Cooking, while Coding

On Sunday morning, at 2 o'clock, I was in the kitchen. Cooking. I was working on an assignment - coding in qualitative data analysis - but knew I needed to get cooking out of the way so that when I resurfaced later that afternoon, I would not have to face an hour or so at the stove, but a mere 3 minutes with the microwave. Student life.

I was really in the mood for pelau but while I love cooking it, as it is an easy one pot meal, I hate cleaning and cutting raw chicken. I guess I could have gone to a market and let the butchers do all that but I am pretty anal when it comes to chicken. I like to clean the fat off myself - for peace of mind. I also hate markets. The smell of raw meat hanging around me is not very appealling. I never liked going to market with my mother, as everything smelled and it was loud and seemed yucky to me. I prefer to spend extra money in a sterile supermarket, where, both here in London and in Trinidad, I buy everything I need - from veggies to chicken to cuts of meat. In any event, the thought of cleaning chicken legs was not an attractive one, so I bought easy to cut pork and decided to do a stew.

I had bought some beautiful pork last week and had cut and seasoned it on Friday morning.

The onions and garlic were welcome smells, along with the peppers and herbs.

I was going to use it to make a stew with some potatoes, and add it to a seasoned veggie rice. I used fresh carrots, onions, ginger, garlic, parsley, and broccoli for the rice.

I also like boiling my rice with a bit of saffron to make it a pretty yellow.

Peeled and cut my potatoes for my stew.

Stir fried my veggies in EVOO, starting with the onions and carrots and herbs, and adding the broccoli near the end, before adding the rice.

Watched Law and Order while the entire thing was cooking, washed up, finished my assignment, put everything in the fridge and went to bed at 11am. Woke up at 5pm and uncovered my plated lunch, heated it - nu fuss, no muss. And in the end, I added some garlic bread to the finished product. And a glass of white wine. It was really lovely.

One thing I have not done since being here was baking. I get the urge sometimes but usually satisfy my craving at the supermarket's in-store bakery. But they don't have cheese puffs and as you know, I am a cheese puff lover - so who knows? Heading to the bakery now actually..ta ta.