I missed you, internets

[eruthros]

I am back at home -- I got back last night and then had liverelibre over for chats and eggnog. And then I woke up today in my own space, put on my pajamas, and read all most some of the internets. (I still have like 200 things left in my google reader, of which about 195 are things that will make me angry or sad, and I haven't attempted tumblr at all, and also I skimmed a lot of dw.)

But! I am left with a dilemna. This is my dilemna:

I used up some most all of the spoons running hobble-speed-walking in the airport yesterday, when my first (delayed) flight deboarded about twenty-five minutes before my second flight was scheduled to depart. So I hustled through the airport with my bags and jogged up and down many escalators and did complicated cane-and-bag swaps for the stairs and made it to the other terminal and collapsed by the door of my second flight twelve minutes before it was scheduled to depart and probably too late for them to still have the door open ... just as they switched the sign to "delayed." Fuckers. I had a whole hour and a half, as it turns out, and had they mentioned the maintenance delay on the departure info screen I might not have, you know, run through the airport.

Anyway, as a consequence I am doing "lying on sofa with hot pad" and not my planned "going grocery shopping." But it is nearing dinnertime, and I'm hungry, but I don't really want any of the delivery options, and there's no way I'm walking to the grocery store.

So! Internets, what would you make for dinner if you had: lots of cans of beans of various sorts, coconut milk, canned crushed/diced/sauced tomatoes, ww pasta, dry lentils, brown and black rice, various baking things including coconut and chocolate chips and butter and canola oil, dried fruit, oatmeal, frozen corn, four eggs that miraculously survived, and a square of cheddar cheese? All I can think of is black beans and eggs (which I had for lunch), black beans and rice (which is rather similar to what I had for lunch), and pasta + tomato sauce + cheese, which is not hugely nutritious but will be fine if I can't think of anything else.

PS: If your answer is "brownies," please be prepared to share a favorite recipe.

PPS: I might not get out tomorrow, and anyway this is often the contents of my cupboards when low on food, so additional suggestions are always welcome!

Comments

[toft]

I would fry the dried fruit with the frozen corn, then put it in some coconut milk and put it on pasta. Alternatively, make tomato and lentil soup (do you have any veg stock to boil the lentils in first?) then eat it with cheese on top.

Or, ooh ooh, make dahl with dried fruit in it, and eat with a hard boiled egg.

[eruthros]

Really? I am intrigued! Most of my dried fruit is cranberries, so I didn't think about doing a sweet sauce with it.

Tomato + lentil soup is always a good idea!

[toft]

Ahh, hmm, I'm not sure if it would work with cranberries, they're a little sharp. Apricots, dates, figs, mangoes, raisins - anything like that dried would work great.

[anatsuno]

fry curry-type spices up, add garlic powder then oil, (I would sautee onions there if I had some, but you didn't list any), pour a can of tomato, let it come to the boil. Add lentils and twice their volumes of water, simmer til the lentils are tender or mush, as you prefer. Melt your cheese on top / break an egg inside (do both) - nom!

You could cook some of your rice in your coconut milk for pudding, too, that's a nice dessert. :D

[eruthros]

Nom! I don't have garlic powder but I do have a clover or two, I think.

I do love rice pudding! I actually have tapioca, too, and I was thinking of turning that into pudding :)

[blushingflower]

Either oatmeal with fruit (because it is enough for supper), fried rice (using the oil, the eggs, and probably the corn), or some sort of curry-like thing using the tomatoes and the coconut milk. You will notice that I am not including the beans because I don't eat them and therefore have no useful suggestions for what to do with them.

[eruthros]

I totally agree that oatmeal with fruit is a good meal! I usually put milk on mine, though.

[nixwilliams]

quick and easy: put one can of tomato, one can of beans, a handful of lentils and the frozen corn (plus any herbs/spices you want) into a pot, lid on, cook until the lentils are ready. grate the cheese on top if you want.

[nixwilliams]

and if you have the energy/desire, cook rice using the absorption method but replace 1/2-3/4 water with coconut milk, add some sugar and dried fruit as you're cooking. mmm, dessert!

[eruthros]

That sounds super nom!

[nixwilliams]

i am such a fan of coconut rice done for savoury AND sweet dishes!

[glass_icarus]

Soup! Beans and lentils and tomatoes and hell, maybe even the corn and pasta if you want, I've done it before (er okay, so I usually don't use lentils, but since soup for me is a question of chucking semi-random things in a pot of water/stock... *g*). Low on effort, and you can salt/spice as you like. :D OH and possibly crack an egg in, depending on what combination you decide on.

