I got a decent night’s sleep Monday night, and woke up early and started plugging away on my work. Somehow everything just went better than average, and I blew past a bunch of things that usually don’t quite go so smoothly.
The only thing that distracted me was a truck, which was in front of me, trying to maneuver through an underpass just south of the Highway 99 bridge between Fremont and Queen Anne. Over about 10 minutes, a few cars started to pile up and then everyone got smart, realizing the truck driver wasn’t going to give up anytime soon, and wasn’t likely to try to get out of everyone else’s way; we backed out and popped back into traffic on the 99. I was on my way to a customer meeting, so this delayed me a bit, though it turned out to contribute to 5 minutes tardiness.
Tuesday night, however, didn’t go so well. I did some work in my office late at night, and then went home with an open issue with one of my vendors in Asia. They called me about 1:30 in the morning, and we tried to settle things, which took about 40 minutes on the phone. After that, my generally insomniac mind was unwilling to become restful again; a little stress goes a long way to unsettle my sleep patterns. I should probably consider this a health problem; it sure causes me a lot of trouble.
Tuesday nights I usually go to a Japanese language meetup in Seattle, and so dinner tends to be simple, and often eaten on the run. This time, I managed to make something simple that I had partially prepared the night before.
Red lentil soup
Spiced with some garam masala, some chilies, and a few adjustments, this lentil soup provided both comfort and heat. Cold weather makes me crave fiber and warmth… this works for me. Red lentils turn themselves into a bit of a puree, with no intervention required, assuming the liquid ratio is about right. It’s a nice low-effort soup-like dish.
Grilled cheese with chanterelles on caraway rye
When I’m in a hurry I feel little concern with making the ethnicities of my cuisine particularly closely aligned. My soup was aggressively seasoned, but I went with something mellow and brain-dead to nibble on.
I took some caraway-seasoned rye bread, a decent white cheddar, and some more sweated chanterelles and turned them into grilled cheese.
Omija-cha
Jumping regions again, I served a medicinal Korean drink that I cooked up on the weekend. Omija-cha (occasionally romanized without the hyphen, i.e. omijacha) is a “tea” made from the fruits of something occasionally translated as magnolia vine, or alternately as schizandra berry.
It takes me about an hour or so of simmering the very expensive berries to get the right level of flavor intensity, and I’m sure you could find someone who tells you it needs to be done much longer. I rarely make it, but I thought it would be a bit refreshing and maybe keep my little cold from relapsing. It’s served cold and fairly heavily sweetened.
Omija-cha is often a bit darker, but I might have been stingy with the berries this time. The name refers to the “five flavors” of the berries, the classic five flavors of Chinese cuisine: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent. I like it, but I’m sure it’s an acquired taste. In Seoul I once ordered it while sitting alone at an art gallery/cafe, and I’m sure the young girl at the counter was a bit perplexed, though she understood my awful Korean.