Mmmmm. Crispy.

Tried a new snackish food today: SnaPea Crisps. They're odd. Pea pods, with peas inside, coated with what I think is rice flour and baked into crunchiness. They come out sort of puffy and crispy at once, like a cheesy poof. Peasy poof? Anyway, they're pretty tasty, but I don't see them taking over from the classic potato chip any time soon.

Speaking of potato chips, I am reliably informed that you can get pickle-flavored chips in London. The Brits do have a lovely exotic way with what they call "crisps." Every schoolchild in England likes a nice "crisp butty," which is not an uncomfortable pair of pants, but a bunch of potato chips mashed into a sandwich between two halves of a buttered roll. When I was last in London, I saw and ate potato chips in flavors like curry, cheese and onion, even shrimp cocktail. I am in favor of exotic flavor! But a potato that tastes like a pickle? That's just wrong.

A new culinary challenge

Frustrating food news: I just found out my cholesterol is high. Not call-the-doctor high, but higher than it should be for a woman my age and size. I suspect it's because of all the bacon, soft cheese, and fried chicken I love so much. So for the near future, at any rate, my gustatory experimentation will have to involve (shudder, wince, sob) eating a bit more healthily than I have been lately.

Did you know 73% dark chocolate has no cholesterol?

Anyway. I had a few friends over last night, and I'm pretty pleased with what I chose to serve them. I needed to meet these parameters:

1. Accommodate a couple of folks' food sensitivities: no tomatoes, no celery, no nuts, no beef.
2. Serve ten people who will not all be arriving at the same time -- in other words, something that can be served at any point, rather than needing to be plated and eaten at a precise point of doneness.
3. Be reasonably "healthy" without leaving my guests feeling that I'm forcing them to observe a diet.

I ended up starting with a recipe for Moroccan vegetables and improvising on it considerably. What I ended up with was a stew of chicken, onions, chickpeas, carrots, sweet potatoes, and corn, heavily spiced with garlic, cinnamon, ginger, cumin, red pepper, black pepper, and clove. I served it over couscous and let people doctor it with mild harissa to their own heat tolerance level. (I can easily find mild harissa in the tube -- I got mine at the Ferry Building -- but I'm still looking for the hot stuff and will probably have to order it online.)

Tasty, healthy, lacking all offending items -- it was a hit, and I had a tiny bit left over, which I ate this morning for breakfast, since like most stews, it was better the second day.

The creative home chef, or, adventures in Lazy But Hungry

My sincerest apologies for not saying much lately. It's not that I haven't been eating. I have, of course, several times a day. It's just that nothing I've eaten has seemed worth mentioning. See "the road to hell, paving of."

My food-loving pals and I have a concept we call "Lazy But Hungry," or LBH for short. It refers to the things you eat when you want something tasty, but don't have the time, the energy, or the ambition to make a big effort. For me, that sometimes means making a quick run around the corner to King of Thai Noodle House for the #16 (flat steamed rice noodles with squid, fish cake, ground shrimp, whole shrimp, and fake crab in delicious gravy -- highly recommended). Sometimes it means tossing a big bowl of pasta with garlic, olive oil, and red pepper flakes. And sometimes it just means "hmmm, what do I have in the house?" Tonight fell into the latter category. I didn't mind cooking, I didn't even mind improvising, as long as it didn't mean having to give it a lot of thought.

I started by defrosting the last 1-cup container of chicken stock from my last bout of stock-making, mostly because I wanted the container for the next batch of stock, which I plan to make this weekend. To that, I added a pot of white beans I cooked yesterday on the assumption that I'd figure out something to do with them later, though I didn't know what that would be at the time. They were soon joined by a can of diced chopped tomatoes, a couple of minced cloves of garlic, one small onion chopped up fine, some thyme and sage (note to self: you're almost out of sage), and a hot Italian chicken sausage sliced into thin rounds. I stirred the lot of it together in a 2-quart casserole and stuck it in the oven at 425F. After 15 minutes, I topped it with two slices of 12-grain bread cut into cubes and tossed with olive oil and salt and pepper and put it back in the oven for 15 more minutes until the bread was all crispy and golden.

Et voila: faux cassoulet. Or should I call it "half-assoulet"?