Whoa! Easy on the parsley!

I had mushrooms and spinach in the fridge and I was in need of a salad. As usual, I perused the Web for a few recipe ideas. The sad truth is that many recipes one finds on the Web (and in books) are not too bright. They call for silly ingredients like canned spinach and their timings can be ridiculous.

For that and other reasons I use most recipes as basic guides and then apply my own kitchen sense. But every now and then I see something that just makes me drop my head with a thump onto the cutting board.

Today, for example, I used this recipe as a basic guide for a zingy spinach and mushroom salad. If you’re bored enough to compare it with my final recipe (below) you’ll see that I kept the basic theme but applied my own special touch. The head-thumper in this recipe, however, was the call for “3/4 teaspoon of minced fresh parsley.”

Uh.. excuse me? Three-quarters of a teaspoon? What would happen if I used a whole teaspoon?

For Pete’s sake, anybody who really cooks knows that “a teaspoon” means “a bit” and a tablespoon means “a bit more.” Unless you are baking, the quantities are open to interpretation. You use the measurements to get a sense of relative proportions. Of course, you might want to be careful with some pungent herbs like sage and thyme. But parsley? Sweet, benign parsley?

Why would anyone be so precise as to specify three-quarters of a teaspoon of parsley in a recipe that is scaled to serve six? If you upped that to two cups of parsley it would only make it better. Parsley, like basil, is one of those things that you simply can’t have too much of.

In the end, I modified the recipe as follows:

Blork’s Spinach-Mushroom Salad

  • 3 big glugs of olive oil
  • Juice of 1/2 a lemon
  • Juice of 1/2 a lime
  • 2 squirts of cider vinegar
  • 1 clove of garlic, smashed and minced
  • As much chopped fresh parsley as you like
  • Sprinkle of salt
  • Pinch of dry (ground) mustard
  • Pinch of dry oregano
  • Pinch of dry basil
  • Pinch of dry sage
  • As many scratches of freshly ground black pepper as you like
  • Generous handful of thickly sliced mushrooms (about 7 or 8 )
  • Half a sliced red pepper (or the whole thing if you feel saucy)
  • Half a bag of that pricey baby spinach

In a small bowl, whisk together the first 12 ingredients (in blue).

Quickly sauté the mushrooms in a bit of olive oil. Set aside to cool.

Dump the mushrooms into the vinaigrette and stick it in the fridge for 20 or 30 minutes.

Have a beer, and/or go about the preparations for the rest of your meal.

In a big bowl, toss the spinach, red pepper, and vinaigrette together.

Eat. (Serves four civilized people or two hungry folks.)

Aceh, before and after

I cribbed these AP photos from the BBC. On the left is a satellite photo of a coastal area and a village in the Indonesian province of Aceh, taken in 2003. On the right is a photo taken three days after the tsunami hit.

As you can see, a lot of the vegetation has washed away, along with the village. Most likely, that land is now ruined for farming due to the saltiness of the flood waters (I’m speculating — I’m not an expert on that).

The BEEB also has a heart-breaking video story (RM) in which a reporter and some army folks go looking for survivors of a washed-out village, and they find a cluster of them inland. In contrast to many other areas affected by the disaster in which a large proportion of the victims were children, this village lost mostly adults — parents of the now orphaned children who are living inland on a bowl of rice a day. (No direct link available — go to the main page and look on the right, under BBC NEWS: VIDEO AND AUDIO.)

If you haven’t donated yet, please do so now. Money is the most important thing in a disaster like this, as it gives the relief agencies the resources to get food and medicine in place as fast as possible.

Aches and pains…

I’ve been quiet lately. Indeed, the rush of the holidays and the preparations for Christmas Eve dinner and a little soirée for New Year’s Eve kept me rather busy.

A couple of days after Christmas, Martine and I went cross-country skiing in the park behind our house. It was a quick run — maybe six kilometres — but it was the first of the year and I am dreadfully out of shape. The result was a sore back (which felt more like a kidney stone than muscle soreness) for the next three days. Then, two nights before New Year’s Eve I developed an inflammation in my Eustachian tubes — something that usually indicates a flu is on the way — but fortunately it passed quickly (with the help of massive doses of vitamin C and those mysterious Chinese pills that Martine buys somewhere).

I felt like a million bucks on New Year’s Eve, but I woke up on January 1 (at about 1:30 PM) with a screaming sore throat and a hugely swollen uvula. That’s the little dangly thing in your throat — mine was as big as my pinky finger (to the second knuckle) that day. It was weird because it was hanging down my throat half-choking me, and when I would cough it would flip forward onto my tongue. It felt like I had a ball of dough stuck in my throat.

Two fatigued and lethargic days later it is still swollen (but not as much) and sore. It seems to be going away, and hopefully I’ll be recovered by Wednesday. In the meantime, life in 2005 begins and off I go to the office to bring home the bacon.

On a positive note, the blork blog is the number one Google hit for "Mulligitawny Soup." I wonder what the Soup Lady would think of that? (Of course, if I had spelled it correctly I would have missed out on this dubious honour…)

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Reading list, 2004

It felt like I spent a lot of time reading in 2004, yet my list of books read isn’t any longer than last year’s list. On the other hand, this does not include countless magazines and unfinished dabbles into various anthologies and journals.

And as with most things, it’s the quality that counts, not the quantity.

As such, here is the list (alphabetically, by title) of books I read and finished in 2004:

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, by A.J. Liebling
Burning Ground, by Pearl Luke
Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
Daisy Miller, by Henry James
East is East, by T.C. Boyle
In Search of Stupidity, by Merrill R. Chapman
In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman
Mordecai & Me, by Joel Yanofsky
Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
Prague, by Arthur Phillips
Seventeen Tomatoes, by Jaspreet Singh
Someday, Even Trevi Will Crumble, by Neal McDevitt
The Child in Time, by Ian McEwan
The Daydreamer, by Ian McEwan
The End of Elsewhere, by Taras Grescoe
The Fixer, by Joe Sacco
The Great Game, by Frederick P. Hitz
The New Yorker Stories, by Morley Callaghan
The Sky Unwashed, by Irene Zabytko
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
This Year in Jerusalem, by Mordecai Richler
Traveler’s Tales Spain: True Stories, ed. by Lucy McCauley
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges
While I Was Gone, by Sue Miller
Youth, by J.M. Coetzee