Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Got off to an early start today, hit an obstacle (tools I need aren't on my system yet), got too tired to focus (cold is gone, fibromyalgia remains), practiced a little guitar, finally found out what's going on house-wise this weekend (nothing tomorrow; next work will be in December -- but they did come over to look at the kitchen floor from the basement), told myself "right, I'll just have a really really brief lie-down then I'll pop out to the grocery for supplies and get back to work" about eight times, finally realized I needed to eat something before I would feel well enough to buy food...

Pasta and pesto sounded easy enough, but then I started getting ideas.

So dinner is, uh, whatever the name is for those little twists of pasta about 4cm long that look like short bits of a rope that's just had a nasty breakup with the pair of scissors it had been dating ... Anyhow, dinner is pasta; with pesto from a jar that I had to add some oil back into because some of the original oil had been drained off (not my fault!) so I used some of the oil from a jar of oil-packed olives; and some canned spinach because I realized there was a half-used container in the fridge that would eventually go bad if I kept forgetting it was there; and purple corn because the jar of dried kernels that I forgot had migrated to the back of the cupboard suddenly caught my eye.

Colour-wise it's pretty bleeping scary, what with the pasta a sort of "muddy lavender" colour (hey, a pinch of lavender would've worked in this!) against the very dark greens of the canned spinach and pesto, and the nearly-black kernels of the purple corn, but the flavours pretty much work together. The pesto takes out a lot of the chalkiness of the chalky nuttiness of the corn, leaving the nuttiness to complement the pesto, and the spinach steps back and assumes a support role (and makes it so not all the green in the dish is "fat masquerading as a vegetable" (not to be confused with avacado, "the fat that grows on trees")). The two things I have to remember for the future are that purple corn takes even longer to cook than I keep thinking (it's just a wee bit underdone), and that (I should've learned this the first time I tried to use it, but I forgot) purple corn should be cooked in its own pot and not added to other things until it's done. Sure made the water an impressive colour draining out of the colander, but I'm glad I'm not photographing the pasta for a cookbook.

So that plus a cup of decaf Earl Grey iswas dinner tonight.