Bailey's: Not Belonging in Allongé

Okay, people, you are looking at an official tree-hugging, sprout-munching recycling Green piece of redeemed shit here. I am simply not believing what we made for dinner last night, and how much we enjoyed it. How about Cheese Fyropitas (lots of feta, phyllo and baking) and Carrot Cashew Curry all accompanied with red and white quinoa?

Huh? Yep, that’s what I thought. I thought quinoa was a stinky Malaysian fruit. But it actually tastes (if prepared properly) kind of like mustard seeds without the mustard. Very odd, but VERY GOOD. An excellent substitute for rice or couscous.

We followed recipes from Mollie Katzen’s entirely hand-written “Enchanted Broccoli Forest” (sorry, no link again, no main computer yet) and I was amazed—usually I read recipes like a music score and decide quite quickly how they are going to taste, but this time I just shut up and did all the chop-chop-chopping, cut-cut-cutting, dice-dice-dicing and let SO do all the cooking, and the recipe didn’t make sense to me; cooking carrots before potatoes was simply SILLY! But I toughed it out (sitting on the cooking sidelines is tough for me, but I have a tiny kitchen and it’s tough to make symphonies of food with two people constantly banging into each other and getting burned on pans, ovens etc.) And as it should be, with SO even when there are only two people present, presentation is very important, so I cut the carrots on the bias (I am getting VERY GOOD at cutting vegetables without ending up in ER--almost better than I play guitar these days) and the plating was on beautiful white china with cilantro plucked directly from the balcony planter.

But amazingly, it all worked, and we ate on the cold balcony, and what’s even better is that the food tasted even better COLD! I will post recipes shortly.

And in other news . . . I will officially (I hope) become Canadian on Thursday, with my interview with the Citizenship judge . . . they actually gave me a third appointment after I failed to make the first two (and pleaded for one more).

So, wish me luck! No more Permanent Resident Card, HERE I COME!!!

And talked with Corey Urman of eatwellmontreal.com and will be organizing a meeting of minds with Adam Lazaris (you’ll be hearing a lot from him) on the redo of montrealfood.

So, exciting times. Too bad I dumped the Bailey’s into the allongé when I wasn’t supposed to. I guess we live and learn.

Nicky out