Sunday, July 06, 2014

Long time no see...

I neglected this blog for so long that I almost forgot about its existence.  The reason?  Health issues, age: I had a cancer scare over two years ago, plus in the meantime I entered my eighth decade and given all the problems I lost quite a bit of interest in cooking and housekeeping.  Yet, life goes on.

These days I rely  a lot on the internet.  Whenever I gather up enough strength to face my daily cooking chores, I punch in the ingredients available in my kitchen that day and see the recipes and cooking ideas pouring out.  Often I make something that I would not mind repeating, but then I lose the recipe even when I copy it out in a word document.  My computer is filled with gygabites worth of "stuff" that I get lost in most of the time.  Sure, theoretically I can search for anything easily...  as long as I remember the name of the document.  Which often is NOT the case...

Anyway, I am attempting a new method now.  I will try to keep track of my daily cooking efforts, with links to the pages where I found the recipes. That should help me return to recipes that I earmarked as worthy of repeats.

If anyone happens to chance by "par hazard" as the French says, he or she may find it interesting to look through the polyglot culinary trips that this curiosity driven old lady is taking through the marvelous jungle of the internet.  Because I do not stop at English recipes.  I make liberal use of the Google Translator to check out any interesting looking recipe, be that in Spanish, Turkish, Hindi, Tagalog or Tibetan.  Maybe I will even inspire some chance visitor here to try my method.  If so, please, do let me know!  :)

So what was on today's menu?
My older son got a batch of chicken pieces beautifully marinated Ethiopian style by a friend and decided to BBQ it here.  He asked me to make some sort of legume based side dish for it.  I chose this red lentil stew



I did not change anything, except using less chili peppers in the spice mix than the recipe was calling for.  But I freshly made a batch of berbere spice blend , properly roasting the whole spices and grinding them afterwards into powder.  Interestingly my son said that it still tasted quite similar to my other spice mixes, the same blend somehow tastes different at his friend's house.  I belive it is because the spices themselves have different flavor if they were grown in different geographic areas.  And since I did not rush out to purchase a new set of spices in an Ethiopian store but used the ones I have here at home, of course, my blend tastes not too different from any of my other combinations. 

So that's it for today.  We had just plain basmati rice with it, although he found out that there is an Ethiopian place here in Toronto that sells injera that is flown in directly from Ethiopia, frozen and then baked fresh.  I will find out the address sooner or later and then I will add it to this blog entry. 





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