15 August 2009

Food in Durham

Hello my pretties, George and I have moved to Durham. We now have our kitchen set up (except that the oven smokes, so I will have to clean it—sigh!). I haven't posted for a LONG time because there was nothing to post; we ate the same sandwich for three weeks, or we ate fruit. Or fruit and a sandwich. This was the sandwich: tomato, lettuce, avocado (optional), cheese or tofutti, and once roasted peppers. Not much to write about, except that the tomatoes here are so incredibly delicious that we couldn't wait to tear into them at every meal.

Then we found our pots. So George invented a simple dish: pasta (we use mutli-grain) cooked then tossed with a Special Sauce> stir-fry sweet peppers and tomatoes in their own juices, then add pasta sauce at the last minute. Mix and eat. We ate that three times.

Then we broke down and cooked a crappy frozen pizza in the oven. There was much rejoicing. Our neighbors pitied us and invited us over for dinner twice. And that really was all there was to our gourmet lives.

Until yesterday. Yesterday I was determined to celebrate Shabbat properly. At the local market I found a bag of something that looked like fresh beans, labeled "crowders." Crowder peas, that is. They are a relative of black-eyed peas. We had no idea what to do with them, so we cooked them the way we do beans, but we didn't soak them first. We covered them with water, brought them to a boil, lowered to a simmer, added a bunch of cilantro stems, and cooked until tender. We drained them, tossed them with e.v. olive oil and salt and chopped cilantro leaves and served immediately. They tasted great! They're chewier and more "full of life," as George put it, than dried beans.

I served this with challah, two kinds of cheese (double gloucester and queso fresco), Kedem grape juice, and a cucumber dish adapted from the Voluptuous Vegan: peel cucumber, scrape out the seeds, chop into finger-thick sticks, toss with lime juice and fresh chopped cilantro leaves, and serve. It worked fine. In fact, George doesn't like cucumbers unless they are served this way, as tea sandwiches with cream cheese, as kappa maki sushi, or unless they are organic Persian cucumbers.

We just purchased a fat bag of baby eggplant at the farmers' market, so maybe we'll have more culinary adventures soon.

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