goblinbox

In which we talk about breakfast! Yum! Because while I read a lot of involved, uplifting, active, and self-referential blogs, personally I’m just not that interesting. Plus: there’s a bunch of food porn!

Yesterday I was craving a big old bowl of the Egyptian breakfast food known as ful medames. The stuff is just so delicious I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Since my shift today didn’t start until one o’clock, I got up and took myself to the grocery store this morning. I didn’t go to Loney’s because they don’t carry fava beans and I never can find any pita bread there. Instead, I took my brother’s truck and went over to Super 1. It was gigantic:

There, I spent about two million years fifteen minutes looking for fava beans and pita bread. They were there, but not where I thought they would be, and I must have covered two thirds of the store’s square footage before I located them.

Then I went home and watched this video again on my iPod Touch, because it’s my favorite recipe for ful and I couldn’t remember how much lemon juice to use:

After that, I cooked up a big old batch of beans with garlic and lemon and garnished it with olive oil, parsley, tomato, radish, hard boiled egg, green onion, picked vegetables, and olives. It looked really pretty plated up:

And then?

And I eated it! With whole wheat pita bread! OMG teh yum!

(G’ma said the concoction “looked pretty, but didn’t taste all that good.” This is because I did not salt it per about ten recipes I’ve read which don’t call for salt. At all. Apparently you’re supposed to salt at the table. Which I did!)

The last time I had ful was in Brooklyn, in an Egyptian place around the corner from Deboka’s brownstone. It was freakin’ delicious there, too, and came with a giant squeeze bottle of tahini (!!!) and even had green peppers in it.

The time before that, I made a batch myself and packed it in a bento box with some falafel:

And here’s an entire gallery of fuul porn, just in case you doubted the status of my fandom for this dish! (Go look. Srsly. I’ll wait.)

Ful is the bestest, cheapest, fillingest breakfast ever. Bonus: it has the added benefit of giving you garlic breath first thing in the morning!

And yes, apparently I did just write an entire post about beans. Guess who needs to get laid?

In which I review my weekend.

Mostly it was rainy and chilly, and it’s getting dark way too damned early, and for some reason this year I’m just NOT READY FOR SUMMER TO BE OVER YET.

Caturday:

I slept in. I did laundry.

I got my nails done. Finally. It had been five weeks and I really needed a fill. Aren’t they cute, with the little airbrushed designs on them?

I have no idea why my otherwise fairly earthy thing needs to be destroyed with long fake plastic nails, but I love my long fake plastic nails OMG so so so much. They totally don’t go with my look – if I can go so far as to imply that I do in fact possess something as unified as ‘a look’ – but I get such a lot of silly happiness out of them that I keep getting them done.

I mean, hello? They’re pink! AND AIRBRUSHED!

I sang in the Tricities with the boys Saturday night and made a hundred bucks.

Sunday:

Another chilly morning and overcast day, damn it. Sometimes, you just gotta make a big ol’ pot of awesome Indian food to warm up the kitchen and make the house smell FANTASTIC:

Sambar, delicious sambar!

Enough said.

I will be watching movies in my room Sunday evening if you need me.

In which there are two lists. And pictures. And a lot of colons. I love using colons.

These are the things I DID NOT do over the weekend:

Get laid, get wasted, have an epiphany, knit, buy a bike, eat Mexican food, do yoga.

These are the things I DID do over the weekend:

Friday, I went to a thing out near the airport, and heard some music:

Saturday, I made this purple wrap:

It was based on a thing I saw on Etsy, and I made it without a pattern ’cause I’m clever like that. It took a looooong time because I would pin it together, put it on, look at it, take it off, cut it, pin it together, put it back on, and look at it over and over.

I made and ate this delicious Indian food:

Sambar, for the record? Is freakin’ nommability squared.

Sunday: I napped, watched three episodes of Mad Men on DVD, and packed a bento. (Seriously. That’s all I did in a whole entire day. You may confer upon me now the Laziest Girl Evar! award, because I totally done did earned it!)

In which there’s a trip to the Tri-cities.

I went and saw my stylist Saturday afternoon for a cut and color. I said I was doing a lot of gigs this summer and that I needed hair I could scrunch up into curls easily… so bitch chopped all my hair off! I have a totally asymmetrical, VERY SHORT razor bob and I’m still a little weird about it, but Curtis & Syl said it was hawt and teh BF likes it, so I guess it’s okay. Color’s good, at least, even if I don’t have bright enough highlights.

My new hair and I played a brewery Saturday night with the boys. (K’s pics of the event are here, because he’s even more of a cell phone camera whore than I am.) People in Walla Walla talk about the Tri-cities in rather the same way that people in Fairfield talk about Ottumwa, so I was surprised at how awesome the crowd was at Saturday night’s gig in Kennewick (which happens to be the town I was born in). They were enthusiastic, friendly, and they clapped after solos. They danced. They followed us outside during breaks and told us we were awesome. We got an ovation, even. The room sounded good and the vibe was great.

But, being a brewery the place only served beer – which I don’t really drink – so I had Pepsi and water all night and made K take me out for cocktails THE VERY INSTANT we rolled into W2 at 12:30a. He took me to the Stone, where we listened to three adorable twenty-year-old skater boys tell us all about their various broken bones and trips to hospitals. The bartender gave me a glass of merlot because he didn’t have a cork for the bottle and couldn’t save it. We rolled out of there about an hour later and went to K’s, where we stayed up late. Really late. Ahem.

On Sunday, we lazed around a lot and accomplished nothing of interest to anyone but ourselves. Monday, we bought groceries and vodka. K mowed his lawn. I made portabella capellini for dinner – a culinary triumph! – and we ate in the shed because the weather was being almost decent. I crashed at K’s again last night and caught a ride to work with him this morning.

I haven’t seen my own house since Saturday afternoon ’round 4:30, and I feel vaguely guilty about it.

In other news, my dress arrived today! Maybe it’ll warm up enough for me to actually wear it this summer.

Behold today’s quick-and-easy soup recipe!

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