Curried Butternut Squash with Red Chard

It's almost the end of the semester! Final projects and final exams are everywhere sucking up time like giant time vacuums! I don't even know what a time vacuum is, but maybe it removes all the trash in your time, like browsing the internet, watching TV shows and the like? With final project time vacuums, none that useless stuff is left! Success! Or something like that.

Anyways, you know what the time vacuums have not sucked away? Time spent making food. I made some pretty darn delicious food yesterday. At some point in the past month, I saw mini butternut squashes at Safeway (they call it Vons here, but really it's Safeway), so I jumped on the opportunity to buy squash that I wouldn't have to spend multiple weeks eating. This week, I finally got around to cooking it. I first roasted the squash Sunday night:

Roasted squash! I couldn't help but try a spoonful

On Tuesday night, I actually got around to preparing the squash for consumption. Since my friend had some extra coconut milk, I decided to prepare it curry-style with ginger, cumin, turmeric, curry powder, cardamom, and a good spoonful of Thai red curry paste. I heated some oil in a pan and fried the spices to "release the aromas" (as they always say on America's Test Kitchen).

I sliced up the squash, and added it to the spices. I let it cook for a while.

And then added about a quarter cup of coconut milk and mushed up some of the squash pieces. 

At SafeVons, I also found a beautiful bunch of red chard, so I decided to try it out by simply sautéing it in a bit of oil.

Yay balanced meals! The squash was super delicious, with the ginger, curry, and cardamom being the strongest flavors. The chard was chard-like, which I liked.  Also, I can make rice now....

Apple Salad

I'm back from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing! It was awesome. Check out this lab's research on prosthetic retinae.

The food at the conference was definitely not the emphasis though; dinner on Wednesday consisted of a dry and vegetable-less turkey sandwich with a cookie. My dinner tonight is much tastier. I got a giant acorn squash from Trader Joe's yesterday, and I was totally going to cook it tonight. Then Laziness struck. So instead I made a quesadilla and salad.

But the salad. It is a special salad. I started with an apple. I don't usually put apples in salads, but my friend had me try apples with dressing a couple weeks ago, and I had to agree that it works well. I chopped up an apple into my usual mustard-olive oil-vinegar dressing. Then I added some romaine and some kale. To add color, I chopped up some of my ever-present baby carrots. When I tried my creation, it was good, but was missing some creaminess and tang: crumbled goat cheese brought the salad to a new level.

So, apparently I don't know how to cook rice

For tonight's dinner, I decided to make rice. I hadn't really made rice in a pot before, but I figured it shouldn't be too difficult. I followed the instructions on the package and put my pot on the burner. When my timer went off, there was a surprise waiting for me! My rice had stuck to itself to form a sort of rice cracked! And I had over-salted it, so it tasted like a rice cracker too. 

Luckily I had delicious leftovers to eat with the rice: indian food doggy bag boosted with cabbage and tomato. And I'm glad the rice did not stick to the pot.

Tomato-Jicama-Avocado Salad

It is what it sounds like! I'm back at school and I'm making my own dinners this semester, so I'm learning to cook from what I have. This evening, I looked in my fridge and saw cabbage, plums, and baby carrots. Eh. Then I saw the tomatoes I had gotten at the farmer's market last weekend, and the jicama from 2 weeks ago. Maybe I could make a salad. After all, I had been wanting to try the avocado I got last weekend.

I made a quick vinaigrette with mustard, cider vinegar, and olive oil. I chopped up three small tomatoes, and about a sixth of a jicama. I cubed half the avocado, and added some cubed cheese for good measure. With some salt and pepper, a slice of toasted bread, this was a very passable dinner. The cheese (part skim mozzarella) and the avocado did not pair very well though. A crumblier cheese like
queso fresco or feta would probably have worked better.