Meatless March

I've delayed finishing this post, which I started a while ago, because it starts out amusing enough, but gets quite heavy. It's long and filled with angst. If you're in a fragile place, consider this your trigger warning, and close this tab. The story actually starts a century ago. Members of my husband's family have been the first and only occupants of his parents' house for about that long. Earlier this year, they made a crazy discovery in the attic: a bunch of large, framed portraits of his ancestors. Some they could identify; others are just a mystery. Some of the portraits are downright creepy, and when we decided to throw a Halloween party, we hit upon the idea of hanging the portraits to create a spooky atmosphere. The ancestors bore witness to some karaoke. That was the beginning of the Curse of the Ancestors. The morning after the Halloween party, we awoke to find our basement flooded, ostensibly because a contractor had not sealed a hol...

I have a lot of random ingredients in my cupboard that I bought for a particular dish but serve no further purpose, so sometimes I just google those ingredients with "vegetarian" or "vegan" and maybe "slow cooker," and see what comes up. This time, the ingredient was pearl couscous, and the recipe that Google gave me was " Moroccan Slow Cooker Tagine with Chickpeas and Pearl Couscous ," which can be made with our without meat. Needless to say, I went without, and the dish is vegan that way. My squash was large so it yielded more than four cups, and I threw in four chopped carrots, and 1.5 cups of pearl couscous. If you're cooking it on low, as I did, you might want to turn it up to high when you add the couscous, or throw in the couscous earlier. And I added the raisins with the couscous, because dried fruit stands up well to slow-cooker treatment. I think more raisins would have been even better. I used just a little sprinkle of red pep...