spicy okra

gooood.

red soup

tomato base, a head of chopped red cabbage, two diced beets, cayenne, cider vinegar, agave syrup, salt, cracked pepper, a handful of barley, and 30 minutes on simmer makes some deelish red soup...

pluming clouds of the nice spice

now, that is some hot sauce!

homemade

i've got the next couple of days off work to dedicate to the completion of my thesis. met with my professor this morning to go over the progress and went home feeling pretty good. for lunch, i whipped up some soba noodles and baby bok choy with a soy and rice vinegar dipping sauce. mmm, good. our water heater pooped out the other day and a plumber is coming shortly to replace it, showers at the gym come in mighty handy about now. in the interim, i decided to put myself to use on the vegan kimchi project that i mentioned a couple weeks ago.

i improvised on the recipe, looking at several recipes out there on the internets. for this, i took a tablespoon of rice vinegar, 1 T. soy, and a few T. of dried korean chilis and let them soak.

grated up a 1.5 inch piece of ginger, 4 cloves of garlic, and shredded 3/4 of a carrot into the compote. tossed in a dash of sugar and a healthy dash of salt.

then sliced up a little baby bok choy and 1 green onion to add for good measure. peeled a stout korean daikon and sliced into 1/4 diameter pieces about 1/4 inch thick.

mixed it all up as best as possible and funneled it into a good ol' mason jar. the fermentation period is supposed to take 4-7 days until its ready for eats. it will be difficult to walk by this bubbling vessel the next few days as it gurgles up a hello from the counter top.

all the lineage cabbage soup

ain't nothin' like a bowl of steamy hot sweet, sour, spicy cabbage soup. all the apple cider vinegar, all the stevia, all the cayenne... a head of cabbage, two cans of diced organic tomatoes, a healthy helping of garlic, and a pinch of sea salt. the recipe has been morphed over time and will continue to change. we've tossed in black beans on occasion, too.

ring of fire

so the other night i got home from class around 9:15pm with a voracious hunger in my empty belly and i found amy reeling in discomfort. seems she had taken the tiny lantern-looking peppers we bought at a sketchy international food market and misidentified them as a milder version that she enjoyed in ghana this past summer. indeed, the peppers were most certainly confirmed habeneros after dissection and the stereotypical hand-throbbing began. she took a sudafed to ease her symptoms.

she announced her err and advised not to even attempt to dish into the couscous medley that she had added 4 of these capsaicin cocoons to. i cast off this warning as doubt about my ability to handle such an invigorating treat. oh, the burn was sooo good. i broke out in a sweat as the splayd neared my mouth. my mouth could handle the heat and my stomach called for reinforcement of nutrients asking the hand and mouth team to work quickly together and before my foresight could jump in to question the decisions i was making there was a good shovel full on its way down to the combustion engine.

my issues with spicy food usually don't occur with stomach distaste for the fire, but aches usually start to pang when the heat is working its slow crawl through my intestines. on several occasions i have been awoken in the night by the incessant echos of a thai dinner or a kimchee inferno (partially to do with the fermentation coupled with the spice), but on this occassion i slept straight through the night. nonetheless, the efficiency of my elimination system proved itself to be on the job about 10-15 minutes after cracking the eyelids from a 8-hr retirement. here it comes, the second coming... bone will surely back me up on this... the ring of fire, baby! how naive i was to have thought that the intranets had not heard such a poignant term. yet for fellow suffers, there is hope! milk-soaked tp! not too kosher for this vegan. maybe i'll just dip my arse in soymilk.