Dinner This Week (for Kiffy)

And for me. Somewhere around this point every winter I’m at a total loss for meals. To answer Kiersten’s question (what do you eat for dinner?) and my own (what on earth do we eat now), this time … I’ve roasted a squash and cooked a lot of garbanzo beans. I made some lime and sesame oil dressing and some tahini sauce.

Sunday, squash / miso / mugwort udon / scallion / hard boiled egg (loosely based on a recipe); carrot and chickpea salad with lime/sesame dressing. We got some turkey sausage at the farmers market, so we have to use that soon, too. Monday, Possibly sausage spaghetti, or else butternut squash and garbanzo beans with tahini sauce. Tuesday, leftover mujaddara (caramelized onions, lentils, short grain brown rice) with yogurt. Wednesday, see Monday.

See also: cabbage with sambal olek and fennel, and a fried egg; cabbage with umeboshi plums; Moosewood‘s Finnish cabbage with tomato paste, dill, currants.

Unrelated: my sister makes stuffed felt owls with big eyes for her friends’ babies. They’re super cute and super easy (though … my sister sews a lot. Her “super easy” might be your first big sewing challenge). Also, courtesy requires us to insist that whatever we’ve made is no big thing. “Oh this? It’s really easy to make.” You can’t say “this was hard to do, but I enjoy a challenge;” So everyone says “oh, you should sell those!” because that’s what we say today when someone is crafty. Why on earth do you have a job as an ICU nurse when you could make your living sewing stuffed owls?. Etsy hardly invented the idea, but they’re sugar to its little yeasties, bellows to its glowing coals. You’ve really got no excuse now! Nonetheless, it has taken me this long to piece together that there’s something really broken about the idea that if you make something well, you should sell it. That Etsy was founded by men who are making a comfortable living off of the factory produced goods on their “handmade” marketplace could perhaps have been a clue, but that’s not even what I mean. There’s a corollary conversation about pretending not to work, while also pretending not to be wealthy that also matters. Also, not what I mean. I just mean that actually making things, beautiful things, inspiring things … it is possible to just make things. You don’t have to sell them.