It's that time of the year again

Monday dinner & Tuesday lunch
Yellow squash, zucchini, broccoli & onions sauteed in olive oil, with Weber Veggie Grill seasoning

Tuesday dinner & Wednesday lunch
Yellow squash, zucchini, broccoli & onions sauteed in olive oil, with turmeric, ground coriander, cumin seeds & garam masala
Miraculously, this had almost no taste. I think some of my spices are going bad.

Wednesday dinner
Sauteed cabbage with Old Bay
Really. It tastes sort of like crab, as does just about everything when smothered in Old Bay.

I'm about "squashed out" for a while. It's funny. I wait and wait for the squash to be ready, and then after about a week I've had my fill. The remaining zucchini & yellow squash in my fridge are probably destined for the freezer.

Cooking Adventures: Mussaman Curry

Mussaman Curry, from "Perfect Thai" cookbook
Key ingredients: Beef, potatoes, onions, peanuts, curry paste, tamarind paste, coconut milk
As my guest put it, if this had been on a buffet, we wouldn't have gone back for seconds. But since we put a lot of time into making it -- not to mention quite a bit of cash for the ingredients -- we managed to eat most of it. It wasn't bad, just blah. Perhaps we didn't have the right kind of curry paste.

The next evening, however, we totally made up for this so-so creation by going out to eat at a new Asian restaurant -- Lavender Cafe -- where I tried bubble tea and Taiwanese chunk chicken.

I liked both but really fell in love with the Taiwanese chunk chicken, which was recommended by the server. It's not marked as spicy on the menu, but it is, especially if you happen to bite into one of the hot peppers (yikes...). No kidding -- I've been thinking about that dish ever since I had it, trying to decide when I can justify going back to get a take-out order of it.

My Yellow Feast

The last couple of weeks have been stressful and hectic. So, as a treat to myself, I decided to take time to cook some Indian food -- instead of, oh, cleaning the house or doing laundry.

Here's what I made:

Turmeric Rice

Murgh Tari (chicken curry)

Alu Tari (potato curry)

If I had made these dishes before, perhaps I would have been wise enough to vary the menu to allow for another color of food.

Tonight, on day two of the leftover chicken and rice, to jazz things up a bit I added zucchini and tomatoes (the last ones from my garden) with fresh ginger, ground coriander, garam masala, and, of course, turmeric:

My zucchini/tomato concoction

I think my favorite of the new recipes was the potato curry. I added extra lemon juice to give it some more zip. While it was the most exotic-looking dish, the chicken was OK but not fantastic. The rice was adequate, but I'll probably never make it again. I think plain basmati rice would have been better with the various dishes, and the turmeric rice wasn't really special enough for the extra trouble.

Considering the amount of money that went into the ingredients and the time it took to prepare it, and the rather mediocre results, I would have been better off going to an Indian restaurant. Ah, but that's just it: the local restaurant is closed, and oh how I miss it!

Oh yeah, isn't it kind of weird to be getting zucchini from the garden in October? In August, the middle part of my zucchini plant shriveled up. I nearly pulled the whole thing out of the ground, but the four little branches out from the middle section looked OK, so I left them. They've been bearing zucchini ever since. It's not the most prolific zucchini plant in the world, but it's definitely long-lived.