serotonin

Hope everyone had a lovely Valentine’s Day (belated Happy Birthday, Kathy!)

I had a mystery invitation early in the month to clear the night of February 14th. Yesterday I walked out of work to a waiting car, where I was whisked away to the city to Twins, an entirely awesome jazz bar, for drinks (too many, on a Monday. Eek!) and banter and Ethiopian food. A fantastic night.

Buttt dim lighting and yknow what? Who blogs Valentine’s night?

So let’s rewind to Saturday, a day filled with sunshine, that magical thing far too lacking this time of year that incites neurochemical goodness: an upsurge of feel-good hormones in my brain.

Steve and I visited Bull Run, to take in the monumental site of the Civil War with the appropriate amount of reverence.

(to make absolutely clear, of COURSE he did a complete handstand. I just was too slow with the trigger finger to catch anything but the dismount).

It was a totally beautiful day, one that made you go “… it’s FEBRUARY?!”

Admittedly, a recent series of windy storms meant that the trail in places seemed a bit… haphazard.

(stolen from Steve’s blog about the same topic, in which he rhapsodizes about the same day very sweetly and posts a picture of me that I find, to be honest, pretty unflattering)

But we clambered atop and under the beautiful Old Stone Bridge (it’s apparently some tourist site, so here I am this girl canoodling with my boyfriend while out of town visitors take pictures hahahahaha). Down underneath we got to see some seriously awesome icycles (bad-ass-cycles, we called them.)

But but but you know the best part of sunny days?

PICNICS!

(I realize that it’s slightly silly that there is snow in that picture, but I’m telling you, it was a beautiful day! Even I, the perpetually cold girl, thought so!)

Since Steve handled the planning and transportation of this voyage, I insisted on catering.

I made a delicious trio of sandwiches (though really I should’ve made four since I usually eat one sandwich and Steve eats three times as much as I do).

On the left, one of my favorites, apple slices, cinnamon, and almond butter; center, a newbie and oh so colorful and delicious, avocado and leftovers of what I’ll dub cheesy butternut chili (must remember to post about that!); and finally on the right, a Kath classic, cheese and jam: sharp white cheddar and lingonberry preserves for my Swedish-obsessed boyfriend.

Halved the sandwiches for maximum sharing; grabbed a hard-boiled egg and a bag of carrots for meal enhancement/fridge cleaning; and brought a farmer’s market apple for Steve and half a grapefruit for myself (cannot. stop. eating. them.).

 

In what I considered a stroke of genius, I grabbed a plastic spork that was randomly in my silverware drawer to eat my grapefruit.

Honestly, it was not all that successful. But fun in theory.

But seriously, butternut spiciness and avocado! So delicious! So beautiful in the sun!

Then there was quality lounging/staring at things.

Blue sky, daydreams of the future.

Thennnnnnn we returned to Steve’s via a circuitous route of grocery stops, all set out on an ultimate goal: DUMPLINGS!

We began with Whole Foods, to buy ethical pork. Cause pork dumplings are the besssssst. And then I had to just sort of wander through Whole Foods, obviously, sampling wine and cheese, ogling beautiful things, etc.

Then Food Star, the awesome awesome SO AWESOME market near Steve’s where they have every kind of tortilla on earth, gorgeous produce, and very very very few English speaking people. But no tofu or wonton wrappers.

So yknow then we just went to Giant.

And, thus successful (and at this point STARVING), we got to assembling.

Filling!

Ground pork, ginger, garlic, finely minced mushrooms, finely minced carrot, teriyaki sauce, soy sauce.

Steve showed me his dumpling rolling technique (rather than moistening the wrapper with water, like a WIMP, he just rubs it all over with pork filling, hahahaha). We made us some dumplins.

He has a very intricate technique which involves stuffing all the dumplings into a pan together…

And then flipping them en masse..

They were magnificent.

(I ate 5, he ate the rest, which according to the above pictures is somewhere like.. 23?)

Meanwhile, he got to making his specialty, something I really have yet to adequately document: fried rice.

