hurts so good/Mister saves the day

I truly don't know how these things happen.  I thought I was finally finished my food shopping when I walked out of Trader Joe's this evening, only to get home and start making Granada Paella from The Urban Vegan and discover that I was short a red bell pepper.  I don't know how many times Mister has gone out after I started making dinner to get something I was missing (tortilla chips, refried beans, spinach, to name a few) but we can add Red Bell Pepper to the list.

He came back with a brown paper bag and my spidey-sense* told me the red pepper was not alone.  Indeed, after Mister pulled out the pepper, he smiled and reached back into the bag and gave me chocolate, "because you ran out."  What a sweetheart! because I did eat my last mini-chocolate bar from the halloween candy last night.  I thought it was sweet that he wanted to be as vigilant about my dark chocolate supply as I am about his bread supply.
*spidey-sense: the magical ability of wives to know beyond any shadow of doubt that their husbands will return home with at least 1 item more than they were sent out to get.  I inherited mine from my mother and that's why my dad isn't allowed to go to Pepperidge Farm unchaperoned.

Anyway, I recognized that Mister was probably about to be even more helpful as I was cooking dinner.

I love this recipe - truly I do - but I keep forgetting how now that I make it correctly, it burns my face off.  This is normally how dinner goes when I make this:
Bite 1: mmmm....tasty, but hey, that's a little spicy!
Bite 2: umm.....
Bite 3: chokecough
water break
get a few more bites in: face starts to feel a little hot around the ears, eyes, and nose
water break
few more bites: nose starts running
wipe nose
water break
few more bites: now my tongue and lips are burning at a steady rate, almost ignorable
few more bites: can't quite feel my tongue
Time for 2nds! (can't help it - it tastes so good it's worth the pain)
grand finale: my nose is red, my ears are red, my nose is sniffly, my lips are burning and my tongue is nearly numb... and my husband, who by now has plowed through three bowls without blinking or taking more than two sips of water, is laughing at me.

As I've learned previously, the best way to treat these "symptoms" is with dark chocolate.

Thank you, Mister

Although Angst initially showed some interest in dinner, it didn't take long for him to decide he wasn't terribly interested in whatever was making his Lady disintegrate, so he found something else to be far more interesting than our dinner time talk about dubstep. [By the way - if you want to see something incredible, click here and prepare to hold your breath for about 6 minutes.]

Inside that large Williams-Sonoma bag live some other, smaller paper bags.  Just before we sat down, Mister added the little brown sack from Essene to that bag, but Angst really wanted it.  This is the last in a series of pictures of him climbing into the larger bag to snuffle at and try to retrieve "his" bag.

my bag.  mine.

spice and rice and everything nice

I'm already thinking [dreaming] of autumn, my favorite time of year, and even the dead cold of winter.  No, it's not actually all that hot right now, no 100+ temperature heatwaves to complain of (although Mister and Angst are wilting and weeping like there is).  I seem to have a penchant for cooking spicier-than-I-thought-they-would-be meals in the middle of summer, when the last thing I want to do is overheat my body from the inside out.  So I'm thinking of how handy Trader Joe's Soy Chorizo is going to be come the snowy, bitter winter months, when all we want is something that will heat us from the inside out.  Or maybe just keep the inside warm.

Isn't that a fabulously trippy package?  I love all the colors that really ought not be combined - quite amazing, but I'll tell you, it's not difficult to locate on the shelf!

By the way, if the meat association I made last time wasn't gross enough for you, I'm just going to let you use your own colorful imagination on this next one.  Once I had freed the chorizo from its non-intestinal casing, I thought it looked super gross.  Good thing I already knew how it tasted...

ew.

Regardless, I chugged along, combining the various components of Granada Paella from The Urban Vegan and testing the true capacity of my 2.5 quart pot (because I was too lazy to clean up the pot I meant to use last night - Fridays are not good for my energy level).

I'm pretty sure if it could have overflowed, it would have.  I was kind of envisioning the funny moment in almost every sitcom or comedy movie in the late 80s, early 90s where the pot of popcorn pops too much and pushes the lid off of the pot and spills onto the stove and floor.  You do know what I'm talking about, right?

Okay, so stupid memories and poor analogies aside, it made for a very tasty and very innard-warming dinner.  Not the best thing in August, but at least I have another hot meal in my arsenal for that first bitter chill this fall.

When I told Mister it was the same chorizo I used to burn my face off with the tacos, he laughed incredulously and asked me why I used it again.  I explained my expectation that the basmati rice would calm the flavor a bit.  It did, actually - it was still quite spicy and hot (if I haven't made that clear yet), but the rice dispersed the heat and made it tolerable enough that although my face still turned red and my nose still got sniffly, I only needed my Apothic Red and a little TJs Belgian chocolate to sooth the burn this time around.  Which is fortunate, since I didn't want to test my luck trying to get ice cream home from TJs today.

So, in the interest of saving money (and showing Whole Foods they aren't the only game in town - I'll let you know when the post is up), I'm making a habit of doing my menu and grocery list on Friday night or Saturday morning, then stopping at Trader Joe's on my way home from teaching.  Since I was doing my best to get everything I would ordinarily get at WF, my bill was a bit higher than it's been...but it was still well under $40, so I consider it a total victory.  I filled my basket with many tasty things to make:

1. Panang Cucumber Curry from the new Vegetarian Times magazine that made my mailbox happy a few days ago.  I don't know if I've ever actually cooked cucumber, so this should be interesting, to say the very least!

