Sesame and Wasabi Dressing and Forgotten Jalapenos

One of the worst pregnancy side effects I've encountered is "pregnancy brain".  I've basically lived in a fog for the past 5 months, having difficulty coming up with words and conveniently forgetting how to do things that I've done a zillion times before.

Oops.

Take, for instance, hair cuts.  I usually cut Colby's hair because all
he gets are buzz cuts, so it saves us like 20 bucks a month or so.  The clippers we got from Costco are probably one of the best investments we've ever made there, but I totally forgot that I usually shave the back of his neck, rather than use the bare clippers.  He may or may not have ended up with cuts on the back of his neck.  Ahem.


Suffice it to say, sometimes my inability to remember things interferes with what I'm doing, occasionally with disastrous results.  On the other hand, on Monday I planned ahead and took the time to go to our garden to get some surprisingly resilient jalapenos for dinner.  We built a raised garden box a la Springdale Farm because we have fire ant problems and we thought that this would keep them out.  The garden grew like gangbusters from mid-May to the end July or so, but then we sort of decided that it would be best to just let everything go because it was probably never going to rain ever again.  After about 3 months of very sporadic watering, the garden box looked something like this:

It turns out that basil is impossible to kill.  In fact, that basil is made entirely of stuff that reseeded from last year.  Our rosemary and sage were fine because those are desert-okay plants, but it turns out that zucchini, cucumbers, and green beans are not.  At least, they need to be watered more than once a month in 100+ heat.  Surprisingly enough, the mint plant that we neglected had bolted and seeded, so when we started watering the box again once it cooled off a lot, we found little mint plants all over the place.  I'll have to come up with creative uses for it.  I think the most surprising result was that not only did our jalapenos not die, they started to flower again and make more jalapenos.  I chose the biggest one.  It was pretty and it was going to be part of our dinner.



I made a version of Nigella's crab and avocado salad, but preg brain struck again and I ended up forgetting about the jalapeno that I had so lovingly harvested earlier.  Le sigh.  The dinner was actually really good, though.  Instead of her dressing, I adjusted the proportions to this:


Sesame and Wasabi dressing
1 t prepared wasabi
1 t sesame oil
2 T mirin
1 T rice wine vinegar
1/2 t kosher salt

juice of 1/2 lime

Whisk it all together in a small bowl and toss with 8 oz lump crab meat, 1 sliced avocado, and as much arugula as you can stand.

Om nom.