Sunday, February 20, 2011

Cooking! Now I'm tired...

As salaam alaikum,

I decided to cook for the week on Saturday. Wow. I think I have enough food for the week. It took me five hours, which my roommate thought was excessive...but then again, I've never seen her spend more than 5 minutes preparing food. My other roommate usually spends an average of 15 minutes on meals, whereas I spend anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours usually because, ahem, I'm actually cooking from scratch.

Anyway, come to dinner! The menu consists of:

Burritos with chicken, butternut squash and brown rice, served with a homemade black bean salsa

Tuscan vegetable soup, with a medley of spinach, tomatoes, carrots and zucchini, served with Parmesan cheese

Mango barbecue chicken, served with my homemade, tangy mango sauce

Tropical fruit lassi, sweetened with light agave nectar, over ice

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

The three recipes I have foodnetwork.com to thank for. I have a normally narrow repertoire that consists of fried rice, jollof rice, rice and stew, foo foo and soup, cabbage soup (the American kind), vegetable korma, tandoori chicken, mango lassi, fried chicken, baked chicken, pasta salad and quesadillas. Put those foods in rotation, and I get tired of them really quickly.

...I guess that's not the narrowest of repertoires, but whatever.

Oh yeah, and also Dominican rice and beans, tostones and fried plantains with mmmm batidas de lechoza (papaya) y piña (pineapple), just like I had in the DR. GOSTOSA!

Okay, so I'm not a slouch. My poor woman's attempt Indian food, my Nigerian food a la my father, Dominican standards and my very American standards and bastardizations of other peoples food. Not bad.

But I want to expand my repertoire of poultry and vegetables so that will give me greater impetus to cook food that I can carry with me and eat at school and, later, at work. I had started regaining weight...well, after a week in which my downfall was characterized by such act as eating a whole bag of jelly bellies in a day...

Womp womp womp.

But last week, I cooked on Monday and my food lasted until Friday afternoon. It was glorious! And I'm pretty much back to the weight I should be.

So, it's back in the kitchen...hmm, maybe next time I won't spend 5 hours cooking, but it took that long because it always takes a long time to cook something for the first or second time as you get used to the recipe and do things inefficiently.

However, standing on my feet for five hours without respite made my feet tired. If I'm ever the matriarch of a big family insha'Allah, I will bring a chair into the kitchen and keep idling interlopers out!

As I told my roommate, being in a relationship means my biological clock has come to a complete halt. Eerrrrrkkkk! No babies! It's like those commercials from the 90s for furniture stores. "No payments, no interest until 1998!" Okay. No babies until 2015! At least, seriously...

But I do look forward to having my own little family of cuties. :) I went to a spirituals concert last night with my public health mentor and her family. Masha'Allah she's got an adorable little family...three kids, 11, seven and three. The baby was at home and the seven-year-old was falling asleep by the end of the concert. She's an OB/GYN, clinical director of Women's Health at Children's/BWH and she works in community health centers (what I want to do, insha'Allah!). She helps me see that it can be done.

She had her first baby at 33, I think. That's a good age to start...the earliest I'm considering is like, maybe the last year of residency (thus 2015...I'll be 30...aaaaaahhhhhh!), since I want to do fellowship. Then, there would be a gap, and maybe I'd have one after in the second year of my practicing (2017-2018), so I could, like, get actual maternity leave.

That all depends on if, you know, I'm married by then, haha! B knows I'm a schemer...he'll be alright. He already said that he wanted four. He asked me how many I wanted. I said three or more.

My roommates, like my cooking time, think that four children is excessive. So do they also probably think that the meticulousness with which I cleaned the house was excessive. I do look forward to being the matriarch and sharing these responsibilities with my husband...until the kids are old enough to take over, muahahaha!

Seriously, who needs a cleaning service when you have children! Trick them into helping when they're young, and you've got service until they move out! That's my plan, anyway...

Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.


I sent B a message telling him that one day I should cook dinner for him (I already made him breakfast one day), or we should cook together. Together, we can make a poor couple's attempt at Nigerian food. Together, we can rule the world...muahahahahaha!

Just kidding.

Anyway, back to work today...sitting for hours instead of standing!

2 comments:

  1. fufu and soup. I want some. Never had it but when I read about it in purple hibiscus (had to do something googling to remember the title) it made me hungry, I love starchy stuff mixed with tangy stuff like japanese rice balls and miso soup.

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  2. Ah, cooking... I am trying to get a hold on that before having to live on my own again... you can cook jollof rice? Sadly, I have yet to master any variety of the quintessential west African dish (not Sierra Leonean, or Igbo or Yoruba versions... lol). And my fufu is always too lumpy... sigh.

    Cooking on your own in the states is usually alright, if you are within reasonable distance of an ethnic community that is. Keep it up.

    As for me, I'm focusing on the little things, like making bread from scratch.

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