Chili oil

I am still daydreaming about this avocado on toast I had for dinner last night.

It all started with a post on The Hungry Tiger a couple of months ago. Said post described a sandwich very much like this one. I was especially taken with the idea of chili oil infused with ginger, Szechuan pepper, star anise and other delicious things. Then I forgot about it, until I was racking my brain trying to come up with some homemade Xmas presents. I made the oil, and then tested it on this sandwich. Perfect! (Note the chili flakes: I couldn't even wait to strain the oil before using it, it smelled so good.) (The oil recipe is from Mark Bittman, who apparently got it from the proprietors of Szechuan Gourmet. But, like the Hungry Tiger, I left out the scallions.)
Xmas present problem solved. But now I need to make more!

No Oil Cake?

Carrot cake with pineapple (crushed, drained) and buttermilk and applesauce is dense. No coconut lightness, no walnut chunks... but this cake made my kitchen smell like spiced donuts. Where does that "fry" smell come from? Was it the 2 egg whites, and one whole egg? Was it the mix of spices and a longing for "fry"?
I think the next time I do carrot cake, it'll be with some oil. Or butter. The crumb was too dense, and even though my head knew it was "healthy," I wanted something that was more like cake.
I got the golden raisins here at a little shop I stumbled into in Philadelphia. They are sugary sweet -- too much for my taste. But aren't the lovely?

Thanksgiving

Shiitake bacon

I have a new favourite fake bacon: shiitake bacon.

I got the idea from the PPK, in its new home here. Following a suggestion in that thread, I used dried, pre-sliced shiitakes. I reconstituted them with the barest amount of hot water, plus oil, liquid smoke, smoked paprika and salt. I think they were in the oven for about 30 minutes -- after about 15 minutes they were smelling really good, and I kept checking on them every 5 minutes to make sure they didn't burn. In the end there was a nice mixture of crispy and chewy textures.

The shiitake bacon found its way into some amazing VBLATs (vegan bacon lettuce avocado tomato). You know the fake bacon is good when it can upstage avocado in a sandwich.

Green tomatoes

One of my tomato plants died. It was the biggest one, with green tomatoes all over that I'd been eyeing for weeks, and then it was suddenly struck down with a disease (fusarium wilt, I believe).

I harvested all the green tomatoes. I'd never tried them before, but green tomatoes are tasty! We had fried green tomatoes, and on Friday (which reached 38 or 39 degrees C -- that's 100 F) we had gazpacho with red and green tomatoes. But maybe the best meal was this one: roasted green tomatoes with tempeh, based on this recipe for chicken.

Looking at the recipe now, I see that I forgot the basil. But it was delicious anyway, and I really loved the combination of the tomatoes with ginger. The tempeh worked out pretty well. I had marinated it in a sort of all purpose marinade (soy sauce/oil/lemon juice, I think). I had to add some of the marinade part way through cooking because it was starting to dry out.

Liege waffles

Recently in a conversation with R about waffles, I promised I'd make him the best waffles ever. And so I finally got around to trying gaufres de Liege (Liege waffles). They're like brioche, but cooked in a waffle iron. The dough is full of pearl sugar, which melts and crisps on the outside. Delicious!

Veganizing notes: I used the recipe linked above, replacing the butter with vegan margarine, and the egg with a pinch of lecithin and some vital wheat gluten (I got the lecithin and gluten tips from Parsnip Parsimony's post on brioche).

Sidenote: if anyone can tell me why lecithin is so widely available here, I'd love to know. Seriously, it's in every supermarket's health food section. I don't think I ever noticed it in the US. The pack I bought suggests sprinkling it on cereal, soup or salad as a 'pleasant addition'. If I'm going to be sprinkling some strange granules on my cereal, I want the packet to be selling me on how awesome it's going to taste, or what miraculous things it's going to do for my health. The mere promise of pleasantness doesn't really do it for me. (Plus, I tasted some, and... NOT TASTY.)

Kale Salad!

