No pictures, but this is another food post, so skip it if you don’t care about recipes. Yes, maintaining four blogs badly started to feel like more effort than using one blog for everything, so I’m posting about cooking and writing here now. Eventually, I’m going to finish working on the Rozelle Press site and then I’ll make it my official author-y news site and let this just be my personal site, but that hasn’t happened yet. So for the moment, everything gets posted here, and today that means food.

Weird food.

Really weird food.

Last night, I had ground beef that needed to be used, and a plan I didn’t have enough energy to pull off (AIP-friendly meatloaf with mashed cauliflower, not going to happen), and a level of tired that meant all I wanted was to efficiently get my protein and vegetables down my throat so I could go to bed and not sleep some more.

I started out thinking I’d just throw what I had in a frying pan and hope for the best, but once I had a couple carrots and a parsnip chopped up and sauteing in some olive oil, I realized I’d be better off cooking the meat separately. So I started a new pan, with onions, garlic, and ground beef. In the ideal world, I would have thrown some sriracha in, but instead I sprinkled in ground cloves — maybe 1/4 tsp, not much, plus 1 tsp or so of cinnamon and 1 tsp or so of turmeric, and mixed thoroughly.

Yes, this was quite random. I just thought those three spices would probably taste good with parsnips and carrots and meat. I let everything cook slowly for a while–fifteen minutes or so?–with the vegetables covered and the meat not covered, because parsnips and carrots take a long time to get soft on the stove. I poured off some of the oil from the ground beef eventually, then added salt, the vegetables, and about half a bag of spinach. I covered it and let the spinach cook down for another couple of minutes, and then added a handful of chopped up cilantro. Mix thoroughly one last time, give the cilantro a minute to warm up but not lose its flavor. Oh, and I had started roasting the cauliflower before I decided I was too exhausted to make meatloaf, so I also added roast cauliflower before serving.

It was surprisingly delicious. The strongest flavor was the cilantro, but the hints of the other spices gave it a warm, autumn-ish flavor. R agreed, really good, but he ate later than me so I don’t know whether he might have jazzed it up with hot sauce. But honestly, for a fairly high-speed, inexpensive, protein plus vegetable meal, it was entirely acceptable. And I’m writing it down, because if I ever have the same lazy impulse, I know I’ll wonder what I included — the parsnips and the cinnamon were, IMO, the key.

Second weird food, this morning’s chicken soup. Classic leftover soup. To my homemade broth, which was perhaps a little heavy on rosemary when I made it, I added leftover chicken & broccoli slaw stir-fry, roast cauliflower, spinach, & cilantro. And salt. It was delicious. And this one I’m writing down as a reminder to myself that everything works with good chicken broth.