Letter to Erin 20151002

In the name of Allah, most Gracious, most Merciful.

I saw your interview on Google at the Global Citizen Festival 2015, and I want you to know that I think you are so beautiful, and I love you so much.  And I need you.  I hope you have figured out now the connection between the mind and the stomach: a stressed out mind creates a stressed out stomach.  But it's also vice versa, that's why comfort foods exist.  Preparing your own food has the advantage that you eat exactly what you want and you know exactly what's in your food.  Don't let yourself be pressured into eating foods you don't want to eat.  Your sensitive tummy, and your being my girl mashaAllah, is what makes you a powerful endorser of food products.

My Mom gave me a bag of dried salted anchovies the other day, so I decided to fry them up to a crispy fry, then keep them in the cooler.  I noticed there was a lot of shake at the bottom of the bag, and it could only be pure anchovy, with some salt.  So I spent the entire morning making anchovy bouillon.  I put all the shake in the spice grinder, and pulverized it into a fine powder.  There was a little moisture from being in the cooler, so I was able to knead it like dough.  So I shaped it in to balls, and used it for my noodle broth for lunch.  I kept the leftover oil from frying the anchovies, because it tasted very light.  So I fried up some chopped garlic and mustard green stems in the anchovy oil.  Then I added chopped cilantro, mustard green leaves, and fish balls into the broth of a single home made anchovy bouillon ball.  Needed a little salt, but it tasted great.  Alhamdulillah.  It didn't taste fishy at all.  Rather, it tasted milky.  It must have been the chopped mustard green stems.