I'll Wait For My Quinoa To Be Fully Grown Next Time

The vegetarian kick continues.

Spousal Unit decided to be creative and buy kaniwa -- which is marketed as "baby quinoa" -- instead of the regular quinoa. According to The Internets, kaniwa is The Next Great Thing in ancient grain superfoods. Because we need more superfoods to combat the supervillains that are overrunning Gotham City.

I like regular quinoa. It's a bitch to clean and cook, but it makes for a nice summer salad. Kaniwa, on the other hand, is just kinda revolting. It's tiny, mealy and bleuch.

Mush

This kaniwa salad was made with chick peas, which is everyone's favourite legume to shove into a quinoa salad. In case you aren't savvy to the whole vegetarian thing, you need to find your protein somewhere, and quinoa and chick peas are "excellent sources" of protein. Plus the softness and mellowness of the chickpeas is a nice contrast to the nuttiness, and slight crunchiness, of the quinoa.

Adding chick peas to kaniwa, however? Ugh. Because kaniwa is so small and mealy, the whole dish becomes a grainy, mushy mess. Plus kaniwa doesn't taste of anything. So eating this salad was like eating tasteless, sandy mush.

I'm lobbying to have the remaining package of kaniwa thrown away. Or, alternately, I can send it to you so you can try it out for yourself. If you exist.

Grocery Store Calzone

It's been a while, hasn't it?  I blame the stupid Whatever S.  It's been synching stupid lately.  Like it unpublished the Pork Dumpling post for reasons unbeknownst to me, but beknownst to it.

Anyways.  Here we are, ages later.  I've been on a vegetarian kick ever since I had that burger.   Something inside me snapped and I was like, "Fuck, I've been eating a lot of grease and animal fat of late.  This can't be healthy."

I also started training with a new trainer.   He's a 24yo ultra-buff rugby player who "indulges" by having a soft-boiled egg in the morning, yolk and all.   At the end of each training session, he asks me how my diet has been. When I said, "I had a burger for lunch yesterday" he was all, "That's OK once in a while.  As long as you don't make a habit of it."  

So I had to atone.  I mean he didn't say, "Atone for your sins, you revolting slug!" but he might as well have.  I mean, the guy's all muscle and no fat.

I am so much more than the sum of my parts

This, here, was a vegetarian calzone. I contend that it was healthy, but my dining companion said that it wasn't. She said that while each component of the calzone was, on its own, healthy, the whole was not. Feta cheese? Healthy. Tomato sauce? Healthy.  Red bell peppers? Healthy. Whole wheat crust? Healthy. Vegetarian feta cheese calzone in a whole wheat crust? Not so healthy.  Especially when washed down with a lemonade. Though, in my defense, I only drank a few sips of the lemonade.

No one needed to get snooty. Snooty? Snotty! Snotty?

It was our wedding anniversary.  Spousal Unit decided that we needed to go somewhere "special" instead of the place we always go to, which has super long line-ups and doesn't take reservations because it is Trendy and so you should feel honoured that they make room for you.

Instead we went somewhere fancy.  It was a place downtown that boasts healthy, locally-sourced, blahblahblah, yaddayaddayadda food.  You know the type.

The thing about this place, though, was that we needed to dress up to go there.  Now you've never met us.   You don't even exist, so how could you have met us?  But if you did exist and if you had ever met us, you'd know that Spousal Unit and I don't really get gussied up.  We don't clean up well.

But we had to.  Because we had reservations and a sitter and whatnot.

So we put on our best outfits and showed up at the restaurant and felt like Ferris Bueller, Cameron and Sloan at Chez Quis. I kept calling Spousal Unit "Abe" and we made pancreas jokes. Of course, we didn't eat pancreas, but Spousal Unit did eat diseased duck liver (foie gras). I had the 5 course vegetarian tasting menu and Spousal Unit had the 5 course meatatarian tasting menu. This place was so good, it made tofu palatable.

It came out to a little over $200 with tax and tip, but we still were greeted with trash when we walked out.

Awwww....How nice!

À la recherche du pain perdu

In French, French toast is called "pain perdu" because it's made with old, stale bread (pain=bread, perdu=lost).  Spousal Unit and I are big fans of making French toast out of the stale bread hanging around the house.  Today we made French toast with some week-old sourdough bread.   

We use three eggs.  Many people will tell you to use fewer, but we find that three eggs for half a loaf works.  We also add maple syrup in the batter because a bad cook told me to do that once.

The bad cook in question was the original cook at the vegetarian place I used to frequent when I was in grad school.  She made these gawd-awful wraps and chickpea mushes that gave vegetarian food a bad name.  The only thing she made well was French toast.  One day I asked her the secret of her French toast and she said "maple syrup".  She put maple syrup in the batter.  That made the bread caramelize and gave it a woodsy-sweet taste.

She eventually left -- or was fired, I don't know.  She was replaced by this fantastic cook who turned the place around and totally made it happening.  He got rid of the wraps and added black bean burritos and hemp burgers and blueberry upside-down cake and brownies and then this local celebrity started hanging out there because he was in love with the waitress, but then she left to be a nanny somewhere and he stopped coming and then I graduated and the place was sold and it's probably totally different now.

Anyways.

Because of that first gawd-awful cook, I started adding maple syrup to my French toast batter and never looked back -- except for that time when I made Nigella Lawson's doughnut French toast, but that was because her boobs told me to.