Misos

I'm mad at this blog page right now because I spent one hour posting Sunday, and when I hit "publish", everything went away with the flash of an "error" message. I blame myself more than anything for not being more intuitive to the wily ways of the Internet and its peculiarities (why didn't I copy and save my post into Word just in case the Error would occur and all writing would be lost in cyberspace??) but nevertheless, here I am, back for more abuse. I just want to post a little about tonight's dinner fiasco and whatever random else.*First of all, what, again, is miso? Miso, from my at-a-glance research, is soybean paste. I don't quite calculate what that precisely means. I understand soy and I know that I like tofu in doses, but Craig cringes when the word "soy" crosses the path of his hearing, so I left out the fact that tonight's dinner would, in fact, contain something soy-ish. Or, soybean-ish. I've been striking out lately, right and left, from cauliflower "potage" (don't be fooled by the fancy language...the soup sucked) to even an average Chicken Curry attempt last night, which broached Indian food in its likeness but which lacked the authenticity and deliciousness of real Indian food (pardon me if being a New Yorker affords me the chance to call any Indian restaurant within a 5-mile radius "authentic" when in fact that could be untrue!) But I think tonight's dish, the Miso Chicken with Brown Rice (boring as that sounds!) turned out actually quite good. My hunt for miso was the most engaging part about miso itself. Miso itself is quite boring - looks something like brown gritty soft clay, but the hunt was interesting in that the aforementioned trusty Internet sent me to either an Asian market or a Health Food Store. I work one subway stop away from a Chinatown but that is in the opposite direction from home, so attempting to justify a trip in the opposite direction of home shaving minutes off my day following a too-long staff meeting from 4.03-5.40 didn't appeal to me. Thus, I wound up in a Health Food Store I've seen before on 1st Avenue. Of course, in the refrigerator section, as indicated to me by the Internet, all flavors of miso were available. I selected the mild white. And dinner tonight, despite the chaos of all the chopping which I underrated going in, turned out downright tasty, soy products and all. The dish rivalled a Shrimp Fried Rice dish I've made before (a healthy one, of course). But the thing with a Health Food Store is this: the pressure to become completely fit, sound, right and organic lingers in the air there. So if you do not walk out wondering vaguely what you can do to better your own health for your own purposes, likely you will never care about such things.*