's with all that cricket; is this still a food blog?

I wouldn't trust Lloyd Grossman as far as I could chuck him, but I guess he merely adds his face to some the apparently ubiquitous sauce bottles that have sparked some lively debate about the cooking habits of the British. OK, I exaggerate. That sparked an article on the four staple meals the British public resorts to by Zoe Williams, whose witty writing we enjoy in our household.

Now under the impression that my little household must also be stuck in the same rut, I felt quite determined to log our weekly diet. Like the state of Schrodinger's cat, the very act of observing one's diet can change one's eating habits. Under normal circumstances, that is. Like all serendipitous findings in the laboratory, our unique circumstances of not having much control over what time we get home, and hence when we eat our single cooked meal of the day, allowed me to log our weeks eating blind since I completely forgot that was what I was going to do anyway. (And you naive folk out there really think I know what's going on when I'm doing my experiments... I ALWAYS do them blind.)

So for what it's worth, and to qualify this as a sometime-food blog, in all its ugliness, this is what D+P ate this week for dinner (breakfast is almost always cereal unless I've baked bread, and lunch is always something leftover or from the canteen or me starving hoping to get finished earlier and thus eat a nicer dinner. ha!):

Sunday: BBQ (friends invited over to christen the pit's new home). Prawns smoked on cedar planks, garnished with garlic and lime. Grilled aubergines: large globes sliced and grilled, then layered up again with mozarella inbetween and oven-baked; chinese eggplant and mediterranean aubergine just plain grilled. Swordfish and mahi-mahi marinated in soya sauce and ginger, cubed and skewered up with a cherry tomatoes and lime slices. Fillet of wild-caught salmon smoked on an alder plank with lemon juice, lemon thyme (from garden) and salt and pepper. Couscous. Sour mango salad (Corrine Trang recipe).

Monday: Bad start to week. D in lab waiting for a 10pm experiment. Leftover breaded chicken from canteen lunch. Yoghurt. Mango juice. P, on the other hand, conveniently FORGOT to pack BBQ leftovers for lunch, and hence dined like a f-ing king while I starved in the lab. Dagnabit.

Tuesday: More BBQ leftovers. And lots of green salad. Dang, I should BBQ more often. Cook for an army, eat for three days...

Wednesday: Chicken wings baked in five spice powder. Steamed broccoli with oyster sauce. Steamed Thai rice.

Thursday: Roasted beef ribs in a pseudo-Galbi sauce. You know, the roasted beef ribs was another serendipitous finding. We left the ribs covered in foil in the oven at 300degF (dammit, I'm even using degF without thinking now; I'm screwed for returning to metric EU), went for a walk with the dog, stayed out longer than we planned (1.5h), and found the ribs cooked to tender perfection. Normally, I guess we'd have them bloodier, but the slow cook helped the tougher fatty and tendonous bits breakdown somewhat.

Friday: Thai takeaway. And no, I'm not proud of this one. In fact, we both acknowledged that we could have easily cooked something from the store cupboard even though the fridge was more or less empty and we left the lab after 9pm. In fact, we could even have had some of the frozen psuedo-siew mai (Japanese style with edamame), or thawed out some squid to fry in Szechuan pepper, or just had couscous and olives. But no, we thought we were desperate enough for takeaway. We didn't even enjoy it. Dog's tummy was bad all week, and cleaning up indoor **** really puts one off a curry. Dangitalltoheck.

Saturday: Post-ballet dinner at En Sushi on Santa Monica Blvd + Barry. Sushi (traditional): hamachi (yellowtail), raw scallops, octopus, snow crab. Agedashi tofu. Veggie tempura. Spinach+enoki cold appetizer. We'd driven all the way back from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion along Olympic in hope that we'd see some all-night Korean BBQ restau with lights blazing and a neon "Open" sign. Which we did. Only to find after parking that they were closed. Even Zankou Chicken on Sepulveda was closed. But En Sushi's kitchen doesn't shut till "late" on Saturdays. 11.30pm on this particular Saturday. It's one of these places we've avoided because it looks too trendy for us. The cheap and cheerful yakitori place half a block down is more our style when eating out in our neighbourhood. Or when we're feeling fancy, SaSaYa, the small-dish (can't remember the Japanese name) is our fave. It's not to knock En Sushi really. The food was great, the service ever so accommodating despite the late hour. It's the fact that every time I've crossed Barry, either to get to the DVD store or the other less trendy restaus, I very nearly get run over by some fancy SUV or noisy sports car leaving the valet parking for En Sushi. I have little charity for such folk, and avoid their company as much as possible. Which has till now deprived us of the very competent sushi chef at En.

Sunday: Dinner at the ex-neighbours' in thanks for looking after their dog while they were away. Some fabby Indian cooking. Rice+cardamon+sultanas. Chickpeas+spinach. Aloo ghobi. Eggplant curry. And some lovely double-fried sweets from the Sweet Shop (name?) on Pico + Fairfax.

