Baked potato, an hour in the oven.

Salt.

Pepper.

Butter.

Cheese.

Nando’s Hot Peri Peri Sauce.

I like putting things in boxes and categories. I have mental boxes such as:

• fruit vs vegetable
• sweet vs savoury

I feel uncomfortable when things drift between mental boxes. This is why I am considerably concerned about tomato based drinks. To me, drinks are in the ‘sweet’ box, as opposed to soups, which are generally ‘savoury’.

A tomato drink is not hot enough to be a soup and not sweet enough to be a drink, so I find it confusing.

Recently, I had a mental box problem to do with rhubarb. Damjan’s housemate, Niall, went to visit Nick. Nick gave Niall some home-grown rhubarb. Niall re-gifted it to Damjan, as everyone knows that Damjan likes to experiment with cooking the less common veggies.

Damjan and I pored over a number of candidate recipes: rhubarb and orange mousse and rhubarb fool. We finally settled on a monstrous hybrid of both: orange rhubarb fool with ice-cream.

We stewed the rhubarb with brown sugar, adding freshly squeezed orange juice and grated ginger. Then we dollaped it onto vanilla ice cream and served it with fresh ripe and sweet strawberries.

What a dessert! It was very delicious, tart and sweet, soft but textured.

Even as I enjoyed my dessert, I was feeling tense because of a mental box scramble. Rhubarb is a vegetable. I can’t go around eating vegetables for dessert.

The only solution, I have decided, is to reclassify rhubarb into my mental ‘fruit’ box. Such reclassifications are not unprecedented. For my whole life, tomatoes and cucumbers have been happily sitting in the veggie box, despite being fruits.

But this particular mental switch (rhubarb as fruit) has been more difficult than I expected. The problem is that rhubarb looks like celery, and there is nothing more vegetably than celery.

If I keep at it, I am sure I will get around this mental block. I know it is possible because after a short struggle, one of my favourite desserts is now carrot cake. The sheer yumminess of carrot cake has overwhelmed the boundaries of my boxes.

In making Chinese dumplings recently, I have come across a useful shortcut. I used to chop fresh veggies for the dumpling mix but while I was at the store buying fresh spinach, it suddenly occurred to me that I could use frozen spinach.

Frozen spinach, how fantastic! It’s cheaper and possibly healthier too.

When I got home and cut open the bag of spinach, I was delighted to discover a third benefit. Instead of having a mass of spinach to melt, the spinach was very conveniently shaped into little truncated cones (also called frustrums or frustra). I could pick out only what I needed and store the rest away for later. Isn’t that clever!

Frozen spinach

I have been eating ‘spicy eggplant stir fry’ all week. It’s a recipe from bowl food, which my ex-housemate Richard gave me for Christmas.

I had bought all the ingredients on the weekend and was talking to mum on the phone about the recipe.

‘Sounds nice,’ mum said. ‘But if you fry eggplant, it will soak up a lot of oil. It’s not very healthy. Why don’t you bake or steam the eggplant instead?’

Later, Damjan confirmed it. ‘Well, yes, eggplant probably will absorb a lot of oil. That’s what makes it taste nice!’

However, in the interest of health, I decided I would take mum’s advice and steam the eggplant before frying it in the wok. I don’t have a steamer but I do have a rice cooker and a flat bottomed round metal container sized such that it would sit snugly in the rice cooker. The combination is an ideal no mess double steamer.

The experiment was successful, very tasty. You can recreate it yourself.

• 1.5 tbsp mápó sauce (Sichuan chilli bean sauce, of mápó tofu and ants climbing up trees fame)
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp vinegar
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 500g eggplant (I used around two medium sized ones), cut into cubes
• 1 onion, cut into slices
• 1 red chilli, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1/2 cup fresh coriander

Mix together mápó sauce, soy sauce, vinegar and sugar.

Steam eggplant until soft (or fry in oil and use paper towels to absorb excess oil).

Then fry the sauce and eggplant together. When finished, mix in the coriander.

The coriander is very good. I think it made the dish taste nice. Serve with rice.

Update
I sent this recipe to my mum and she immediately tried it out. She wrote:

‘Joan, I have just cooked the eggplant stir fry recipe that you gave me. It’s very tasty. For the next party I go to, I will bring this dish. Have a look at this photo. Is it like yours?’

Eggplant stir fry by mum

Mum, I’m glad you liked the recipe! I cut my eggplant into smaller pieces. I think your eggplant dish is more beautiful because of the dash of fresh green coriander sprinkled on top and it’s in a pretty bowl.

I am a tender hearted person, really. I blink back tears when reading sad stories, watching advertisements designed to tug at the heartstrings, and go to great lengths to avoid maybe possibly slightly hurting someone’s feelings.

On the phone, my mum was telling me about this show she had been watching. ‘Jamie’s Fowl Dinners‘ had arrived in Australia.

I don’t like watching or hearing about animals suffering on their journeys to become food. You might say that I am wilfully ignorant. But there was no way I could ignore it this time because it was my mum telling me.

She said, ‘Did you know that chickens only grow for 42 days before they’re killed to be eaten? They grow up in cages and there’s not enough room for them to stand up. Because they don’t stand, they never grown bones properly. Their bones can’t even carry their own weight!’

‘EEEE, stop it, waaah!’ Tears were practically flowing down my face as I imagined the poor chickens, too fat and weak to stand up in the crowd.

‘Isn’t that interesting?’ mum marvelled. ‘I never knew!’

‘I wish they could grow chickens without brains,’ I lamented. ‘Just chicken bits that aren’t connected to feelings.’ Perhaps for some people, a chicken-sized brain is small enough to not worry about the chicken’s feelings.

