Breakfast for the lonely-hearts. After three months of being a forced bachelor, I have realized I don’t really like cooking for myself when I am by myself. Neither do I like ordering take-out on a daily basis. After all, I live in Noida and not many options for ordering decent food exist. ( I usually end up ordering from Happy Hakka even though their service & quality has deteriorated a bit from when they started. ) On other days, when I’ve had enough Chinese for a while, the minimum I can do at home is this : Sautéed slices of tomatoes, plus blanched spinach and a few eggs sunny side up. The dollop of butter is the only extravagance allowed. I really love eating eggs and this combination does the whole fat + protein + fibre combination quite well.
I try to order about a kilogram of spinach from iSayOrganic each week and when it is delivered, I wash it and boil it and cut it up into large segments ( easier to cut once boiled ) and store it in my refrigerator. Even when I order take-out, I can add a bit of spinach to it. I’ve found it to be one of the easiest ways to include a bit of green and fibre in my diet. ( The boy eats Isabgol straight from the container but that is too hardcore for my tastes. Also I hate the texture and taste of Isabgol. ) iSayOrganic delivers the spinach neatly cut from its roots and mostly sorted – although you should still look through for a couple of blades of grass – and after a couple of washes under running tap water, I put the spinach in a wok, cover it and leave it on the cooking gas for about ten minutes. I don’t like the leaves turning a muddy green and prefer them to retain a darker but fresh colour. Also depends on how you are planning to reuse the spinach – I tend to re-heat it when I mix it with other food.
I don’t usually do three eggs in one sitting but I recall this to be a particularly cold day ( er, today! ) and I was missing the sunlight.
I woke up today morning with my toes frozen, acutely aware that the winter season has finally hit NCR. The first half of the day was windy, cold and overcast with not a peep from the Sun. There was a surprising few minutes of feeble sunlight around noon as you can see from the photo below, which is my view from the study-room window. But the rest of the day has been even colder, windier and there was even a brief spell of rain. I have been putting off plugging-in the room heater but at this rate, I don’t know how long I will last.
I am not looking forward to lonely winters in Noida. The sailor boy still has three months left in his sailing contract. But since I always try to look at the silver lining every excuse I get, I AM looking forward to the hot mugs of coffee and the visits to the parents’ home where there will always be something hot and cosy cooking in my Mom’s kitchen. I’m also planning to stock up on marshmallows and thinking of ways to stay doped up on sugar this winter. It will be 2015 soon and I can’t wait to have another fantastic year that flies by right under my nose! I can feel the excitement in the air!
