Adventures in Cooking: Quinoa

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but this year was, kind of coincidentally, an exception. A few days before 2019 began, I took stock of my eating habits and concluded that the largest portion of my protein intake came from cheese. Now, far be it from me to knock this most wonderful of foods, but I did decide it wouldn't hurt to cut down on the cheese and focus more on lean – ideally vegan – protein sources.

And thus began my relationship with quinoa. While I was cleaning out the kitchen cabinets in a post-Christmas organizing frenzy, I found a 2-quart carton of uncooked quinoa, a holdover from one of my boyfriend's many brief flings with ambitious cooking. I don't recall what recipe he tried to make with quinoa, but he never made it again, and the quinoa has been sitting in the cabinet for at least a year since then. Quite convenient for me, since quinoa is practically a vegan superfood. It has one of the highest protein contents of any grain, and it's a rare vegetarian source of all 9 essential amino acids. Unfortunately for me, it is also unappetizing to the extreme.

When prepared, quinoa resembles nothing so much as a bowl of coarse sand. It has no flavor to speak of, so consuming it is only slightly more appealing than eating said sand. It's slightly more chewable than sand, but being likewise comprised of tiny particles, it doesn't provide anything satisfying to bite into.

There are many recipes on the internet for quinoa, but like any good Adventurer, I decided to go my own way. The first time I prepared the stuff, I followed the simplest cooking instructions (1 part quinoa, 2 parts water, boil until the seeds have absorbed all the water). I figured I'd flavor it with cumin and fresh cilantro and have a quick 15-minute sort-of-Mexican meal. And I did! But it was so boring, I could barely choke it down. In spite of all the spices and all the salt (and more salt! And more!), my healthy dish was as bland as health food is reputed to ever be.

The next time I made the quinoa, I followed an actual recipe. It called for sauteed greens and curry powder. The greens added texture (a slimy, stringy one, of course), but I still felt like the soul was being sucked out of me with every bite.

The third time I made quinoa, I decided to really rock the boat and mix it with cashews! While not as low-fat as pure quinoa, at least a few cashews scattered throughout the bowl would give me something solid to bite into from time to time. The spice rack did not offer any inspiration as to how to season my delicious dish, so I consulted Google and came up with a mix of garlic and turmeric. I threw in some more dried cilantro leaves for the heck of it. And salt. More salt! 

 

 

The turmeric gave the quinoa a bright yellow color, so at least it looked fun, even if it wasn't going to be any fun to eat. And it wasn't. But it was better than my first batch. Either the turmeric or the cashews or perhaps both imparted a slightly sweet flavor, that made the eating interesting, if not exactly delicious.

The going has been ploddingly slow, but I'm learning something about cooking quinoa. The best way to enjoy quinoa is to just make sure you eat it with a lot more stuff that's not quinoa! My next Adventure in Cooking is totally going to be quinoa-sprinkled ice cream!

Ms. Fix-It

In the nearly 3 years that I have owned my house, I'm pretty sure I've become a contractor's nightmare.

While I originally approached even the most basic of repairs with extreme trepidation, I have evolved to take a very cavalier attitude towards the maintenance of my home.

You might recall the series of jury-rigs that were necessary to make the place fit to live in. After the first seven months, I'd basically gotten the essentials under control, so all that was left to work on were the "nice-to-haves"—things like a bathtub faucet that doesn't spew water while the shower's running, a kitchen sink that isn't warped away from the countertop...maybe, you know, a picture rail...and perhaps, an interior door that opens against the wall rather than right into the middle of the kitchen.

For these things that are hard to do right, but not exactly necessary for survival, I felt like I should Don't It Myself and enlist the aid of a professional...but then I thought about how many other things would have to be fixed concurrently to really be done right...and how much that would cost...and how many people I would need to interact with in order to make it happen...and I decided that maybe I'd just take another stab at self-sufficiency.

So over the past few months, I've tackled a number of things on my House Things To Do list. Usually with very little forethought other than a sudden impatience to get things done right now.

First there was the bathtub faucet. It didn't leak...much...but the water did run out the spigot when it should have been all diverted to the showerhead, and all I could think about was how much money was literally running down the drain with every shower. So, with the help of a couple of online resources and a superhero of a friend, I took apart the faucet and reassembled it with new washers. Naturally, that sounds a lot easier than it was. It required two trips to Home Depot, the purchase of a special tool I'll probably never use again, and most of a day of my time. After my friend left, I learned that while the diverter and handles were no longer leaking, the fixtures were actually leaking from the back, behind the wall, and I had to take it all apart and do it again on my own. Eventually I got the faucet working, and the shower diverter is completely leak-free. Of course, now you have to crank the handle with the force of a titan to get the hot water to shut off completely, so I'm just waiting for the day when the whole process needs to be repeated. Next time I'm just buying a complete new faucet assembly! Trying to find the right replacements for an ancient plumbing fixture is just more trouble than the money you save.

