Amarand Journal

Chana Masala--the gateway Indian food.

This is what I made for dinner tonight—a rip off of the Chana Masala recipe on VegWeb.  I made it fully expecting a fight from the children.  After all, it looks a little weird, especially for kids who have grown up with the whole meat-and-potatoes mentality (ideally, chicken nuggets and French fries).  I dished it up over whole wheat couscous, gave them each a big glass of water (for the subsequent gagging that I fully expected), and settled myself in at the dining room table for the fight to ensue.

Daniel got to the table first.  He sat down, asked what was in his bowl, took a deep breath, and lifted the first forkful.  Sylvie plowed through it after she asked what was in it—tomatoes, carrots, onions, and chickpeas with some Indian spices.  Not one complaint.  Not a word was spoken to the tune of, “I don’t like it…”  They both finished their dinners, and I wondered if I should have given them more since I only gave them about a quarter of a serving each in the interest of cutting down on the food waste.  I’m totally going to make that again for them sometime soon.  It’s one of my favorite dishes, and now that I know that they’ll eat it, I might start to branch out with some other Indian food.  Victory is mine!  Hah!!

On a sad note, though, I broke the tamper for the Vita Mix tonight.  Only had the thing for two days, and I broke it already.  ☹  From what I read when I was looking on Amazon for replacements, though, it’s a pretty common occurrence.  The review that made me feel the best about my stupidity was this one:

“So you dropped your Vitamix tamper into the blender?” February 2, 2009
By Jeff A. Stucker “Jeff A. Stucker” (Eagle, ID United States)
Well, join the club. This is the replacement for that chewed up part. Next time, let’s make sure the lid is on when we use the tamper, okay? (Doh!)”

Thanks, Jeff—I’ll definitely remember this little piece of advice!

The disaster happened when I was trying to make ice cream, which looks incredibly easy on the videos.  Either I did something wrong, or I’m just too impatient for my own good, but I messed up.  I pulled the lid off while it was doing its thing to check on it, and then tried to use the tamper to mix things up a bit more.  Sean told me afterward that he tried to say something to me like, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t do that…”, but I couldn’t hear him over the noise of the blender.  And then the tamper ended up hitting the blades—not good.  This is what happens when the tamper hits the blades:

There's a reason they tell you not to use the tamper with the lid off...

The good news was twofold:  Amazon offers a replacement tamper for about $11 plus shipping, so we should have one here before the end of next week.  Sean also read somewhere about a guy who used a carrot in place of his tamper when he was in a similar situation, so at least we have a back up method while we’re waiting for the new one.  The other good news was that the ice cream actually came out okay (once I dug the bits of plastic out of it, of course):

I promise that any black flecks you may see are actually Newman's Own cookie pieces, not broken tamper bits.

And somehow, after this Adventure in Kitchen-Land, Sean convinced me to make a pizza.  At first, I thought he wanted to bake it at 10:00 at night, which I thought was completely insane.  Then he mentioned something about Alton Brown’s suggestion to freeze a pizza crust overnight and then bake it the next day.  Ah.  Well, fine.  But I still ended up with dough all over my hands and much more mess than I had really wanted to deal with after everything else today.  And now that I actually read his suggestions, I see that AB actually said to refrigerate the dough overnight, not freeze it.  And to refrigerate it in ball, not spread out on a pan like I have mine right now.  Darn.  Oh, well.  It’s Sean’s baby tomorrow, I think. 

I’ll be sure to post pictures of that monstrosity masterpiece—right after I get back from a Whole Foods run for more vegan mozzarella.