January 26: Pumpkin Curry

The important ingredients: winter squash, coconut milk, orange or lemon juice, spices. The rest is whatever is in the fridge.

January 25: Middle Eastern Food

My brother and his debate partner were in town for a competition, so we had them over for a middle eastern feast. Everything home-made: pita, hummus, three-grain tabbouleh, falafel, as well as onions, escarole and goat yogurt.

January 21: Roots in cast iron

January 20: Pasta

Seviche

Seviche is normally prepared with 3/8-inch cubed fish, and tomato juice makes up much of the sauce. Instead, we bought quarter-pound filets of sushi-grade snapper from the Berkeley Bowl, and soaked them all day in a small glass pie pan in the juice of three limes and three lemons. The raw fish turns opaque as if it had cooked from some reaction between the acid and the lemon juice.

We made a salsa consisting of a giant beefstake tomato, cubed, a small onion, minced, capers, fresh oregano from the garden, and olive oil. The seviche from Joy Of Cooking replaces the capers with chopped green olives, uses dried oregano, and adds cilantro and jalepeno, and optionally avocado.

On the side, we had a "Spanish rice": we cooked brown rice with paprika added to the water, then lightly sauteed the greens of a spring onion in olive oil, a small tomato, the rice, some turmeric, and a hint of ketchup.

Salad with apples and blue cheese; new camera cable

Hello world! My boyfriend and I were in Oregon this weekend, where we stole an extra camera cable. I hope to start posting daily dinner updates. I also discovered that my camera was housing more than seven hundred photos, dating back to when I lost my cable on our January trip to Fiji and New Zealand. I hope to post some of those eventually too.

Tonight we were tired from the plane, and overheated from the summer. So we elected to have a dinner salad.


Included in the salad:

• Apples from Berkeley Bowl (the Farmers' Market is not until tomorrow).
• Bagged hearts of romain lettuce, from Earthbound Organics (also from Berkeley Bowl). Of the three heads, one was infested with little green bugs, and the other two were fine.
• Wax beans, tips removed and blanched for two minutes and chilled in ice water, from Farmers' Market last week.
• Blue cheese from Cheeseboard.
• Torpedo onion, from Berkeley Bowl, macerated in:
• Olive oil.
• Juice of one lemon, from the tree of a friend of the mom of a friend of mine.
• Salt.

We also had a loaf of sourdough bread from Acme.

Jamming

It's the middle of the night. Do you know where your blogger is?

This is my extra-hard week, since my adviser is out of town and I am teaching his morning class in addition to my afternoon class. So I should have slept hours ago. But we went u-picking for strawberries this weekend and returned with about 20lb ($50). I had meant to jam them that day, but I didn't get to until today, by which time we had to throw some out.

On the menu: strawberry jam is in the canner; whole strawberries in rum syrup just came out; we did get two batches frozen right away; there are some fresh strawberries in the fridge.

By the way, I highly recommend the farm we went to. It's a bit of a drive from Berkeley, but worth it — the drive is beautiful. Oh, what farm? Swanton Berry Farm has five or so sites around Santa Cruz area. To avoid the traffic returning from Half Moon Bay, if you're coming from the north, like we are, take the 1 the whole way. From the strawberry fields (which were mercifully foggy when we were picking) you can hear the sounds of the elephant seals.