The great Eat more Lentils and Beans and Spend Less Money on Meat challenge took another leap forward this evening with the creation of a new dish, one so excellent and characterful it’s name jumped right out of the volcanic bubbling sauce at me: “Fire Puddle”. Yup, Fire Puddle, and that’s exactly what it looks like too.

Half a cup of red lentils, half of Quinoa, two’ish cups of water, boil briefly, simmer at a low heat with half a cube of chicken stock. About half way through the twenty or so minutes it takes to cook, while there’s still a little liquid showing drop in a few balls of frozen spinach and a generous handful of frozen peas. Meanwhile, slice a large onion, heat gently with some oil in a wok shaped frying pan (or whatever you use, but make sure it’s big), while that’s heating crush up two or three or however much garlic you want, throw it on the pan and slice up half a green chilli with a decent grind of black pepper and sea salt. Give them all about two minutes then at a high heat before throwing on I’d say nearly three table spoons of curry powder and a good shake of chilli powder (adjust to own taste). Keep stirring this mix for around a minute to heat up the spices and bring out the flavour before sloshing on a little water, while the water and curry powder are forming a paste of sorts get a can of tomato ready to throw in, then plop in about a 1/3 of a tube of tomato puree with it. After a minute or two of bubbling spoon off as much of it as will fit into a small hand held food processor jug, I suppose about a quarter of it, and blitz to a smooth puree with a handful of cashews, dust the salt off unless you’re particularly mad about salt, and return this to the pan to continue cooking.

At this point the lentils etc. should be ready to go in and your sachet of creamed coconut should have melted in a nice jug of hot water, ready for you to put in along with two or three tablespoons of natural yoghurt. Now you need to put it on a stiff simmer to reduce by about a 1/4, or until you’ve achieved the texture that appeals (stir it CONSTANTLY for the five or six minutes this takes or it starts exploding like a little nest of tiny volcanos). Adjust the seasoning with a little splash of soy, and perhaps more tomato puree. I served mine with naan bread.

Make any sense? Prob’ly not, but it arrived as a burst of inspiration after spending some time reading an Indian cookery book this afternoon. I hope it might inspire something for one of you too!

I had to come home early to Benny who’s in the middle of a nasty cluster of migraines. He’s been so good with not having them for this past six months at least, but the wedding and other bits and pieces have obviously conspired to create this painful blip. He had a bit of a scary moment with a dip in vision so I didn’t have to be told twice, I was home in minutes to provide tea and pets and migraleve and tasty dinner. Tasty dinner can solve a lot of things though, to be fair.

(I actually wrote the post over at the secret blog last night but forgot to leave a note here. What do they call the markers hobos leave to one and other? Was trying to think of a more interesting way of describing these little one liners to indicate the way to the other blog.)

Fat load of nothing of a day. Went for my medical and handed in all my paperwork for the new job this morning. Glad it’s done. Worked. Made creamy salmon pasta but it didn’t work as well as the last one (no yoghurt in the shop and the smoked salmon wasn’t quite right, cheapie stuff from Asda that I thought might work as a budget alternative). The high point of the day was our first viewing of the entirely odd and enjoyable Hudsucker Proxy, definitely one to watch again.

Anyway, the film pushed me way over my blog time, and there’s new blankets on the bed, mmm, new blankets.

Night night all

The weather was beautiful in Sligo today. At around two, after a decent sleep in, a nibble of toast for breakfast and an intensive morning of filling out my ‘binder’ on the Good Food website we decided we’d better do something with the day and go out for a walk.

I asked where we were going to go just before we left the estate, as if seized by some premonition of the fantastic day we were about to unwittingly blunder into, Benny steered us left, away from our original plan of a quick stroll around Dooney Rock.

So we headed up the coast, enjoying the sun on white stone houses, the other traffic, the mountains of Donegal luminous and in super-technicolour across the neon cerulean sea. We got as far as Bundoran and enjoyed a slow crawl up the main street, people in t-shirts and shorts, burnt shoulders and flip flops, an old couple buying whipped ice cream with a raspberry ripple from a window in a shop front. The arcades twinkled and buzzed with people drifting in and out as if magnetised by the shinning lights and whizzing sound effects, the little sandwich shops, paint peeling and old chairs creaking, men with red faces with that hint of a stagger that screams ‘fulla’ drink’.

And then we kept going, up through Ballyshannon, and out to Murvagh, all the way up the coast, deep into Donegal. Now, we love this beach anyway, it’s in the most beautiful sheltered bay, it’s lined by a forest and has the most beautiful views of the mountains and coastal towns of southern Donegal – but today was just special. The temperature was perfect, warm, but not overpowering, the sun was like a balm on our skin, the sea breeze just lightly cooling us off, and the water, ohhh, the water – it was almost warm, an unusual thing in Ireland. Whatever way Murvagh’s tides work, there is a huge stretch of water that only comes up to your knee, and it warms up easily after a long day in the sun, and because this knee high water stretches for such a long way, the waves that you do get are more like the lappings of a lake when the sea is calm – which it was today.

