The best part of cooking on a Sunday afternoon is not this:

The best part is this:

While everyone snoozed, I made blueberry cheesecake ice cream, fresh tomatillo salsa, and Indian red sauce. I researched and bookmarked countless other recipes. I called an Indian restaurant to see about ordering na’an. I ordered a cookbook. All this despite feeling kind of draggy. (I know I’m draggy when I drink a big coffee and then fall asleep on the couch. But I went to bed early last night, so I don’t know what’s up with that. Maybe it’s the heat? In any case, I’m doing my best to pretend I’m not tired.)

And then Mr. Handsome woke up, washed the mountain of dirty dishes, and took the kids to the pool. I do believe I could cook all day if I had someone to clean up after me.

So why all the Indian food, you wonder? Well, this past month I read Interpreter of Maladies for book club. There was Indian food all over the place in that book and so of course I got real hungry. Behaving in my typically logical (that’s a joke) fashion, I checked an Indian cookbook out of the library, ordered spices, and got busy.

The library book is superb (thus the reason I ordered it today, obviously). Each recipe I’ve made so far is delicious. The recipes look complicated, and there’s a lot of detail, but it’s really not all that bad once you get started. In fact, with a little prep work in the morning, I can pull together the evening meal in an hour.

Indian food involves spices, spices, and more spices. Whole spices get toasted and then ground, releasing an incredible fragrance that makes my kitchen smell like my childhood Indian friend’s house—this is how I know I’m doing something right.

And I feel good eating the food. It’s light, nutritious, filling, spicy, and flavorful. Forget boring old macaroni and cheese and give me a bowl of fish in dark sauce or some rice with spinach and tomatoes any day. Or maybe some halves of boiled eggs floating sunnily in that Indian red sauce? Yes, please!

My goal is to cook enough recipes so that I get a feel for the rhythm of Indian cooking. I’d like to develop a big-enough repertoire so that I’m able to pull off a well-rounded company dinner fairly easily. I made this shrimp in coconut milk, the first recipe I tried from the book, and one taste—nay, just the smell—told me I was well on my way to meeting my goal.

The kids found the sauce to be too hot, but the older two gobbled up the (sauce-drenched) shrimp which gave me hope that they will all, with enough opportunity, eventually learn to appreciate the exotic flavors.

Shrimp with Coconut Milk
Only slightly adapted from A Taste of India by Madhur Jaffrey

If your local store doesn’t carry black mustard seeds or dried curry leaves (not related to curry powder), you can order them here.

The original recipe called for 3/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper, but I cut back to ½ teaspoon. The resulting sauce made my mouth tingle, and I had to eat slower (not a bad thing), but I didn’t cry—perfect.

I reduce the shrimp to 1 pound and ended up with a bunch of shrimp-less sauce, delicious over rice, nonetheless. However, the full 1 ½ pounds would’ve been perfect.

Hint: before you start cooking, measure your spices and chop your veggies. Line everything up on the counter in the order that it gets added to the pot. This sounds anal, but it makes the cooking process smooth as silk.

1 ½ pounds shrimp, unpeeled, deveined, uncooked
2 tablespoons whole coriander seeds
1/4 teaspoon whole fenugreek seeds
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
10 dried curry leaves
2 teaspoons lemon juice
5 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon whole black mustard seeds
1 medium onion, sliced into thin, half rings
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
1 3/4 cups water
2 tablespoons paprika
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon salt
2 fresh, hot green chilies (I used serranos)
14-ounce can (1 3/4 cups) coconut milk

Peel and rinse the shrimp. Pat dry, cover, and keep chilled in the refrigerator.

Heat a small, cast-iron skillet, and when hot, put in the coriander seeds, the fenugreek seeds, and the peppercorns. Stir them about for 1 minutes until lightly roasted. Remove from heat and put them into the container of a spice (or coffee) grinder. Add the dried curry leaves. Grind as fine as possible.

Heat the oil in a large, heavy kettle. When hot, put in the mustard seeds. As soon as they begin to pop (watch out!), add the onion and garlic and fry till lightly browned. Add the ginger and cook for another couple seconds.

Add the water, paprika, cayenne pepper, turmeric, salt, whole chilies, the ground spice mixture, and the lemon juice. Bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer briskly for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat. (At this point, the sauce can be jarred and refrigerated till shortly before serving, making it a perfect dish for a company meal.)

