Smelliott's Cooking Dinner

Since I needed to go to Chip's anyway to do over 2 month's worth of laundry I decided to help out my nephew with his "cooking day". As I was at my house discussing menus with Smelliott I got a call from Pepper's sister (doesn't have a cat so I don't know what to code her) and I invited her to join us. We cooked pastitcio and watched a documentary that I wholly recommend, " Bigger, Stronger, Faster". It was a very well-made film about steroid use. It really made you rethink about a lot of issues, not just athletes and steroid abuse. It also introduced a lot of facts about steroids I didn't realize mainly that the evidence of long term damage from steroid use is shaky. It also didn't necessarily condone steroid use either. At the end of the DVD you couldn't really say what side of the debate the narrator was on.

Anyway, here is my recipe. The only think that we didn't quite do right was the macaroni; we should have cooked the macaroni to just underdone because it cooked a bit more in the oven. Also, I used 3 different bags of macaroni as they were each sitting opened (hidden) in my cupboard and they might have had different cooking times due to brand and age.

Pastitcio

Cook 2 cups of dried macaroni until almost done. Rinse well to quick cooking.

Meat Sauce

1 tbl oil
1 onion, diced
1 lb burger crumbles, I used 1/2 bag of Morningside crumbles & 2 Morningside Veggie Patties that I smooshed myself after nuking for a minute or 2
1 can tomato paste
1 can diced tomatoes
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg

Heat oil in pre-heated cast iron skillet. Saute onion until golden (or until nephew's arms fall off). Add crumbles, cook for a while then add the crumbles, then the paste and tomatoes and last the spices. Reduce heat and simmer (and stir occasionally) while you make the bechamel. Taste again before assembling to adjust spices, may need to add more.

Bechamel Sauce

4 tbl oil
4 tbl flour
4 cups unsweetened soymilk heated in microwave (don't boil)
1/2 tsp nutmeg

Heat oil in large sauce pan. Wisk in flour and cook until floury taste is gone (about as long as it takes to heat the milk) Pour in hot milk while wisking constantly. Heat on medium/high until it bubbles. Reduce heat to medium and continue cooking until thickened.

Assembly

Preheat oven to 350. Spray Pam large casserole dish. Add the cooked macaroni to the bechamel sauce and stir. Should be soupy, the pasta will soak up a LOT of sauce. Layer macaroni and meat mixture and make sure you end with pasta on the top. (We didn't do it right last night and the meat sauce ended up in a funky layer top crust) Optional: sprinkle top with Parma, bread crumbs or French Fried Onions (last is expensive but if you have some left over from Thanksgiving it doesn't count)

Cook for 45 minutes then let stand for 10. Delicious and just as good the next day for lunch.

Prius Sucks

Glad you are alive, Kipsy.

After spending, as you know, $2500 on my 2001 Prius less than a month ago, it stopped working. Latest diagnosis? Catastrophic failure of the hybrid battery system. Cost for parts alone? $4900.

Kind of amazing, isn't it?

I have decided I don't need a car for the next month. I'll just take buses around town until I go to Texas next month, and I'll fly down there with Roothy (the Cat). Momcat said I could use her car while I am there. Maybe I'll buy a new car while I'm down there, and drive back.

Would anyone like to buy a large, green paperweight?

I am alive!

I'm doing this at school, but it's Saturday so I don't feel so bad. I don't get on the computer at home much (of course, I'm not THERE much!). I still can't write much because I'm here at school to get my materials ready for TAKS testing this next week. Last night was opening night of the play. I had a soccer game this morning in Waco (playing, not reffing)so I figured I'd come by the school and get some work done. I need to get home early enough to shower and get ready for tonight's show.

I'm planning to get an iPhone. That way I can check the blog regularly when I'm out and about. I can't do momcat's phone deal because I can't get cable where I live - we have satelite.

I'll be able to come to Momcat's on the weekends after surgery, but I'm still scheduled to work until we leave for Germany (and I will still owe the school some days).

