Food items of interest

Tonight I cooked a real dinner for the first time in a while, and I haven't done a food post in a while, so that's what you're getting today. (Do salads count as cooking? I chop a lot when I make salads, but there's not any actual cooking involved. I did bake special cornbread to go with a salad the other night, but I didn't take a picture of it, so I'll have to make it again and write about it some other time--it was good.)

It was fun, although I'm dreading the dishes in the sink. I do enjoy cooking, but not so much cleaning up after myself. My stovetop is filthy with splatters and crumbs. Nobody needs to see a picture of that. Besides, my mom's dirty daughter radar would track it down on the Internets and then tell me I should do a better job of cleaning up or else I'm going to get bugs (trust me, whatever kind they were, they wouldn't last a second in here with our cats--the other night they were eating june bugs, and when we were living in Virginia Beach Jacob and Jasper ate cockroaches).

We did not have bugs to eat tonight, however. I made an Indian dinner: Patak's Sweet Peppers and Coconut Jalfrezi sauce, Morningstar Farms Chik'n Strips, a can of okra sautéed in olive oil with a medium-sized diced organic white onion, three spoonfuls of chopped garlic (from a store-bought jar), and one medium-sized diced organic red bell pepper. We had store-bought naan (egg free, but it does have dairy ingredients--boo) and jasmine rice on the side, with tall glasses of soy milk to wash it all down. It was so good, even Jacob wanted a taste--he had his eyes on the naan. He got his claws into it at one point while I was plating the food, but I caught him before he dragged it off the table. Indian food is one of Jason's favorite dinner genres, so it went over well.

I also discovered a special heart-shaped potato chip the other day, in a bag of Cape Cod chips that my mom bought at the actual chip factory when she was on her East Coast Tour of 2008. (I have been to a cereal factory--the now-closed Kellogg's Cereal City USA in Battle Creek, MI--and a GM plant in Ohio, but never a chip factory. Perhaps, if taken at gunpoint, I too will tour the chip-making place.) I am saving the Holy Grail of fried and salted potato slices in a plastic bag so Jason can eat it the next time he has a sandwich. Isn't it lovely? That is how much I love my husband--I save him interesting chips out of the bag. I know--you're wishing I were your wife right now.

Maybe tomorrow I'll find him a piece of cereal shaped like a nice round rack. He'd like that even better. Or maybe I'll just flash him every once in a while.