His method is noteworthy for being adorably OCD about keeping ingredients on one side of the pan, and also using tons of butter. This picture illustrates both!

Sauteed onion and tofu; sauteed then steamed peppers, carrots, and broccoli; sauteed mushrooms; an egg beautifully fried with scads of pepper…

 

BROWN rice (I love having a healthful boyfriend), cilantro (what MAKES it, I’m telling ya!)

And everyone all together, with soy sauce and teriyaki sauce and oyster sauce and cumin and chili paste and then scads of Sriracha just for good measure.

My whole fried rice experience is inexorably altered by virtue of having Steve in my life. I never knew what it could be.

Glo. ri. ous.

We sat ourselves down for another picnic, this one indoors :D

Hope everyone else’s past few days have been filled with sunshine :D

oh what a beautiful morning

Had the most radiantly lovely breakfast the other day: it was before work, but I managed to book it to the gym first thing, have a pleasantly sweaty workout, have my favorite blissful walk across the gym parking lot (high on endorphins, warmed from the exercise so all I need is a hoodie… in February!), and still have the time to sit down and hard boil an egg for breakfast.

Perfect hardboiled egg! Cover the eggs (I always do a few) with cold water in a small pot, bring to a boil, immediately turn off heat (if you have an electric stove there will remain residual heat which is all you need- if you have gas turn it to low) and let simmer for one minute.

Then cover the pot, remove it from the heat, and let it sit for 13 minutes. PERFECTION!

Rounded out with Quaker Oatmeal Squares (true, bizarre story: we discovered on our door two samples of this cereal and of Quaker’s new instant oatmeal. From time to time, people apparently wander my neighborhood distributing Quaker samples. This is so, so so amazing!), and a grapefruit.

I cannot stop eating grapefruit. February is National Grapefruit Month, and I have a cold.

The abundance of flowers?

Here’s the thing: when you break your pelvis (as my mother recently did… in Antarctica) a lot of people send you flowers. A lot.

(Another bouquet has arrived since this photograph was taken).

It makes for a really pretty kitchen table, and makes you want to top it with other pretty things.

Like Sunday brunch (the prettiest meal!) in the form of savory oats, something you haven’t had in way too long!

    

Oats cooked up with milk and frozen spinach, topped with a laughing cow and a fried egg. Plus tea and an Asian pear. And sunshine and flowers and the Sunday paper.

 

This was the most successful fried egg I’ve made in SO LONG. Steve is really good at them, which I think is because he has no qualms whatsoever about using very very large quantities of butter. However, I managed to pull this off just using VERY thorough cooking spray.

Ohhhhhhh and it is so good. I love farmer’s market eggs. And the rich egg yolk-salty cheese-slightly bitter spinach combination was just… cool :D

  

Another meal among the foliage: yummy weekend lunch!

I love getting time to devote to lunch. I hate hate hate weekday lunches at this point. I typically have 15 stress-filled minutes to eat and derive no satisfaction whatsoever from the experience.

Experiences like this are necessary:

I ate a really really super fantastic oh-so-colorful and nutrient-rich salad: a base of spinach with carrots, canned sardines in mustard (my mother says one of the things she kept from being married to my dad- other than, uh, the kids- was buying canned sardines. They are awesome. And low in mercury, sustainable, and ludicrously high in omega 3!), carrots, leftover pumpkin hummus, and pickled beets.

Phenom.

 

Along with a yogurt and yet another grapefruit.

So beautiful!

potluck n superbowl

Last week’s potluck was HILARIOUS! There were 7 boys and three girls (in my house no less! Funny, I pointed out that the stellar and highly unusual was kind of wasted on us ladies since three of those dudes were.. our boyfriends). As you might imagine, the topics of conversation were a bit different than our typical nonprofit-type woman-centered potlucks, and the food? Mostly wine.

I made do. Frozen pizzas were invented for these occasions. Which is good since it got shnarfed through, and this was my serving (hostess eats last!):

And that rice pilaf I’d been ignoring on my shelf for several years? Perfect! Random salsa in the fridge? Put that puppy out! Bread! Awesome!

