delayed post for valentine's day:

broccoli artichoke pea risotto
lettuce-less salad with carrots, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, annie's goddess dressing
defrosted lard bread--not quite as good as fresh but still pretty tasty
creme brulee with sadly neglected hand held blow torch
wine

yum!

current status: starving! and stuck at work! i'm so hungry i could plotz!

sometimes you throw together one of those last minute meals and you totally hit the nail right on the head. last night was so one of those nights. i'd had a rather crappy afternoon so i dragged myself home, making a quick stop at people's food co-op and the main street party store for last minute supplies (veggies and beer). the roomie came to pick me up (and buy cod liver oil--it was on sale!), which was good because it's cold cold cold here!

i made the following tasty delicious dinner:
bowtie pasta with sauce consisting of broccoli, fake sausage, grape tomatoes, mushrooms, shallots with the help of butter, veggie stock, oregano, basil, salt, pepper and red wine vinegar and a little flour to thicken it up.

accompanied by a tasty delicious Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold, the lovely company of my lovely roommate and everything seemed better than it had a few hours previous.

today i woke up feeling productive and made some banana bread. can't wait to eat some when i get home from work!

i thought i'd treat myself to a fancy little lunch today at sushi.come (yes, that's really what it's called). so i ordered some stuff including oshinko maki because i always get that and i swear it tasted like my grandmother's apartment smelled. and it's not like my grandmother was cooking up sushi all the time. no, she preferred canned baby peas and steak. so, yeah, it was weird and i couldn't eat it.

I don't know if this really qualifies as a food-related update, but after my 9pm class, i zipped over to Ashley's for a desperately needed beer (three hours listening to a professor offer his "definitive" wisdom on the Proper Way To Teach will drive a girl to the bottle), chugged down a 9.5% beer called Nostradamus and am now safely parked behind the reference desk, slightly tipsy and waiting for questions.

how professional am i? oh, how?

how not to make a spanish tortilla, based on a real-life experience

ingredients
2 potatoes
1 onion
1 cup olive oil
1 tbl butter, unsalted
6 eggs, whisked
salt to taste

recipe
1. observe roommate making spanish tortilla on an almost weekly basis for five months.
2. wake up on sunday morning and yearn for spanish tortilla.
3. realize that roommate is still sound asleep, having come home at 5am.
4. decide 5 months of observation should do the trick and finally get up the nerve to make tortilla.
5. scrub and thinly slice potatoes.
6. dice onion.
7. heat olive oil in medium sized frying pan on high heat.
8. fry onions in oil with mind to carmelize until realizing that there's too much oil to carmelize.
9. add potatoes.
10. flip potatoes and onion repeatedly, spilling oil on stove and causing several mini-grease fires.
11. be thankful you removed battery from smoke detector and haven't remember to put it back in.
12. when cooked, scoop potato onion mix out of pan, leaving oil.
13. to oil, add butter and melt.
14. mix potatoes and onions into whisked eggs.
15. add mixture to pan, still on high heat.
16. while eggs are cooking, begin washing dirty dishes.
17. watch more smoke from unknown stove location fill the kitchen.
18. ponder how you will flip large tortilla now that it's about to burn.
19. at last possible second before burning begins, somehow manage to flip tortilla onto plate without burning yourself.
20. spill raw egg on stove, producing more smoke.
21. slide half-cooked tortilla back into pan to finish cooking.
22. wash plate used for flipping.
23. when tortilla is "done", flip it back onto now-cleaned plate.
24. watch tortilla sag and collapse instead of fluffing up proudly.
25. wait for tortilla to cool; open door to air out kitchen.
26. cut tortilla and realize that it's raw in the middle.
27. eat tortilla.

yesterday had "medium" spiced food at tup tim, ann arbor's premier thai restaurant. i hear siam garden, in the quality inn, is pretty tasty, too. but if you go to tup tim remember to order a notch down from what you'd normally get. my curry was so spicy i could barely eat it...littered with red pepper! but good, nonetheless. equally tasty was my post-workout lunch at the people's food coop, which has the best cold/hot bar i've ever had. i got:

veggie chili
a small slice of pizza
salad (chickpeas, sprouts, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, annie's goddess dressing)
fried pita chips
coffee

i always get too much (it's pay the pound and i usually pay twice what anyone i'm with pays) but it is salad bar perfection...especially after three hours at the gym (so hard core!). it's all happy and organic, there's a ton of stuff to choose from, i can leave out the lettuce (unless it's organic stuff from henry's farm, i don't like lettuce in my salad) and if i'm feeling up to it, i can douse the whole thing with nutritional yeast. plus, they have liquid soy creamer in their cafe. sigh.