I took a break to eat pizza with Richard around 8.

Cooked some more.

I had to pur�e the pounds and pounds of soaked lentils with onion, garlic, and fresh cilantro. Mixed in more spices and salt. I pan-fried those into hundreds of little rounds. They turned out great, just had to stop at 5:30 this morning. It was taking forever to pan-fry 32 at a time. I didn't finish all the pur�ed lentil batter I made, I got through a little over half. I think I made 400? My goal was 600, but I was too tired to count them all.

I just had a 10-cup food processor so I bad to do the lentil pur�e in about 15 batches. Had a 5-gallon bucket to mix it up in.

In the meantime I was also making the chili sauce, from scratch starting with dried chilis. I had to stop cooking that as well at 5:30 and put it in the fridge. I hope it thickens up. I'll have to heat it up again for Saturday service.

I've still got to do the avocado dressing. I sent my boss and team an email at 5 saying I would be working from home this morning, coming in at 12:30. I gave the excuse I needed to be home for the maintenance people to come by and fix our heater, that I had to hide the kitties. Lies!

It's 9:30. I could get up now and make the avocado dressing. Mmm hmm. Check up on the chili sauce. Please oh please please please be thickened up!

Richard and I took an outing at 1 am to go to the bar for a couple of drinks and to get some free ice from our bartender friend. Got home at 2:30 to continue cooking. The apartment reeks of food. I had to pan sear the chili/onion/garlic pur�e and that was pleasantly odoriffic.

I decided I'm going to top the dish with chopped fresh cilantro, not the kale. Kale is too weird for judges. Just plain cilantro. Perfect. A dude at the bar gave me that advice last night.

I can't do any cooking tonight because one of our good good friends turns 40 today and we're going out.

Ok, 4 hours of sleep is fine. Right?

Gonna get outta bed and make that avocado dressing now.

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