I never learn.
About a year ago (when I was still posting regularly) I wrote about my tendency to stuff the fridge with perishable vegetables, blow my food budget in the first week of the month, desperately try to eat pounds of lettuce before it wilts, and live out the last weeks of the month on beans and half a gallon of questionable milk.
Yesterday I got paid and I went to the grocery store – twice. My receipt (the second one) is thirty inches long. Erik asked for salads this month – “I might even want a few vegetarian dinners,” he said – and so I bought a month’s worth of salad ingredients in a day. Sometimes I miss my vegetarian days. I’d bought raw chicken only once in the ten years between the time I left my parents’ house and when I started dating Erik. Now love inspires me to get out the yellow plastic cutting board at least once a month and take a knife to quarter the bird’s grisly pink flesh (because I usually buy whole chickens, since they’re cheaper.) But not this month. Not since he requested otherwise. This is what’s on April’s menu:
Shrimp salad
Seared tuna salad
Brussels sprout salad
Salad Nicoise
Pad Thai
Red curry with tofu
Cauliflower chick-pea curry
Leftover cabbage curry (tonight)
Dal, rice, and roasted broccoli
Black bean soup
Sunbutter-red cabbage soup
And so on.
This morning, for our lunches, I made this:
GRAPES, WILD RICE, AND RICOTTA IN A BOWL
From Mark Bittman’s 101 Salad Ideas, posted in the New York Times in summer 2009
Mix cooked wild rice/rice blend, barley, or other chewy grain with grapes, cut in half. Dress with olive oil and lemon juice. Add thinly-sliced romaine lettuce and crumbled ricotta salata or feta cheese. Be careful, as somehow the ingredients expand to a far bigger salad than two people could eat before it wilts.