Before I was scrounging my cupboards, though, I was excited to finally pull out this:

   

Pathetically, I have yet to make most of the recipes I learned at cooking school in Thailand. Since it’s been a YEAR since I was there, I decided to get crackin’.

This week’s assignment? Pumpkin hummus.

Now, obviously pumpkin hummus doesn’t sound terribly Thai. However, the restaurant/cooking school where I learned of its deliciousness was a cool place. Banglamphu, its Bangkok neighborhood, was the hippie tourist mecca where hostel rooms could be found for $7 a night. The earth-lovin’, herb-smokin’ denizens positively FLOCKED to the vegetarian, wholesome restaurant, and the owner made a KILLING. And, they brought along, with their idealism and body odor, inspiration for food from other places.

Thus, pumpkin hummus, whose simple ingredients are arrayed below:

 

Pumpkin puree (I used some I froze earlier in the winter), cashews, soy sauce, sesame seeds, and cilantro (I was too wimpy to add fish sauce, though it’s an authentic Thai ingredient).

Smashed around in the food processor (lacking, sadly, a mortar and pestle like the awesome ones she used) and it was beautiful. With homemade chips and celery stix. Yum!

 

So at potluck we managed. Erin and David had brought veggies. There was bread. There were dips. Did I MENTION there was wine?!

 

Then I went to another potluck later in the week, for the SUPERBOWL! Football. So cute.

I had no idea what a conversion was and the boys in attendance thought it was just SO FUNNY to explain how the football turns into a soccer ball (converts, if you will) if you get it over a certain line.

Anyway, I wanted something reasonably healthful, so I started with some veggies:

4 carrots, chopped. 1 T olive oil. Medium heat to soften up.

Then quinoa (1 cup) went in to toast.

Then 3/4 cup Craisins and 2 cups water. Bring to a boil, simmer twenty minutes.

Add: 1/4 cup pine nuts, 1/4 tsp. dried ginger, 1 T ground flaxseed.

Thought it was SO delicious, and sort of cute and colorful (actually sorta Redskins colors HAHAHA since they will never be good ever.)

 

 

Tasty. People didn’t really eat it. I mean, there were chicken wings… this was quinoa.

I personally ate my body weight in sweet potato fries. Quality Bowl.

lunch at the fourth estate

So a billion years ago (well okay like a week and a half but seriously Leels? With the blog slacking?) I went out for a LOVERLY lunch!

My boyfriend’s sister was visiting from out of town and I was very excited to get to meet her. Also, and I don’t know if other people who live near but not in big cities, it was an excuse to actually see some of the sights in DC, which I ignore for all too much of the year.

As an added bonus, I had a Groupon to eat at The Fourth Estate, the restaurant in the National Press Club, a building I’ve always wanted to visit. It’s always a site for important speakers and press conferences, and the walls are decked out with the various VIP’s who’ve visited.

Like this shot of two of my favorite boys!

 

I could admire the scenery with no awkwardness whatsoever, since a combination of sleeping late, romantic walks in the snow, and public transportation meant we strolled in for lunch around.. 2:45.

The space was lovely, elegant, and more or less empty.

We were all sort of dazedly hungry, so we were jazzed when they brought out bread. Then super jazzed that they had two kinds of butter! Regular and a wonderful compound one with garlic and cheese (!). Then, oh then, we were SUPER DUPER MEGA JAZZED to taste the Asiago baked into the bread. It was magnificent.

This is really the first time I’ve had a boy I’ve liked enough and dated long enough to do the introduction of family members, and I was excited and a tad nervous to meet his sister, to whom he is very close. And she is awesome! And very easy to talk to!

And as a testament to our budding friendship (and mutual desire to taste as much of the menu as we could), we did the ultimate bonding: went halfsies on ordering lunch!

