Because I can make a meal out of anything. And I realised it was late, I had missed dinner and had no actual food.

Fry dried chilli, szechaun pepper corns, methi seed and cumin seed with frozen quorn pieces while boiling some noodles with veg stock and soy sauce. Then fry the noodles with the spices, some ginger and onion powders and blue dragon sweet chilli and garlic sauce. Add some frozen green beans and let them fry a bit too.

Very very tasty and all made of random dried stuff and weird things I found in my freezer!

I have aquired these salted and dried black beans. So I decided I would figure out how to make black bean sauce.

First wash the salt off the beans and then mash about a desert spoon full. Fry up a little fierce chilli, an onion, between three to six spring onions (depending on how much you like them), a lot of garlic and ginger (this is one of those taste things). Then add the black beans and let them simmer. Next add a cup of veg or chicken stock, some soy sauce and a good swig of sherry or equivalent authentic chinese concoction. Also add some rice vinegar to taste and a star anise. Add about two breasts of chopped chicken and a similar amount of broccoli and make sure the liquid covers them (top up with more stock if not) and tip in about a spoonfull of washed and unmashed black beans and half a tea spoon of sugar. Then allow it to cook until the sauce has thickened. You should probably add cornflour but I never remember to buy any. Taste it periodically and add more black beans etc if it needs it.

Serve it with rice and it feeds two to three people.

If you want it for vegetarians omit the chicken and then when the sauce has thickened out add some deep fried tofu and stir it around until it is covered by sauce and warmed through.

Oh my have I used actual measurements? Shocking.

http://icanhascheezburger.wordpress.com/files/2008/07/funny-pictures-kittens-grandmother-made-a-sweater.jpg

Also I saw a weasel today, it was tiny and cute and I want one.

While we were hunting for jedi pick up lines (and we had a reason for this, but it's a long story) K found this http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUKN2540400520080726?feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews

I'm so entertained by it. What do we think, is this more or less geeky than klingons?

I have been plagued all day by the dreadful urge to add "and terrible" onto the end of peoples epithets every time I come across someone called "the great."

My lovely Swedish friend has returned from Norway and has brought me three types of fruit tea and a kg sack of dime bars. Bjorn is fantastic. He brought K and E Easter marzipan and V Jelly men and women, (in order to prove that he came from an egalitarian country), and we all sat on my couch eating them yesterday. The security nazis apparently took his yoghurt away. This made him cranky. One of the teas was pomegranite, whish smelt marvelous but tasted disapointing. I thought this was odd, as so far my expierience of Scandinavian fruit teas is that they taste as good as they smell, but apparently pomegranite tea is usually vile rather than mediocre, so I suppose it must just not translate as well to tea.

It got me thinking though, what do they do to the tea in Scandinavia so that it tastes like it smells, and what do they do to it here so that fruit tea tastes of dishwater?

Also I am having insomnia and this is aggravating, although it is making revising Egyptian propoganda much more amusing. This is the third time I've been awake for sunrise in as many days though, and I'm beginning to like it, sunrise is pretty and not like sunset at all.

For two people;

Fry four onions and some garlic in butter (add olive oil if there isn't enough butter) with mustard seeds and black onion seeds. When caramalised add water, some stock (I used vegetable because K is a vegetarian but I think beef may be nicest), a bay leaf, some thyme, some sage, some oregano, some white pepper and quite a bit of parsley. All of that is to taste. When it's cooked for a bit add some milk and then let it cook a bit more.

Taking a small break from The Dreaded Essay I am going to post the recipe I invented earlier.

Fry some chicken chopped very small with an onion and some garlic and when the onion is translucent and the chicken seared (about seven minutes if you start with frozen) put in some water and bring it to the boil. Once done add rice, peas and green beans. You could probably add other veg if you wished. Put in a significant amount of chicken stock and vegetable stock and add pinches of thyme, sage, parsley and oregano to taste. In order to make the sauce fry some onions coated lightly with flour and then slowly add some milk, a large dash of cooking sherry and some vegetable stock granuals, then simmer for a bit. For the vegetarian I made a smaller version with all meat removed. Took less than half an hour interspered with helping the Thanksgiving preparations for tomorrow (which we are celebrating as 70% of my friends are homesick Americans) and probably less if you synch the sauce with the rice.

Tonight we're going to try making kasha again. It's my friend's Dad's recipe and it involves making a cream sauce so it should be exciting. It mostly worked last time except we lacked flour and substituted nutmeg for cinamon.

I haven't tried making a meat one yet as the majority of the carnivores amoung my friends despise lentils (this is very sad and I pity them).

So, being a cheap student, soak the chickpeas the night before.

Boil the chickpeas for an hour and while doing so chop some onions, potatoes, garlic, chillis and a sizeable amount of ginger, and then fry with black onion seeds, cumin, methi seeds, a star anise and two green cardamon.

Once the chickpeas have had all the nasty boiled out of them pour away the water and put the chickpeas, red lentis and green lentils into the pan with the fried things and then cover with vegetable stock. Add a several tea spoons of tamarind paste and a dried or freshly squeezed lime and some cloves. Salt and rice vinegar and additional stock should be added to taste. Boil vigorously for ten minutes and then simmer until the lentils have become mostly liquidised. Just before you think the dansak is nearly ready add some peas.

Serve with rice.

I didn't put quantities down as it's really a taste thing here, you need to work out a balance of flavours for yourself.