2. Braised Cabbage with Seitan from Appetite for Reduction, which has been feeling a little left out lately, so the rest of the menu is also sourced from that amazing cookbook...since I know I can count on Isa to never let me down!  This is actually in a section of the book some people might consider appetizers or side dishes, but it looks substantial enough to me - protein, veggies, served on Basmati for a starch...we're good to go!

3. Forty-Clove Chickpeas and Broccoli, which I intend to serve over mashed potatoes, because that's awesome.  It's also awesome that at Trader Joe's, they call russet potatoes "The" Potato and only charge 29 cents apiece.  Compared to other produce prices at Whole Foods, I'll admit that $1.79/lb sounds like a great deal for potatoes...until you realize that most russet potatoes are nearly a pound each!

No, I'm probably never going to stop being awed by how much I'm saving by shopping across town.

4. Pasta Con Broccoli to make up for the blandest meal I've ever made.


5. Ginger Bok Choy and Soba.  Maybe.  If I can find soba and bok choy.

6. Moroccan Chickpeas and Zucchini which I realized, as I was flipping through the pages, I've never made before.  I scanned the ingredients and discovered that this may be the first recipe I'll make that has the word "Moroccan" in the title and does not include fake ground meat.  So, of course, I needed to try it.  Let's see if Moroccan food can be tasty when it's only vegetables!  (I'll bet it can.)

tonight's winners: Angst and Chorizo

At work, we frequently run little daily contests to inspire our sales agents to do their very best (Silly me, I usually regard that as "work ethic," but what do I know?).  Since our sales department is open from 7am until Midnight, there are a number of shifts that spread across the day, so normally, we'll have a "day shift" winner and and "evening shift" winner.

Angst is our Morning Winner.  I guess.  Remember the struggle of skill and wit that has been playing itself out in our kitchen?  Last night, the score was stuck at Mouse 2, Me 'n' Mister 0.  This morning, the score changed a little... as of this morning, the score was Mouse 2, Me 'n' Mister 0, and Angst Won.  In case I needed a reminder that Angst is neither vegan nor buddhist, stumbling out of the bedroom to find him batting a dead mouse around the kitchen is a great way to remember.  By great I actually mean nauseating and not the best way to wake up.  I was simultaneously proud of him for behaving like a cat and so, so sorry the little mousey wouldn't let Mister and I catch him and release him into a nice, grassy, cat-free area.

Mister was proud of me for disposing of the mouse without waking him up, even though he told me I could have.

Evening Winner

I had intended to make Mama Pea's Chickpeas and Dumplings tonight, but for inexplicable reasons, I walked into a home that was in no way as chilly as I needed it to be to want to make a homey, hearty stew with dumplings.  Mister decided it wasn't hot enough to have the A/C on, which I appreciate as our financial situation could almost always be better, but I have to admit - I disagreed.  Nevertheless, my desire to make the stew was gone with the air, so I opted to make the Chorizo Veggie Wrap from Katie Briggs at Philly Broadcaster.

Freeing the vegan chorizo from the "casing" came the closest I've been to feeling completely disgusted toward meat since...well, since this morning.  I did my best to banish thoughts of dead mice from my visual memory as I squished the bloody red faux sausage out of its plastic tube and into the sizzling skillet.  It immediately smelled the way I thought it should, which was delicious, by the way.  It smelled very similar to the chorizo they use at Farmicia, but as I ate my dinner I became convinced that it is most certainly not the same, since my face has never actually caught fire at Farmicia.

Fortunately, I was generous in my slathering of guacamole.   I didn't realize at the time that it would save my face from falling off; I just really like this guacamole.  It's the best guacamole ever.  It's so good that I have absolutely no problem sneaking up on strangers at Whole Foods and telling them they should buy it because they'll never eat better guacamole.  It's so good I can ignore the frugal side of me nagging about how there's no good reason it should be that darn expensive.  No reason except that it's the best guacamole ever.  So, since I had applied about a half-inch layer of guacamole, I was able to at least partially battle the chorizo for the ethical treatment of my tongue.

The arugula added a fun crunch and a bit of cool, crispness amidst a very spicy dinner.  Unfortunately, it had the tendency to grab hold of something slimy of either the guac or chorizo persuasion and attach that thing to my lips when it slurped past.  In the future, I'll probably chop up the arugula so it just sits there like it's supposed to with its little green hands folded in its little green lap.

Seriously, though, these wraps are phenomenal.  The chorizo was quite a bit spicier than I expected it to be (for no good reason, other than the less spicy nature of the chorizo at Farmicia).  In fact, it was so spicy that I went through two large glasses of water and a small cup of almond milk and Mister laughed at my red nose and sweaty brow.  But, it was so tasty that I still had a second [smaller] wrap [loaded high with mouth-saving guac], even though I knew it would burn my lips.

But hey, that's what chocolate's for, right?

I've found that spicy things make me crave chocolate.  I'm sure there's a scientific reason, but I'm not terribly interested in that right now.  What I am interested in is how Trader Joe's packs so much amazing taste into these little dark chocolate bars?  What's even better?  They sell these 1.65 oz Belgian chocolate bars in three-packs at the cash registers for about half of what I normally pay for one Endangered Species bar.

Good thing I plan to go back for more chorizo....