this weeks menu- a ginger laden feast for two (or four, or six…)

Sometimes we swerve when we mean to serve but life goes on anyway. 

If my resolutions last you’ll be getting a weekly round up of three to five new recipes that all work together. A menu! A theme!

Yes, six years into this blog and I finally started an editorial calendar (I also added ads, sorry about that ) to keep me on task.

One of my favorite poem about the creative process is Why I am not a Painter by Frank O’Hara

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,


for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is 
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.


But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a 
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Frank O’Hara, 1926 – 1966

These menus, I suspect are going to be a little bit like that. The calendar may say Sardines but in the end you get Oranges. 

This week began with Chinese New Year but I’m no expert on Chinese cuisine and the internet is filled with actual experts so you’ll find a lot of rice vinegar, ginger, garlic and scallions but the resemblance ends there. It does however all work together. With the exception of the lamb dumplings it is vegetarian, vegan actually,  so sub out mushrooms for the lamb (Tell me to test this and I will!) and you’ve got a tasty vegan meal. A little sweet, a little tangy, something hearty, something light.