jducoeur

H-Mart comes through again. I've come to the conclusion that, odd and idiosyncratic though it is, it may be the best place for me to go when I want something New and Different for dinner.

Tonight I wandered in with few preconceptions, when my eye was caught by the Seaweed Salad, a traditional sushi-bar favorite app of ours. This led me to wondering what to make with it, when coincidence led me to the display of prepared and packaged Unaji: big eel filets, pre-cooked and marinated. I know when kismet is calling to me.

The results are truly wonderful. The eel just needs a quick reheat in the oven, and a bed of good sweet rice made in the fancy Japanese rice cooker I picked up a couple of months ago: poof, nearly restaurant-grade Unaji-don (one of my favorite dinners) for maybe a third what it costs in a restaurant. Not an every-week dish, but a very easy treat for tired work nights...

I was afraid that, a dozen days later, my "this ought to work" veggie chili would be an undifferentiated mass of goo, but not so: it actually keeps nearly as well as serious beef chili.

This dish was actually the result of the Sharepoint conference I went to (SPTechCon), a week ago Monday. The conference was, frankly, pretty disappointing: while I learned a bit, I got about half an hour's worth of education out of each of the three-hour workshops I took there. One of the sessions was too disorganized; the other was well-enough done, but less relevant than I'd been hoping for. If I'd paid my own money, I would have been downright annoyed -- as it was, I was mostly cranky about losing an entire day of work without enough to show for it.

But *lunch* was surprisingly good. The conference was held at The Ziggurat -- the Marriott on Mem Drive where Arisia resides nowadays. They had opened up an innocuous door next to the escalator, which led into a corridor I'd never seen before, leading to an airy pavilion they'd set up outside -- one of those big affairs with big plastic domed "windows", looking rather like a Victorian glass house. I and my co-worker Bob sat and ate a rather good lunch with a bunch of other engineers, commiserating about how much Sharepoint sucks for serious work. And the centerpiece of the meal was a quite good vegetarian chili, which left me with a bad case of, "That was tasty *and* healthy. Surely I can do that." So a day or two later, I did.

Of course, like so many of my dishes, this was more thrown together than designed. But for my reference and your consideration, the basics(  behind the cut )

... specifically, the occasional shipments of Turkish baklava, which makes the stuff you find in the US taste like dry cardboard by comparison. Bits of pistachio on the bottom, exactly the right amount of honey (sweet, but not cloying), resulting in what may be the platonic ideal of "dessert"...

Tonight's experiment was the "Very Good Mushroom Lasagna", from the September/October issue. The underlying theme seems to be that the way to get decent mushroom flavor is to have lots and Lots and LOTS of mushrooms -- two pounds of portobelli *plus* half an ounce of dried porcini *and* half a pound of sauteed buttons. Way too much work and expense (see "two pounds of portobelli"), and the end result isn't even remotely healthy (the lasagna involves a quart of milk and a pound of cheese) but it's very tasty.

Recommended to those looking for a good veggie entree. (And who like mushrooms.) No, I'm not typing it in -- the recipe is very, very long, and creative enough that I'm going to respect their copyright on this. Find it in the library, or get the collection at the end of the year...