After having so much delicious coffee in Colombia, and then traveling in Michigan and having notable coffee drinks such as my cafe miel and lavender latte, I decided I would make my own special coffee drinks by creating my own lavender syrup at home. Sugar syrups are super easy to make — all you really need is some water and sugar dissolved over high heat, and it keeps for weeks, if not months. And then if you want to flavor it with a herb like lavender, rosemary, etc., you just have to add a tablespoon or two during the simmering process.

Today, I made about half a cup of lavender syrup to add to our coffee drinks, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out in our Sunday morning lattes.

One of the biggest game changers for me with Indian cooking was the Instant Pot. Since we purchased one last summer during a big sale on Amazon, my life has forever been changed when cooking Indian food, especially when it comes to stews, beans, and biryani dishes. Another game changer was finding this incredible Indian cooking blog called My Heart Beets, which is hands down one of my all-time favorite food blogs. One of the best recipes she has on her blog is for onion masala, which basically has key components distilled down into a masala mix of tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger, and various common Indian spices, all cooked in an Instant Pot, then frozen into 1/2 or 1/4-cup portions so that you can fish them out of your freezer and use them at any time to make authentic Indian food faster and easier.

I’ve since made a batch of this onion masala and have already used it for several dishes. The most rewarding dish I’ve used it for was just this morning, when I made Indian-style shakshuka in just 10 minutes! I took out about one cup of onion masala and defrosted it overnight, then I used that as the base for my shakshuka, just adding some crumbled sausage into the tomato mix, then eggs, and topping with cilantro and salt and pepper. It was one of the simplest, fastest, and most satisfying fully-homemade meals I’ve made in a long time.

The only way to have quick homemade meals is to do a lot of meal prep beforehand and in bulk, and this onion masala is definitely a key to that. Luckily for me, we have a much bigger freezer than before, so we can store things like this.

After getting such rave reviews from Chris’s parents and Chris about the Eleven Madison Park-style granola I made a few weeks ago, I decided that since I had so much extra oats (and well, I’m not a big regular oatmeal person) that I would make a second batch today. I made the same additions by adding in flax and chia seeds, plus macadamia nuts, as last time. But this time, I increased the amount of sea salt. The original recipe calls for an entire tablespoon (that’s three teaspoons!) of sea salt. I’m pretty salt conservative/sensitive (whatever you want to call that), so for the first batch, I used only a teaspoon. Given that I could barely taste any salt in that, I decided, why not increase that to two teaspoons this time? And to me, I think this batch came out nearly perfectly with a good combination of both salty and sweet. Chris, while he enjoyed it (he never eats granola ever, but this time, he’s actually snacking on this before and after dinner!), says the first batch was better and this was a tad too salty for him.

Maybe the compromise for the next batch will be 1.5 teaspoons? I’ve just never been able to find granola I really loved from the store, so in both cases of making this granola and my hemp granola two years ago, these have been my favorites. It just tastes too processed, even when most of these brands claim to be organic/non-GMO/yada yada. Homemade granola-only in this household from now on.

Cooking authentic mole takes time. For those uninitiated, mole is a popular sauce in Mexican cuisine. Oftentimes, each restaurant, family, grandma, and mother has their own version of mole. It varies by region and by town. But the unifying ingredients in all of them include a combination of Mexican spices, such as oregano and canela (Mexican cinnamon), aromatics such as charred onions and garlic, Mexican chocolate, and the most pungent and fun ingredients: dried Mexican chilies. The end result is a mix of chocolate, spices, chilies… a very complex tasting dish that is hard to liken to anything else I’ve ever tasted or made. Some moles have 20-30 different ingredients and can take days and days to make! And the longer it sits on the stove cooking, the more and more the flavors meld together and become even more complex and delicious.

I’ve made mole twice, both times in cooking classes in Oaxaca. The first time was in 2010 during my first trip, and the second time was this past trip in May 2018 with Chris. Today was my first time attempting mole at home, albeit a more simplified, home-friendly version.

Today, we used dried ancho and guajillo chilies that we brought back from our Mexico trip last year for a simplified red mole. I also ground up the canela I purchased whole from a market in Mexico City. I used a teaspoon of the Mexican oregano I purchased, as well; Chris noticed that the smell was far more pungent than the dried oregano we buy here. It took about 2-3 hours including the time to film the cooking, but in the end, after adding some additional shaved Mexican chocolate and a touch of sugar, it tasted rich, well-rounded, and smoky.

