Food, Glorious Food

As I mention in my profile, I spend much of my day thinking about food. Since most of my time is taken up with reading, I find the mind needs to wander and food seems a legitimate channel! I made a couple of things I was really pleased with this week. The first was an Indian meal which was absolutely fantastic. I'm blowing my own horn here, but it really was! Apologies for the bad picture but the camera batteries died after only one shot and we were too hungry to mess about finding more! Here in all their fuzzy glory are steamed basmati rice with a spiced coconut dahl, green bean-sesame curry and beetroot salad.

I must hasten to point out that the dahl and curry are both from recipes so to be honest I don't deserve much credit, I just did what I was told! The dahl was from an old Waitrose magazine I think - basically cooking red lentils in stock, frying up some onion, garlic, ginger and curry powder, then adding these to the lentils (keeping a little for garnish) along with some coconut milk. By far the best dahl recipe I've found, and very easy. The real stars of the meal were the green beans which I made from this recipe posted by Indira on her Mahanandi blog. I've been thinking about using the sesame mixture on other vegetables, maybe courgettes...? I urge everyone to give the recipe a go - so so good.

On the other end of the food spectrum, I made some cupcakes for Saturday tea. I did the Brooklyn Brownie cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I didn't do the icing, instead I put a little maple syrup on the top and stuck on some chopped pecans. Now I know it's tantamount to blasphemy for someone who loves chocolate as much as I do but [whisper] I think if I had to choose, I'd take the green beans!

I'm going to lie down for a minute and hope the world gets back on an even keel.