goodness (gracious)

So much for speedy recovery. Apparently I have a viral infection, not a bacterial one, and I am effectively back to square one in terms of recovery. I’m behind on school work and concerned about my half-marathon training. I was pretty sure I’d be fine taking a week off – but I’m probably looking at 2, maybe more.

HOWEVER. Life is overall fabulous, and regardless of anything and everything, there will be other days that I can get a full practice session in, and there will be other half marathons (if it comes to that). Life goes on.

More than that! It thrives. What’s been good lately:

• This recipe for coconut-spinach fritters and guacamole. Honestly, I was a titch skeptical but they are FABULOUS. I left out the nutritional yeast and pink salt and subbed maple syrup for agave. Still great. Oh and I used olive oil instead of safflower, just personal preference – I love the flavor olive oil adds to dishes like this.

omnomnom. I plated with brown rice, as you can see.

• These excerpts from David Byrne‘s new book, How Music Works. He talks about how human creativity has not progressed over time; rather, it has adapted to its surroundings. My brain has been chewing on this for a few days – there are points I agree and disagree with, but I’m not going to get into my thoughts at length, at least not right now.

• Salman Rushdie‘s book Midnight’s Children. I’m about a quarter of the way through and in love with his writing style (haven’t read anything by him before). I e-booked it after hearing an interview with Rushdie and director Deepa Mehta about its movie adaptation on NPR, the transcript for which I cannot find anywhere.

• How to Die Without Regrets (blog post). I’m not in agreement with everything in this post, but I like the overarching message, and found this bit particularly interesting (my mother informed me there was also a recent NPR story on the top five regrets):

“Earlier this year, a palliative care nurse revealed the top five regrets that her patients expressed before they died:

1. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

3. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

• Yogi Ginger Tea, and actually Yogi Tea in general, because of the awesome quotes with every tea bag. This one is SO applicable to my life…I feel like I need to make a giant sign with this quote on it and hang it in the room where I practice violin.

love. this.

All smiles,

b

spicy peanut kale bowl

I rarely buy fresh greens because I live by myself and it's damn near impossible to consume a bag of greens by yourself before it spoils. However, this recipe for a spicy peanut kale bowl sounded too good not to attempt. It also sounded like a perfect healthy detox lunch after consuming copious amounts of fried food at the Wilson County Fair last night. I had already started the day with a mango-carrot juice-coconut water-mint smoothie (highly recommended), so kale seemed like a reasonable next step.

Mmm, the fried fair fantasticality of a funnel cake.

I made my way to Whole Foods this morning and bought what I needed for this attempt, including my first-ever bunch of fresh kale (omnomnom!). If there's one thing I've learned since I've started to make lots of different dishes from scratch, it's that cooking can seem expensive. This is especially true when you're trying a new genre of food that uses oils, butters, and spices that you probably don't have sitting around your kitchen. But in reality, if you're cooking a lot of different kinds of food, you're going to need things like rice vinegar, tahini, and cayenne. So it's usually worthwhile to buy it, because once you have things like that you won't have to restock for a looong time.

I made a few modifications to her recipe, out of a mix of cheapness and personal preference:

• nixed the tamari and just used soy sauce (it calls for both)
• only used fresh ginger instead of both fresh and pickled
• bought rice vinegar but subbed safflower oil for sesame oil
• subbed dried cilantro for fresh cilantro
• subbed maple syrup for the agave
• for the rice bowl part of the recipe, I sauteed some garlic in the pan before adding the onions and mushrooms.

mise en place (cue dramatic music)

sauté-ing away!

Both the salad by itself and the portobello-infused rice bowl were delicious! I kept nomming on the salad while I was preparing the rice bowl...it's a miracle there was any left to put with the rice, it was so tasty!

the finished product

I'm not sure there's much I'd do differently here! I forgot to add the little bit of lemon juice to the spicy peanut ginger sauce, but I'm also not sure it made a whole lot of difference in the end product because it's infused with so many spices! Speaking of that sauce, it's so tasty that it'd be worth whipping up a bunch to use as a salad dressing or maybe even a marinade! 

ready for its close-up!

Happy nomming, 

b