Dragon Fruit

Yesterday turned out to be a total wash. I got home a couple of hours early but I felt exhausted and fuzzy-headed so I decided to watch one of my shows before I worked on getting my act together. I could barely keep my eyes open during my show so I thought a quick nap might help. Forty-five minutes later I woke up still fuzzy-headed. So much for catching up on things.

Today's NYT Dining In is pretty good.

I love this article

In July 2007, in Amman, Jordan, he opened Sugar Daddy’s, the shop that brought the cupcake craze to the Middle East.

Cupcake shops have become as ubiquitous as hot dog stands in some American cities, and have spread to Rome; Istanbul; Berlin; Seoul, South Korea; and Sydney, Australia. Now Mr. Jaber has proved that even the Arab world is not immune to such a Western frivolity.

This noodle thing is the kind of recipe I clip every time I see one.

Noodles of all kinds are easy and beloved. But soba noodles, a staple of Japan, are special: they usually take no more than 3 to 4 minutes to cook and — because they’re made from buckwheat — have a slightly firm texture and a nutty flavor.

And I make it one time and it's never as delicious as you'd think it should be. Here's the recipe. I'm not sure what I do wrong but the noodles always seem to be starchy and flavorless.

Normally I would skip over something like this coconut barley pilaf because I've never made anything called pilaf that I couldn't live without. But then I read this.

As I dug out the rice, I noticed a crumbled and forlorn bag wedged behind it. It was the barley I bought last winter that I swore I wouldn’t neglect. But after one batch of mushroom barley soup and a pot of pilaf, it had somehow migrated to the back of the cabinet.

And I have barley in my cupboard leftover from the exact scenario minus the pilaf. The recipe looks easy so I think I'm going to try it.

Finally, there's this article about crowd-sourcing recipes.

Crowd-sourcing recipes — corralling a group of strangers on the Internet to create and edit a bank of recipes — is gaining popularity and investors. The idea is that a thousand cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef.

There are aspects of this idea that I think are good but there are a lot of horrific cooks out there. My cousin found a recipe for pumpkin soup on a website and one of the comments said that the soup was horrible and the only way the cook could make it edible for her family was by adding a jar of Marshmallow Crème. My cousin said, "I'm glad that wasn't my Mom."