One of the must-go places in Ithaca and a favorite with students was Collegetown Bagels. It made a wide variety of sandwiches with different kinds of bagels and toppings.

This is my made-up version of one of those:

You need

mini bagels
salsa
chicken strips (optional)
cream cheese
mozzarella cheese
cheddar cheese

Just spread the cream cheese on the bagels so that the hole in middle of the bagel is covered. Then spread the salsa and chicken strips (if you have them). Cover it with cheddar cheese and mozzarella, put it in the oven for 2-3 minutes or until the cheese is melted and it’s ready to eat. That simple.

Pickles or as we call it Torshi is an essential part of the Iranian cuisine and one of my favorite parts. Almost anything you can imagine can be pickled, eggplants, whole limes, onions, even walnuts, beets and cherries. The easiest one to make and a really good one is pickled garlic. It is just garlic put in a jar and filled with vinegar.

But then you have to wait, at least 6 weeks. But my experience says you shouldn’t try it less than a year. They will turn brown and so soft and good. The traditional wait is 7 years. After that they will turn almost black and you can imagine how soft.

To make it more interesting you can use different vinegars. The best I’ve had was with apple cider vinegar. One version I read in my favorite Iranian cooking book, New Food of Life, was to put barberries in the center of the bulbs.

I am feeling nervous for no reason and leaving writing a new post to the last minute hasn’t helped. So just what I did today:

- Classes started in Princeton today. I wanted to attend some economics classes, since all this talk about economy made me understand I know nothign about economy. The problem is there are two introductory courses. Microeconomics and Macroeconomics, and I don’t know which one suites me more. So I tried Macro today. It was fun. The professor was really energetic and enthusiastic. She spent the first lecture on recession and I think the focus of this course will be on explaining the recession. One interesting point was the participants of the class are asked to read The Economist. On monday I will try the other one and then I have to choose.

- My package from Amazon was delivered today. I had called USPS before and they said there is no indication that the post office actually has received the package, and it just shows delivered. So this must be a wrong record. That’s it! But then in the afternoon the postman brought the package.

- I made Ratatouille for dinner. After watching Julie and Julia I wanted to make a French dish out of Julia Child’s recipes but all of the ones I could find online were really difficult, even the omelette. But I found a recipe of Ratatouille on Cooking for Engineers. It is totally different from how Julia Childs makes it but it is French. So I made it today. And here is a picture:

To make good use of my Kitchen Aid Mixer I decided to make pizza dough. I used the New York Times recipe.

I didn’t have a pizza stone or a peel or even a rolling pin. But the end result was awesome. Maybe not the shape but the taste was really good. For the toppings we used tomato sauce, bella mushrooms and ricotta cheese.

And also one with fresh slices of tomato, fresh mozzarella and dried basil ( I didn’t have fresh basil leaves, should try it later).

We both liked the second one better and made two more of that (I had divided the dough to four parts).