Tonight I made a dinner like I haven't done in a long time. I made two salads that I invented. One was a couscous thing with feta, cilantro, toasted walnuts and kalamata olives, the other one was a variation on a Moosewood Cookbook recipe. [Wikipedia even has the Moosewood Cookbook. Can you stand it? If I could, I would marry Wikipedia.] I used the Perfect Protein Salad recipe but swapped out the soybeans for garbanzos. I also have wheatberries and kamut berries. I know, seriously, I'm not making this up.The berries are a million years old but apparently that doesn't matter. Take note survivalists. I haven't had much interest in cooking berries anytime recently except that this week I had some at lunch.
My normal favorite Wednesday Farmer's Market lunch is the sausage sandwich.But a couple weeks ago we saw someone eating a very interesting looking pita sandwich and on further investigation found a food vendor on one corner with some sort of lamb sandwich/salad thing that we decided needed investigation.
This week was the first chance we had to try it and first of all, the line was twice as long as the sausage line which normally stretches down the block. Last week we asked how many sausages they sell on a Wednesday and he said 300-350. Maybe 400 on a big day. We had guessed 400. Second of all, the lamb sandwich was $9. (The sausage is $4.50). Your nine dollar sandwich is a big pita with a scoop of salad that has garbanzo beans, wheat berries and some sort of tahini dressing. I don't have any tahini on hand and didn't see any at Trader Joes so I used the gist of the Moosewood dressing which was mayo, sour cream, vinegar, dill and garlic. I think the nine dollar sandwich also had a scoop of tabouleh or maybe hummus, I can't remember, and a little lamb kabob. It was good. But was it a great, worthy of nine dollars sandwich? Ehhhhh.
There's a restaurant in downtown Portland that we go to for a fancy lunch called, Carafe and they serve a lamb burger that costs about $9 but there you get to sit down and someone brings it to you and you get a cloth napkin and a plate, and it's crystal clear whose turn it is.
There was a little line snafu at the market and this woman had stepped more towards the pay area and away from the order area so when it someone approached to take our order they skipped her. No big deal. No one was ignoring her on purpose but instead of saying, "Excuse me, it's my turn," she did this loud throaty, "UH UH AH AH AH!" like you would do at the dog when he was trying to climb on the Christmas dinner table and lick the turkey. So instead of feeling bad, like, oh, we missed this lady's turn, we were like, "Geez, if that stick up your butt hurts, maybe you should yank it out."
It's back to the sausage cart for me next week.
For the rest of the dinner we had hummus and pita pockets and I made little falafel balls. The recipe made about 30 so we'll be eating falafel balls for a week.