I've seen these really beautiful kale salad posts on SmittenKitchen and 101Cookbooks, but my version is sort of a hack's salad with lots of whatever in it (like a regular salad). This one has wild rice with roasted butternut squash, dried cherries, feta, almonds, and raisins. The wild rice-squash mixture is actually a pilaf I made, so it has onions in there too... but I've had this for lunch now two days in a row, and with a slice of German seeded rye bread, it's superb.

Seeduction

Our big natural food grocery store sells this bread called "Seeduction," which isn't vegan (I think it has an egg wash at least, and maybe some honey), but it is mighty tasty. They make these little rolls, too, which are perfect for sandwiches. This is a leftovers lunch that I photographed because I thought it was such a brilliant use of the little bits in my fridge/freezer.
While I was making it, I had the unfortunate experience to say something that immediately made me think of Homer Simpson. Okay, here it is: "I loooove mayonnaise." So there.

Toast the Oats and Pecans

I made the oatmeal raisin cookies from the book I always attribute to "Peter Barley," The Modern Vegetarian. I used 1c oats and 1c pecans, and toasted them, as he suggests, for 10 minutes before pulsing them. (Half the oat/nut mix is pulsed into a fine powder, half is roughly cut.)
These are FINE cookies. Even better, methinks, because I added chocolate to them. I couldn't resist.

Aussie Yogurt?

Forgive the dramatic sun/shade, but is it true? Do you have your own yogurt Down Under?

Magical Fruit

For my birthday, my sister gave me some cold.hard.cash. to buy beans. This is my haul. I have a dish of them today -- Cannelini beans -- with roasted butternut squash and goat cheese. I went wrong on the dressing (sherry vinegar?) and on the other vegetable ingredient (radish sprouts). But the beans are beautiful.
They're FAR larger than the cannelini beans at the grocery, and I've blended them to bulk up a soup to good effect. Just this week, I followed a recipe for baked beans, and turned out a plump, gorgeous batch. (The recipe for baked beans is from the "Modern Vegetarian" cookbook, and calls for the following to spice: a quartered carrot, a celery sprig cut in half, one onion pierced with three whole cloves, a bay leaf, and some unpeeled garlic (+ kombu). Stir in, when the vegetables have seasoned plump beans and are discarded, 3T tamari, 4T maple, 2t dijon, and 2T olive oil. A terrific broth.
Will the popcorn be purple? Will the chia seeds improve the nutrients in my cells? Gosh, I hope so...

Sourdough pancakes

I love my sourdough starter. However, I find these days that breadmaking doesn't really fit in my schedule. (Or maybe it is truer to say that I am more impatient.) What to do, what to do? The answer -- if only this were the answer to more of life's questions -- is pancakes.

I've tried a lot of sourdough pancake recipes, but this is the best. It's from Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery, via Wild Yeast. Unlike a lot of sourdough pancake recipes, this one uses baking powder in addition to baking soda, and it works best with nice lively starter. The end result is pretty much the fluffiest, tastiest vegan pancake I've ever made.

So here's the routine: in the late afternoon or evening, pull the starter out of the fridge and feed it enough for the pancake recipe (I've been making half batches, so this means at least 125g flour and 125g water. A half batch is just barely enough for us two.). My starter is usually fed white flour, but I've been feeding it wholemeal when I make pancakes. After sitting on the counter overnight, in the morning the starter is ready to go -- measure out the required amount of starter and simply whisk in the other ingredients (I've been veganizing with egg replacer, but I have a hunch that its not necessary.)

I wish this photo were better. I was in too much of a rush to get eating these babies, so just took a quick snap before the syrup went on and they got gobbled up.

Mango season

Serendipity

So, when it comes to food shopping, I bristle at the thought of planning a week's meals and writing a list. I do bring a list, but it's of staples that we've run out of. And when it comes to fruit and veggies, I buy what looks good and what's cheap.

This means that I can have a recipe bookmarked for ages before it happens that all the necessary ingredients are in the house at the same time. It's only taken about a year for me to get around to this recipe: cauliflower with almonds, capers and raisins. (The capers were the hold-out ingredient -- somehow they haven't made it onto the staples list, but I think they might deserve a place there now.)

