Vegan dinner in 20 minutes

I pretty much hate cooking in summer, but if I don't make and eat something then I am likely to starve. So I have become interested in making the quickest meals possible. This can be hard sometimes when you are a vegaquarian with a food intolerance to wheat. We don't even eat fish at home because I can't be bothered buying or learning how to actually cook it properly. So apart from a bit of cheese, milk, fish stock and oyster sauce, many of the meals we end up eating are practically vegan.



Here is an extremely quick and random dinner that I threw together in 20 minutes last night. On the left is a red cabbage salad. Just chop up half a red cabbage into small bits and mix it with two tins of beetroot (chopped), plus chopped parsley. This takes like, two minutes and tastes pretty good. The dish on the right was a random invention: I took a tin of lentils, rinsed the lentils and then put them in a foiled metal tray with some oil and put them under the grill for about 10 minutes. On the stove, I quickly fried some chopped cauliflower. Then I threw the lentils into the pan, along with some chopped cherry tomatoes, chilli powder, turmeric and tomato paste. That's all.

Attempt at Thai cooking 7/10

On the left is a kind of Thai salad made of up of: dragonfruit, orange, beansprouts, sunflower sprouts, coriander and chilli.On the right is a kind of Thai stir fry made up of capsicum, cauliflower, chilli and sweet chilli sauce. It all tasted okay and I think I'd give myself a 7/10. Not extremely delicious but highly edible. The creation of this meal however, was fraught with disaster and chilli-related physical pains.

I came at the chillis with a kind of innocent enthusiasm. C had recently been talking about the anti-cancer effects of capsaicins, so I kind of went a little mad with the chopping and throwing off mini chilli-bits into both dishes. All was well for about half an hour after I cooked and ate dinner,.. but about 45 minutes later, my hands started to burn like nothing else.

I washed my hands in water, in soap, in dishwashing liquid but the burning persisted. We looked up remedies online; I rinsed my hands in milk, in vinegar, in alcohol, rubbed them with an onion - everything gave temporary relief of about 10 minutes but after that the burning kept returning. Man it killed so bad, and the best I could do was sit still on the couch nursing my hands with a bag of frozen peas.

C kept checking on the internet and found various comments from other people who had burned their hands with chillis. Apparently the burning sensation was to last between 8-10 hours!. I had prepared dinner at 7, so I guessed that the sensation wouldn't subside until 3-5am. Aarghhh! There was so much heat in my hands, as I sat there staring at them, I honestly would not have been surprised if small flames had of leapt out of them, they were that hot.

Eventually out of desperation, we went to Mt Lawley chemist and I tried to explain my situation to the clerk. Unfortunately the clerk didn't really seem that sympathetic and kind of looked at me like I was half mad. Could he not interpret that I was talking figuratively rather than literally when I spoke of flame bursts erupting from my palms? Most unhelpfully he had nil suggestions, so I settled on an anaesthetic antibacterial skin-spray and a box of codeine enhanced painkillers.

Back at home, the skin-spray only gave 10 minutes of relief so around 1am I resorted to the last, and ultimately most successful option of dosing my self up with the opioid analgesics. I was happily knocked out for the rest of the night and awoke in the morning so very very happy to find that my palms were back to normal.

Moral of the story: Love the chilli, but use protection. Does this mean that I have to buy latex gloves from the supermarket if I want to chop chillis again? That would be an embarrassing item to purchase. Possibly even more embarrassing than female sanitary hygeine items. Actually I am not embarrassed to buy those anymore, but latex gloves,... they imply a whole plethora of possibly icky and unusual private practices. When purchasing the gloves I would have to mention to the clerk, "oh, I'm chopping chillis," but the excuse would probably sound like a lie.