Storebrand Food, Almost Haiku

Cheap "natural" cheese

Unnaturally orange

I know how, not how come

*for some not-stupid actual haikus, please see this man.

Times I Wish I Knew More About Cooking, Episode One Million

So I set about tonight to make the Mesir Wat referenced earlier.

I happen to have two separate bags of red lentils bought in the bulk section of PCC.  They were bought within a few weeks of each other, one of those times I forgot what I already had as I was shopping for that month's batch of Red Lentil Soup with Harissa Paste and Smoked Hot Paprika.  (Which is incidentally, far too long of a name and so will forthwith be referred to as Red Lentil HP SHP, pronounced Hop Ship.)

This is what is in each of the bags.

Does it matter that they almost look like two entirely different kinds of lentils?  The ones on the left look almost old and tired next to the bright clarity of the right. I've made a Red Lentil Curry recently where the lentils never seemed to get to that falling-apart softness.  Were those maybe the old-n-tired ones? Are small ones sweeter?

I know enough about cooking now to at least have SOME sense of perspective.  I know this isn't like using sugar for salt or some other major recipe-altering kind of deal. 

But I do look forward to the day where I can be like one of those Italian granny kinds of cooks who can look at the two kinds of lentils and be all like, "Yes to the right!  No to the left! Get it away from me!!" with all sorts of dramatic dismissive gestures.  I mean, I COULD make the gestures now, but would secretly run off to google an answer when I thought no one was looking.

Mrs. Peacock, In the Freezer, With a Corkscrew

As noted in the below report on Art of the Table, my new wine friend is the lightly bubbly Portuguese white wine Vinho Verde.

There was a relatively inexpensive bottle on display at Metro Market when I ambled over for my coffee and paper (like a grown up!) on Sunday morning. I picked it up, and mid-afternoon, stuck it in the freezer to get nice and chilly for dinner. (Despite now living in the Pacific Northwest, and despite the fact that Fall has made itself soggily present over the past week or so, I still can't resist the Southwestern urge to drink icy and refreshing beverages during all seasons.)

I don't know what it says about me that I got so caught up in happily washing out the interior of my refrigerator while listening to dire podcasts about the economy that I totally forgot about the bottle of wine in the freezer.  Whatever it says, it's the truth, because I did.

By the time I'd finished with the fridge and was ready to move on to cleaning out the freezer, the wine had frozen, the contents had of course expanded, forcing out the cork.

Luckily the bottle didn't break, and the wine is still drinkable.

So here's the mystery: where the hell did the cork go?

I'm in the midst of a fridge clean-up, obviously, and I wound up going through everything in the freezer after taking the wine out, and as I finished up that, I realized the cork was nowhere to be found.

I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for it, but I always prefer to come up with the unreasonable explanation.  Like maybe some sort of special freezer wormhole was created by the velocity of the cork being expelled.  Maybe the cork is now happily residing in an alternate universe where it frolics with stray socks and that rebate check that never showed up.

And because I don't like to have a post utterly devoid of practical information, here's a wine tip: the wine guy I met through the cooking school says go ahead and freeze your wine if you can't finish the bottle.  (Make sure you have drunk some of it, unlike me, at least one glass, to avoid creating your own freezer wormhole, and then take out to thaw on the countertop the AM of the eve you plan to drink it.)  He says it would not hold up, quality-wise, after thawing, if you have a freshly opened bottle to compare it to side-by-side.  But since you probably won't be doing that, it should taste just fine.

And if you still have some wine leftover after that, check out KCRW's September 27th episode of Good Food.  Evan Kleinman talks with Du Vin Wine's Stacie Hunt about some uses for leftover wine, including "turning wine into vinegar, making ice cubes, using them as sauce starters, baking cookies and creating an appetizer."