Sunday, September 15, 2024

Cookapalooza, leaf, flowers, Clever Girl

Today was mainly about the Yeung Man Cooking dish of jasmine rice, tofu, mushrooms and broccoli, with all kinds of stages, including making an umami seasoning.

At the same time as








I was making a batch of yogurt, which you see on the stove.  This picture series works backwards from the finished meal which was a whole lot more interesting than it looks, back to creating the seasoning.

It involved, aside from the umami seasoning, the surrounding ingredients ground together to a powder, some of the red chili oil you saw me make a while back, hot peppers and soy sauce. 

Tofu is like cannellini beans, bland enough you can go wild with flavoring and it will work. I was missing a few ingredients but I don't think I noticed. I love the steady progression of Will as he stages the dish so everything arrives as planned, flavors in layers you find as you eat.  

It doesn't take as long as you'd think. About 30 minutes including finding the spices and dicing the mushrooms, crumbling the tofu and cooking the rice. 

And things like the red chili oil and umami seasoning last a while. I've found that roast potatoes in red chili oil are an order of magnitude better than in olive oil.

You have to stay alert though, particularly if you get involved in making and timing yogurt at the same time.   But wise people try to keep things simple. I still have to bake the muffins, but maybe Sunday..

The lunch was really good, and did I mention I made chocolate pudding? Too late for a picture, all gone. It was a great contrast to the spicy main dish.

Meanwhile I'm posting things to keep people's spirits up, away from the T person trying to take up all the oxygen.

Here's the latest bunch of flowers


And this lovely leaf. Look at the design, the colors, shape, contrasts.


Happy day everyone, I'm writing postcards, trying to be legible, reading Clever Girl, sitting out drinking tea, watching a silver spot butterfly engrossed in the butterfly bush, hearing a happy birthday party down the street, laughing, singing, little kids running about, I love my neighborhood.

I wouldn't mind this one either








 

27 comments:

  1. Sounds like a beautiful dish. I just saved a NYT's chicken curry recipe that I really want to try. Also a cauliflower and peas one. You are an inspiration.

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    1. I love Bill Veach's Buckingham Palace chicken curry. It's really just chicken curry with coconut milk, no idea about the title! This is where Sandra pops in to say, oh dear, I can't do coconut milk 😉

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  2. A busy and fulFILLING day so far! And that leaf is amazing.

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    1. I think my days are busy, even if I planned otherwise.

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  3. The food looks artful and delicious. And oh that flower carpet! Many cities and towns produce flower carpets for Corpus Christi that amaze me, but I’ve never seen anything like that!

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    1. It's amazing. The most intricate I've ever seen.

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  4. The leaf looks beautiful (and the gardener in me wonders what disease or fungus caused it). Fortunately the gardener in me doesn't often feel obliged to do anything about diseases and fungi, and I able to enjoy the sorts of things you have discovered.

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    1. Yes, I love skeleton leaves without angsting over what caused them.

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    2. You think it is angst to find out the type of leaf blight?

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    3. No, just sometimes irrelevant.

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  5. when we moved to this neighborhood there was only one family with children. it's getting younger now and we have several families with children. when we have passed I hope a family with children gets the house. when I remodeled the big (relatively speaking) bathroom, I left the bathtub for that very reason.

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    1. That's very nice future planning. I do like a neighborhood with kids around, full of life and noise. I don't know how people tolerate retirement communities unless their health forces the issue.

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  6. Sadly, tofu is on my food allergy list being a soy product. One little bit creates nausea from hell. The leaf doesn't look all that healthy. Must be the year for it because the milkweed I've been protecting has weird insect markings on some of the leaves.

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    1. The leaf has the beauty of bacilli and viruses. Seen through the artist's eye, not the epidemiologist's.

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  7. I saw the flag and thought it was amazing that they had made something that large and THEN (!!) I read that it was created from flowers. Oh. My.

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  8. Those flowers are gorgeous! And the leaf is a study. Fascinating. I love when I stop to notice things in nature that are decaying. Thanks for the reminder to take notice more often.

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    1. Yes, I like to just observe without analyzing. It's calming.

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  9. Leaves can be interesting in their decay.

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  10. I miss hearing children, playing, waiting for the school bus, selling school fundraisers door to door--all that child stuff.

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  11. They are very pretty flowers - and make me realise how unnaturally orange a certian person really is.

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    1. They're lovely, and the camera likes the color.

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  12. Oh that meal looks delicious! Thanks for the info!

    Your and our tiny bouquets are almost identical today. Quite a contrast to that magnificent flower carpet!

    Trust your artist eye to pick out the beauty in that autumnal, well-worm leaf.

    Chris from Boise

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    1. I think my response went into spam! I think you'd like that meal, maybe mention yeung man cooking to Mike

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