Dept. of Healthy-Type Bachelor Chow

Tonight's incremental step towards foodwise self-sufficiency is brought to you by "glop," which is the affectionate nickname Mandy & I gave to a genera of dinner food characterized by chick peas, spinach, and diced tomatoes. When whirled together in a food processor, these ingredients achieve a healthy brown color & chunkily saucelike texture: thus "glop." However, glop can be left happily unwhirled.

In any condition, it may be served over rice or pasta, or with toasted pita bread on the side. I made up some fusilli with it tonight, and that goes well with it. It's good to have some parmesan cheese to put over it too.

Making glop is extremely easy and requires little cleanup. Obviously, it's vegetarian, too, if that's your bag. There might be a better-worked-out recipe for this in the Moosewood Cookbook; I can't recall if that's where this came from, or if Mandy just had it in her general repertoire already.

Ingredients:

• a few cloves of garlic
  
• 1 onion
  
• 1 can chick peas
  
• 1 can diced tomatoes, or similar quantity of diced fresh tomato
  
• 1 package frozen spinach (thawed in microwave)
  

Sautee the garlic & then the onion in olive oil. Add the chick peas once the onions go transparent; then the tomatoes in a few minutes; then the spinach in another few minutes. Stew until the texture is as good as you're going to get it. Doing all of this over medium heat seems to work just fine.

With rice or pasta, this will give you enough for three medium-sized meals or a couple of large meals.

Voila! Now that's good eatin'.

And if you don't mind my continued harping on the atmospheric effects of John Adams's orchestral music, I'll note that putting The Chairman Dances on the stereo will inflect dishwashing with the whimsically nocturnal sense of ritual it's supposed to have, and lasts almost exactly the right amount of time for cleaning up.