This was really good. The story behind the dish is that it was developed to convert a cauliflower-hater. I don't know whether it can do that, but this cauliflower-lover liked it a lot. It's a bit of a fussy recipe, with a few separate steps, but it's easy enough. The cauliflower is sauteed and then finished in the oven. It's topped with capers, almonds, raisins, herbs (I only had parsley, and left out the chives and tarragon. If I had waited until I had tarragon in the house, I don't think I ever would have gotten around to making this.) and toasted bread crumbs. Delicious!

For lunch today I had a simplified version: cauliflower with capers, raisins and parsley -- still good. I think I am officially a fan of the raisin + caper combination.

Sourdough crepes

I wanted a snack, and my sourdough starter was sitting out on the counter, and one thing led to another.

I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner. Take some sourdough starter, add a pinch of salt, a spoonful or two of chickpea flour, (a tiny bit of sugar if you want), and whisk in soymilk until you get crepe batter. (Optional addition for flax-fiends or the omega-three deprived: a spoonful of ground flaxseed.)

My dad the expert crepe maker always insisted that you let the batter rest for at least half an hour, to let the flour hydrate properly. But sourdough crepe batter is ready to go right away. Yay for instantaneous crepe-based gratification.

Kale!

This is the first kale I've had in over a year (it's not really a thing here). I finally found some, and then it found its way into my belly (sauteed with garlic, salt and pepper, and a squeeze of lemon at the end). I did not share this with anyone.

Birthday Dinner!

Another one of my famously terrible photos... but you get the idea. Forgive me the chickens -- I had lots of meat eaters for dinner. The pie is tomato pie, from Laurie Colwin's Gourmet colums. The sweeet potatoes were dry (it's still early for them), but the beans were excellent. There's a big salad down the table, a rice salad (local rice!), and another green bean salad and dressings. I have to say, I was exhausted when it was all over. I had fun, though. Good fun. Worth every minute of prep.

Cake 3

Buttermilk cake with lemon frosting. Cake too squishy to frost entirely, so it has big pancakey layers of frosting. (I need to work on this.)
My birthday dinner was on my sister's birthday (the day before mine). Another guest - a new girl in town M met and, on her funniness and niceness, promptly invited - didn't mention it, but her birthday was actually the night of the dinner. I made this cake the day after, and we dropped it by her house.

Cake 2

Chocolate chocolate, topped with animal crackers.

Cake 1

Almond (naked).

Blowfish for vegetarians

Recently in the New York Times, Harold McGee had a fascinating article about baking baking soda. It turns out that when you expose baking soda to heat, it changes its chemical composition (from sodium bicarbonate to sodium carbonate).

After I baked the baking soda, I used it in two ways suggested by the article. First, pretzels, and second, alkaline noodles. The pretzels were okay -- I didn't think they were much different from my usual recipe which uses plain old baking soda. But the noodles! They were very exciting and I really want to make them again soon.

I didn't have any semolina on hand, so used plain, all purpose, white flour with some added vital wheat gluten. The noodles worked out so well -- they were bouncy and slippery (I'm not sure why the word 'bouncy' describes them so much better than 'chewy', but there you go). I had never really thought about what makes the family of yellow Asian noodles (I know them as Hokkien noodles or yellow mee, but they have lots of names) distinctive, but it turns out that they are all alkaline noodles.

R was very skeptical about my experiments with sodium carbonate. If you touch the stuff it could irritate your skin, so in his eyes I was dealing with a dangerous ingredient, like blowfish.

Plum Jam

This is a terrible picture of the plum jam I made this morning. 7 or 8 plums from the market had been hanging out in my fridge, so I boiled them up with some sugar and water and the juice of half a lime. I have been reading Laurie Colwin's old columns in Gourmet magazine (collected in "Home Cooking" and "More Home Cooking"), and to say that I have been enjoying these books is grossly understating the point. She wrote about plum jam, and I knew instantly what needed to be done.
I've already made my birthday cakes -- chocolate, for the People -- and a flourless almond cake for me. They're in the freezer. This is the filling for the almond cake. I made it in small rounds (6"), so it'll be a very tall four layers by the time I split and jam them. I plan to serve it (Saturday) with tofu custard. Yum.

It lives!

