Weird, wonderful combinations
Sometimes I imagine I’m eating combinations of things that no one else ever has. Like Wednesday’s wraps: collard leaves on the outside with peanut butter, cold buckwheat (think brown rice), pickled ginger, umi vinegar, sliced yellow pepper, fresh dill, and slivers of daikon. I think there were some sliced dried apricots as well. Once the wraps were wrapped, I sprinkled them with green Tabasco and dunked them in a dip of tamari, garlic, rice vinegar, and sesame oil.
I wish I’d taken a photo, but I was too hungry and wolfed down the wraps before I thought of it.
The idea of wrapping in collard leaves comes from Chef Mary B, whose raw food DVD Raw Fundamentals I reviewed for Video Librarian. I started out using nori for the wrap because I thought collards would be too tough, but that’s not the case at all. If you have the wraps at the vegan Blossoming Lotus on NE 15th, just up from Pete’s, they will come wrapped in collard leaves.
All that crabmeat
More recently, there was the chowder I made to use up a couple of ears of aging farmers market corn and some jarred roasted red peppers. I added a bottle of clam juice, red onions, celery, potatoes, flour. Once everything was tender, in went some milk, a splash of cream, and a bit of lox that Bob left behind when he went to Turkey. It needed more seafood, so I added about half a can of Bumble Bee crabmeat (not a product I’m likely to buy again). On the side, a piece of rye bread toasted and rubbed with garlic.
Then I was left with the other half can of crabmeat. That became a salad with celery, a hard-boiled egg (another leftover), a small Jerusalem artichoke from my garden, a small container of shredded orange and white cheese that mysteriously turned up in the fridge, a bit of chopped yellow pepper, Vegenaise (tastes better than mayo, I guarantee it) and lemon juice. I sliced some napa cabbage (bought at the Epworth United Methodist Church bazaar for next to nothing) as a base but ended up folding it into the salad, which was very rich.
Also with that last meal, an avocado sliced with pink grapefruit pieces; a plate of sliced daikon (also from the Epworth event), carrots, and oil-cured Miseastern olives;Â and a buttermilk scone I made using half whole wheat pastry flour.
One of my five overarching goals is eating satisfying food. These things were satisfying to me.
