I rushed through the making of dinner tonight because my new laptop unexpectedly appeared on my doorstep this morning and I wanted to go play with it. Since I also wanted to make sure it recognized my camera, I snapped a few pictures before eating, but I can’t say this post is up to my usual standards of bombarding you with a million photographs. But doing things I often do on the laptop will tell me what all I settings I need to set and what I need to download and stuff, so here’s a boring post for you!

Cabbage and Seitan “Ham” Skillet Dinner

1 onion, sliced
1/4 pound seitan ham
1/2 jalapeno, chopped
1/2 head savoy cabbage, chopped
1 cup water
1 vegan “beef” bouillon cube
1/2 cup Dutch Apple Catsup
freshly ground salt and pepper, to taste

Heat some olive oil up in a large skillet. Add the onions and sauté for 5 minutes, until beginning to brown. Add the “ham” and jalapeno; sauté for another 5 minutes. Add the cabbage, water, bouillon cube and salt and pepper. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, until cabbage is soft; about 15 minutes. Stir in the catsup.

That was my own recipe, thrown together with little thought. I also made a tossed salad. I enjoy making up my own salad dressings, but tonight I adapted a dressing I found in one of those “old time” cookbooks I borrowed from the library. Only this book claims to contain recipes from “historic” Alexandria, Virginia, but the only thing historic about it is the fact that all the contributors were female and all used their husbands’ names instead of their own first names. It seems to be from the 1970s or thereabouts. A time when a can of soup was considered something to base a recipe around. In fact, the recipe for this dressing does just that. It was called Tomato Salad Dressing and instead of the can of tomato soup it dictated, I used tomato sauce. I decided it tasted more like Bloody Mary Salad Dressing. I’d share the recipe with you, but I’ve decided I don’t think Bloody Marys should dress salads. The original recipe noted that the dressing was good on “cold cuts of beef”, so maybe it’d be better on some seitan. OR WITH VODKA.

Here’s my new laptop, which I got after arguing with Mark for about a year. But because it’s me and Mark it was a backwards argument: he arguing that I needed a new laptop and me insisting I didn’t. I finally gave in when it became impossible to boot my old one. By the time I got home from work today, Mark had removed that bloody awful Vista and installed the latest version of Ubuntu for me, and I have to say that after 8 years of using Linux on my personal computers, it is really nice to be able to plug stuff in and have it magically work. Like my camera. And (cross your fingers!) maybe my iPod! And I’d set aside the evening to download and install all the apps I’ll need, but the only thing I could think of that wasn’t already installed was Picasa. I just needed that and a picture of The Toonse for the desktop and I was set!