The exquisite creation which you see there had several components, all fantastic: moist and buttery spiced shrimp; sauteed Swiss chard, and very very best of all, red pepper polenta that I’m sure was made with cream and all sorts of wonderful artery-clogging things that made my heart so happy.

Our other order was a salad; but what a salad.

Frisee, itty bitty chopped up bits of what I think was shallot (?) that was maybe pickled or something (?) and wonderfully flavored (their online menu is woefully out of date so I’m going on memory here!)

And, lest the salad be too healthy, fried oysters (! I live for fried oysters! I love fried oysters SO SO SO SO MUCH GUYS THEY ARE SO WONDERFUL!) and bacon (my portion of which I fed to the man- the restaurant claims at their website to source locally and organically and Steve is an ethical guy who loves on the bacon when he gets a chance)

Though Steve was also occupied with the entree that was definitely the most beauteous: just LOOK!

Let me try to break this thing down. I know that the stuff on the bottom was quinoa with dried cranberries. I know there was an outside crust (as I recall on the menu they adorably called it a “Wellington”), and the filling involved yummy root vegetables and cheese.

Basically it was incredible.

And then we did an obligatory/awkward photoshoot in the restaurant. I include this one of Jordin, Steve, and I mostly just because I am amused by the dude across the atrium unaware he is in the picture… talking on a cell phone. Very DC.

   

restocking

Having to throw away food due to a power outage is heartbreaking to me. HEARTBREAKING.

However, the restocking with reckless abandon part is really quite fun.

Plants!

Delighted to see beautiful beets. And since beet greens just didn’t seem like enough greens, got some kale too.

Roastables! Parsnips (the hugest I’ve ever seen!) and butternut squashies.

Glorious apples

Beautiful multicolored eggs!

Local dairy from happy cows!

  

Steve’s been having some food woes, as you can read about at Planet Wisely. So I made him a loving local foods care package: a parsnip (which he’d never had), a sweet potato (which he’d only had in nasty marshmallow-topped casserole incarnations til I set him straight :D) and because he is a hungry man some buffalo (!) jerky.

Fun if overpriced farmer’s market purchase:

Empanadas! I interrogated the guy there about the chicken he used (it passed muster: local and “Got to run around”). He was a good sport, though he went “Yep… the chicken had a good life… before it got killed.” Well okay FINE well EVERYBODY DIES but their life should be okay. And better life= less scary superbacteria trying to kill my innards.

On that note, that was the same day I picked up my Lebanese Butcher halal organic awesome chicken :D

And while the butcher was wrapping that up for me I saw these cute meat pies and thought they must be mine. And then they were 69 cents each! Too cute.

 

Fiiiiiiiiiinal impulse purchase was by the counter: GORGEY BIG FAT DRIED APRICOTS! I went “Are these Turkish?” cause though we Greeks weren’t crazy about the whole occupation thing, I have been taught that they are the best.

BUT the guy behind the counter goes “No no! Syrian! They are the best!”

And yo: Syrian apricots. Are. The. BEST!

Post-farmer’s-market lunch turned into a bonanza of things stuffed in things, one of my favorite ways to eat.

Along with a yogurt for m’bones, I had some micro-steamed spinach (woulda been a salad but I was too cold, so I cooked it. Makes the iron more bioavailable, too!) topped with various stuffed things. Awesome!

 

The spinach was just tossed with olive oil and lemon. Had one of the meat pies and went halfsies with my mom on the two empanadas: chicken and my current favorite, crayfish mango. I don’t know how they make that wonderful light, flaky empanada crust (er, do I want to?) but dang it is good.

The mini meat pie was a wonderful bready crust (a bit like a calzone- I think the people who invented those kimchi tacos should do a middle eastern calzone place for their next project!) and the filling was moist, tender, spiced, pepper-flecked beef. Organic, halal, lovely!

The chicken empanada filling was a mix of light and dark meat with leeks and a hint of perhaps a curry-like spice?

 

Aaaaaaaand crayfish-mango, I wish I knew how to quit you. Meaty chunks of crawfish, sweet mango, chewy and savory wild rice. Nom!