Costa Rican Rice-A-Roni and the Return of the Brownie Cookies

For dinner, I had glorified DIY Rice-A-Roni (I had to google how to spell that), with a Yuengling to drink. And a brownie cookie.

That mess is a take on our usual quasi-Costa Rican rice+beans+egg dish. I had an odd desire to clean out the fridge this week, as well as clear the pantry of Jon's repulsive canned baked beans. So I cooked some sad frozen peas with the rice, added some seasonings, and topped the mess with an egg and the now-ubiquitous Aleppo pepper. Jon ate his toxic-smelling, slightly neon-hued beans instead of the peas, which he dislikes. The dish was somewhere between serviceable and decent, and far better than Rice-A-Roni, but I was too busy baking cookies for five hours to really care.

So, the cookies.

They're good, but I can think of a dozen other cookie recipes I can make with less mess, and in less time. They taste like brownie edges, crispy, with a chewy middle, and maybe a bit of macaron shatter when you bite into them.

Unfortunately, I might have to make them again out of curiosity- I "mixed" rather than "folded" at a critical step, and I'm now wondering if the texture would be significantly better had I folded. Maybe not. Also, they're so devastatingly chocolaty you'll come away from baking hating chocolate (yet covered in it...) At least they make the whole house smell great, until you succumb to the fumes.

Punjab Eggplant and Rice at Home

For dinner, I had Indian eggplant mush and rice.

The eggplant was vaccuum-sealed in a foil pouch, courtesy of Tasty Bite. Their food items are awesome: cheap, relatively healthy, and super-easy to prepare. I microwave them for less than a minute; Jon somehow thinks the flavor is magically better when he takes the time to boil the foil bags in water. My faves are the Punjabi eggplant and Kashmiri spinach, with the peas paneer a distant third place option. The eggplant is always very good, just spicy enough. The texture takes some getting used to, but that is the eggplant's fault, not the preparation's. To go with it, I once again trotted out the trusty rice cooker and made some fresh basmati with butter and salt. Yummy.