The last suppers

Andy left for his dive trip this morning—at 5.15 am, to be exact. That’s pretty early. Now I’ve got a month of cooking for one. I’m planning to eat lots of the stuff he doesn’t love, like corn bread, bagels, and muffins. It sounds very carb-y, and that’s okay, but I expect I’ll eat a lot of veggies as well. I haven’t cooked for one since I left the US two years ago, and I had a giant freezer for leftovers then, so it will be a bit of a challenge, but Andy has a few more trips over the next three years so I’d better get used to it!

Anyways, these are the last few meals-for-two that we had.

Monday night we made a last minute decision to have pizza. Luckily, I had a ball of dough in the freezer, so we thawed it out in a sink of hot water and then loosely followed a recipe from the newspaper. The original was called “Pumpkin, Spinach and Ricotta Pizza”. Ours was roasted rosemary pumpkin, baby spinach, green capsicum, a few capers and olives, and then whole fresh basil leaves on top. I sprayed the whole pizza with oil so the basil leaves semi-fried themselves in the oven and got all crispy. Yum.

Then, for the very last meal before going to an island with no grocery store, Andy wanted mushrooms. Every fortnight a barge delivers food from the mainland, but mushrooms don’t weather the trip so well. And luckily they were marked down at the shop yesterday afternoon, so he got three or four containers. When I came home, one container of portabellas was marinating in a mixture of soy sauce, orange juice, and garlic, to be baked later. Another container of pre-sliced mushrooms became part of a simple tofu scramble. We got a very cool white-skinned, purple-fleshed sweet potato from the market, so we tossed that with oil, cinnamon and brown sugar to make sweet potato fries. And to add in some more fresh veggies we had a salad of avocado, raw corn, and cherry tomatoes.

The sweet potato fries, pre-sugar’n’spice.

The whole meal. I couldn’t decide whether the flash photo or the no-flash was better, so I’m putting up both! Click for a bigger version.

PS—Remember this day in 2000 when upwards of 20,000 people protested and blockaded the spring meetings of the World Bank and the IMF? Me either, I was in 10th grade and was more focused on my assignments than on global issues. But there were puppets, there was street theatre*, there was communal housing, there were bands and games and fun and protest, and, most importantly, there were 20,000 people! 20,000 people who gave a damn about the way the world was going. When I went to protest the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF in 2005, there were probably 2000 or 3000 people there. What happened to everyone? The optimist in me would say they are off fighting where it really matters, on the local level. That's where I prefer to do my activism. But I am aware that a lot of people get burnt out and/or jaded--which reminds me: we all need to relax every now and then and just take some time for ourselves. So tonights plan: hot bath with essential oils and a non-uni related book!

*That's right, theatre, not theater. Although I'm from the US with our -er and -or endings, I have changed to -re and -our endings of the British and Australian spelling, as Alec astutely noticed last week. My reasoning is mostly practical, since my academic writing is viewed by other Australians and the local spelling is easier on their eyes. But I also sort of just like it better.