May 16, 2009

So I have been feeling like I am in a bit of a cooking rut, making the same old stuff every week.  That's not true, of course, but most of my food is Mediterranean influenced, French and Italian, with occasional forays into the Middle East.  I love to eat Asian food, but I do not feel like I have a good intuitive sense of how the spices and herbs work, so I tend not to cook that way.  Well, I have resolved to do something about that.  My goal is to do one Asian dinner a week.  Last week I made a basic Indian meal with dal, rice, an egg curry, and sauteed okra.  Tomorrow night we are going to have a tandoor chicken (already marinating) with rice and a radish and carrot salad.  We'll see how it works.  I have just ordered the book 660 Indian Curries, which will no doubt give me some ideas for the future.  Perhaps my goal of one dinner a week is insufficiently ambitious...

Things look pretty good in the garden.  The squash and cucumbers are all coming up, and I will pick some radishes and lettuce for the salad tomorrow.  Some of the greens (arugula, spinach) are growing very slowly.  I am wondering if the problem is the growing medium.  A friend gave us some horse manure last year that we spread on the beds, but there were a lot of wood shavings in there that have not really decayed.  I'm not sure if that makes the best growing medium.  I did fertilize with some Plant-tone, so I guess we will see if that does anything.  It just would be really nice to have a fresh arugula salad...