Afghan is awesome!

So my mama’s BIRTHDAY was April 8th.

The evening was slightly bizarre given the fact that she’d been working cray-cray hours up to her birthday, because despite various douchey Congress members talking about lazy-ass federal workers, she in fact worked like a horse preparing for the possible furlough that would’ve begun the next day… that then never happened… so then she had to work on a Saturday too.

But we enjoyed the slightly bizarre atmosphere, inspired by the carefree attitude of government shutdown pickup lines on Twitter.

We dined at Panjshir, a restaurant for which my mother had a Groupon, which I guiltily let her use on her own birthday (I paid the rest, obvi).

Panjshir serves AFGHAN food! The inside, though appearing hilariously tacky on their website, is in fact beautiful and really nice in the evening. It’d be a good date place!

I always feel awkward taking pictures of strangers at restaurants… so here’s the bar! I thought the muskets over the door were neat.

 

We kept our drinks virgin for the evening. Apparently in Afghanistan they drink CARDAMOM TEA! Love me some cardamom! Love me some tea on a somewhat gloomy night!

The mug was so beautiful! Though small, they refilled mine like six times :D

We started with the Aushak, scallion-filled dumplings with tomato sauce and fresh yogurt.

 

Green onion, go figure! That typically-relegated-to-garnish vegetable makes it big. The tomato sauce was wipe-it-off-the-plate-with-your-spoon awesome, made particularly succulent with mint, mm.

Salad. Standard. Yummy creamyish dressing. I have to say, there is something (and I think it is because I have it so rarely), something slightly magical about iceburg lettuce to me.

 

We split the veggie combo: you get your choice of three of their vegetarian dishes, plus rice.

We got:

Kadu Chalow: sauteed pumpkin topped with seasoned yogurt and tomato sauce

Seib Chalow: apples baked with tomato sauce, seeded Afghan prunes, walnuts, split peas, and spices

Shalgam Chalow: rond slices of fresh turnips cooked with tomato sauce, butter, onion, fresh ginger, brown sugar, and Kashmiri masala.

I don’t know if any of you have been lucky enough to taste Afghan food but dannnnnnnng. That pumpkin dish is probably the most famous for those in the know (agree? disagree?) and this one was good, if not the best I ever had (that honor goes to The Helmand, in Cambridge, MA). Sweet with the tomato/yogurt tang atop.

Those turnips though?! Crazy awesome! Just enhanced everything elemental in a parsnip: the sweetness, the earthiness, the depth of flavor. Afghan food has an amazing balance of sweet/savory/sour.

Also, the apples with the split peas. Who’d think, right?! But the still slightly al dente legumes added something sort of irresistable.

Plus, just for good measure, one more veggie dish:

Zardack Chalow: Round slices of fresh carrots cooked with seeded Afghan prunes, walnuts, chickpeas, and tomato sauce

Aaaaaaaaaaagh God. I went, “You’d eat this with lamb, right?!” If there are any lamb-lovin’ Greek girls out there, you know everything good about lamb? This had it, but somehow in a vegetable stew. This probably makes sense to no one. That is fine.

Basically, how can you go wrong with slow-roasted carrots, succulent sweet-savory sauce, and walnuts?!

All the leftover juiciness got soaked up with their bread, which comes with hot sauce :D

Aaaaaand the birthday girl got almond pudding, dusted with pistachios and cardamom. Beauteous!

I attempted to get a picture of her smiling, but we are chronic blinkers in my family, oi.

stress eating

Work morale is a bit low. My boss, in response to this, rather than attempting to address the underlying lack of organization where I work, instead has started a mandatory email chain of inspirational quotations. Wow, that’ll help.

Here are some actual useful coping strategies I have found.

1. Caffeine. Enough said.

I got to Steve’s for our usual Thursday lunch and he was off buying groceries for our usual Thursday potluck dinner. So I walked to Dunkies. Dunkin Donuts makes the bessssssssssst coffee. Ubiquitous Dunkin Donuts on every corner is what I think I miss most about living in Boston.

Toasted almond coffee. With milk. Yes.

2. Potluck. I cannot imagine having a high stress job without truly phenom coworkers. Our Americorpse team is the bessssssssssst. Potluck is usually the highlight of my week.

