Curried Dookie

My new favorite word is dookie. My fella refers to butts as dookies. I've always referred to poop as dookies. The conflation of the two meanings gets a bit confusing. When I shout, "Whatever, dookie" I mean "Whatever, poop" but in his head I'm not sure if it's being interpreted as "Whatever, butt." And though perhaps still an insult, "Whatever, poop" has a better ring. And alternately, when he pokes me and says, "Check out that girl's dookie," my head immediately reacts with horror at someone walking around with their poop out until I realize that I should be sneaking a peek at a mighty fine ass. See my dilemma here?

What does this have to do with food? Well, I've been eating a lot of things lately that look like dookie. In both senses of the word.

Surprising? No. What with my lengthy list of dookie/vomit-reminiscent foods of yore.

What IS surprising is that I think I'm starting to not like Indian food. *GASPS OF SHOCK AND HORROR* Thing is, I think it's only Indian food that *I* cook that I'm starting to not like though. A nice puff of naan and some spicy eggplant curry from the local Indian food restaurant sounds delectable to me right now. But the past couple weeks, when I whipped up two different Indian food dishes at home, they didn't make lunchtime too happy for the week. And the thing is, they weren't bad recipes. I just never found myself looking forward to actually EATING them at lunch.

The first Indian dish I whipped up was Georgia's Dahl with Eggplant and Spinach:



I ended up making lots of adjustments (cumin seeds to cumin powder, mustard seeds to mustard powder, chili paste to chili powder, etc.) mostly just because I didn't feel like going out and buying whole versions of things I already had in powdered form. And all in all it was a nice, tummy-warming recipe. And it made TONS--I had enough for like a small army. But it was so DENSE. (It looked nothing like the picture posted at Lady's Vegan Blog, as you can see.) Whenever I dipped a fork into it, I felt like a little kid playing with his mashed potatoes, 'cause I could've easily formed it into some huge edible sculpture, it was that thick. I ended up pawning off some of it on my friend P. She, in turn, I suspect ended up pawning it off on the garbage.

The other Indian food dish I made was Scrumpdilly's Spicy Red Lentil Dal:



This was UBER rich and decadent-tasting. And yet, for some reason, I felt like I was gonna die whenever I ate it for lunch. I could only get a part of the way through a portion before I just couldn't handle eating anymore. Which was weird because it really IS very yummy. But perhaps it was too heavy for lunch portions? I mean, all that coconut milk perhaps isn't something that's gonna leave you anything but sluggish for the rest of an afternoon. So again: this was actually a really tasty and simple recipe, but I just was like BLUH whenever I tried to eat this for lunch.

Perhaps I'm turning into an old fogey and no longer can handle spicy foods? Perhaps I'm turning into a palate curmudgeon? Perhaps I just need to make lighter lunches so I don't feel like I'm dragging around a belly the size of a house for the afternoon? Not sure.

Either which way, it saddens me, because Indian food used to be my favorite food. And now, well, I guess if it's going to drop that title, I'd really like to have something to enthusiastically take its place.

And not dookie.

Unless you're referring to the ass meaning.

In which case, PERHAPS I'd be amenable to that.