Nacluatl

After eating three delicious cookies at a meeting, I'd originally wanted to make Mark Bittman's recipe for a healthful lemony lentil salad, but I realized too late that I was missing a key ingredient: capers. While Andy despises capers and derisively calls them explosive little balls of salt, I prefer to think of them as tender kisses from the Aztec god of table salt, who I have wittily named Nacluatl*. The absence of those piquant little berries derailed my original plan, so instead I made a lentil salad with lime and minced jalapeno, cilantro, green pepper, and red onion.



The red onion was a little heavy. I'll add less next time. To go with the salad, I made garlic knots. I love using my Galloping Gourmet dough cutter, and the freshly braided dough is so very twee:

Not all of them survived a stay in the fridge overnight, but some held the knot shape. I feel like the recipe (from the only food blog I've ever read that doesn't make me loathe romantic attachment through cloying application of endearments) overestimated the drama of knotting the dough; I didn't need the surfeit of oil and flour to tie the knots.

I brought the majority of the rolls to the medical center hand out to classmates, because social skills are not my thing, so I can at least attempt to compensate with judicious distribution of tasty, tasty calories.

*Shortly after conceiving this idea, I thought that perhaps my theological concepts were not all that original, and sure enough, a quick Google introduced me to Huixtocihuatl, Tlaloc's older sister and the goddess of salt and salt water.