The Dumbass Gourmet is the type of foodie who thinks about my next meal while I’m still eating the current one. (This may be why my diets always end with me eating an entire pizza — the thought of healthy food while still eating healthy food is too much to bear.) This afternoon, while spooning up some tomato soup at Panera bread, I got to thinking about the Portuguese sausage and kale soup that my friend D makes every now and then. Kale is a little too bitter for me and I was craving ground turkey, so when I got home I Googled “ground turkey soup” and discovered this recipe from Sunday Nite Dinner, a blog I’d never read before but which looks immensely interesting because the current recipe is for something called “flognarde.”

Anyway, I copied down the ingredients and bopped off to Kroger to the tune of the 5K mix that’s still on my iRiver from last month. (I never did tell you about that. I finished in 38:36 — not brilliant but not bad for a couch potato!) When I came home, I was presented with a dilemma: it was 6:50 p.m., 10 minutes before the start of The Amazing Race. Since no one keeps me from Phil Keoghan, I had to choose between eating a late dinner or cooking during the commercial breaks and hoping nothing burned during the show. In the end, I improvised by setting the cutting board on the ironing board in the spare bedroom and watching TV in there:

We need a TV in the kitchen.

Only minor injuries were sustained in the dicing of onions and garlic, which were soon simmering on the stove along with the ground turkey. After deftly slicing open the bag of spinach, I took it into the bedroom to chop it up … but some of it didn’t quite make it there:

The five-second rule does not apply when you live with someone who sheds like a feline.

After that, The Husband set the DVR and I bid Phil a fond adieu so I could prepare something other than floor soup. I bought a 10-ounce bag of spinach, but that seemed like too much so I saved some to make a salad tomorrow. Into the oven went a loaf of rosemary olive oil bread, which came out wonderfully warm and crusty — a perfect complement for the soup:

Non-floor soup!

Once it cools, I’ll bag the leftovers and freeze them for southcentral Kentucky’s next dreary, rainy day. Hopefully the sunny weather we’re supposed to get this week lasts — we bought a boatload of vegetable plants today for Balcony Garden, Part Deux. Maybe this year we’ll figure out a way to keep the cursed birds from eating all our strawberries.

For a week now, I’ve been battling what the UrgentCare doctor calls a cocktail of sinus infection, bronchitis, and ear infection. With their powers combined they are! — a great big pain in my rear. Until yesterday, when he prescribed me a trio of drugs including codeine, I hadn’t slept a full night in quite some time. I’d been existing on water, apple juice, and whatever bland offerings our pantry had, so once I started to feel a little better I decided I wanted something with some pizazz. Something … with curry powder.

A lonely mango has been rotting in our fridge since spring break, so I decided to start there. Allrecipes.com offered up mango rice, so I pulled out the slightly squishy fruit and got to work. Except I didn’t realize just how rotten it had become, because there were about three slivers that were usable — the rest was gray and kind-of spotty. Crap, crap, crap, I sang to myself, until I remembered the granny smith apple sitting on my desk. I couldn’t remember how long it had been there, but it didn’t seem to be imploding in on itself like rotting apples do, so I grabbed it and sliced with gusto.

Did you know apples start sprouting from the inside? Makes sense ’cause that’s where the seeds are, but I was amazed to see little coiled roots trying to push their way out of the core. Momentarily defeated and a bit grossed out, I decided to slice off the outer edges (which looked fine) and add it to the mango mix. The rice called for a bit of chicken broth and some brown sugar, so I got that going, adding the fruit at the last moment so it was warm but not mushy.

The mango rice recipe included curried chicken, but after perusing it I decided to go my own way. I diced some garlic and added curry, paprika, salt and pepper, which I figured I would sprinkle over the chicken. But, ah — you’re apparently supposed to rub it in, so I rolled up my sleeves, dipped my fingertips into the dry mix, and went to work. It was a little awkward. I wondered if I should be asking it where it’s from and how it liked its stay at Kroger, or, at the very least, playing a little soothing Enya music. Into the oven it went, out came the rice and some peas, and here we go:

Peas artfully arranged by The Husband.

It actually wasn’t bad. I put some curry and paprika on my rice and some pepper on the peas, and it made for a pretty satisfying dinner. Of course, I was comparing it against ramen noodles and graham crackers, so that’s not saying much. The Husband enjoyed it despite his dislike of curry, so I may give my mother’s chicken curry a shot next. We probably only had that dish a handful of times when I was a child, but it remains one of my favorites. See you next time!