A confession: I forgot about my sourdough starter for months, and when I finally did unearth it from the fridge, it had completely dried out. Bad, bad baker!

I rehydrated it, and started daily feedings, but things weren't looking good. It smelled okay, but never got bubbly, and I thought it might be hopeless. But then, after about 10 days, there were bubbles. And now, we have bread:

I used the Natural Starter Bread recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini. I used a mixture of white, wholemeal and rye flours (about 200, 300, 100 grams respectively), plus some vital wheat gluten. One of the things I like about this recipe is that it has a long rising time -- my starter is kind of slow, and the 8 hour rise worked nicely for it. I wasn't sure about the recipe's suggestion of starting the bread in a cold oven (I've always assumed that you get the most oven spring from a preheated oven) so I used my usual technique based on the no knead bread one (where you preheat the cast iron pot, and bake the bread in that, for 30 minutes covered and about 20 minutes uncovered).

The bread worked out very nicely, with an excellent sourdough flavour.

Sometimes, We Need a Nice Sandwich and a Novel

The real treat here may be the soup (in the glass jar). Saute 1 onion, add lots and lots of sliced zucchini, and pour in some water with bouillon (not enough to cover zucchini). Steam/cook the squash until it looks soft. Add one small bunch chopped dill, puree, and serve room temperature or even cold. Delicious.
I believe I had this lunch, with a cloth napkin, while I was reading "Elegance of the Hedgehog." An excellent way to spend two days.
(I scored these plates - 4 - at a "moving sale" hosted by a woman I barely know who was moving to Scotland. I doubled my plate count.)

The Hot, Hot Oven

On the final days of a meditation retreat in early summer, I had begun to think of worldly things. Two worldly things became interesting to me in those days: an oven thermometer, and an oven timer. I bought them shortly after the end of the retreat.
I haven't been baking much this summer, but any time there is a birthday (a twelfth, a forty-seventh, a forty-fifth), I fire up the oven and make a double-layer chocolate cake. This is an old picture, but you get the idea... they're messy cakes, and obviously home made. The last one was covered in chocolate-covered star-shaped cookies. It looked crazy.

Tuesdays and Saturdays

This morning at the market, I came away with these things: kale, cantaloupe, bread & butter pickles, eggs, green beans, and cherry tomatoes. Jim, who grows organic vegetables and fruit, is especially nice to me. Today opened up his cooler to pack my bag of kale with all of his scraps. He wouldn't take anything extra for them.
I came home and made a peach salsa and a kale salad. This photo is from a week ago, when I re-made the zucchini soup. I used some of these peaches for my salsa, and froze most of them for smoothies. Before I head off to work, it's already 86 degrees or so, and the cold cold drink is lovely.
The market - the farmers, the food, the event of being there - is absolutely my favorite part of every week.

Easy Dinner

You may not know it in the Southern Hemisphere, but today is the start of College Football Season here in the Deep South. I made a very very easy dinner, with ingredients almost entirely from the market: the soup is built from bouillon, and some roasted tomatoes and red pepper; it was a bit lemony by the end (?), so I added a small spoonful of basil pesto. The sprouted wheat toasted cheese is filled with goat cheddar curds. The pickles, bread and butter, I love to put inside the sandwich while it's hot and gooey. Yum.

Election night baking

I had to do something to ease my nerves. And so, bread:

Even though the results were coming in and not looking too good, when I pulled this beautiful loaf out of the oven, I cheered up for a bit. (Basic boule from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, with a bit of sourdough starter added, baked in a Dutch oven.)

Hummus pizza

Without tomato sauce or cheese, it feels a bit weird to call this a pizza. Whatever you want to call it, it was good: hummus, topped with lemon slices, olives, pomegranate and sun-dried tomatoes. I wasn't sure that this combination would work, but it really did -- sweet, salty and tangy, with a nice hit of garlic from the hummus.

The tomatoes got a bit burnt, but still tasted pretty good. (The pomegranate bits had been frozen, which changed their colour but they held up pretty well.)

When I did some googling about hummus as a pizza topping, it seemed like quite a few people thought it better to reduce the amount of time the hummus is in the oven, by putting it on after par-baking the crust, or even putting it on after the pizza is done. However, I thought this worked out well, and don't think the long cooking time (12 min) hurt the hummus at all.