Our food sourcing situation is completely ridiculous. Not only do I and my coworkers and boyfriend (well er my boyfriend is my coworker, shh) constantly end up eating at work and sometimes taking home extra food bank food, Patricia’s boyfriend who works at a completely different site… gets food bank food and takes it home. So he brought home a gargantuan amount of broccoli and Patricia was complaining about what to do it and I said “hook me up.”

Thus, my potluck contribution, “broccoli two ways.”

First, Jacques Pepin’s broccoli stem relish (with fresh mint, chili, garlic, sesame oil, etc.)

Annnnd the florets, which I quickly sauteed in peanut oil, then threw in some water to steam, then dumped in Asian fermented black soybean sauce for flava.

So I had my cooking all set and then I, after a long stroll after work in the park near my job/Steve’s apartment, I got to Steve’s about fifteen minutes before potluck was set to start, thinking he’d be done.

So he was… um… making my mom a birthday card. Which was very cute. And had… cooked nothing.

So I made Steve’s contribution. Didn’t really complain since it was muhammara (! Oh my God guys remember when I made this every day all the time?! Now I’ve tasted it again and now it’s SO STARTING AGAIN AS SOON AS RED PEPPERS ARE AFFORDABLE. Well that won’t really be for awhile. The guys in this batch came from… a dumpster… an undisclosed source)

Served in a blender because by the time it was finished I was tired and didn’t feel like dealing with spatulas and transferring.

The latest diving shopping expedition yielded a lotta bread, so we had a lotta bread with olive oil and cheese, mm.

Roomies Carolyn and Erin both went Indian-ish. Carolyn went for a chickpea and tomato curry…

And Erin made Trader Joe’s veggie masala burgers which really are the greatest veggie burgers of all time (well in taste anyway. They are tragically low on protein.)

Patricia brought muffins. They had cornmeal, cheese and… broccoli :D

So intensely good. I had three?!

My first plate, just a sampling.

And finally, work stress is vastly improved when one has

3. Quality snacks.

All reasonably healthful, from a variety of sources, which did good things for my blood sugar level in a variety of unpredictable situations

From the Asian market near Steve’s, when we’d taken a walk after work and it was already 8 o’clock and it seemed prudent to get a snack since dinner had yet to be even conceived of, let alone made:

Dried green mango!

Pros: Wonderfully tangy (though there is added sugar), its texture is chewy enough that it takes awhile to eat, alowing you to focus on its flavors.

Cons: a bit expensive and low in fiber

As seen in Healthy and Sane, Somersaults! Saw them at World Market when I ran there to unsuccessfully hunt for birthday pressies for my mom during my lunch break.

Pros: Delicious crunchiness! Zesty ranch-y salsa-y salty flavor! As Steve put it, like a healthy version of Combos (oh man, remember those?!). And good on the protein so it’s pretty respectably filling.

Cons: Why is the second ingredient (after sunflower seeds) white flour? It’s supposed to be “toasted grains”! That’s hippie food! Make the grains whole! Throw some oats in there! In all honesty, their appearance lacks a lot… in that they look like dog food. Also, friggin’ expensive.

TJ’s dried blueberries.

Pros: antioxidant powerhouse, whole big bag is just 120 calories, so if you just feel like eating and want something sweet these are your guys

Cons: FRIGGIN FRIGGIN EXPENSIVE. And make your teeth blue. And you really only want to eat a few at a time because they are strangely chewy.

favorites and tangents

This post was filled with pleasant foods and memories but a bit aimless… then I kept going off on tangents… and then I had a title!

My MEGA ADORABLE work supervisor sent me this text a few Saturday mornings ago:

 

1. My supervisor is the coolest.

2. Is there anything better than spreading a good thing?

And then having that good thing waiting for you? But wait… oh wait… not just oats in a nut butter jar… oats in a SUNFLOWER SEED BUTTER JAR.

This. Stuff. Is. Insane.

I premade the oats in bulk on the weekend, per usual, and put one of the portions into the nut butter jar.

Pro: soaked it up nicely, no doubt.
Con: couldn’t microwave it in the jar (typically I store them in tupperwares and then transfer them to a micro-safe bowl for reheating in the morning).

So, I made a well in the middle and poured in hot water, then carefully stirred. Worked aight! The texture restored itself nicely. It wasn’t super warm, but I’d just been to the gym so I didn’t mind tepid oats (me and cold food after exercise… it’s weird).