Anyway, the play ends next week, TAKS testing will be (mostly) over by then, too, so perhaps I'll be home enough to blog (and clean).

More Health News

Now that I have my vertigo under control, I have another health issue to deal with. I had a CT scan a week or so ago and the scan revealed a mass attached to the outside of my uterus. No indication that it is malignant but I need a hysterectomy.

The surgery can be done vaginally but I will not be able to drive for at least two weeks. I am hoping Kipsy can come up and stay with me after school lets out in June. The doctor does surgeries on Wednesdays and ideally I can get an early June date so I will be ready to go to London on the 10th of July. If any of you other than Kipsy could come that would be great and I would pay the airfare - especially if Kipsy can't come in early June.

I will be in the hospital only 2 days and probably only need someone here for a week - I can get rides for the second week as I had to do when I was having vertigo attacks.

If anyone has a week in May that would be good too - give me more time to recover. Let me know so I can make further plans.

Meanwhile, I am getting ready for a visit from Aunt Twiggy and Uncle Farooz. Farooz has never seen the condo so I am running around making sure it looks good. I am having a party for them Sunday night. They leave here to visit Roothy I think.

I got a large tax refund - but as Alan pointed out, that is because I didn't make much money last year. Twiggy and Farooz got the first refund in over 30 years.

I have found a new plus in not buying anything new this year - I can throw away the catalogs I get in the mail without even looking at them!

Easter Eve Dinner at Bonny Doone

I was going to try to do a real recipe like Roothy but I gave up.

This is what I cooked for friends last Saturday. I'm really proud of myself because Pepper and her family were needing some TLC and I was able to put this together while they watched TV. I only messed up on the greens as they needed a lot longer to cook.

Country Fried Boca Burgers

Heat up on large cast iron skillet, once it's heated spray some Pam on it.

Take two pie pans, in the left one put about 1/2 cup of soy milk and add enough prepared mustard to make a thin batter. Into the right pie pan add about a 1/2 cup flour with some salt and pepper. (will probaly need to make a little more of one or the other as you make the burgers.) Oh, and this used 8 patties.

Drag each Boca burger in the batter then the flour mixture and cook about 4 minutes on each side.

Country Gravy

Microwave 2 cups soy milk for one minute

In a medium sauce pan lightly toast 2 TBL of flour with about 1 TBL of curry powder. Add 2 TBL of oil and wisk for about a minute.

Add heated soymilk while wisking constantly.

Cook until bubbling and thickened. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Collard Greens.

Saute 1 small chopped onion in 1 tbl oil until soft.
Add 3 or more chopped garlic cloves and cook for a minute more.

Add 1/2 cup water and 1/4 cup nutritional yeast to make a broth. Cook for a little while and then add cut up collard greens. (may need to add in batched to get it all in.

Stir the broth and greens to coat and may need to add more water.

Cover and cook for 45 minutes.

Mashed Potatoes

I'm not going to bother with a drawn out recipe for this as we all know how to make mashed potatoes. I will say that using a rice steamer to cook the potatoes is the way to go as you don't risk over boiling and getting water soaked potatoes.

Soy milk, pepper and that's it.

As an additional gravy choice I made Bryanna Clark Grogan's Brown Gravy that I learned at one of the celebrity chef weekends I did. At the conference she said her friend called it "crack gravy" and I totally agree. I don't wing her recipe, I go strictly by the book so I don't want to plagarize her. It's in her no fat vegan cooking book and it should be in your library anyway.

Steal This Recipe #3--Mujadara

This is a simple Lebanese peasant dish. It is very, very flavorful, and very, very cheap. All but Kipsy would love it, but since Kipsy is no longer seemingly a member of this group (growl), too bad.

