Flip-flopping

This morning: "Man, I had better adapt this recipe and bake rather than fry the squash. It will be healthier, and plus I really, really need to study."

This evening: "Man, I have exactly enough olive oil left! And fried things are delicious. And I can always catch up on learning the arteries of the arm after lifting tonight. Let's do it."

And I'm so glad I did. The only bad thing about this recipe is the instruction to fry garlic until golden, then remove all the garlic and discard it. Who does that? I thinly sliced the garlic so that it would be easier to pick out of the oil and then mixed it into a yogurt sauce with scallions, lemon juice, dried mint, pomegranate seeds, salt, and pepper. Amazing... and yet, really, I should have made some other protein with this, perhaps chickpeas. I hate it when people use a hearty vegetable as a substitute for protein in vegetarian dishes, and yet I commit this sin constantly. Vegetables are too delicious.

On that note, Andy and I ate an entire bunch of kale in salad form with dinner tonight. And by Andy and I, I mean mostly me. Erm.

Superfreekeh

It's a very special grain. But I'd totally take it home to my mother.

Especially considering that I probably don't get enough protein in my diet, and this is a relatively high-protein grain. I put it in a salad with persimmon, pistachios, mixed greens, shallots and scallions (overkill? who cares). Dressing: olive oil, rice wine vinegar with a shot of white vinegar, a little lemon juice, salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, and dried mint. Andy ate it all before I had a chance to pack some away for lunch. I suppose that's a compliment?

Whatever it is, this stuff is delicious. It's my first time cooking it, and I might go with more traditional preparations next time just for fun, but it's definitely going to reappear in our diet.

Also, a final shout-out to my mom and aunt, who ran the NY Marathon this past weekend (and fed us delicious food at locations like this one) for Shoe 4 Africa. Well done!

Study skills

New strategy: now that I have finished reviewing all lectures at least once, I am going to type up outlines to every single lecture and then review those all weekend long. This will require epic amounts of Diet Coke. Also, bread stuffed with cheese, pesto, and tomato paste.

Mmm, cheese. Did you know that cheese contains casomorphin, an opioid? That is one of the reasons cheese can cause constipation (a notorious side effect of morphine) and is reputedly one of the reasons cheese is so hard to stop eating.

Now please excuse me while I have another slice and try to hit upon more pleasant dinner-oriented topics.

Pisum thank you

After making a series of neurology termination-related puns with a friend, I feel a little bit better about the fact that we are in our ninth week of this neverending unit and it is severely interfering with my food and exercise routines.

I suppose I should have expected this; it's what med school is supposed to be about. Up until this point, though, I could manage blogging a lot/working out a lot at the same time. Perhaps limb anatomy next week will be a bit of a respite? Or perhaps I should take this as a sign that my blogging/working out career is over and my medical career has begun to actually rear its head. Or perhaps I should take this as a sign that in order to manage exercise, cooking, and school, I shouldn't be spending time reading 1Q84. I was a little skeptical of it at first, considering that there's an episode of sporadic barely legal teen Asian lesbianism within the first 20 pages and I generally prefer my literature to be a little less like an idealistic porn scenario. But it's increasingly worth reading.

Here is pasta with peas, lemon juice, olive oil, and just a little taleggio. I thought of making taleggio crisps or taleggio ziti, but my resident garbage disposal got into the cheese and reduced it in quantity somewhat. No matter! It's so powerful that a little bit on top is all that is necessary.

Imam bayildi: You'd cry, too, if you were an oil-marinated eggplant.

Imam bayildi means "the priest wept" in Arabic, and while I found a variety of stories as to the origin of the name, I'm going to stick to the "eating eggplant cooked with over a cup of olive oil will make anyone cry copious tears of joy."

Sitting in a pool of broth that's mostly olive oil, ready
to be devoured. Yes, it is sticking a few inches off the
plate! Thank you for noticing.

Chillin' in the skillet, pre-baking. The other eggplant halves
had to go in a 9x13 baking pan, because they didn't fit.

Seriously. It's that good. I'm a little afraid of how good for you it is(n't), but I can't care all that much because it is that good. We ate it with lavash, a flatbread flaky with yet more lipids, dusted with za'atar.

Mmm, lavash.

This is the recipe I used. When the blogger says "two large eggplant," I don't think she had foot-long eggplant in mind, but that's what I got, and it worked just fine.

In the dessert world: I've been wanting to attempt a vegetarian (read: gelatin-free) marshmallow for some time now, and with a small amount of maple syrup taking up space in the cabinet, yesterday seemed as good a time as any to attempt a maple sesame marshmallow. After doing extensive research on the hazards of agar agar marshmallows, I used 3/5 the recommended weight of gelatin of agar agar, and I simply replaced the corn syrup in the recipe with maple syrup. Instead of greasing and powdered sugar-ing a dish, I greased it and dusted it with sesame seeds and just a touch of cardamom. The sugar mixture fluffed up just as I hoped it would and didn't have a weird, grainy mouthfeel. Agar agar success! But then it didn't set. Rather, it set to a certain extent, but it just didn't become that cuttable, chewy, fluffy wonder that is the marshmallow. I was crushed. Agar agar fail. Fortunately, upon looking over the procedure once again, I realized that I'd misread the temperature to which the sugar solution should have been boiled. I'd cooked it to 220 F, not 250. Drat. It's these kinds of mistakes that waste valuable enzymes in undergraduate-bedeviled labs the world over. Luckily, it tasted great, and I'm living with someone who I have observed eat a pat of butter rolled in cinnamon sugar. It shouldn't have been a surprise that he was all too willing to eat a soft, gooey, maple-flavored quasi-marshmallow and declare it "so *$&#%)! good. No, seriously, this $*#& is amazing."

Silence, cur!

A little education for the uninitiated: Hush puppies are the finest of Southern delicacies.

Fried cornmeal scallion batter with a chili honey dipping sauce?

Yes.

Pumpkin head

I've been remiss. To be fair, potato leek soup looks sort of gross when I attempt to photograph it, and showing you Emmenthal* grilled cheese on homemade rye with pumpkin fries and kale chips would have been simply unfair, and I have made udon noodles four times in the last two years, so who wants to blog about that again? But here you go, pesto pizza on whole wheat pumpkin crust:

That's right, pumpkin crust. I substituted a small amount of the liquid in my usual pizza crust recipe for mashed pumpkin; it only imparts a slight pumpkin flavor (then again, I only added about half a cup), but the color is nice, and the crust is oh so tender. I'll titrate the pumpkin for my anticipated pumpkin flavor-friendly pizza (Manchego? Goat cheese? Parmesan? who knows!) some other time. Meanwhile, using the rest of the (large) pumpkin we got this weekend on pumpkin fries does not sound half bad.



Also meanwhile, Andy's chemistry department guru sent an e-mail alerting the department to a molecular gastronomy talk on, appropriately enough for those dastardly chemists, foams and emulsions. I'm trying to convince him to take time off from his, you know, real work to absorb transmissible wisdom, but he's not being receptive. Yet.

*Insanely cheap at East Village Cheese, the home of all insanely cheap and awesome cheeses.