Mind The Gap

I discovered that you can put basically anything in curry and it’ll be good, so basically, when I’m in a hurry to make something (or need to use up the tempeh before it goes bad) I make a curry, using whatever vegetables are around or can be quickly procured.

I bought some red curry paste at the Asian market, and finally got around to using it, the result is really more of an orange curry, but it’s very good.  Today’s occasion was that a package of tempeh in the fridge reached it’s ‘sell by’ date tomorrow, so it seemed like a good time to use it up.  I also had half a jalapeño left waiting to be used, a couple of orange bell peppers, a couple of potatoes left over from something, and some leftover bits of squash and zucchini that weren’t big enough to be used in the recipe the other parts of the unfortunate vegetables died for.

The process is pretty simple:

• Chop up all your vegetables.  Keep the peppers separate since they will go to mush if they cook as long as the others.  (I tend to chop everything up pretty small and as uniform as I can so it will cook consistently, and faster.)
• Chop up the tempeh in little blocks (like .5″ by 1″ or thereabouts)
• Brown the outsides of the tempeh in a frying pan on medium/medium-high, with olive oil, a bit of sesame oil, red pepper flakes, chili powder and some minced garlic if it’s handy.  Stir it a lot to keep it all moving around so nothing gets burnt and the browning is consistent.  This doesn’t take long, but I haven’t timed it.
• Set it off to the side when it’s done and get back to everything else.
• Put 5-6 tablespoons of the curry paste in a saucepan on medium heat and add two cans of coconut milk (they actually make a light version) and get it all mixed well.
• Leave the saucepan on medium/medium-high until it starts to bubble, then add your veggies (except the bell peppers).
• Cook for 5-7 minutes, stirring once in a while.
• Add the tempeh and the bell peppers.
• Cook for another 8-10 minutes or so, until the potatoes are done.
• Take the saucepan off the heat and let it cool until you can stand to eat it.
• To eat curry it’s really a good idea to have rice, if you use the cheap boil-in-bag kind (I sure do) it only takes 10 minutes to cook on medium-ish, so you want to put it on around the time you start adding veggies to the curry paste/coconut milk mixture.  Add some rosemary and a bay leaf to the water, it won’t really taste much different (what with the curry on it) but it sure will smell nice while it cooks, and it might taste a little better if you opted to eat the rice plain (weirdo).

Yum.  I hope I remember to come back to this post later and remember this combination of ingredients.

Taken at Ryan’s office while we were burning an install CD for Linux to set up a friend’s computer for her.

…driving down Archer towards downtown.

We found a neat signboard (the kind with little white plastic letters that clip in, such as one might find at a concession stand at a sporting event) at one one of the antique/junk/kitsch stores in Gainesville. Plans are to hang it above the window nearest the bar in the living area.

The sign originally had a pepsi ® logo insert in the middle, which wasn’t appealing to us…since we weren’t going for collector’s value, and the price we paid for the sign was for the sign not the brand, we figured out how to break the glue and pop the insert out (at the expense of the insert itself, as it had grown old and brittle. I don’t feel guilty about desecrating a corporate behemoth’s collectible/promotional item. Some business that bought and sold lots of pepsi ® probably received it free of charge after all.
The plan from there was to:

1. Design a new sign we like and print it up
2. Glue it to some foam-core the same size as the previous insert
3. Pop it into place and secure with whatever adhesive is necessary and convenient
4. Increase the sign’s letter populations with whatever we feel like saying to each other or anyone walking into the house
5. Hang it up (and take care to make sure the letters are still reachable after that for easy publishing of updates)

So far, we’ve found a store with letters and bought a couple boxes (the sign didn’t come with many, and they were in various sizes and stages of yellowing), and I’ve drawn a new insert up based on Ryan’s desired pub name. The finished insert will take up a sheet of standard 8.5 x 11 paper, to give an idea of final size.

I was thinking it might make a fun t-shirt as well…