[eruthros]

Mmm, soup. I'm going to get a winter CSA delivery on Tuesday, and then I will have things like parsnips and potatoes, and then there will definitely be that kind of soup :)

[stewardess]

You have probably eaten at this point (I hope!) but I would make corn fritters with a bit of cheese in them.

[eruthros]

That sounds awesome, but I have no idea how to make corn fritters - can you point me towards a recipe?

[stewardess]

An easy version is to make your favorite pancakes (you can even use a mix like Bisquik), and just throw in the corn (thawed!) and grated cheese with a bit of extra salt -- say 1/4 of a teaspoon.

Cook them as you usually cook pancakes, in a frying pan, but with extra oil (about two tablespoons of canola oil, or any other good vegetable oil). Keep the fritters small for best results, no more than three inches across.

Now for the better recipe!

http://americanfood.about.com/od/vegetabledishes/r/cornfritter.htm

The key to a good corn fritter is replacing some of the flour with yellow corn meal, as the recipe I linked to does.

[thefourthvine]

Depending on where you are in the world, you've probably already had dinner, but I would make one of the following:

1. Eggs in Hell, which is basically eggs poached in tomato sauce with cheese on top. Nommy. Fast, if you don't make your own sauce, and fairly fast even if you do. (I'm not clear on whether you have spaghetti sauce or just tomato sauce, but if you only have the latter, you can easily achieve the former.)

2. Lentil soup. I'd throw in two handfuls of rice for a complete meal and a handful or two of corn for sweetness, then hit the whole thing with an immersion blender to make a semi-smooth soup. (This works better if your lentils are red or yellow, but could work with any lentils but puy lentils, which in my opinion do not lend themselves terribly well to this sort of soup.)

3. Vegetarian chili, which is basically: garlic and spices (cumin, red pepper, chipotle or cayenne or whatever if you have it and like it), onion if you have it, a couple of cans of assorted heartier beans (black, kidney), and a can or two of diced tomatoes. Serve with grated cheese on top. (And rice if you want a REALLY heavy meal, although my experience is that I cannot so much move for a few hours if I do rice with chili.)

[eruthros]

Re: Eggs in Hell, interesting, because that's sort of what I did for lunch. (Except the eggs are more over-easy than poached.) I do butter and salsa in the pan, crack the eggs in and cook until they're at least a little firm, and then add black beans on the side of the skillet.

Re: Lentil soup, immersion blender is a brilliant idea! So is rice in the lentil soup, because I was stuck on completing the lentil protein without bread.

[thefourthvine]

That does sound like Eggs in Hell! Although yours is more like classic huevos rancheros, really - the only difference is tomato sauce v. salsa. (And you're supposed to poach them, but really I do them over-easy, too. Poached eggs worry me a little.)

As for the soup - the rice in lentil soup thing is a vegetarian standard. (I know people who would not have survived college without it.)

My brother-in-law is Turkish, and there's a classic Turkish soup he and my sister make at least once a week that I make once a month or so (in the less hot months) because it is so easy and so nommy and a complete protein besides.

It's basically what I outlined to you, except we generally add a few things you don't (didn't?) have - we start out with onions and garlic and carrots in the pan and cook those in olive oil before adding the (red) lentils and rice (brown or white) and water or stock. We also add a LOT of aleppo pepper (you can use some crushed dried red pepper flakes in place of these, if you don't spend a lot of time around Turkish people or Penzey's) and a lot of salt at the end (it really does need this - you add and taste and add and taste and waaaaay after your instincts are telling you you've added too much, the soup suddenly pops and becomes 3x more tasty). My sister makes hers a complete moosh with the blender, so that her kids don't see the evil carrots lurking in there, and I sort of half-blend mine so we can still see some of the carrots. And then it's served with lemon wedges, so people can add lemon juice to theirs if they want. (I always want.)

Since you don't need the carrots or lemons - they are nice but not necessary - this is an incredibly easy soup (and relatively fast; it's usually done in half an hour or forty minutes) that relies on ingredients you can keep around basically forever. I advocate intensely for this soup!

[sasha_feather]

Is there a grocery store in your area that will deliver groceries? Or a friend who would be willing to shop for you?

[eruthros]

Sadly, we have no grocery delivery. In a town full of college students! We only have a service that does some specific things from far-away farms and bakeries, which is nice, but pretty much guaranteed to only have apples, potatoes, sausage, and pies.

But if I'm still feeling shitty tomorrow, maybe I'll see if someone else wants to walk to the co-op.

[torachan]

Tomatos, lentils, corn, and beans = stew.

Or you could have the oatmeal with dried fruit and coconut.

[eruthros]

I love oatmeal! So useful and tasty. I've never put coconut on it, but that sounds pretty nom.