Dinner Sunday night was good: I made Thomas Keller's recipe for calf's liver
with onions, bacon, and wine-poached spiced figs. I had cream-scalloped
potatoes and steamed haricots verts with lemon butter along with it.

I found a spinach-feta focaccia in the grocery store on Monday, so I decided
to make a pseudo-Greek dinner. I started off with hummus and bagel chips,
then moved on to a kind of relish (or salad, or side dish...the line is a
bit blurred) made with tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, plain yogurt, and
parsley. There were yellow potatoes which had been boiled, quartered,
coated with a mixture of rosemary, lemon juice, and olive oil, and then
grilled to get brown and crispy. Lamb chops were marinated in a mixture of
lemon juice, olive oil, oregano, and mint. They got grilled along with the
potatoes. I made a kind of mint-parsley pesto to go along with the lamb,
and of course I had the spinach-feta focaccia. I had lemon-cinnamon iced
tea to drink and some watermelon chunks for dessert.

Tonight, I didn't feel like anything Mediterranean, but I needed to use up
some of the leftover ingredients from Monday night's dinner. I had:

uncooked lamb chops
plain yogurt
mint
watermelon
tomatoes
half a cucumber
half a red onion

I've got a good recipe for vindaloo, and I hadn't had Indian food for a
while, so I decided to follow that. The recipe calls for onions and meat,
so that took care of the half-onion and lamb chops. I also added the
tomatoes, after peeling, seeding, and chopping them.

The vindaloo is supposed to simmer for an hour, which allows the flavors of
the spices to soak into the meat. I used a pressure cooker and cut the time
in half. (I've had the pressure cooker since last year, and this was only
the third time I've used it. But it *is* a time-saver, and it keeps my
kitchen cooler than running a gas burner for twice as long.) Thus, I had
thirty minutes to prepare the remainder of dinner.

First, I dumped basmati rice, water, and some spices (cardamom pods, whole
cloves, a cinnamon stick, and coriander seeds) into my rice cooker and set
it on its merry way.

Next, to counteract the extremely spicy vindaloo, I concocted a relish from
chopped mint, cucumber, salt, and a tiny bit of sugar. Finally, I made
watermelon lassi by blending watermelon, yogurt, ice water, a bit of honey,
and a bit of salt; that's what I drank with the meal.

Overall, I was reasonably happy with my dinner. I think it would have been
better if I'd had a greater "salad" presence; the cucumber-mint relish
wasn't quite adequate in satisfying my hunger for some kind of fresh-tasting
vegetable. For something just thrown together from what was in the house,
the relish served reasonably well, but I kicked myself afterwards when I ran
across some radishes in my refrigerator, because just a couple radishes at
the right time would have helped out.

Also, although it's traditional to cook rice with whole spices, you're not
supposed to *eat* those spices, you're supposed to pick them out as you run
across them while eating. Some people might object to that (though I'm not
one of them).

After eating, it was time to pay the piper: Cleanup was a bitch. I had
dirtied the pressure cooker, the rice cooker bowl, the blender, the
mini-chopper, a saucepan in which I boiled water to loosen the tomato skins,
the cutting board, and several bowls I'd used for my "mise en place." I try
to clean up as I go, but somehow that just wasn't feasible for this meal.
Oh well, it'll help me work off the calories!

In other news, daytime highs here have reached 90 degrees (although at least
it's not humid), so I broke down and turned on my air conditioner. *sigh* So
much for power bills under $100...

Bob