We walked the whole length of the beach, up to our ’seat’ (a piece of drift wood we jammed up to make a bench across some to the rocks), and back down again, paddling, laughing, talking shite, and trying not to hurt our feet on the really ripply bits of sand. The swoosh of the water between my toes, the cool of it against the skin on my legs, it was relaxing beyond words.

We drove back by the Smugglers Inn (? could be Creak) and sat outside sipping a club orange while the temperature softened and cooled further. We discussed the idea of staying there some night and having a meal in their award winning restaurant, and the requisite few pints.

The drive back was just as pleasant, and on a spur of the minute sort of thing we stopped at the Yeats Tavern, a lovely restaurant about ten minutes drive from our house, very close to Yeats’ grave. We had a spectacularly pleasant bacon and cheese burger with chips and homemade coleslaw.

We spent the whole day discussing the new job, delighting in the idea of all the fun new things I’ll be able to do now that I’ll be able to have some time off. Thinking about the potential for a career path, savouring the reality of the fact that I will no longer be working with an axe constantly hanging over my head.

It was a beautiful day, one to remember.

I just made the weirdest but oddly successful dinner. Deep filled wild mushroom and creme fraiche quiche from Asda, with small new potatoes (the ones that come covered in muck and are lovely and floury), with my brand new creation, the Russian style Quinoa salad.

I learned about Quinoa (pronounced keenwha) in a Good Food magazine a month or so ago, but only tried it this evening. I’m particularly excited about it because it’s a complete protein, having all of the essential amino acids, and it’s cheap – we like meat replacements in our house, or at least experimenting with them.

The salad is pretty simple, one gerkin, cut into tiny dice, one little peppadew pepper, thinly sliced, one baby plum tomato (these are tiny, I get them in lidl), two dessertspoons of low fat mayo, a slosh of good quality vinaigrette (or make you own), a triangle of low fat soft cheese and a grind of fresh black pepper. Whisk all the wet ingredients first, obviously. Add to this half a cup of Quinoa cooked in a full cup of water with a chicken stock cube (a cup equalling approx 200mls, I use the cup from my bread making machine). Make sure the Quinoa has cooled before you add it too, mine wasn’t fully cooled and had to have a spell in the freezer before it hit the plate, which may have added to the tangyness.

It’s a strange little recipe, but something about it really works.

I spent quite a bit of today on the BBC Good Food website, adding recipes I liked to the ‘binder’ facility they provide if you register with them. One of the handy things with that is being able to give Benny the login and password so he can get some inspiration from my hand picked list of recipes, we had fun looking through them together this evening.

Happy weekend all, x

(Written at 23:24 25/07/2008 ) (just in case you were wondering).

Sorry about that, not often I give an excuse of being too busy to write, but that is the truth on this occasion. I wrote that little placeholder saying that a new one would go up on the secret blog at around five, minutes later customers came in and then when they left and I had settled myself to write something quickly I ended up taking calls and then Benny rang me to tell me about an accident one of his fathers friends had had (he’s going to be ok). My focus was entirely on getting to Dublin, where my parents gave me a huge warm welcome and I never got a chance to even think about writing (they have dial up anyway, which just makes me scream). Next day it was all about the wedding, today it was all about the getting home and splonging on the couch. I shall return in the morro with a full report.

Sorry again,

Lou…zzzzzzz….

At 11:41 this morning a nice gentleman from the county council called to say I had come first in the interview process for the position of branch librar*an for Ballym*te libr*ry. I sprinted to answer my mobile from the other end of the showroom and was so shocked when he told me I could barely say anything. I remember running for it thinking, if this is my Ma I’m going to have to give out to her for ringing and making me think it was the county council. Then I saw the Sligo number, and the world span around the phone and the professional voice on the other end. I can’t even remember what I said to him, something about ‘oh god’ and ‘thank you’. I’m still in shock now, but boy am I looking forward to the waves of fuzzy-happy that I know are going to keep coming over me for the next few days.

I cried a little on the phone to Benny, I could cry a little now too. I wanted it so badly, I was so worried I didn’t do enough in the interview, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and how great it would be for the whole last month or however long it’s all been going on.

I will be a librarian, something I’ve wanted to do since I was a little kid (and something I coveted ever since college, man how I’d have loved to be one of those guys I borrowed off day in day out in the college library, or the one across the road from me in Cabra). I’ll have the run of the place all by myself. I will gain experience in a field I imagine myself being in for life (a profession! No more call centre!!). I will have time to go to Dublin/Meath, do my writing, spend more time on cooking, cleaning, part time education – whatever! I will have time, and a job that I don’t find ethically or morally, um, wobbly.

I will be around books, I will be genuinely helpful to people, I will be a keeper and gaurdian of books, blessed books.

I cannot wait.

The package giving me all the info will come out at some stage this week, then hopefully I’ll find out when I’ll be starting. I could barely answer the man who rang me this morning, let alone ask him when I’d start.

It’s going to take a few days to digest this, really it is.

I have to say thank you to all of you, you will never know how much help you have been to me. I sat there waiting for the interview the other day and thought of all of you and it calmed me and gave me strength to think of your support. I don’t know what I’d do without you all, x

Love, Lou