Then, there was the kitchen sink. Whoever designed this kitchen apparently did it (much like I do all my housing projects!) with a bunch of scraps that were definitely not meant to go together. You are fortunate that I'm going to spare you the details of exactly how messed-up this kitchen setup was, but I will tell you that the sink was warped in several places, which made the handle wobbly and allowed water to leak into the cabinet. To fix it properly, I determined that we'd need to completely replace the sink...and the countertop...and the cabinet underneath. Way too expensive! So I did the next best thing. I got a 3-inch metal plate with holes in it—it happened to be a scrap door hinge, but that's irrelevant—and slid one of the holes over one of the bolts on the underside of the sink faucet. I was able to brace the plate against the underside of the counter and, with the magic of physics and a couple of nuts, muscled the most warped part of the sink down into a semblance of flatness. Again, it works, but I cringe at the thought of having to explain that setup to a plumber!

And that very setup is one of the major reasons that when the kitchen faucet started dripping, I decided to fix it myself, even though my last experience with faucets (see above) had been a trial I didn't wish to repeat. Sigh. I repeated it. I disassembled the sink faucet, drove around to three separate plumbing and hardware stores to find replacement parts that looked about right, and reassembled it. Several times. Today it works and doesn't leak...as long as you remember to turn the handle slightly up and left of center when you close it. Next time I'm just replacing the whole faucet with a new one (this time, I mean it!), and keeping the model number in a sacred file!

Moving aside from the struggles of plumbing, there was the relatively straightforward issue of the attic ladder. Or, to be more precise, the lack of one. I store a lot of stuff in the attic, and I was constantly risking my neck on a rickety old 5-foot stepladder to get up there every month or so. It was clear I was going to have to put in a permanent ladder. For months, I debated if I should get a professional builder to re-cut the opening and install a proper folding ladder (and maybe some lighting, while they were at it!). But I'm saving my money for a basement remodel that keeps getting delayed, so ultimately I decided I'd make do with a cheap ($110 from almost all sellers), do-it-yourself ladder that's especially designed for small openings. After the requisite delays (such as the kit I first ordered from Home Depot being a damaged customer return), the requisite amount of unplanned purchases (a box of screws, to secure the floorboards before I could start), and the requisite amount of cursing and crying (let's not even get into the details of that part), I got the ladder set up.

The second part of the project was to install a trap door so that the ladder can be easily accessed. But the instructions required re-framing the attic opening, and I was pretty certain I wasn't going to be able to do that without ruining something. So instead, I set up this ridiculous pulley system with a couple of metal rings and a length of Paracord. It is absolutely unintuitive, and if anyone were to buy this house from me, they would think me a crackpot...but it works, and I can get into my attic without needing to drag a stepladder anywhere. The downside, which I never considered until it was too late, is that the ladder takes up so much space, it's almost impossible to fit anything else through the hole. I might have been better off falling to my doom from the stepladder.

But I never did get around to falling to my doom, so I was obliged to continue looking around for things to fix. This time, it was the kitchen door. As with many of the other features of the kitchen, this one was poorly thought out and sloppily done. The doorway was in a corner of the kitchen, but the hinges were on the opposite side. So every time you opened the door, it swung out directly into the room, rather than into the wall where it would be out of the way. I tolerated this for years, but imagine trying to release two extremely antsy dogs through this door multiple times every day. It was like being in the middle of an evacuation gone very wrong. I thought that whenever I contracted someone to remodel the basement, I'd ask them  to reverse the swing of this door. But, as you recall, the basement remodel is interminably delayed, so, over the past weekend, in a fit of frustration, I took matters into my own hands.

It isn't actually that hard to reverse the swing of a door...as long as you're willing to reinstall the door upside-down. Apparently, doing so means that you're the devil incarnate, but your soul is a small price to pay for convenience! I took my time with this project (meaning I did it in a rush while the dogs were safely sequestered in my boyfriend's room) and tried to do everything right (as right as can be when you're doing something so inherently wrong!) and managed to get the door back on its hinges, facing the other direction. It still works, but I'm sure it would make anyone with a lick of carpentry experience roll over in their grave.

Notice anything odd about this door? Of course you don't!

And such is the way of my home stewardship. I get things done, but I get them done in a way that will never stand the test of time. Should I be proud of myself, or should I slap myself on the wrist and tell myself to stop being so cheap and antisocial and call a pro next time? I don't know what you think, but I bet you can guess from the fact that I wrote a whole blog post about my handiwork, that I've decided to go with the former. From now on, you can just call me "Ms. Fix-It!"