Five minutes before you want to eat, heat the sauce in a heavy kettle. Once it bubbles, add the shrimp. Stir them around till they turn opaque. Stir in the coconut milk. When the sauce is heated through and shows signs of just beginning to bubble, turn off the heat.

Serve over rice.

Yield: 6 servings.

About one year ago: The sex talk
About two years ago: Alfredo Sauce

Written Friday afternoon…

Six kids are in rest time, one in each room of the house (not counting bathrooms). Now you know how many rooms we have. It makes this house sound right small, but it’s not. The main room is actually three rooms that we knocked the walls out of when we moved in. Or before we moved in, rather. Two of us are sharing that room—the three-year-old baby is zonked out on the brown sofa; I’m chillin’ (or trying to—it’s HOT again) on the green.

Yesterday when I told Miss Beccaboo to gather up whatever she needed for rest time, she said, “I don’t need anything. I have my imagination.”

This is the type of thing she comes up with when it’s just her and her head in a room for an hour.

A homemade skirt, just masking tape and scrap paper.

It even has a kick-pleat.

I’m thinkin’ of taking the kids to the pool this afternoon. The two extras will be gone by then and I want to wear my kids out real good so they go to bed early tonight and Mr. Handsome and I can stay up and watch a movie. I love movie nights, especially when they involve my favorite popcorn.

I’ve been getting up before six most mornings to go for a rulk; I run for the first mile and a half and then walk for a mile. This morning when the sun came up over the ridge, it cast rays just like in the picture books. I walked backwards so I could stare at it. But then I turned around and walked normal. My walk time is my think time and I have to force myself to concentrate on whatever it is I’m puzzling. I’ve been working through some ideas for an article I’d like to write, and I’m convinced that my best ideas come to me after I’ve so rudely jolted my brain awake with the pavement pounding.

We’ve had a pretty slow week. The car was in the shop for a couple days, the weather was cool, not much was happening. When the days are long, this is the type of entertainment that Yo-Yo creates for himself.

We forbid him from climbing stairs, but he’s learned to navigate hills and gravel. Whenever I see him loping over the premises, the BFG comes to mind.

As for me, my week has been filled with the same old ho-hum stuff. When our days fall into a lull like this—no evening meetings, no garden rush, no trips to town, no deadlines—I start to wonder how much of an anomaly I am. Just living, one day at a time, day after day after day. It’s probably not all that common nowadays, and, me being an extrovert and all, I often rebel against monotony, but for some reason, it’s been nice this time around.

There has been excitement in my kitchen, so maybe that’s why. Hot, spicy, authentic Indian food. Over-the-top ice cream. Coconut cake. Grilled salt-and-vinegar potatoes. Bacon-wrapped breadsticks.

Somehow the idea of bacon-wrapped breadsticks niggled its way into my mind. I found myself pondering them when I woke up in the morning and when I lay down at night. They appeared before me in the shower and they danced in front of me while I ran down the dirt road. So I finally sat down at the computer and typed in “bacon-wrapped breadsticks” and whaddaya know, they were all over the place out there! I should’ve felt abject and deflated by such overwhelming proof of my lack of originality, but I didn’t. I’ve read Ecclesiastes, so I take this sort of thing in stride.

I had some leftover five-minute bread dough in the fridge, so I rolled it out, sprinkled it with a little Parmensan, cut the dough into strips, paired up each strip of dough with a piece of bacon and then gave them a hearty twist to seal the union. The strips got baked in a hot oven for fifteen minutes, and as soon as I pulled them from the oven, I rolled them in more Parmesan.

The kids went crazy.

Bacon-Wrapped Breadsticks

½ recipe of five-minute bread dough
1 pound bacon
1 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese

On a floured surface, roll the dough into a rectangle the same width as your bacon pieces. (If you’re making appetizers, you can cut the bacon in half, or even thirds). Sprinkle the dough with a quarter cup of the Parmesan cheese. Cut the dough into as many strips as you have bacon. Match them up, bacon atop dough, grab both ends and twist in opposite directions.

Lay the sticks on a sided baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes, depending on the size of your breadsticks, until the bacon is brown and crispy. If the bottoms are getting too brown, you can tip them over on their sides.