I knew that I’d use it as the base sauce for the chicken enchiladas I wanted to make to use up old corn and cassava tortillas in the freezer, but I didn’t realize how special it would taste when all the components were put together until I ate them today. Filled and topped with a vibrant red mole, chicken, cilantro, and cheese, these enchiladas were lick-your-plate worthy and definitely tasted authentic. I actually impressed myself with this dish.

I was chatting with one of my Persian colleagues about cooking on Friday, and I told him that I planned to make Persian style layered chicken and rice on Sunday called tachin joojeh. He looked at me, surprised that I want to make Persian food. “How did you get into that?” he asked me. “You know I am Persian, right?”

Everyone is always so fascinated by someone who looks like me making any kind of food that isn’t Chinese or Vietnamese or Asian. I’m honestly not really sure what the fascination is about. No one really exclaims like crazy or is impressed when you hear of an Asian person making spaghetti, clams with linguine, or chili. Somehow, a Chinese person making Indian or Persian food is considered fascinating. If you like something, you like it, right? You don’t have to have grown up with it or be married to someone who is of that ethnicity, yes?

I say this all the time, but I really believe it: if we were all open minded to trying and embracing the cuisines of other cultures, there would be less hate in the world. I mean, that’s why Trump only eats McDonald’s and other garbage “American” junk food.

Even after hosting a small brunch yesterday, we still have an incredible amount of leftover food from the weekend, everything from the dosa batter, potato masala filling, the coconut chutney, and even the roasted chicken and vegetables I made for dinner on Sunday — it’s filled our fridge to the brim, and I can barely see inside without having to move things around. It’s a good “problem” to have, though, as in “too much food.” But given that Chris will be away for a few days this week, it’s a lot of food just for me, and there’s definitely no way we’ll finish it before this week ends. So while it’s nice to have “too much food,” there’s also the other first-world problem of having to eat the same food every single day until it’s gone.

Then, I thought back to a conversation with two colleagues, one who is very like-minded as I am with food, eating every last bit and saving bone and vegetable scraps for homemade stock, and the second… who is our total opposite. When I told our opposite about how we always eat every last bit of everything at home when I cook, or when I roast chickens, I save the bones and any vegetable scraps into my freezer “stock prep” bag, her eyes widened and she laughed hysterically. “You would really hate to live or eat out with me. I hate bringing any type of leftover food home, and I’m notorious for buying a whole roasted chicken from Whole Foods, eating half of it, and then throwing the rest of it away.”

We laughed… but I told her she was a horrible human being and there are literally starving children in this country, and that’s such a spoiled rich-American thing to do. She admitted that all the above was true, but it was just her bad habits. I could actually feel pain in my insides listening to her say that she wastes that much food every single day.

I’m passionate about mental health and children in need, but given that I am also passionate about food, I’m indirectly also passionate about food waste, or rather, the focus on not wasting food. I think a lot about the best way to prepare and eat food so that the minimal amount is wasted. I like the fact that some companies now are focused on food waste and thus starting to sell “ugly” fruits and vegetables that get rejected from mainstream stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, but I think that barely even touches the surface of the issue because that doesn’t even address food waste issues like the ones noted above: perfectly good food that goes to waste.

Although I have made paleo banana bread a few times, including recently for my mother, who is trying to reduce the amount of sugar she’s consuming, I think the overall concept of paleo eating is pretty stupid, that we should return back to the time of cave men to really be eating as healthily as we can. So… cave men had access to eggs? Really? And they used sugar as a sweetener for… baking banana bread?

The biggest gripe I have with the paleo diet is that it demonizes beans and all legumes and puts them on the “unhealthy” food list. As soon as I heard that, I knew this diet was total garbage. The rationale they have is that beans contain lectins, which are supposedly bad for you. The lectins are pretty much destroyed by cooking; that’s why we cook legumes in the first place and to soften them. As long as you are cooking the beans long enough, you will be fine. Beans are high in fiber and likely the most nutrient-dense food on earth. If I were vegetarian or vegan and didn’t have access to beans, I’d probably be massively malnourished.

I thought about this as as I made my Kerala black-eyed pea coconut curry tonight. Over the last year, I’ve been cooking more black-eyed peas, and I’m so impressed by how buttery and creamy they can become. It actually makes you miss meat less when you eat these beans. Just think of what all these crazy paleo followers are missing.