The other marinara sauce

 

Hi Natty!  How are you?  Is everything all right with you?  I hope you are healthy and safe.  I want you to know that I love you with all of my heart, and that I long to be with you always.

I had to cut the grass this evening.  Yeah, I have a lot of yard work to do, so I've been buying my dinner at the new food court at the crossroads.  Today I got a fried chicken breast and some breadsticks.  The local breadsticks are called "pak tongko".  They're light and fluffy and slightly sweet, and like all breads they are great when freshly cooked.  Well, what do you know... my spicy mango sauce is a perfect match for the breadsticks.  It's like marinara sauce, but made from mangoes.  Do I dare?  Do I dare to make spaghetti?  All I need to add is garlic, cilantro, black pepper, and ground beef.  Tomatoes are expensive lately, and I have a shitload of mangoes in the yard.  Oh my God... what have I discovered...

Egg drop soup with black mushroom broth

 

Adolf, get your snout out of my lunch!

Hi Natty!  how are today, my love?  I hope all is well with you, and you are having a great time.  After a few delays caused by chores, I finally got around to making my egg drop soup for lunch.  I had about 200 grams of black mushrooms, which I bought yesterday.  Black mushrooms have a texture of a very firm gelatin, but tastes like mushrooms.

I put aside half to slice up and put in the soup, and the other half to turn into broth.  It's simple: I blended the mushrooms (after washing them, of course) in drinking water until smooth.  Thus my broth was already nice and thick, I didn't even need any starch.  Just some MSG, and I got a great mushroom broth.  My soup turned out extra thick, but not overwhelming.  If not for the egg, it would have been a vegetarian meal.  Here's a snapshot of it below, without Adolf Kitler doing a photobomb.  I sprinkled some salted radish and dried onions on top.

Egg drop soup

 

Hi Natty!  How are you today, my precious darling?  I hope you are keeping yourself safe and healthy.  You are so very precious to me.

Someone from China sent me the video for egg drop soup above.  I thought I would try to make it for lunch tomorrow, so I went out this evening to buy the ingredients.  At first I thought that the dried mushrooms was what infused the basic flavor.  So I headed out to the Chinese grocery store, and found them.  70 bucks a kilo!  Yikes!  I know what mushrooms taste like, so I decided to use local mushrooms.  It's the dry season and a bad time for mushrooms, but I did find some black mushrooms.  Then I looked at the video again and saw that she washed the mushrooms twice, meaning that the mushrooms are tasteless in the soup.  That means I can use any flavor broth I want, and I probably don't need any mushrooms in there at all.  Sigh.  I'll go ahead and make the soup mushroom flavored.  I don't have any coriander either.  It was too late in the day, and the fresh coriander was sold out.  I don't want to go out tomorrow morning, so maybe I'll use mint or chives.  I have those growing in my yard.

Food

 

Hello nymph!  Natty, you look absolutely gorgeous.  And that hair... how many hours did they take to do your hair?  It looks surreal.  You are so beautiful, my Natty.  I love you with all of my heart.

I have a lot of yard work to do, so I think I will be getting my dinner from that new food court that just opened at the crossroads.  It's local cuisine, so that's what I'll be eating for dinner everyday for the next few days.  It will save me time and energy from having to cook.

The nap

 Yes Honey, I love the rain.  I don't want to be overwhelmed by it, but I prefer the rain over the hot sun.  I suppose if I were in Seattle or Portland, I wouldn't enjoy the rain that much.  But in this weather, it's nap time.

It didn't rain here today.  I did manage to squeeze in a nap before the midday prayer, but I had to sleep on a chair because it's too hot to sleep on the ground.  I don't sleep a lot as it is, just about 4 to 5 hours a day including naps.  It's not possible to sleep for long on a chair, but the "one snore" rule seems to work quite well.  All I need is one snore's worth of sleep, and I can get back to work.  But it only works for naps.

Whoops!

 Hi Natty!  How are you, my love?  What's going on?  What's for dinner?  I'm having leftover home fries and lentil fritters.  The home fries crisp up quite nicely in the oven.  Want some?  I think you would like lentil fritters.  I'm not certain, but I would call it "mountain climber food".

I prefer to use the stream at free-shoutcast.com over the karaoke stream, so that people can karaoke while Mary keeps streaming.  Make sense?  On March 10, the free-shoutcast.com stream was turned off, so I switched to the karaoke stream.  I forgot to switch it back when the free-shoutcast.com stream came back on.  Whoops!  Mary has been using the karaoke stream for 5 days!  So when I switched it back today, folks came around wondering what happened.  Sorry about that!  That was my bad.  So let me make this as clear as possible: the first stream is the free-shoutcast.com stream.  The karaoke stream is the backup stream.  If neither stream worked, then please stay tuned to this blog for a replacement stream.

We love flexi hair!  Mary says it has so much more bouncity-bounce than mesh hair!

Ah... miso

 

Hi Natty!  How are you today?  Are you still at your tropical paradise?  Please show us what you're eating!  It's Sunday here today.  It's busy all day as usual.  I did some shopping in the evening, then I made a batch of cat food and my dinner.  I made chicken chow mein with a miso base for my dinner.  That last batch of miso that I made was so good.  That was over a month ago I think, and I still have some left over.  It's so smooth, and it finally picked a tiny bit of mold after over a month.  The crazy thing about soybeans is that mold makes it taste better!  You have to scrape off the mold first though.  The miso makes the fried noodles extra thick and rich.  I did have to add some MSG though, I can't seem to get away from that stuff.  No, I didn't eat the whole wok.  You want some?