Ok, first off, the thing about hot sugar is that if it wants to burn you, it will. And it will keep on burning until it’s good and ready to stop, completely disregarding any frantic efforts you may be making with cold running water and ice. Ow.
(Also, stirring thick goo continuously for half an hour will be quite painful in the shoulder and hand-al regions. But that will bite me much harder tomorrow and isn’t really a problem at the moment.)
But it’s worth it. I found the best food blog today - Sailu’s Food - and I made Chandra Kaantalu. Or am making it, still; right now I’m on the “waiting to cool” step. Oh my goodness, this is delicious. It pains me to be able to smell it in the kitchen and not eat it. But it’s not for me. It’s for K’s yoga class, which is having a makeup class tomorrow and doing a peace chalk drawing thingy, and I thought it would be nice to take a snack, since most of those kids probably won’t have eaten since lunchtime and it goes ’til pretty late. (Ok, also since I won’t have eaten since lunchtime and I’ll be there even later. Still. My first thought was for the children! I swear!)
Yeah, ok, so it’s really sweet. But it’s got dal AND cashews, both of which are protein! Therefore, it is a health food. (I choose to ignore the fact that there is sugar in equal measure.)
Regardless, this blog was a lucky find. Her photography is amazing, and she’s got that “it’s only fifty thousand ingredients, all of which you should be able to find in your pantry, and it can be thrown together in under three hours!” thing going that I really admire in Indian cooks. (I buy my paneer pre-made. The shame!) I feel equal parts envy and inspiration reading her entries, and I really don’t think you can do better than that.
And I’m always fascinated by street food stuff. I live in DC. Our vendors vend hot dogs, and that’s it. Why so dull, DC?
Today we had somewhat different lunches. It was beans (K)/bean soup (me), green beans with ketchup/asparagus with no dip ’cause I forgot mine, one slice buttered WW bread, 1/2 banana. K liked her lunch; I discovered that if you pack half a banana and a cup of asparagus together, you will get both asparagus-tasting banana and banana-tasting asparagus, both of which are unspeakably foul. To make up for it, I treated myself to a diet Coke from the Deli.
No lunch tomorrow; we’re going to Subway! (That is my one regret about K staying for lunch at school; we’ve eaten lunch at Subway once a week since I was first pregnant with her and the only thing I could keep down was their VeggieMax subs. Now we all eat lunch alone, and that’s kinda sad.)
Monday, September 17th, 2007. The day that my child, who is currently 4 years, 4 months, and 14 days old, has shown me how to do something on the computer that I didn’t know was even possible.
I guess it’s not so bad; I know people who could have said the same of their 2-year-olds. Considering that I make my living by knowing more about computers than other people do, though, it’s not reassuring.
Ok, so I’m finally getting around to reading last week’s Time (was too busy with Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage before now. It is a singularly dull book. I only got it because it was on the shelf below the Graham Greene at the library, and you know, that is generally an excellent way to choose reading material.) Anyway. They have a handy “Guide to 1337 Sp33k”, which, besides being so 1997, is also… wrong. They claim that “teh” = “very”.
Now, I have a theory about ridiculously blatant errors like this. I remain firm in my belief that most journalists have at least two brain cells to bang together; nobody who can do something as basic as “talk to another human being for five seconds” could possibly make such a silly mistake. In my world, obvious mistakes in subculture articles are really code for “don’t believe everything you read.” See, they’re really plain honest folk just trying to make a buck, like the rest of us; their scheming overlords keep them on a short leash, only allowing them to report on the news that They want you to hear. But because scheming overlords aren’t up on any subculture, those are the articles that the brave and noble journalists can insert their blatant falsehoods into, with nobody being any wiser, except for the intended recipients of the message, the members of the very subculture upon which the journalists are pretending to report.
Then, when those people wonder, “how could someone get something so simple so wrong?” they may eventually find themselves pondering larger questions, such as, “does the media really report the Truth?” and “How can I find out how factual this article on geopolitical relations actually is?”
A salute, then, to the journalists of deceptive integrity!
Hm. Apparently half an hour “isn’t long enough” to eat more than three green beans and four raisins. I may call the teachers, but I always hesitate to do that. I always feel like when I ask, “what’s going on with X” they hear, “why aren’t you doing something about X!” and I never can find a way to phrase it that can’t be misinterpreted. This could just be me, however. I never know.
Maybe I’ll get Aaron to call.
Anyway, today’s lunch: Cowboy Food (chili and cornbread), green beans (w/ketchup) and orange raisin salad, yum. Eaten, the aforementioned three green beans and four raisins, although everything else was devoured after school, so it’s not the food… I don’t know what it is.
I’ve gotta say, it’s nice to have a fridge again.
