Third Chances

Take some ginger, garlic and cumin seed you’ve sauteed. Ignore instructions from Bittman on amounts. Decide how much you like these flavorings and use accordingly. Enter chickpeas, those cuddly tan orbs. Excuse my bad poetic writing. Blend in rice vinegar for sour and honey for the sweet. Enter the bitter greens, arugula. Omit the red onion if you don’t care for tasting onion in you rmouth the rest of the day.
There you have the perfect adaptation of a Mark Bittman recipe for Warm Chickpea and Arugula Salad from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.
I felt betrayed after my double fail on his Cottage Cheese Patties but I gave him a second chance. Third actually, since I made the patties twice.
This salad was goooooood.
I’m taking him back.
Even though he apparently said he does not like pie crust which I find appalling. Appalling.
Nobody’s perfect.
Oh, if you are making this for a vegan use maple syrup or something else sweet instead of honey…

Do you like pie crust? Or are you a filling person? I won’t judge.

cruddy cooks + brilliant food

=great dishes, if and only if(is there a mathematical symbol for that, Eleanor do you know?) the cook barely touches the ingredients.
Although I am pretty decent in the kitchen, when it comes to fruits and vegetables I don’t mess with them much. In fact, I love most veggies uncooked, and would rather eat salads undressed and fruits by themselves if the quality is high.
My CSA deliveries are yielding great things these days, so why mess with them? Why gild the lily? It’s like putting butter on butter. Wait, I would probably do that. I love butter. Almost as much as I love Mark Bittman, whose “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” managed to convince me to play with a couple of the things I got delivered this week. First up was a strawberry and arugula salad. Basically just the berries, some balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper. I played around with the proportions but got the idea from Bittman’s book. The results:

Perfection. Actually perfection to the nth degree.