lots of speckly warm confetti meals

There's this elusive flavour I can never seem to get from recipes. Simple and rustic - maybe old-school hippy if you want to call it that - but utterly delicious in it's own way, the food of the flaky potlucks I went to in my formative food years. (with roasted veg and homemade bread and vinaigrettes and lasagnas and OMG a trampoline in the backyard???)

Anyway, this pie is so it. Maybe all I had to do was not use a recipe and just try to make lunch, ha! It has millet and leeks and swiss chard and tomato and next time I'll put walnuts in the crust for nuttiness, but it was really light-yet-satisfying anyway.

And yes, those are garlic-stuffed olives. I am also a fan.

Pictured here are probably the worst (looking) cookies I've ever made, but for future reference it's good to know I can whip up a batch in less than 20 minutes. I halved the sparkled ginger cookies from VwaV, didn't have molasses, didn't wait for them to cool, and ran to a picnic, but they were awesome anyway (3 of us wolfed these down in an hour, which should be telling). I think it was the cloves that really wooed me.

Oh, and I lucked out the other day and picked up a whole bunch of super cheap cookbooks at chapters, including Moby's Teany book, which is impossibly cute and has recipes like matcha-chocolate pudding and plum french toast I really want to try (hurray for cleverly disguised vegan pseudo-cookbooks - it doesn't say vegan anywhere on it, but I knew. Oh, I knew). The first thing I made was the tvp chicken salad, cause like... sandwich-y crumbly fillings are the best. It needed a lot more mayo and I added basil and bell peppers, but it's a pretty good base and tasted great on the last of my homemade bread (yay freezers).

And Indira has done it again - I think what I adore most of all about her recipes (besides how easy and downright delicious they always are) is how clean they taste. I didn't even realize this was her take on Hoppin' John until I was halfway through making this, but it's oh-so south indian and SO ADDICTIVE. Like, "please hide the spoon from me" addictive. I love how all of the heat is from black pepper, too, it's neat. (and it has bok choy instead of mustard greens, so um... that's three points of the globe coming together for a pottage of homey happy rice? excellent)