Chicken is my favourite meat but I could no longer plead ignorance. From now on, I will only buy free range chicken. I already buy free range eggs.

Last week, I was proud of myself because to make sauteed chicken breasts with olive and caper sauce, I went straight to the fridge cabinet with the free range chickens. I didn’t even glance at the standard chickens.

I am lucky that I like leg pieces (thigh and drumstick) more than chicken breast. Chicken breast is very, very expensive. The free range variety is around £10 for two pieces. I used to buy chicken around once a month. To manage the extra cost, I will probably continue buying at the same frequency but smaller amounts.

With Damjan back in Melbourne, I have been left to entertain myself on the weekends. There is a little Saturday farmers market near my house, which I had not yet visited during my first nine months of living here. I finally got around to it and was really pleased with all the yummy food stalls.

One of the stalls was selling goat’s cheese. They had around 10 different samples to try. I am a sucker for food samples. I first tried the black pepper goat’s cheese. Then, the chilli goat’s cheese. Then a piece of cheese that looked like chocolate, which turned out to be chocolate, planted there to occupy children while their parents tried the more sophisticated cheese samples.

‘Hmm,’ I murmured. ‘Yum!’ I nodded approvingly.

And then, without realising it, I had gone beyond the ‘acceptable time period one can loiter in front of a food stall without buying something’. So sheepishly (haha), I bought a round of garlic and herb goat’s cheese. I also ended up buying a giant slice of almond orange cake and a round of sourdough.

Although the cheese round wasn’t large, I did not think I could consume it within the two days, as recommended by the stall holder. Luckily, my favourite cook book of 101 one-pot dishes came to the rescue with ‘Chicken with Goat’s Cheese’.

I went to Sainsbury’s to buy chicken, tarragon and vine-ripened tomatoes. I was lucky. Vine-ripened tomatoes were half price.

I was less fortunate with the chicken. A few days before, I had resolved to buy free range chicken only. All my ethical friends did this, and I wanted to be ethical too! Alas, the ‘normal’ battery caged chicken meat was on sale and it was a sixth of the price of the free range meat. I could not bring myself to pay that much extra. It was a lot of money. I felt pained. So I bought the remains of the sad chickens.

(I have since gotten back on the free range chicken bandwagon but that is another story.)

Now that I’ve done ‘Chicken with Goat’s Cheese’, I am now 15% through the 101 recipes.

The last step for my taco dinner was to chop some lettuce. My heart sank as I pulled the head of lettuce out of its bag. The green leaves glittered with a grainy shininess — ice. The fridge had frozen my lettuce.

Not too hopeful, I peeled two leaves off and ran them under the tap to wash them. As the frozen burst cells warmed up, the leaves melted into a green ooze. Sighing, I squeezed the water out and put the ooze and the head of lettuce into the bin.

Luckily, I had a backup cucumber.

Last week, I lamented not getting around to cooking ‘Greek salad, stuffed peppers, Mapo tofu or sausages in chilli tomato sauce’.

This week, I managed to make:

• Greek salad
• Mapo tofu with turkey mince, capsicum and mushroom, topped up with passata (sieved tomatoes)
• Stir-fried broccoli and green capsicum with oyster sauce
• Sausages and omlette of mushrooms, red capsicum and parsley

I’ve also insured myself against the risk of not having any food to eat. In the freezer, I have spinach curried rice, sausages, and pork dumplings. It’s a nice change from not having a freezer (and microwave) last year.

Bad habits I’ve picked up

• Salting food before tasting it
• Chewing gum

I’m looking forward to dinner tomorrow. To celebrate coming out on top after some busy weeks, our team is having Mexican food at Covent Garden.

What I got done this weekend

• Went to the gym twice
• Booked accommodation for my upcoming trip to Germany
• Cooked ‘quick meatball casserole’ from my favourite recipe book. Tonight’s dish plus ‘oven baked risotto’ takes me up to 14% of the 101 recipes.
• Roasted herbed chicken and potatos (with paprika)
• Did a mega grocery shop
• Researched and bought an MP3 player
• Cleared my inbox

Things I didn’t get done

• Tidy my room
• Make Greek salad, stuffed peppers, Mapo tofu or sausages in chilli tomato sauce (but I bought the ingredients)
• Laundry and ironing
• Getting my hair cut
• Finish reading Guns, Germs and Steel
• Process all the photos from my Chinese New Year weekend.

Hobbies by the wayside
I’ve become rusty at blogging, diary writing, taking photos and writing social emails. The time I used to spend doing those things is now spent:

a) commuting
b) cooking
c) working
d) hanging out with Damjan
e) relaxing
f) going to the gym

I would like to keep up blogging, diarying, taking photos and emailing. I guess I’ll have to find ways to make other parts of my life more efficient so that I can do what’s important to me.

This week might be a difficult one. I have a rather important report to write by the end of the week. I can do it but the amount of writing that needs to be done might mean late nights in the office. The only bad thing about this, really, is that it threatens my fledgling exercise routine.

Going to the gym
I’ve joined gyms before and have fallen off the bandwagon after a few months. This year, I’m going to try to go to the gym at least three times a week. Without a routine, I stop exercising. This makes me feel guilty.

I’m enjoying the gym, actually. It’s a good way to relax and not think about very much. The only negative is that I end up having dinner at 9 PM, which is quite late.

Eating
So that I can come home and eat dinner immediately, usually I cook a big batch of food on the weekend. Last week, I made ‘Ants climbing up trees‘. This week, Damjan and I made a noodle soup. It is definitely convenient to have dinner already made but by the end of the week, I am usually sick of it.