Rice And Peas, Inauthentic Style

You've probably heard of the West Indian dish, "rice and peas".  It's a side dish and you have it with jerk pork/chicken/goat/etc.  Or at least I believe you do.  Despite living in a West Indian neighbourhood for several years and eating my fair share of West Indian food, I never really learned the finer points of the cuisine. 

I remember once trying to make potato curry the way the local curry-n-roti place made it.  I used to have it often with a vegetarian friend.  My attempt didn't work out in the least.  After thinking about it for a very long time, I came to the conclusion that the secret ingredient in that place's vegetarian dishes was meat.

Anyways.

Rice and peas is made with black eyed peas, which are one of my favourite legumes.  They aren't really easy to find outside of West Indian neighbourhoods, but thanks to all the health-conscious SUV-driving (isn't it ironic?  don't you think?) people in my current neghbourhood, they're way easier to find now than they used to be.    

One of many rice and peas lunches. 

The rice and peas from the other night -- which I had for lunch several times in the subsequent days -- was not authentic, but it was still tasty.  It was made with Uncle Ben's basmati rice that I found on sale.  I didn't even know Uncle Ben's made basmati rice! 

There is no "Chicken Dinner" Jelly Belly

So here we are at the end of another work week, and what do I have to show for it?  Roast chicken.  Spousal Unit decided to make roast chicken one night.  I thought he was insane, but aside from eating at 9pm, it worked out quite well.  We had leftovers for days!  (Especially since we didn't really eat much when it was made because we kinda ate grilled cheese sandwiches while we waited for the chicken to cook.)

On Thursday I had leftover roast chicken with rice "pulao" (it wasn't really rice pulao...it was rice made with some random spices that kinda didn't really work) and Peri Peri sauce.  I also threw caution to the wind and had a root beer from the office drink fridge.  It was so good!  I haven't had root beer in years.

During lunch, one of my coworkers wandered in with a handful of Jelly Bellys.  It turned out that he had had a bowl of them on his desk for months and no one had noticed.  He was tired of seeing them there, so he brought them into the lunch room one handful at a time.  Mmmmm...

Because I can't say no to Jelly Bellys, I took some.  But because you can't pick and choose your Jelly Bellys when you're in company, I had to just take a handful and deal with what I got.  I still tried to grab more Buttered Popcorn and Marshmallow ones, but a stupid Watermelon one got in the mix.  I hate the Watermelon Jelly Bellys:  Sure they're all clever being green on the outside and red on the inside, but they taste like Watermelon Bubblicious Gum and that is a sin that cannot be forgiven.

Something Different: Kichri

Have you heard of kichri? No? Yeah, that's not surprising, and not just because I'm imagining my imaginary reader to be far too sophisticated to ever eat kichri.  Unless you're Indian, like from the subcontinent, you've probably never eaten kichri.  It's not something they serve in Indian restaurants of any stripe.  It's simple food that you make when someone's sick or when you don't feel like cooking.

Kichri comforting my notebook.

Kichri is basically rice and {split red lentils, split yellow peas, split mung beans}.  (Did you like the quasi-set-notation there?  I did, too.)  I usually make it with mung beans, but split mung beans are hard to find.  But on Monday, one of my coworkers had the loveliest-smelling kichri for lunch.  He told me he made it with red lentils, using a pressure cooker.  I don't own a pressure cooker. because my mom told me that they explode and that I should never buy one.  But people swear by them.

Anyways.  

Monday night I went home and said to Spousal Unit, "We must have kichri!  I need kichri!  And let's make it with red lentils."  And we did.

Now, our kichri wasn't quite like my coworker's kichri.  First of all, we didn't have mustard oil, bay leaves or cardamom in the house so we couldn't put it into the kichri.  Second of all, we buy powdered spices rather than toasting and grinding our own.  And, finally, we didn't finish it with ghee or homemade yogurt, made with a starter obtained from the nearby Hindu temple.  We used unsalted butter and full-fat yogurt.  It was fine.  In fact, it was more than fine:  it was warm and spicy, and just as comforting as a big heaping bowl of mac'n'cheese!