So. In a blind study of the eating habits of some ex-UK inhabitants, we find no evidence for any spag bol (we probably eat that once or twice a year), tikka masala (D is not keen on sweet curries, Brummie or otherwise), chilli con carne (put off that during undergrad years; now have irrational hate of kidney beans) or bangers and mash (have to admit to eating that monthly in Edinburgh thanks to the venison and boar stalls at the fortnightly Farmers' Market in the West End). I think our rut comes more from not trying many new recipes or styles, rather than having staple set meals. Our cultural influences, while many, have grown stale. Sadly, without my library of cookbooks and their ideas or not reading the broadsheets' lifestyle sections or not having the time to browse Flickr quite so much, we've lost the will to try out more complicated dishes or experiment with the ones we know and love.

So, in the spirit Schrody's cat, or rather, in tribute to the spirit of Schrody's cat, we will attempt to change the diet by the very act of observation, thus leading to experimentation.

Joffrey @DCP

We've been to the ballet.

Dichotomy of Japan

Compare and contrast

Japan apology for blossom error

Japan reiterates sex slave stance

I like aspects of the Japanese culture and race; there is much to be admired about the way the Japanese people can be focused, the manner in which they preserve their cultural heritage, and have pride in their nation. But sometimes, I wonder if the outward politeness masks a deep arrogance and feeling of superiority over their Asian neighbours. The sterotyped image I have of the average Japanese person is typified in the first story: absolute apology for any minor error. But the second issue reminds us that WWII was really not so long ago, and that there still exists tension between the nations that the militant Japan of old sought to dominate and this allegedly new generation of Japanese. My parents were born shortly after the war, leaving me two generations from the Japanese occupation of SE Asia. I have no bone to pick with the Japan of now, but if they persist in trying to rewrite the events of 60 years ago, perhaps we should start noting signs of increasing nationalism instead of worrying so much about some Bush administration-invented axis of evil.

Go on, you Patricks

It's been a mixed day for the Irish, hasn't it? 4 points off a 6-Nations victory (merde!). Denied yet again, as far as I can tell... But they're celebrating in Jamaica now. What an upset that was. Good on Ireland, but what on earth happened to the batting order of Pakistan? I feel for them. Their reception at home will not be good. But these things happen in ODI. What an interesting World Cup this could end up being.

house demolition

WTH? I thought I'd just modify a few cosmetic things on my blog and Blogger made me choose a new template. Oh hell. Does this mean another week of working out how to change things to how I like it? Dammitalltoheck. I guess things have changed since I last did any blogging. Darn dotcoms and their love-in takeovers. Dammitalltoheck.

Ms Lazy-pants here will be leaving this place looking like crap until she finishes her own version of March Madness. But she musn't complain. That new "labels" function looks like fun... Even a little... WordPress?

the world is going to hell in a handbasket

What is the world coming to? Global warming, illegal wars, economic and polar icecap meltdown, road rage, the 405, and to top it all, Blue Peter fakes a phone-in! We're doomed, I tell you. Doomed!!!

what world cup?

As far as most sporting games are concerned, I tend to lend my support to my adopted home of Scotland, even though they suck at football, cricket, rugby... You name it, they suck at it. On the world stage, when Scotland don't qualify for whatever World Cup is on that year, I generally cheer on all the other British and Irish teams. So, that will be England and Ireland for the footie, and Wales for the cricket. Ha. Not being a true Scot, I don't have an automatic, born-with hate of the Sassenachs. And they're usually entertaining enough to warrant my interest anyway.

So, it's with no compunction whatsoever that when the Ashes are played, unlike the Scottish tabloids, I give my misplaced yet wholehearted support to the underdogs: the English. And like every other cricket fan who is not pro-Aussie, I suffer. Mind you, the suffering is less great when you can't even watch the damn tests. A number on a website is a lot easier to quickly erase from your memory.

It gets complicated when both teams end up in the same championship. But they tend to be separated into different groups. And Scotland sucking at everything means the teams usually don't meet (apart from the odd game or so... but it's been a couple of decades. at least). So this time round, I was trying to work out how or when the Auld Enemies would pit bowlers and batsmen against each other.

Then this happens. If you're 203 short in an ODI, even if you are playing possibly the best side of the tournament, maybe it's time to start saying things like "It's the taking part that matters" or "At least our fielders can catch the ruddy ball". But I'm proud of Scotland. They took on a giant and didn't flinch. (OK, they might have. I dunno. I don't get to watch any cricket in this god-forsaken country! Not even the ruddy highlights!!) From the blow-by-blow account, courtesy of the Beeb, it looks like underdogs made a valiant attempt to limit the run rate, but were out-classed. And in typical Scotland fashion (at least in rugby.nobody mention the 6-nations please. it hurts), gave too much at the beginning and suffered at the very end.

It may make more sense for someone from the Asia-Pacific region to cheer on the best of the local talent, especially when one can choose from giants like the All Blacks or even the Aussies. But once you've lived and supported in Scotland, it seems so traitorous to go glory-seeking in Australasia. Here's to many more decades of cheering wildly whenever Scotland score a collective century.