I feel like lately I've been getting stuck in a rut in a lot of different ways - work gets tedious, I never seem to make progress on anything, and I end up eating the same things a lot. I did finally get around to making a new recipe the other day - Gobi Manchurian.

It's an Indo-Chinese recipe featuring battered and fried cauliflower in a tomatoey sauce. I got the recipe from an old issue of VegNews. It came out pretty well - considering I'm a novice at battering-and-frying. And *gasp!* my mother ate it, too!

I also found some vegan zucchini tamales at Whole Foods last week. They're delicious with green chile sauce. Why? Because EVERYTHING is delicious with green chile sauce.

You can sorta almost see my super cute houndstooth skull plates from Target! What would I do without Halloween sales?

We've been growing a basil plant and some tomatoes since June. As a result I've been looking for every possible excuse to eat fresh basil. Pasta with tomato and basil has become one of my default lunches when I can't decide what to eat.

Somewhere in all my still-packed stuff is a book on backyard gardening. Now... as it happens we don't have a back yard, just a porch. (Well, technically there's a pit of rocks that you can walk out into downstairs, but there's not much sunlight.) But I've been checking out a lot of urban gardening blogs and it seems like you can grow almost any vegetable you want in containers. Do I smell a new hobby?

One of the things I hate the most...

Am I the only person who hates it when you spend a ton of time cooking something and then you don't like it? It's one of the things I dislike most, probably only second to stressful parking situations. (Don't laugh, I hate when I can't find parking and I have a paranoia about my car getting towed.)

This past week was trying - not because of any huge emotional event, but because it was one of those weeks where something goes wrong every day.

Right, the cooking thing. Monday (I think) I made a dish called Disco Stew that I got out of this cookbook. It sounded awesome, and it was... okay. Not nearly as good as I had hoped. That was going to be my big recipe to share of the week, and it didn't come out well, so that's why I didn't post about it. BUT, since we'd had such a bad week, and my mother was feeling sick, I made a big pot of green chile stew - my own recipe! I served the stew with these Flaky Chive Biscuits. Everything came out perfect.

Green chile stew and biscuits

I've also been eating a lot of veggie burgers - I got the Boca Vegan burgers and they're pretty good (especially with green chile... New Mexico people will know what I'm talking about.)

Vegan Boca burger with lettuce, tomato, red onion, ketchup, and Vegenaise.

My problem with blogging is that I think of ideas for posts and then don't write them down, so I end up just rambling like this with miscellaneous pictures of food. And here's a picture of me:

Lazy snow day outfit

And here's a picture of my cat:

I actually wrote down my chile recipe (usually I just kind of throw things in) so tomorrow after I'm done working I'll post it.

Until next time!