   

Speaking of oats, I really would be totally content eating them three meals a day. I’m currently on an intense nostalgia trip for when I lived alone and had a student schedule and could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, with time to devote to it and the ingredients I wanted always on hand and the ingredients I didn’t want (like horribly unhealthy things that go “Ileana! Ileana! Evolution has caused you to crave my sweet and salty fattiness! Eat me!) out of my effing environment.

Tangent.

This bowl was oats, pumpkin, and a glob of Greek yogurt and cinnamon on top.

 

Clearly was feeling plant-deprived when I made this particular lunch, since then I had a salad, too.

Farmer’s market greens, hummus, bit o’ cheese, pickled beets.

 

Pink and green things are

1. beautiful and
2. delicious together.

Also orange and green things. And actually pink and orange things. My photographer aunt and I had a hilariously lengthy phone conversation about what we were cooking for Easter, and topics included lamb sourcing (I taught her about Lebanese Butcher and I think we are having a halal and organic meat Easter! So cool!) and beautiful colors (thus, my other aunt’s beets and my Moroccan carrot salad that is my most vivid memory of last Easter.

Another tangent!

I hate hate hate work lunches for many reasons, mostly that they are short and stressful and thus provide me with no satiety whatsoever, but I also hate that they rob me of the opportunity to survey my food and appreciate its prettiness before snarfing it down.

Thus, hurray for weekend tableaux.

   

Concluded with cute little clemmies.

A brief tangent for a NON favorite: mayonnaise. I don’t get mayonnaise most of the time. Mayonnaise makes sense to me

1. With fries at a Belgian restaurant
2. For dipping artichoke leaves

When I see people slathering it all slimy and nasty on their sandwiches and soaking their egg and tuna salads with it it seriously initiates my gag reflex. Plus I just don’t like egg salad that much. I like an egg yolk in moderation (for example, oozing over a lovely spinach salad!) but just… the overkill of the mayonnaisey thick slime and then the eggs as well… it’s just too much for me.

Thus, tofu salad. Finely diced tofu, plain yogurt (Greek is divine!) and, to me, the best part of egg salad which is the seasoning: I do various combinations of dijon mustard and/or capers and/or vinegar and/or green onion and/or dill. Always lots of black pepper.

And snacky dippable lunches are so fun.

This one had the tofu salad'; Triscuits (which my mom always buys) and Persian cucumbers from Trader Joe’s (which are awesome) for dippage; and a chopped apple and plain yogurt bowl (the ush).

  

I can’t talk about favorite things without a final rhapsody on Cooking Light’s brown Irish soda bread. Here is the thing: when you buy buttermilk, at least at our store, you have to buy a quart of it. That is a lot of buttermilk! So you finish one loaf of bread (which in my house and at my potlucks happens very very quickly) and then you think about how good that bread was, and then you look at the buttermilk… So with this recipe, between one thing and another, you probably won’t make it one time. You’ll make it lotsa times!

Make it. Lookit that crumb!

 

And now we appear to’ve transitioned to dinner.

I really am sort of formulaic when I eat. If I had a choice, I would probably eat sweet potatoes at every meal (er… when I wasn’t eating oats. A full serving of both in one meal might be carb overload, even for me. I’d feel compelled to run a marathon… or fall into a coma. Tangent!).

I’m also very fond of my homemade lentil burgers, and having a stash in my freezer has saved my booty on more than one occasion when no one in my home has felt like cooking.

And yes, there is still tomato chutney.

There was a quart of this, too! Another recurring theme!

How many weeks has it been now?

     

Oh God, yeah, and brussels sprouts. Man I eat a lot of brussels sprouts! And I always make them what I now refer to as the “Austin way” (if you want to know it, scroll down and read one of the other gazillion times I made it).

Well and parsnip fries are pretty fantastic.

Aaaaaand tofu makes another appearance. Baked this time. Just guess what that red condiment baked on top of them is. It rhymes with momato butney.

Another day, another text…

 

… and now I’m craving another favorite, NAAN! And Malindi, she is SO WRONG.

slice of life

Last Sunday was new faces and spontaneity. And delicious. Hurray for going out for a drive and finding things along the way.

LOOK AT THIS CUTENESS.

 

Adorably shy Girl Scouts manned (girled?) the establishment, earnestly if quietly informing me about flavors.