2T. olive oil
1/2 onion, chopped
1 T. cumin
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. allspice
3 cloves garlic, minced

Sautee these in a medium pan for about 4-5 minutes, then add:

3/4 c. green lentils
28 oz. water

Bring to boil, then reduce heat, cover, and simmer for ten minutes. (Meanwhile, you'll start making the blackened onions--more on that in a minute.) Then, add:

3/4 c. long grain white rice

Bring to boil, then reduce heat, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. To prepare the blackened onions:

2 T. olive oil
2 large onions, sliced

Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, for at least 20 minutes, until they start to blacken.

When the lentil/rice mixture is done, add a teaspoon or two of salt, then serve on a plate. Top with a generous portion of the blackened onions. Voila! (If you want to use brown rice instead, add at the same time as the lentils, bring to boil, and cook both for a total of 30 minutes).

Cost:
About $1 for the onions, .25 for the rice, and .25 for the lentils, at most. Maybe another .25 for the other ingredients (oil, garlic, spices). This easily makes four very large servings, so about .45 per serving.

Lose weight, save money!!

"At the moment, however, the only safe way of activating brown fat is to stay chilly, right at the verge of shivering, for prolonged periods. That reproduces the conditions that led to the evolution of brown fat — namely, life-threatening cold in babies and small furry animals that can't put on clothes to keep themselves warm."

http://www.mercurynews.com/nationworld/ci_12102140

So it turns out that refusing to allow anyone to turn on the wall heaters in my house helps me to maintain my girlish figure...I'm a genious!!

Sucker's Rally

The markets have been rallying. One huge reason for this is that under government pressure, the Financial Accounting Services Board just suspended "mark-to-market" accounting rules. Imagine you are running a bank. In a mark-to-market regime, say the bank owns an asset (or a liability)--how do you value it on your books? One obvious way is to look for similar assets, and see what they recently sold for. That's what you and I do when we look at "comps" before we buy or sell our houses.

What an asset is worth matters a lot to banks, because if their assets are too small relative to their liabilities, regulations may kick in and force them to raise money so that they are not undercapitalized. (This is, essentially, the issue of how much "leverage" an institution is allowed to have, which we've talked about before in email.) If they can't do it--say, investors no longer think they are worth pouring money into--then the bank could go under. The details don't matter: all you need to know is that if the bank isn't worth enough on their books, they are in big trouble, and might even have to declare bankruptcy if they can't raise enough cash to compensate for the losses.

One way to make it so that the banks don't have to recapitalize is to simply change the rules about how they value their assets. I mentioned the "mark-to-market" rule, but there are others. There's "mark-to-mark" which means, whatever I bought/sold this very asset/liability for is what I can claim it is worth. (That would be like Momcat, for instance, valuing the house we grew up in at its 1972 price.) No one uses mark-to-mark for pretty obvious reasons.

Another rule would be "mark-to-model," which says you figure out what something is worth by cogitating on it, and making a lot of assumptions, and using your "good" judgment (often with a computer model). Enron pioneered this method, and it is one of the things that got them into so much trouble. Nevertheless, many, many other companies followed their lead, because as idiotic as mark-to-model is, it wasn't illegal. This way of valuing assets effectively says to banks, "Your assets/liabilities are worth whatever you think they are worth!"

The use of mark-to-model is why, right now, we are on the brink of financial ruin: banks assumed that the trash on their books was worth far more than it was, because they assumed real estate only goes up, and people don't, en masse, default on their mortgages and credit cards and cars and student loans, etc. Finally, in 2007, mark-to-model was banned; suddenly, banks had to come clean. You have seen the ruin that followed.

And mark-to-model, friends, is what the government has just decided it should reintroduce. The market has gained massively on the news, because it has just been told that the doors to Fantasyland have been reopened. And when you stick your head in the sand, every day looks like a day at the beach!

Many people have ridiculed "mark-to-model" as "mark-to-myth" or "mark-to-make-believe." And mark-to-my-words: this is a sucker's rally. It cannot sustain. Maybe we squeeze a few more months of life out of the market. Maybe even a couple of years. But all we are doing is delaying the inevitable, and when the crash comes, it will be even worse than if we just admitted how many banks were insolvent, and nationalized those that are NOW.