Remove the sticks from the oven and roll in the remaining cheese, using your fingers to press cheese to bread and bacon, if necessary. Serve warm or at room temperature.

We ate them all almost immediately, only saving one for Mr. Handsome to taste when he got home from work, so I have no idea how they hold up. I have a hunch they would freeze beautifully, and after a quick run through a hot oven, they’d be good as new.

About one year ago: Zucchini Parmesan Frittata
About two years ago: Coconut Oil-Popped Popcorn, Chit-Chat

Our garden is pathetic. Usually I’m harvesting all sorts of things and feeling semi-overwhelmed come mid-July, but this year I’m practically twiddling my thumbs. The basil plants are anorexic. The chard got eaten by something evil and microscopic. The beans are so measly I get mad just thinking about them.

Even so, I managed to cook a garden meal last weekend. One zucchini, one yellow squash, a handful of cherry tomatoes, and three store-bought Romas. Working together, they pulled off dinner quite nicely.

This is a roasted meal, one that calls for a hot oven, something I generally avoid over the July dinner hour, but we’ve had some blessedly cool evenings after those hellishly hot days last week—I even made a hot soup for supper one evening. The roasting method is quite delightful: the veggies slump in on their juicy selves, the edges caramelize, the cheesy, bready top creates crunch, and the olive oil binds it all together.

My parents, popping in late Sunday night, ate the cold leftovers straight out of the pan. They seemed mighty pleased about it. In fact, my mom, after cramming an especially loaded fork-full into her mouth, yelled at the rest of us, “That’s it. I’m not eating anything else tonight. No more food!” This is what she does—loud public announcements, especially in regards to food—when her internal resolve can not withstand.

Or maybe she was just fed up with me trying to foist all my leftovers on her.

Pasta with Roasted Tomatoes and Summer Squash
Adapted from The Wednesday Chef

I think the original recipe needs twice as many veggies as it calls for, so I’m adjusting the proportions accordingly. If you prefer a less veggie-to-pasta ratio, reduce the veggies by half. (In the photo, it looks like there are plenty of vegetables but that’s because I, in a fit of greed, dug them out of the tangly pasta.)

You can switch up the veggies if you like, but I think that in order to provide enough juiciness, half should be tomatoes, cherry or Roma, preferably. Also, I’m not sure on the exact poundage. I filled a 9 x 13 pan in a single layer; if you skip the scales and just cover the bottoms of two 9 x 13 pans with chopped vegetables, you’ll be fine.

1 pound of cherry or Roma tomatoes, bite-sized pieces
1 pound of summer squash (yellow and/or green), bite-sized pieces
1 handful torn basil leaves
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 – 1/2 cup olive oil
½ cup bread crumbs
½ cup Parmesan cheese, shredded fine
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 pound spaghetti, or other pasta such as penne, fettuccini, etc.

Divide the chopped vegetables, skin side down, between two 9 x 13 pans. Drizzle with some olive oil, perhaps a quarter cup.

In a separate bowl, combine the bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, garlic, salt, and pepper. Sprinkle over the vegetables.

Bake the vegetables at 400 degrees for about twenty minutes, or until fork-tender. Remove from the oven and toss with the torn basil.

While the vegetables are baking, cook the spaghetti according to package instructions. Drain.

Combine the pasta and vegetables and toss with the rest of the olive oil. Add more salt and black pepper, if needed.

Updated on August 2, 2010: Made this again, this time using 1 ½ pounds of cherry tomatoes. I stuffed them all into one 9 x 13 pan and they roasted up fine even though they were overlapping. The final tomato-pasta ratio was pretty good, but I still think it could have used more tomatoes, up to 2 pounds.

It really truly is a wonderful dish.

Updated August 17, 2010: This is soooooo delicious! We can’t get over how delicious it is! Like, REALLY delicious. I made it for supper tonight—two pounds of cherry tomatoes, no squash, one 9 x 13 pan. Didn’t bother to arrange the tomatoes in the pan skin-side down; just threw them in any which a-way. So easy and fast and—did I mention it yet?—DELICIOUS! I had three helpings and countless snitches post-dinner.

About one year ago: A girlie outing
About two years ago: The Baby Nickel, Cooked Oatmeal