Sunday’s I usually cook up a batch of something I can portion up into a bunch of lunches for the week. This week I made another attempt at one of my favorite Indian foods - saag. A while back I found an excellent recipe that I’ve been using as a base to improvise over.
This time around I substituted mustard greens for the spring greens (I have no idea where to find the spring greens the recipe calls for, it appears that they are some sort of young cabbage), then added 2 carrots cut into big pieces right after I zapped the mixture with my nifty immersion blender. Before I cooked up the onions I pan fried up two cubed russet potatoes, then mixed the onions in and rejoined the recipe. I like things a bit on the hot side so I added 3 tsp cayenne to the spice mixture. Finally, when mixing the spiced onions and potatoes back into the main pot I also added a can of garbanzo beans.
Results? Pretty damn good with the jasmine rice I cooked up, although as usual way too much food and a bit hotter than I planned.
I had a bit of leftover rice sitting in my refrigerator that I thought I’d cook up into something I could quickly heat up for breakfasts as well. I usually do a stir-fried rice with whatever I have left around when I have old white rice but this time I though I do something different. Many years ago I went to Costa Rica for a week and while I was there I was exposed this addicting black bean & rice dish that they eat for breakfast over there. I found a recipe online and proceeded to cook up a batch that I zap up for breakfast. Results were ok but not quite like what I remembered, maybe because I had to use chicken stock instead of bean stock.
I’d put some pictures up online but I sans camera for the time being - I destroyed my trusty canon S400 this last summer when I took it on an ocean hike with my brothers and ended up getting sand in it . Now the lens is stuck halfway out and no amount of compressed air will remedy the situation… < big sigh >.