So happy to oblige you, mr. colon.

Breakfast yesterday, perhaps not so impressive, but personally rewarding just because of the rarity of this food item in my life, two pepperoni rolls. If you're not familiar with pepperoni rolls, the name is pretty self-explanatory. It's bread wrapped around pepperoni and then baked. There are lots of versions of this around the world, or at least around the parts of the world where pepperoni and bread are common enough. My favorite iteration were the pepperoni rolls from a now defunct supermarket chain in my home town that used pepperoni cut into sticks about 3/8" wide and 3' long with a dough that featured corn flour, making for a sweet, crumbly roll that became very crispy on the bottom as the pepperoni oils released into the baking pan.

The best my hometown currently has to offer is about 5 slices of pepperoni cut in sturdy slices from a roll that is about 3" across wrapped up in a swirl of dough that might otherwise end up as a hot dog bun or sandwich roll. The roll is entirely closed so all of the pepperoni juices stay in the roll and saturate the surrounding bread, but the bread itself isn't very interesting. Still, two of them provided a solid enough breakfast without pushing my insides too far after yesterday's strange dyspepsia.

Lunch was another dietary rarity of note that I only get when I go back to my home town, cabbage rolls. I have a stronger emotional attachment to these rolls than the ones I ate for breakfast because this is my soul food. My mother makes these Eastern European specialties when I manage to beg her enough. They are no small feat, since they require hours of preparation, so we usually make them by the dozens, usually for big family events, but this time they were mainly for me to take several Tupperware containers full of them back to Manhattan. (Run-on running gag, how would I explain myself without you?)
The cabbage rolls were done when I got home Friday night, but there was no shortage of food all weekend and it was my goal to not gain 5 lbs. while home for the weekend. As you may have guessed by my choice of blogspiration, my family's main form of recreation, communication, consolation, celebration and affirmation is food. We are not a thin family, but not as hefty as you might think. Through the family breakfasts, 50th birthday parties, Stanley Cup Finals noshing, more family breakfasts and Sunday night grill-fests I didn't get a chance to dive into my cabbage roll stockpile until lunch today.
I threw a few frozen french fries on top of two cabbage rolls with a healthy dollop of the excess cabbage, sauerkraut, dill and tomato juice that they are roasted in. I like to eat the cabbage rolls with mashed potatoes, but I didn't really have time to make mashed potatoes before work. They were uncooked, standard-cut seasoned fries. I nuked them for a minute before microwaving the whole thing for about 3 minutes with occasional stirring, and in all the simmering in juices and whatnots they came out pretty close to mashed potatoes anyway. They were a great lunch, anyway. I have about 18 more where those came from and I am looking forward to making a big pile of mashed potatoes and tucking in to some serious Slovak sustenance some supper soon.

But not in this posting. Dinner was a Thai curry done up from scratch. My local grocer doesn't have Thai curry paste readily available and I haven't made it a priority to pick any up as I wander the city's myriad fooderies so last night I broke out the food processor and set to work.

I didn't have a recipe on hand, but I was adapting my Indian curry starter to the occasion. I'd read up on Thai curries one afternoon about four years ago, so I wouldn't take this as authoritative, but the results were highly edible so you can take this basic outline as a springboard for your own exploration.

I started with 7 cloves of garlic, a 2"x1" piece of ginger, as much of my lemon basil plant as I could cut back in good conscience (two stems about 3" long and the resulting leaves, admittedly not that much) and two tablespoons of the spicy tomato soup from my uncle's greenhouse operation. This initial paste could have benefited from more ginger, more basil, and some lemongrass or kaffir lime leaves, if I would have had any on hand. The food processor also makes a very chunky paste. Real scratch enthusiasts will encourage you to grind the ingredients together, but I just didn't have the audacious ambition to pour an hour of my life into my mortar and pestle.

Toss the paste into a pan with a little oil. I used olive oil with a kiss of sesame oil because that was what was easiest to reach out of my pantry. I fried cubed potatoes in the paste until they started to brown, then I added some carrots and onions till the onions started to soften and I doused the whole thing off with two cans of coconut milk.

I transfered about a cup of this mixture to a small pot on the side, added a cup of water and used this to stew a chicken leg/thigh. The separate cooking method was out of deference to my roommate's vegetarianism. The curry didn't really need meat but the chicken had been in the freezer for quite some time and was in need of being eaten. It was just begging for it. I obliged.

As the main curry was getting on, I added a cubanelle pepper and about 20 whole basil leaves, also begging to be eaten before their prime was lost to the entropy of the produce drawer. The stems to the basil I added to the pot with the chicken. Then I added about two teaspoons of chili powder and a similar amount of dried ginger to compensate for the lack of ginger in the initial paste. Then I finished the curry with a dash of Adobo seasoning and the juice of one lime, tossing the juiced lime rinds into the chicken's pot. All of this stewed a bit as we waited for the rice cooker to finish it's job. I started the jasmine rice a bit late. Then I spent about half an hour on the phone with an old friend from home before pulling the chicken meat and devouring a big bowl of spicy, creamy, tart curryliciousness.

As an epilogue, the vegetarian roommate never did come back for dinner. I can only infer that he came home as his door was firmly shut when I woke up this morning. He must have been out late, getting drunk, chasing tail. Ah, cosplay, how you do lead manboys to ruin.
That's probably not as true as either of us want it to be, but why do we have roommates if not to fictionalize their lives for our own amusement?