I just prepared some buckwheat kasha from this recipe. It was out of a vague desire to be more healthful than just making macaroni and cheese and to use something in my co-op house’s pantry, along with adjusting to the future (more on that in the next paragraph). I’m sure it will fill me up, but beyond that I can’t recommend it. Buckwheat has a taste which I find very hard to describe. Perhaps bitter and smoky? I feel like I should be eating it with black bread while lying on a stove. I am drinking it with water, which seems suitable ascetic, but perhaps I should have vodka or beer with it, since I can’t trust the water near my hut. Sorry for the stereotypes. Also, I realize I made enough kasha to fulfil Tevye’s dreams. Oops. Sorry.
During the summer I’ll be trying to cook the easiest, cheapest and heartiest vegetarian stuff I can find. I’ve come to call it the “biomass method.” Previously I’ve been on a co-op food system, which has happily provided enough food out of a common budget. But this summer I’ll be sharing the costs of food with only one other person and the food situation is going to be straitened. I have, though it may be at my parents’ house, the “Starving Student’s Vegetarian Cookbook.” It’s okay, but does anyone have any suggestions for other cookbooks or websites? More toward the casserole end than the salad. Buckwheat might be out of the picture (unless people have good buckwheat suggestions), but rice isn’t.
UPDATE: Returning to something of the anticipated political content of this blog, kasha (and porridge) are the cooked version of the dry “human food” I imagine in dispensers on street corners next to water fountains when I’m thinking in my “socialism from above” mode (as critiqued by Draper).
My poor laptop webcam photo of my buckwheat concoction. Also, Ubuntu's Cheese (a photobooth homage) crashes my whole computer.
Goldenes Kalb 