(Pizza specs: as usual, I used my favourite dough recipe from Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day. This time I used 2/3 wholemeal and 1/3 white flour and it was very nice. I got some nice bubbles in the crust, maybe because the toppings were lighter and drier than usual.)

World peace cookies

You might think that the name of these cookies is a bit effusive. I did, until I made them. They're very good. The recipe (you can find it here) is by Dorie Greenspan.

 A couple of notes:

• There is a very troubling sequence of instructions in the recipe. First you are told that the dough may be crumbly, and not to worry about it. Then you are told to form said dough into logs. The recipe does not seem concerned that crumbly dough may not want to be formed into logs. (I found that swearing at the dough helped a lot with this step.)
• While the recipe instructs you to refrigerate the dough for at least 3 hours, if you are like me and don't read all the way through and have plans to bring these cookies to a dinner party in about an hour and a half, don't worry. Just stick the dough logs in the freezer for as long as you can (about 40 minutes worked fine for me).

Lemon pizza

Well, technically it was a lemon, thyme and olive pizza. The lemon was kind of overpowering, in a good way.

(The other pizza specs: olive oil pizza dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2/3 all purpose flour, 1/3 whole wheat, plus some vital wheat gluten) and mozzarella style Cheezly.)

Saag paneer

I really can't believe that this worked.

I had some 'mostarella' (good god, when will the wacky names for vegan cheeses end?) which I made from a recipe in The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. It's an oatflour and cornstarch thickened 'cheese', flavoured with tahini, nutritional yeast and lemon juice. (I left out the onion powder, and added one cube of stinky tofu.)

I had some spinach, and had a hankering for saag paneer. At first I assumed that I wouldn't be able to pan-fry the mostarella, because it is pretty soft. But I gave it a shot anyway, and it worked!

Rosemary and basil

So here we are in the middle of winter in Perth, and I find myself obsessed with basil and rosemary. Luckily winter in Perth is sort of a joke, compared to Massachusetts (a typical winter day time temperature here is 18C or 64F) so I actually still have basil growing in the garden.

And as for rosemary, many of our neighbours have rosemary hedges in their front yards. I don't feel bad about grabbing a few sprigs here and there while walking the dog.

So this is how we ended up eating some pretty summery looking meals this week. Here you see beans with pesto and cherry tomatoes, green beans and mushrooms, and baked polenta 'fries'. (The polenta was pretty great -- I made it quite cheesy-tasting with miso and nutritional yeast.)

And here is baked eggplant with a quick tomato sauce and pesto, stir fried cabbage with lemon and pepper, a quick focaccia topped with rosemary, and rosemary-roasted tofu cubes (from Vegan Soul Kitchen). The tofu was great -- the baking technique is really cool. The tofu cubes puff up and get crisp on the outside.

New toy

On Sunday, I went to a charity second-hand sale and scored this beauty for $5.

It's a vintage Kenwood Chef, probably about 35 years old, in perfect working order. In the UK and Australia, these guys have the same sort of reputation as old Kitchenaid mixers. (Of course, they're not as pretty, but oh well.)

In the picture, the mixer is kneading bagel dough. It did a great job on the dough -- after 6 minutes, it passed the windowpane test easily.

I'm looking forward to making lots of bread with this thing. And marshmallows!

Coconut muffins

I recently bought a young coconut. After we drank the coconut water inside, I was left with the question of what to do with the coconut meat. It was too soft to grate, and its flavour was quite subtle -- not that exciting to eat on its own. But cut into chunks and baked into muffins, it was amazing.

Even though it was quite a lot of work cutting into the coconut, I am thinking about getting another one just so I can make these muffins again. (The coconut water was great too -- it wasn't the flavour that blew me away, but the scent, which was surprisingly floral.)

I used this recipe with a few modifications*. (I should take a moment to praise this recipe -- it is terrific. I say this as someone who has made many failed muffins.) I used some cooked and pureed pear for the cup of fruit in the recipe, and added the chunks of coconut plus some Dutch chocolate sprinkles.

