cereal thief and tomato fail

Angst has an unnatural obsession with my breakfast.  I mean, I guess it's somewhat natural in that he always thinks he wants to eat what his humans are eating, but he is over-the-top lusting after my cereal.  He begs for waffles, occasionally for oatmeal, rarely for fruit, but he is absurdly insistent about his "need" for my cereal.  It doesn't matter what cereal I'm eating, either.

He sidles over to my desk area to start his hunter gymnastics.  Here is my set-up in the apartment: I have my piano against the same wall as the oven, then the bench, which doubles as my desk chair because there is exactly enough room to swing around to face either the piano or my desk.

Angst has this strategy for stealing a bite of my cereal which involves him jumping up on the piano and lurking behind me for a minute...eventually, he climbs onto the bench beside me and tries to pull my hand (holding the cereal bowl) toward him.  If and when that fails, sometimes he climbs up on the desk in front of me and stands in front of my computer display and on my keyboard until I move him.

He's such a naughty little beast.  No mystery here as to why there's cat hair on my piano keys...

Anyway, after my little cereal thief tried to steal my breakfast, I went off to work and had the privilege of having lunch at Pure Fare again.  Today I tried the Zucchini Noodle Salad, which consisted of thin but perfect "noodles" made of finely julienned (probably spiralized) raw zucchini, plenty of nutty edamame with some cherry tomatoes and red peppers, possibly a little too much cilantro, and a divine lemon-miso dressing.  It was both beautiful and delicious, and if I hadn't been lunching with a colleague, I would have taken a pretty picture.  I'm not quite ready to wear my Food Blogger Princess crown in public just yet.

Tonight's dinner, then, was the only thing left: Vegetable Chili from The Low GI Cookbook.

Looks delish, doesn't it?  It was, actually, which surprised me.  I've made this before, so I was quite aware that it is a good recipe (which is why I chose to repeat it), but something went terribly wrong this week, either in my grocery list preparation or execution, and I came up with no tomatoes tonight.

I've never made chili without tomatoes and realized upon finding no tomatoes in my home that I was not quite sure I could pull this off.  However, Mister had already braved the cold mist accumulating outside in order to pick up the tortilla chips I also forgot to get, so I couldn't back down.  I simply had to figure out how to make chili without tomatoes!

Well, I said I wanted to stretch for MoFo this year, and I had intended that as incentive to create bona fide recipes, but it's always good to know how to compensate for missing ingredients, so I put my brain to good use and came up with these changes:

• I added some frozen corn to give the chili a little more bulk.  I contemplated dicing an apple but then I thought Mister might not appreciate me incorporating fruit into his chili.  I may try it in the future, though, because now my mind is a little stuck on that idea.
• To add the tomato "flavor" in the absence of both fresh and canned tomatoes, I added a generous amount of the Spicy Hot V8 still in the fridge from our Harira adventure.  It totally worked.