What's for Dinner (...and Lunch) -or- How to make 3 different meals from the same ingredients, basically.

This post is all about food.  It is about the food I have made and eaten the past two days.  I recently bought a kilo of dried lima beans at Mercury food market, which is one of the best markets in UB.  They have all kinds of produce, meat, cheese, dried foods, and spices year round.  I made a lima bean salad with blueberry flavored craisins (that I/my mom bought at Dekalb Farmers Market last summer), blue cheese from Mercury, and yellow and red tomatoes on Sunday night.  I topped my bean salad with a vinaigrette I made from yellow mustard, balsamic vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, sugar, lime juice, basil and oregano.

For lunch on Monday I had the lima bean salad over pasta.  Delic, albeit a bad photo of it.

For lunch today I had the same lima bean salad on top of spinach with dried shrimp.  I know what you are thinking:  what, dried shrimp??  Gross.  However, Do Not Judge.  I bet you would like it too.  I heart dried fish.  I especially heart how you can buy dried fish at any ole little store in China and then munch on it as you are walking.  Yum.

 So you can see the salad's profile:

And, lastly, for dinner tonight I had something somewhat different, but nether-the-less somewhat the same.  I cooked some lentils with black bean seasoning (I dunno what it was actually....some packet I had that smelled really good) and sauteed green onions with eggplant, tomatoes and spinach.  These were seasoned with salt, pepper, and dill.  I stuck it all in a bowl and topped it with fitaki cheese.  Fitaki is a cheese that comes in a box here that has the consistency of goat cheese, but is from a cow and sort of tastes like a mild feta.  Also delic, but once again bad pics.  The electricity was out here for about 4 hours while I was cooking (we have a gas stove, so no electricity, no problem) and taking these pictures, so I will blame it on that, even though the lack of electricity has nothing to do with my poor picture taking skills.

Thank goodness the electricity came back on, so I could write this post about food.

In other news, most of my classes were good today.  Only two students cried my classes today, so it was probably the most un-tearful day in the history of my teaching 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade.   Would you like to know why students were crying??  Of course you would.  One student drew a line underneath the other girls' eyelid with a pen.  The girl who got wrote on started weeping and then the class boss came over to see what happened (the class boss is simply the bossiest student and because of this the class teacher makes that student the "boss") and told the girl who did the writing she was in for it, so she started weeping too.  I told all three of them to be quiet.  And then proceeded to ignore them.

I lied.  I forgot I had another student cry in one of my first grade classes.  And I had an intensive boy on boy fight I had to break up in another first grade class.  Ah, the joys of teaching youngsters.

I did realize this afternoon that I have forgotten to tell University of Washington's Graduate school yes and pay $100 to enroll there.  I don't think I am going there though, so I guess it doesn't matter too much.

I am really trying hard to not start every sentence with "I this" and "I that", but I think it is pretty hard.  Blogs are all about the person who is writing them, riight...yanaa.

Okay, so something interesting:  well maybe you will find it interesting.  Or funny.  Today I was in my housemate Thomas's room and I stepped on his shoe (he wasn't wearing it, it was just on the floor) and it made a noise and I suppose it sounded like a fart, because he accused me, "Did you just fart?"  "No!" I said a bit aghast that he would question my lady-likeness in such a fashion.  "It was the shoe," I said.  And then it reminded me of a story:
When I lived in the countryside and was still pretty new out there, I was in my school director's office one day with several other teachers.  It was cold outside, so I had my big down coat on.  I sat down on a chair in her office, and her chairs were new and covered with plastic wrap.  As my coat made contact with the plastic wrap, it made a loud farting noise, and everyone turned to look at me.  My director just looked at me.  The other teachers were polite at first and did not laugh, but then they were not.  I tried to explain in my barely comprehensible Mongolian that I DID NOT, in fact, fart - of course not.  WE americans DO NOT fart - it was the chair.  And so I went about demonstrating, but to no avail.  The chair and my coat would not cooperate and I was left looking like the gassy, mute American.  After that, at least once a week when I would see Tsolmon (one of the male teachers who was in the room when the chair farted), he would raise his leg and bend over slightly and make a farting noise.  For two years.

It was the shoe.  I am not kidding.