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* I reduce the oil to 1/4 cup, use regular whole wheat flour, reduce the sugar to 1/2 cup and increase to 3/4 if necessary, replace the egg with a 'flax egg' or just extra water, and use soymilk + vinegar for the buttermilk. So far the fruits and vegetables I've used to great success are: pumpkin, pear, apple, banana, and most surprisingly, a mixture of banana and pureed kiwifruit.

Thai corn fritters

Last month I went to a festival celebrating Buddha's birthday. I'll admit it, I was there for the food. There was a wide array of vegetarian food stalls, and after I checked them all out, the thing that caught my eye was the stall offering Thai corn fritters. I love those things, so I lined up, money in hand, only to find that they had run out. Curses! All was not lost -- I ended up grabbing some delicious sesame balls filled with mung beans.

But Thai corn fritters are great, so I decided to make some. The thing is, once I mixed up the batter, it was kind of delicate (I put so much corn in that it would barely hold together), and the thought of forming individual fritters and trying to flip them without destroying them... well it seemed like way too much work. So my bright idea was to cook one enormous fritter, and -- success! We cut slices of this like a pizza, and had it with the traditional accompaniment of sweet chile sauce.

 

Avocado Relish

Oh my god, if you love Indian food and guacamole, you must try this. From 660 Curries, it's Kerala-style Avocado Relish with Tamarind and Chiles. We had it with Eggplant-smothered Yellow Split Peas (left) and old favourite Cabbage and Potatoes with Fennel and Chiles (right).

This was so good! It's like guacamole, with chiles and cilantro and tamarind, and with a tarka of mustard seeds and curry leaves.

I don't know why

Here you see my take on Cincinnati-style chili: beans and TVP in a tomato-based sauce spiced with cinnamon, clove and cocoa, served over fettucini (we had no spaghetti) with some cheddar-ish cheese (Kingland soy cheese) on top.

I don't know why I was craving this -- I mean, I've never even had the real thing. But it ended up being pretty tasty.

Fenugreek cauliflower and dal

     Sometimes I wonder what the point of these 660 Curries posts is. Every time I make something from the book that I love, I want to post it so that I remember it and can make it again. But, seriously, I think I've loved almost everything I've made from the book. I think flipping open a page at random has just as good a chance of ending up with a good dish, as does sticking with the tried-and-true. But I digress...

This meal was great. Here you see, at the front, Fenugreek-Perfumed Cauliflower, and at the back, a dal of Yellow Split Peas with Tomato and Chiles. 

The cauliflower curry was supposed to include ivy gourds, but the book suggested cucumber as a replacement and that's what I used. Cooked cucumbers are a revelation -- I know the idea takes some getting used to, but they're really good. The curry also used up the half of my fenugreek crop that didn't get eaten by snails. In the end, I couldn't really taste the fenugreek greens distinctly, but maybe they added something because apart from them, this curry has a pretty simple list of ingredients, and yet it tasted surprisingly good.

The dal was also simple and delicious: the split peas are cooked (I did them in the pressure cooker) and then you add a tarka with the usual suspects (coriander, cumin, chile, garlic, turmeric) and tomato. I don't usually put tomato in my dals, but it added a really nice tang.

Really?

Bao

Here you see (a cross-section of) a steamed bun, filled with leftover tofu scramble, cabbage and mushroom. These were fun to make, and really tasty.

I used a recipe from Essentials of Asian Cuisine (but used regular white flour rather than cake flour, and canola oil in place of lard). You make a yeast dough with baking powder in it, let it rise until doubled, shape the buns and fill them, and then steam them for about 15 minutes. (I found that the water should be really boiling rapidly while you're steaming them -- it makes the buns rise better and get much fluffier.)

Biscotti

Food routines are funny. As a kid, I would eat the exact same thing in my sandwiches every day, until suddenly I would demand some other thing, and have that every single day. While you're in the middle of your obsession, it feels like it will never change, but it always does.

With that in mind, here's one of our current favourites: biscotti. We are steadily going through a batch a week, dunking them into our tea and coffee. Always almond, sometimes with some walnuts, and this time with some chocolate sprinkles (brought back from the Netherlands). (Recipe modified from the green tea and walnut biscotti from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.)