There were adorable Easter cupcakes with bunnies atop…

Smores…

And nostalgia trip of nostalgia trips, meringues! Homemade meringues! The second I saw these, I knew what I was getting.

No, I have not turned into an egg-white obsessive health nazi since last I posted, but I have a powerful, powerful attachment to homemade meringues. My mother’s mother was both a great lover of having delicious desserts on hand to nibble on whilst sipping tea and listening to her tell us why her recollection of a particular event in family history was more accurate than someone else’s. She also was very virtuous about not wasting food, so she’d make custard or lemon curd or ice cream or something (using egg yolks), then whip up the whites into homemade meringues.

If all you’ve ever tasted is the weird jelly stuff on lemon cream pie or the hard-as-rocks packaged meringues, you are MISSING OUT.

A real homemade meringue has a wonderful airy crunch as you bite through its outside and then just a hint of gooeyness in the middle. Mmm!

   

We were heading into town to see the cherry blossoms, but as we got on 395 we figured out everyone else on earth had had the same idea. Geographically it was not terribly far but sitting in traffic is bad for morale.

So we parked at Gravelly Point, a little park type thing next to the river and also next to the airport. The views of takeoff and landing are dazzling as this picture… not at all shows.

And we walked over the bridge to the Tidal Basin and the Cherry Blossoms. I saw billions and billions of tourists snapping their fancy Nikons (and a family who I sincerely hope could not read English since otherwise a man was posing… in the water of the FDR Memorial… directly next to the sign that said “Please respect memorial and stay out of the water”. Washington D.C., home of irony.), but I knew that I would not get a good picture.

Cherry blossoms are pretty. Obviously.

My favorite tradition of visiting the cherry blossoms (I say “tradition”: I lived here for eight years, finally saw them at 16, and just now went for the second time) is going to the Maine Avenue Fish Market. It is SUCH A FUN SCENE.

Clever Steve thought to do an aerial shot, which I am now appropriating.

 

At its most basic, it really is just a market… full of fish. Lots of smelly, glassy eyed, fishy fish!

Being in the Chesapeake Bay area and all, of course there were crabs. Wriggling around!

And you can buy a variety of precooked foods… lots of steaming and frying going on. The stalls were below ground level, so you just reached in and grabbed your food.

The food is delicious and the environment is enjoyably, delightfully, no-frills. If you want cocktail sauce you can feel free to mix your own bottled ketchup, horseradish, and lemon juice.

And the scene! We were there at 5:00 on a Sunday, and there was definitely a hefty crowd (if you go at lunchtime on a Saturday, leaving right after eating breakfast is probably advisable. Maybe you won’t be too ravenously hungry when you have finally reached the front of line to order, then waited eons for them to prepare, lunch). Fortunately our wait was brief. I took the opportunity to people watch. Lots of cute families. Kids blowing bubbles.

 

There was a girl in the most gloriously trashy jeans I have ever seen- they had many many holes but one was basically her entire front left thigh. I wish I could’ve summoned up the nerve to take her picture! She seemed to have a boy she was trying to impress.

Anyway, I wasn’t all that hungry but surprise surprise, Steve was. Freegan first helped himself to a great deal of saltines…

 

And then we made our way across the street, up the hill for a picnic, to look out on the city and eat some stellar fried food.

SO AMAZING. The combo: fried jumbo shrimp, fried oysters (!!!!!!!!!! GOD I LOVE FRIED OYSTERS SO MUCH. Steve had never had them before. Mannnnnnnnnn he was missing out), hush puppies (OH GOD I LOVE HUSH PUPPIES TOO!)

 

It was epically delicious. I ate… more than I intended to. Cause… it was epically delicious.

They were so fried, so skilfully, that Steve just ate his shrimp tails.

…

But I threw them to our neighbors.

And then they were in love with me.

  

Steve and I have this nice symbiosis when we dine together. In that I pick at things and leave unfinished bits… and then Steve eats them!

Such was the case with the hush puppies. I just wanted to eat that doughy corny center til I died, so I happy handed over the crispy outside coating to Steve.

Love.

We set back for Virginia, but first Steve wanted a picture of the two of us by the cherry blossoms. So he asked another couple if we could swap photog duties.

And then we went over to pose… next to a magnolia tree.

In this picture I cleverly looked at the person taking the picture rather than the actual camera, so I look a little… slow.

(But Steve is handsome!)

And this one’s just a little awk.

But that is life.