Breakfast was fine – nothing eventful, thank heavens.
Lunch and dinner was also fine. I cooked chicken tagine again, but this time, I used a packet of the frozen veggies instead of chopping, chopping, and more chopping – I can be lazy at times, plus it’s Sunday, which means I have a definite time table, and the frozen veggies needed to be used anyway. So on it goes.
And Fahim even let me add the raisins and cinnamon to it while it was cooking. Yippee! And I was out of cumin – Fahim looked for it at the grocery store, but they didn’t have any. We think we may have bought it at another grocery store last time.
Oh yeah. It’s that funny here sometimes.
Ignore the fact that cumin is a staple ingredient in curries. It’s still hard to find powdered cumin. Whole cumin, yes, oh very easy. I think it’s cumin seeds, but my brain is mush at the moment, so I wouldn’t swear to it on a stack of bibles.
And the chicken tagine turned out good, I think. Fahim’s response? Okay. And rather an unenthusiastic one that that.
However. Fahim still eats whatever I make anyway. He doesn’t complain. Much. And he eats the burnt rice when I forget to check it. I’m absentminded. And he doesn’t even complain about that. Too much. He’s really quite reasonable.
So no, I don’t often get useful feedback from him over food issues, but it could be so much worse.
The gross cooking moment didn’t happen until after the sun went down.
And yes, that fact does play a part in the tale. This would be called foreshadowing.
We have a light in the kitchen. A light. Mounted on the wall. Mounted on the wall opposite where the counter is. So when one is standing in front of the counter and looking at something on the counter, the lighting isn’t very good. At all.
This would be more foreshadowing. Oh, yeah, it is.
I was getting ready to make the Lazy Daisy Oatmeal Cake. I pulled what I needed out of the cupboard – a plastic container and the oatmeal to start. Cuz the oatmeal needs to soak in boiling water for a while.
I open the container – which I previously thought was airtight – and this is even more foreshadowing – measure how much I want, and then I notice that some of the oatmeal flakes are sticking together. The same way our gross bug infested bag of rice did. Even more foreshadowing.
And I’m really enjoying this. Can you tell?
So I start looking at it even closer. I don’t see any bugs, and I’m looking closely. Standing in front of the counter with the light behind me.
I see something move, I think, but I’m not sure. So I move under the light, and I see dozens of tiny little bugs crawling all over the oatmeal.
Ew!!!!!
I call Fahim. Yeah, I’m a chic, and I need my husband to comfort me over gross bugs in my oatmeal.
I toss the oatmeal. Scratch this cake, I say. Fahim suggests putting bran in instead of the oatmeal. Not exactly the same, but maybe it’ll work. Yeah, fine. So I do.
A little while later, after the margarine and eggs have warmed up, I start mixing the rest of it.
I open the rice flour containter.
More bugs. Same damn ones.
Ew!!!!
Rice flour into garbage.
I open the gram flour container, expecting the same damn bugs.
I screamed instead.
Big bugs. Flying bugs. Flying big bugs. Big Flying Bugs!! Bugs!!!!!!
I tossed the lid back on the container and made Fahim deal with it.
Girls, this is where husbands come in handy. Believe me. Yeah, of course I could deal with it. But I don’t want to. I love Fahim. 🙂
Next, I try the white wheat flour, dreading what I’m likely to see.
Nope, back to tiny little bugs.
It gets tossed.
Yep.
But luckily, I have an unopened bag of roasted white rice flour. Saves the day!
And no, I have no idea what kind of a difference roasting the rice or rice flour makes – and no, I also have no idea whether it’s roasted while it’s still in rice form, or if it’s roasted after it’s turned into flour. I only know what the bag says.
But back to the cake. So I’ve substituted bran for oatmeal, and all rice flour for white flour, and the texture just ain’t right. At all. Still majorly runny.
So I keep adding rice flour until the texture feels right – which is almost double. Then I add the cocoa until it tastes right – which is about 3x as much as normal. And to complete, I add pitted dates, raisins, and chocolate chunks and bake the damn thing.
Baked at three flames for 25 minutes, if I recall correctly.
It’s cooling down now, and Fahim’s just had dinner, so we’ll probably cut into it in the next half hour. So no, I also have no idea at all yet whether it even tastes edible or not. I’m hopin’.
