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Get Your Ass to an Indian Grocery Store

Get your ass to an Indian grocery store. I can’t even pretend to start this post with a cute little intro. You just need to find one, budget an hour plus of browsing time, and thank me later. The store will amaze you with its aisles of spices and spice blends, varieties of dal and boxes and boxes of in-minutes dinners. I’ve never purchased a Lean Cuisine but for some reason I thought it was perfectly acceptable to buy boil-in-a-bag, ready-in-2-minute versions of palak paner (spinach and cheese), chana masala (chickpeas in tomato sauce), dal makhani (creamy black dal) and paner makhani (cheese in a cashew cream sauce). I haven’t tried them yet, as I’m saving them for a night I can’t bare to cook.

In the meantime, another purchase inspired me to actually cook. And my about-to-expire Greek yogurt became the perfect addition to my almost-Indian dinner.

And don’t worry, I’ll try to stop my love-of-the-dash current obsession for the recipe portion of this post.

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in Recipe / Veggie 13 comments
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Honoring National Snack Food Month: Touring Herr’s Potato Chip Factory

I’m right there with you. You open the bag of chips. You peek inside. There’s 13 fucking chips in there. That’s it. Why so little chips? Why such an inflated bag?

I don’t know all of the answers, but I do know something that might infuriate you even more.

Yesterday I toured the Herr’s Snack Factory. If you live outside the Mid-Atlantic, you may not be familiar with the greatest brand of potato chips. You may actually enjoy Lays, you poor soul. (Or you’re on team Utz, another brand soaring from Maine to North Carolina, and then you probably lack a chromosome for identifying superior potato chips.)

Anyway, I learned a few things from the factory tour. On a personal level, my boyfriend and I realized we were the only potato chip lovers that weren’t either parents or 5 year olds.

On potato chip level, I learned:

  1. 4 pounds of potatoes yield 1 pound of potato chips.
  2. 1 inch of a potato yields 17 potato chips.
  3. It takes 6-7 minutes for a whole potato to turn into a chip.
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in Rants & Raves 2 comments
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Friday Fuck Up: Attack of the Three Dairy Smoothie

Look how beautiful and pink that drink is. It’s just gorgeous. I wanted this calcium-filled liquid to taste as good as it looked.  But I think I took it one dairy too far.

Like most weekday breakfasts, this one started simply: a blender, yogurt and frozen strawberries. But I barely had any yogurt left so I reopened the fridge. What else could I throw in this? I spied milk. Of course, milk lends itself perfectly to smoothies. Problem is, well, there are two problems. One, I hate milk and don’t like a lot of it in anything I consume. And two, there wasn’t that much milk left and I wanted to save it for my boyfriend’s cereal. I added a splash, but my smoothie begged for more ingredients. So there it was. The final dairy left in my fridge that I thought was somewhat suitable for drinking: cottage cheese.

Clearly, I was wrong. Cottage cheese consumed the entire smoothie, even covering that signature yogurt tang. I gagged to swallow the pink liquid down my throat.

So let this be a warning: keep your smoothies to a two dairy minimum.

in Breakfast / Drinks 5 comments
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Artsy Guess the Photo of the Day

in Photos 7 comments
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Show Me the Playbook

“Do you know the name of the large black bean?” I asked our waiter, shoving my arm into my winter jacket’s sleeve. BS and I had finished our Rancho Gordo three bean salad at Flatbush Farm, a Brooklyn restaurant focusing on humanely raised animals and vegetables, and we were steps away from the door. But I had to ask. It was the best bean salad I’ve ever had.

A warm and tender polenta base, as smooth as hummus, provided the backdrop to lovingly cooked beans. Soft but not mushy, like the pillows in a furniture showroom.

The waiter, having taken an American Apparel ad too seriously, sported perfectly cuffed trousers showing just the right amount of white sock. “I can find out for you,” he answered back.

He walked behind the bar and pulled out a binder, or what Flatbush Farm refers to as its playbook. Along with the slim binder, filled with printed pages and handwritten notes, the waiter brought out a glass with a variety of dried beans. Feeling his way around the beans, he simultaneously flipped through the binder’s pages.

“Scarlet Runner Bean,” he answered.

We thanked the waiter and walked out. “Holy crap that was cool,” I blurted out as the door closed behind us. “He just whipped out a book and told me exactly what kind of bean was in that salad. He didn’t have to ask the chef or anything. Do you think other restaurants have that kind of book? I’ve never seen it before.”

“Maybe you should start to ask to see the playbook everywhere you go,” BS replied.

in Restaurants / Trends 0 comments
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Aunt Jemima’s Lies

I recently pulled my mom out of maple syrup ignorance when I told her the cheap Aunt Jemima syrup probably did not contain any real maple, just corn syrup and other artificial flavorings. She reported back that maple is the sixth ingredient listed, which means that there is probably little of the tree juice in that plastic bottle.

She was bummed. She felt duped. Unfortunately a lot of the foods I grew up on were fakes. But nothing came close to the fake that is Walden Farms’ “peanut” spread that I found at a convenience store in Seattle. The first tip off – the spread claimed to be-calorie free. With a slight turn of the jar I uncovered that it was free of many other items as well: fat, sugar, cholesterol, carbohydrates and gluten. And of course, no animals or animal by-products were used in the production of this spread—it’s vegan.

So what the hell was in this magical jar?

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in Rants & Raves / Trends 10 comments
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Happy Valentine’s Day

in Holiday 0 comments
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