Philosophical Food Blogging: Guess Who's Not Coming To Dinner?

If you're not imaginary and you have actually read this blog regularly (as opposed to accidentally landing here because Google went berserk and returned this as the top link when you searched for "winter gazebo maintenance"), you may have noticed that I haven't posted anything lately.  That's because I had a deadline looming, I had to move cubicle and I was spending my free time with the Silvia.  

Cup of mystery

But now I have time to tell you what I ate, but you probably don't care.  Nor should you.  Because I could totally be lying to you.  How do you know that I'm not totally making up what was in these empty plates and containers?  For example, I ate some Veggie Straws in this paper cup the other day.  (Veggie Straws are what you eat from the snack closet once the chips are done.  When the Veggie Straws are done, you eat the Ritz crackers.  When those are done, you start prowling the cubes for random food on people's desks.)  But maybe I didn't.  

Maybe I'm just pretending that this cup was full of Veggie Straws to make my life seem more mundane.  Because you'd be more likely to believe that I ate Veggie Straws out of this stupid paper cup while discussing memory leaks with a developer rather than the truth:  That it was full of marshmallow and popcorn Jelly Bellys that I ate while discussing the Cirque Du Soleil with a guy in Support who's also an amateur opera singer (he's a "true tenor").

Bad dahl or a clever decoy?

This other container contained red lentil dahl with rice and yogurt.  There wasn't enough water in the rice and it came out gloopy and partially burnt.  There was too much tomato in the dahl, so it looked like globs of orange stuff.  The yogurt was OK, though, as it was store-bought.  But maybe I'm actually a better cook than I'm letting on and the dahl was super-flavourful, the rice was perfect and the yogurt home-made.  You will never know.

Irene Has a Cold, But She Still Ate

Today is a special day.  My friend Irene (pronounced EE-ray-Nee, like in that song by Caetano Veloso -- not because she's pretentious, but because she's Brazilian) heard about the blog and wanted to contribute. 

I was like, Irene, honey, you're an awesome cook and I loves ya to bits, but we neither work in the same office nor live anywhere close to each other.  But she was all, "I'll email you my pictures and tell you what the food was!" So I said OK.

Now a note about Irene:  she's an awesome cook and she was the only person I knew in grad school who knew how to make a proper quiche, so she's going to elevate the level of this blog quite a bit.  She's also an awesome photographer and will make me look bad.  But since no one's reading this, it doesn't matter.

Anyways, on with Irene's lunch.

As the title of the post indicates, Irene has a cold.  Hence, she didn't have a very complicated lunch.  The first picture she sent me was of this lovely clean bowl. 

I called her up and asked her what was up with the cute picture of the clean bowl. 

"Oh.  I washed my dish and fork before I remembered that I was supposed to take pictures of the finished food.  It was risi e bisi, because I'm sick and didn't want to make something too complicated."

There you have it:  When I'm sick, I make frozen fish sticks; when Irene is sick, she makes risi e bisi.  (Risi e bisi, btw, is the fancy Italian name for rice and green peas.  Knowing Irene, they were probably from frozen rather than from the can.)

Next she sent me the picture of her afternoon snack: a banana.  She said it was very sweet.  She couldn't really taste it since her nose is blocked.  She also lamented the slow decline of the banana and the sad news that they were going extinct because of some virus.

The last picture she sent me was of three Ricola wrappers.  "They're for my cough," she said. 

"Do they work for you," I asked.  "They don't work for me at all."

"I don't know.  They taste good, though, and make me feel better."


And there you have it:  The food Irene ate. 

She's very much into this, so I'm guessing her food will feature prominently here.  In fact, I'm guessing her food will appear more often than my food.  If anyone's reading this, you'll probably be happy about that because there are only so many pictures of coffee mugs and tupperware a person can handle.