Three Beautiful Things 04-16-2023: Welcome Back Eggplant, Sunday Crossword Puzzles, Lt. Columbo Nails a Crafty Forensics Expert

1. Eggplant made a triumphant return to our house on Saturday and to our dinner table tonight. Debbie bought a bunch of groceries on Saturday, including two eggplants. I bought eggplant regularly when we lived in Maryland, but hardly at all here in Kellogg and I was stoked when Debbie showed me she'd bought them.

For me, eggplant meant fixing a curry. The only paste we have on hand right now is red curry paste, so I combined a couple cans of coconut milk with paste, fish sauce, soy sauce, brown sugar, and dried kaffir lime leaves. I also decided to commit some extra time to this curry and I roasted the vegetables (eggplant, sweet pepper, onion) and the tofu in the oven in three different batches. 

I also souped up the jasmine rice a bit. I melted butter in the rice pot, added fresh ginger and some white onion bits, cooked them until the onion was tender, and then added rice and stirred it in the butter, ginger, and onion. I finished the process by adding water, bringing it to a boil, and cooking the rice on simmer with a lid on the pot. 

I hadn't fixed Thai curry for a while and I thought the sauce I made was a little too thick so when we dive back into the leftovers, I think I'll cut the sauce a bit with chicken stock.

2. In the last week or so, I've been going back into the New York Times Crossword Puzzle archives and doing Sunday puzzles from earlier this year. When I complete them, I'll go back to 2022. It's fun having these puzzles at my fingertips and enjoyable to experience all the clever ways the constructors of these puzzles come up with themes and little tricks to give the puzzles more dimension and we puzzle solvers more to think about.

3. After dinner and after several hours of listening to classical music via Spotify playlists, Debbie proclaimed she was ready for Columbo. We both enjoyed watching Columbo outwit a homicidal forensics expert who used his expertise to make it look like the husband of his lover had murdered a business rival. It took Columbo a while to see through the scheme. The way he figured it out and trapped the perpetrator and his lover was a blast to watch develop. One bit of advice: never ever underestimate Lt. Columbo.