Paella in Amsterdam

Last night we made paella with red and yellow capsicum, mushrooms, peas, and the essential smoked paprika. We baked some tomatoes and put them on top once the paella was done. This was my first ever paella cooked in the authentic style, on the stove top, and in an actual paella pan even. It worked out very nicely, and we even got a nice crust on the bottom. (As you know, sp, my go-to paella recipe is Bittman's tomato paella which you bake in the oven.)

Uttapam

I made some more dosas yesterday, and things went pretty well, except I sort of lost my dosa-mojo about halfway through cooking them. I think the pan got too hot or something -- temperature management on the cooktop here is pretty complicated.

Anyway, that meant leftover dosa batter, which in turn meant uttapam. It's a thicker version of dosa, with chopped veggies added in. I used shallot, chile, tomato and cilantro. We ate these with coconut chutney (coconut, cilantro, shallot, chile, lime juice, water) and leftover chana masala and a version of saag aloo (made with an Chinese vegetable that looked like giant gai lan and tasted a bit like asparagus).

Sausage rolls and spaghetti

This is a photo of spaghetti, but this is a post about sausage rolls.

One of the Australian foods (or food types I guess) I missed while in the states was savoury pastries: pies, pasties and sausage rolls. I was very glad to find this recipe for vegan sausage rolls, and was delighted with the results. (I used walnuts rather than pecans, and I didn't have enough rolled oats so used about half uncooked freekeh (bulgur would work well too).)

I slathered the sausage rolls with tomato sauce (=ketchup) and gobbled them up. Side note: it is de rigueur to eat these pastries with tomato sauce, yet if you buy one at a shop they will charge you for a little sauce packet. America has trained me to be an easily-incensed consumer. I am incensed.

I made the full recipe of the filling mixture but only used half of it in sausage rolls. The other half I spread on a baking tray and cooked along with the rolls. This stuff ended up in the spaghetti sauce pictured above, and it was good -- like, worth doing again on purpose good.

Dosa!

I've tried a few times before to make dosa, but was never successful for one reason or another. (For instance, there was the time I put the bowl of dosa batter into the switched-off oven to ferment, only to discover when I went to check on it 8 hours later that we had mice living in our oven -- mice who thought dosa batter was tasty.)

Anyway, finally: success! It probably helps that the kitchen today was a toasty 31C (88F) -- a bit warm for the humans but the perfect temperature for lactobacillus.

I followed the recipe here (but added a little bit of fenugreek seed at the soaking stage because it's supposed to encourage fermentation). I broke the rules and cooked up a whole pile rather than eating them as they came off the pan; after sitting, they ended up a bit soft but not too bad. We had them with potato masala and onion-chili paste.

Iron chef: sriracha

I was out of ideas for dinner, so asked R if he had any cravings. I don't know why I asked -- I was expecting him to say no, as that's his usual answer to that question (weird, right?) but instead he surprised me and asked for something with sriracha. This turned out to be an excellent and inspiring answer.

We had tofu omelettes with sriracha (based on the Thai classic); roast cauliflower with a dipping sauce of sriracha, honey and lime juice; and latkes (from the freezer) with a sauce of vegan mayo and sriracha.

All three were pretty good but I think the best one was the cauliflower. The very brown pieces went especially well with the sauce. (I got the idea for this combination after some googling turned up the suggestion to combine this sauce with roasted brussels sprouts.)

After all that heat: ice cream (chocolate and peanut butter, with pretzels. I used soy milk in place of the recommended half and half, and regular cocoa powder, and it worked out fine -- very rich and almost fudgy.)