Weeknight Dinner
Eggs scrambled with broccoli, mushrooms, and shallots with homemade bread (multigrain sourdough cheese bread).
Another opportunity to practice gratitude.

Eggs scrambled with broccoli, mushrooms, and shallots with homemade bread (multigrain sourdough cheese bread).
Another opportunity to practice gratitude.

Green beans, basil, and garlic chives variation approximately number 17: red lentil pasta and green beans with pesto and garlic chive blossoms

In this upcoming time of shortages, how are you preparing? Are there ways you can use more of the food you get? Can you grow some?


Long-store pantry items
Sprout brown lentils for 2-3 days and use while just showing sprouts.
Cook one or more types of whole grain rice (here a mixture of red and brown rice) (I like to use a rice cooker).
Let rice cool. Mix rice with lentils.
Add some oil to keep the rice a good texture. I used sesame oil. You could use the oil recommended for your Ayurvedic type if you are familiar with the recommended oil for your type. Though this does not really resemble traditional kitcheree, the basic/unprocessed elements of the dish –the mixture of rice and lentils and the spicing — are the same.
Add a mix of spices. Here, too, you could vary the spicing according to your dosha if that is something with which you have experience. I used turmeric, ginger, clove, black pepper stirred into the salad mixture and then minced some green coriander seeds from the garden to sprinkle on top. I think a squeeze of lemon, had I had it, would have added extra zest.
Serve the salad on delicate, freshly picked greens–spinach and baby chard would be good, though I used lettuce because it was what needed most to be harvested.

As I walk around the neighborhood seeing all the pumpkins on stoops, like Proust with his madeleines, I remember the scent of roasting pumpkin seeds and the salty taste on my tongue, and I return to the place of my childhood. My mother wasn’t much for holidays, but she very much enjoyed arts and crafts projects. The jack-o-lantern, was something then that showed up when we were little kids. I don’t think there was ever a jack-o-lantern carved when we did not eat the seeds. Part of the project was cleaning the seeds, oiling a cookie sheet, spreading the seeds out on the sheet, salting them, and roasting them until golden, and then enjoying the seeds as a special salty treat. I think it unlikely she has decorated a pumpkin at home since I was in early elementary school, but if she were to do it now, in addition to roasting the pumpkin seeds, I am sure she would decorate the outside instead of cutting it into a jack-o-lantern, so that the pumpkin could also be used for soup or pie.