remember me?

Wow - I didn't realize I just let three entire days pass with nothing... sorry about that.  Let me fill you in on the dinner situation:
Maoz falafel salad
Maoz falafel salad (so fortunate that they are right around the corner now)
Peanut Butter and Apple Butter sandwich

Exciting, I know.  The rest of the time?  Spent it lying flat on my back or drinking vitamin-enhanced water and slurping soup (Mister made it last even longer by adding leftover pasta to it).  I can't believe how sick I ended up being!

Anyway, last night, Mister and I finally completed our move and today I turned in the keys to the old apartment.  How liberating!  We're both in a decent amount of pain and are unanimous in our decision that next time we move, we're paying someone else to carry all our crap for us.  We're too old for this. 

In all seriousness, though, you have to come to a point where you realize that even if you're only moving from one apartment to another one that is only marginally larger, you can't continue to pull off the college-style move: get a group of friends and DIY.  There comes a point when you can no longer deny that you are a grown-up with a lot more stuff than you want to carry down two flights of stairs and down the street to the only legal place to park, then repeat, except this time you're going up two flights of stairs.  By the way, everything is heavier when you're carrying it up stairs.

Nevertheless, we are finished moving things in and out of places and all that remains is finding time to put it all somewhere.  I don't have much time that I'm not at work, in transit, or sleeping, and the time I do have I try to spend cooking (and then babbling about it), so I'll be brief tonight and hopefully get a few things "put away" before bedtime.

As I'm sure you can imagine, after about 2 weeks of at least 50% take-out dinners, I'm really ready to just have everything set up so I can actually cook food.  It's far less expensive and I enjoy it.  As I set out to make dinner tonight, I realized how discombobulated I am right now.  I couldn't find my cookbook, even though I knew exactly where it was (and exactly how peeved Angst was that I put books all over his favorite Lying-On Shelf).  I couldn't find towels upon which to drain the tofu, even though they were just a short arm-reach away.  Finding a prep bowl was maddening.  And, because this is my cooking M.O., I set off the fire alarm for the first time - but I'll tell you, that was some crispy tofu!

I made Better Than Take-Out Tofu Stirfry from Vegan on the Cheap; it seemed a bit ironic.  Besides, when I went to Superfresh to get munchie-things to make Mister happy, I picked up some fresh, pre-cut broccoli (despite it being a complete waste of money) and I wanted to use it before anything went too wrong with it.

I made this before, to mixed reviews.  Mister loved it because broccoli is awesome.  I was not at all pleased with the tofu; in the recipe, you are instructed to coat the tofu in cornstarch.  All it did last time (in my opinion anyway) was make a huge ugly mess, so this time I just flash-fried the tofu and I liked the results much better.  I would have enjoyed the whole experience more if I had a bit more kitchen feng shui going on and wasn't so busy trying to figure out where my spatula was to actually read the recipe.  The sauce is outstanding, though, and I'm always amused by how the seemingly disparate flavors of Asian-influenced sauces actually come together into a tasty cohesion.

One final note that is part question: I served our stirfry in stoneware bowls with painted wooden chopsticks.  At the conclusion of our meal tonight, Mister requested that we not eat out of those bowls with chopsticks ever again, as the chopsticks scraping against the bowl made a sound he likened to nails on a chalkboard.  I didn't get that, but I refuse to use these bowls for anything that involves silverware for the exact same reason.

Have any of you encountered this auditory trouble when using stoneware dishes?

Our favorite bowls are also stoneware, but they are coated in a thick glaze, which seems to make the difference.  These bowls are just straight-up stoneware with matte coloring; no nice glossy glaze to protect our ears.  Does anyone know what I'm talking about?  Any last suggestions before they're relegated to prep bowls or decor?

zen: my kitchen's feng shui is broken

Let me start by saying that what prevents me from becoming a full-on hippie (besides the awful fashion statements I associate with them) is that I can not stand all the fruitiness. Thank heavens, the feng shui craze seems to have passed, but I have two things I would like to say about it now:

One: I think it's a big load of bullcrap.
Two: There might be a little sliver of truth hiding in all the froo-froo "good vibes, man" BS disguised as a bona fide Asian art form/philosophy.

Tonight's dinner was the Monk Bowl from The 30 Minute Vegan, with a little special sauce I'll go into later. First, I want to talk about the not-quite-zen experience that was my dinner preparation. In their happy-flowers-everywhere introduction to the recipe, Jennifer constructs this meal prep into a "symphony of multitasking." It was not a 30 minute meal (though it could be with practice) and it most certainly couldn't be called a symphony, unless you were possibly referring to the noisy banging-on-piano-strings crap that late-20th century "composers" wrote.

The cubing, marinating, chopping, roasting, and steaming part of the prep could almost have fit together like a perfectly disjointed Chopin Mazurka. The "symphony" fell apart, ironically, with the assembly of the Monk Bowls. The zen of the moment collapsed and my kitchen feng shui promptly imploded. I think zen requires a larger kitchen, or at the very least, more counter space. It's a sad day when I don't have room to do an assembly line kind of thing with a roasting pan, a pot of rice, and a bowl of steamed veggies.

Fortunately, fruity feng shui and the zen of meal preparation have nothing to do with taste - Mister and I were both thrilled with (both of) our Monk Bowls. You see in the picture tasty blocks of roasted tofu, marinated in tamari and peanut oil, 8 cups of steamed broccoli, carrots, and red bell pepper, on top of my renewed flame: Basmati rice. To top it all off? An even tastier (and much easier to assemble) surprise: a slightly altered version of Dreena Burton's Sesame Mustard Tahini Sauce.

I found the sauce when I was poking around on my new favorite blog: Peas and Thank You. There were some fun links under the recipe section (Peas and Carrots) and when I saw the Sesame Tahini dressing, I thought it would be interesting - it was amazing! And it still is, since the recipe made quite enough sauce for Mister and I to have two Monk Bowls each, generously "drizzled" with this intense dressing, and still have plenty left over for the, well, leftovers, and for at least a pair of salads. The only real difference between what is posted and what I did involved subbing peanut butter for the tahini, since I didn't have any on hand.

So far, we are two recipes into my new cookbook and our experience so far has been spectacular (if not increasingly sarcastic in terms of my caustic comments - which is really just an attempt to shield all of you from the sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice overload I'm encountering on every page). Stay tuned for more fun adventures!