One day we won't be obsessed with these; I don't really believe it.

Fenugreek

I am really only into gardening in so far as it involves things I can eat. At the moment I have a few herbs growing (lemongrass, basil, thyme, mint, oregano, and cilantro/coriander).

On a whim, and to fill in some of the empty pots -- where some casualties of my not so green thumb used to reside -- I raided my spice drawer and planted some fenugreek seeds. I half assumed that the seeds would have been irradiated, and hence wouldn't grow, but was pleasantly surprised:

It's sort of weird to realise that the seeds in your spice jars are actually, you know, seeds.

Carrots with peanut and coconut sauce

I must admit that I usually find carrots kind of boring, but this recipe from 660 Curries is a winner. It's Carrots with Wilted Spinach in a Peanut-Coconut Sauce. The peanut and coconut sauce is outstanding.

Bagels

Oh I love me some boiled-then-baked breads. Last time it was soft pretzels, this time: bagels.

I used the recipe for Montreal-style bagels from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, with a few changes (no egg, 1/4 of the white flour replaced with whole wheat, less sugar/honey). Now, I LOVE Montreal bagels (from Fairmount Bagel, please) but I was sort of aiming for a NYC-Montreal hybrid here, to satisfy the Long Islander.

This recipe is great. You can have fresh bagels out of the oven less than an hour after you wake up! The secret is that you mix up the dough a day or so (even up to a week) earlier, let it rise for a couple of hours and then stash it in the fridge. When you want bagels, you take the dough out, form it into balls, let them rise for 20 minutes, shape them, boil them, and then bake for about 25 minutes.

Pretzels

These were so good.

I used the soft whole wheat pretzels recipe from Papa Tofu, with a few small changes (halved the recipe, used half white flour and half atta flour, added a couple of tablespoons of lively sourdough starter, let them rise a bit longer than suggested, made 6 pretzels).

When it came time to twist the pretzels, I forgot how to shape them. Luckily it turned out that R's pretzel eating expertise extends to pretzel shaping.

Thai green curry

Sometimes I feel sorry for our boring meals, the ones that don't make it onto the blog. So this post goes out to all the Thai curries we've been eating recently: so wonderful, so easy, and so easy to take for granted.

Here you see a green curry with veggies (bok choy, Japanese pumpkin, onion, peas), alongside pineapple fried rice with grated carrot. Usually some tofu gets thrown into the curry too, but not this time. I use Maesri brand green curry paste. Oh, and now that we have Asian food stores aplenty, and I've become reacquainted with kaffir lime leaves, I've resolved never to make a green curry again without adding some. They're that good! (Any recipe that says you can replace kaffir lime leaves with regular lime juice or zest is lying to you.)

Rice Krispie Treats Cookies

We had (1) some store brand Rice Krispie knockoffs that didn't taste that good, and (2) homemade vegan marshmallows that worked out kind of dense. I wanted to make cookies, and was inspired by this recipe for Momofuku Milk Bar's cornflake, choc chip and marshmallow cookies. And so I bring you Rice Krispie Treats Cookies:

 

I based the recipe on the Cowboy Cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, simply replacing the oats with the rice krispies, adding a marshmallow on top, and leaving out the coconut, chocolate and nuts. These were really good: incredibly sweet and butterscotch-ish, with a bit of crunch from the rice krispies.

Pomegranate pizza

 

This is pomegranate pizza, based on a recipe from Classic Vegetarian Cooking from the Middle East and North Africa by Habeeb Salloum. (Hey, you can look inside this book on Amazon and find the recipe by searching for -- you guessed it -- pomegranate pizza.)

I cheated by spreading the topping on pita breads and throwing them under the grill (=broiler) -- you would too if you were making this on a day that was close to 40 C in a house without air conditioning. Also I didn't have any green onions, and used grated Cheezly mozzarella rather than feta. I like the way that the cheese is mixed into the sauce in this recipe -- it kind of sneaks up on you.

Pomegranate seeds are still something of a 'what the hell do I do with these?' ingredient for me. That this recipe worked out so well was a pleasant surprise.