Day 44/180: From sublime to adequate

A busy Monday.

I had a restless night, perhaps because of the tofu dinner, and got up later than I expected. I knew that I was going to be doing taxi service to Logan at about noon, but was pleased to get a call from the passengers, my wife's uncle and cousin, inviting me to lunch at the local townie bistro.

I was pleased on two accounts. First, I really enjoy their company and conversation. Second, I know that this dinky little restaurant has good food with a couple of vegetarian options. We had a great 45 minute conversation over coffee, chocolate milk, a ham and egg breakfast, a BLT, and for me a roasted red pepper, tomato, and pesto sandwich on a delicious home-made, multi-grain, bread.

When I got back, I did some further straightening of the kitchen, read some of "The Book of Miso" and threw together a quick and dirty TVP chili for dinner.

I need to remember to get myself a copy of the latest edition of Frances Moore Lappé's "Diet for a Small Planet". I can't find my old copy and the last time I saw it it was leaking pages all over the place. It was from that book I made my first batch of mujaddara (although, as I remember it, she called it mjeddrah). I must have been "blivved-out" for the last decade or three since I see that she has several vegetarian books and a number of political books as well ... one just released this year.

It may sound as if I have a lot of cookbooks, but that's not the case. I have three Indian cookbooks, 1 Chinese, 1 sorta macrobiotic, 1 Moosewood, there's a Tassajara Bread Book skulking around the cupboards somewhere and I think that's about it. My mother is threatening to dump a ton of cookbooks on me as she downsizes. If she does, I'll probably pass most of them along to other family members since, as I mentioned before, I tend to take recipes less as instructions than as possibilities. I tend to read cookbooks at night in bed and wait until the next day when I've forgotten the specifics to do the  cooking.

I know, I know, I'm a real wild child.

If anyone is trying the recipes I post, I hope that you're approaching them the same way. If recipes weren't meant to be tweaked we wouldn't have developed tastebuds.