Spaghetti with mango marinara sauce

 

Hi Natty!  How are you today?  How are you coping with life?  How's your health?  I pray you are able to handle being who you are without depending on drugs and alcohol.  I am able to put up with life and remain drug free, by the mercy of Allah.  I mean not just from substance abuse, but also from dependence on daily medication.  I sometimes take an antihistamine when I feel a sinus cavity infection coming, that's probably once every 2 weeks.  I try to survive from disease through an educated and common sense approach to what I consume.  I don't eat sugar, except for the Coffee Mate I put in my one cup of coffee everyday.  I'm not trying to be high and mighty, Honey.  Being Mrs. International Rock Star is tough enough, please don't add drugs and alcohol to your burden.  I have to admit that Lookie has been worrying me.  All those years of being cooped up in the house and being in heat has taken a toll on her, it didn't help having a mother who was a bully.  It got to the point where she couldn't stop the pee, but the vet gave her a prescription and she's much calmer and happier now.  The trouble is without the regular dose, she goes back to having pee problems.  Waaaah!  My kitty is a drug addict!  Alhamdulillah, there's a male cat in the house now.  Adolf Kitler is a great guy.  And he's soft and fluffy.

No tomatoes were sacrificed in the making of the spaghetti above!  Not even tomato sauce, paste, or ketchup!  I recently discovered that mango and red pepper makes tomato.  I used rehydrated chillies for today's example which made it super hot and spicy, but I like that.  Use red bell peppers if you like it mild.  There are a couple of caveats in using mangoes to make marinara sauce.  First, the mangoes not not be fibrous.  The local Harumanis mangoes have none of that annoying stringy fibers, that's part of its charm.  Second is that the mangoes have to be sweet and sour to match the tomatoes.  Mangoes have a habit of ripening from butt to tip, the butt being sweet while the tip sour.  This is especially true of Harumanis mangoes, so I used the ones that were not fully ripened.  How did it taste?  It tasted like spaghetti!

Fish

 

Hi Natty!  How's your crazy and glamorous life today, oh fabulous supermodel?  It's been a busy day for me, beginning 4 am.  Yet I had made plans to do yard work, but then a whole lot of fish came up and after that I got overwhelmed with laziness.  Or fatigue, if you will.

I took my mother to the hospital in the morning.  After that, we went to the market downtown.  I bought fish balls and fresh tofu for myself and that's what I've been eating all day, right now in fact.  Healthy food!  I did need to buy more fish for Adolf Kitler's food because male cats can't eat salt, so I went to the night market to see what kind of deal they had there.  6 kilos of fresh mackerel for RM 10!  Can't beat that, even in the old days.  The trouble is, I have no room in my freezer.  I have an ancient cooler that used to belong to my mother, I remember it from when I was 7 years old, which makes it almost 50 years old.  It still works great, so praise be to Allah!  Back in those days, they didn't think about building in obsolescence.  The freezer compartment frosts up regularly, so I have to defrost it regularly but it's no big deal once you get used to it.  It's so small though, I didn't think I could fit all that fish in there.  My brother didn't want any fish, and my mother was hiding so I assume she doesn't want any either.  But after emptying it out, I managed to fit all that fish in there plus shove some of the other foods in the cracks.  Say Natty, would you like some fish?

Sunday

 Hi there, beautiful Natty!  How are you feeling, my precious love?  I hope you're doing well.  It's Sunday over here for me.  It's the usual routine, the usual labor which resulted in fatigue, so there's not much else to talk about.  I'm still trying to catch up with the yard work, so I bought my dinner at the new food court over at the crossroads again.  This time I bought only breadsticks.  I just wanted to see if my discovery yesterday was still valid today and yes, mangoes do make a fine marinara sauce.  So it looks like spaghetti is on the menu, Tuesday perhaps.  Would you care to join me for spaghetti?

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.